A Reactionary Holiday that Suppresses the Memory of Civil War

Thanks to Marc Goodman, I have discovered the reactionary kernel that hides at the center of Hanukkah:

While Jewish children, one way or another, manage to acquire insight into somber holidays like Yom Kippur, Jewish parents tend to assume that they have nothing to learn from kiddy celebrations. As a result the "minor" holidays of Purim and Hanukkah escape scrutiny, like lullabies whose sweet melodies drown out disturbing lyrics. Many a community knows how to use children as shields against confrontation with its own darker truths. I can think of no better illustration of this strategy than our current ways of marking Hanukkah. For it turns out that Hanukkah is a festival built upon a mound of suppressed memories and censored texts, a putative celebration of light that in fact commemorates a Jewish civil war.

As Rabbi James Ponet points out, there is no account of Hanukkah in the Torah and very little mention of it in the Talmud.  In fact, the major account of the holiday is found in the Book of Maccabees, which rabbinic Judaism considers apocryphal, and is ironically written in Greek.  Ponet speculates as to the various reasons why the rabbinic tradition chose to ignore key aspects of the actually events:

There are a number of reasons why rabbinic Judaism abandoned these texts. In the aftermath of the devastating losses inflicted by Rome on the Jews of Judea—beginning with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., more than 200 years after the time of the Maccabees—the rabbis wanted to shape an inward-looking Judaism. They chose to portray the Jews as a historically small, proud, self-isolating people.., ready to martyr themselves in the battle against tyranny, a people capable of sustained spiritual resistance to foreign domination. The rabbis recast the Hanukkah story to match that self-image.

But the facts, as retold in the Book of Maccabees, describe the conflict as primarily being one fought amongst Jews: there were the "Hellenized Jews who had fallen madly in love with the sophisticated, globalizing super-culture of their day" and those who wanted to maintain their separate identity and traditions:

That's the clash of Hanukkah. Armed Hasmonean priests and their comrades from the rural town of Modi'in attacked urban Jews, priests and laity alike, who supported Greek reform, like the gymnasium and new rules for governing commerce. The Hasmoneans imposed, at sword's edge, traditional observance. After years of protracted warfare, the priests established a Hasmonean state that never ceased fighting Jews who disagreed with its rule.

So the miracle-of-the-oil celebration of Hanukkah that the rabbis later invented covers up a blood-soaked struggle that pitted Jew against Jew. The rabbis drummed out this history with a fairy tale about a light that did not go out. But really, who can blame them—after all, what nation creates a living monument to a civil war?

I am not a biblical scholar or theologian, but it seems that the various accounts that surround this period in Jewish history have a resonance with our own.  Many of the questions that a progressive politics face are still the same: what constitutes a popular uprising and what ought the ends of such an uprising be? 

Unfortunately, the "Maccabee freedom fighter" has been appropriated in modern Israel for creating the image of "Jew as warrior" and Hanukkah is celebrated as a military holiday.  But Rabbi Ponet has a different suggestion:

I propose that on Hanukkah we ought to consider whether an ethnic group that wishes to survive must turn itself into a nation-state. In the aftermath of the Bar Kochba debacle, at Hanukkah the words of the prophet Zachariah were read in the synagogue: "Not by power nor by might but through My spirit, says the Lord." In the glow of the candles this year we should wonder aloud whether the prophet's vision is but balm for losers or whether the international system may yet generate a new way for groups to be both part of the world and apart from it.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

Yes, this is populism.

[mark]

so what's the story? the Hsmoneans were actually a Jewish Taliban? invites the question whether the Afghan jihad was really a national liberation struggle, or what.

[Alain]

Marc, you raise a good question. I am not qualified to answer it as an expert in Jewish history, but I suspect that this example points to the difficulty of identifying popular resistance. That is not to say that we can not distinguish a progressive movement from a reactionary one, but that one person's liberation struggle is another one's jihad. In the present example, the issue that would need clarification is the extent to which the "hellenized Jews" were involved in the exploitation and repression of the Hsmoneans. To the degree that they were, this could be considered a liberation movement. To the degree it was simply a revolt against "modernization," however defined, the rebels would be closer to Afghan Jihadists. And perhaps this also shows that the current Jihadists are a genuine mix of freedom fighter and fundamentalist.

I realize this is a simplification of a religious/cultural event but that is what I think is the basic distinction to be drawn. And this is also the difficulty we face today when looking at religiously inspired movements that resist neoliberalism. Can a movement be reactionary and liberatory at the same time? I am not sure but I suspect that a reactionary movement can have liberating affects. If that makes sense?

[s0metim3s]

Doesn't the figure of the 'hellenised Jew' segue into that of the 'rootless cosmopolitain Jew'? Which both National Socialists and early Zionists were both derogatory of.

And, there were indeed left-wing versions of National Socialism that justified their anti-semitism on the grounds that Jews were rich and therefore exploitative - but this in no way makes them liberatory.

In any case, I'm not sure it's that difficult to distinguish between so-called reactionary and liberatory movements. The assumption that 'national liberation struggles' are indeed liberatory is a fiction. Not just because it's a question of different perspectives, surely. But because every 'national liberation struggle' requires the liquidation or suppression of alterity within the construction of national space. That this liquidation is sometimes wrapped in ostensibly anti-colonial rhetorics should not confuse anyone - take Mugabe, for instance.

Frankly, I do not understand the gullibility.

[Alain]

Angela, in all seriousness, perhaps I am being very gullibile. I certainly am not justifying anti-semitism in the guise of revolution. But I think the rabbi that I am quoting raises what I think is a legitimate question: can we envision some sort of group identity, that remains distinct, and yet is also part of the larger community (however defined)? And can this be accomplished without violence? Perhaps it is gullible to think this is worthy of discussion or that we inevitably end up with the quasi-mysticism of Walter Benjamin, and a more originary "divine" violence.

I would like to ask you,(without revisiting the entire populism discussion of a few weeks back), do you think there is a form of resistance that does not succomb to a reactionary populism?