From Peniel to Tel Aviv

The name first appears in Genesis 32:28, when Jacob wrestles with a celestial being.

Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו מַה־שְּׁמֶ֑ךָ וַיֹּ֖אמֶר יַעֲקֹֽב׃

Said the other, “What is your name?” He replied, “Jacob.”

וַיֹּ֗אמֶר לֹ֤א יַעֲקֹב֙ יֵאָמֵ֥ר עוֹד֙ שִׁמְךָ֔ כִּ֖י אִם־יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל כִּֽי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל׃

Said he, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”

The etymology is explained by the angel as ‘Sarita,’ you have striven. Sin resh hé, to persevere or exert oneself, contend.

The nationhood of Israel in the bible

By the beginning of Exodus, it is established that the narrative concerns B’nei Israel, the children of Jacob.

Exodus 1:1

וְאֵ֗לֶּה שְׁמוֹת֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל הַבָּאִ֖ים מִצְרָ֑יְמָה אֵ֣ת יַעֲקֹ֔ב אִ֥ישׁ וּבֵית֖וֹ בָּֽאוּ׃

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each coming with his household.

בְּצֵ֣את יִ֭שְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָ֑יִם בֵּ֥ית יַ֝עֲקֹ֗ב מֵעַ֥ם לֹעֵֽז׃

הָיְתָ֣ה יְהוּדָ֣ה לְקָדְשׁ֑וֹ יִ֝שְׂרָאֵ֗ל מַמְשְׁלוֹתָֽיו׃

Numbers 10:36

And when it rested, he said, “Return, O LORD, to the ten thousand thousands of Israel.”

בְנֻחֹ֖ה יֹאמַ֑ר שׁוּבָ֣ה יְהֹוָ֔ה רִֽבְב֖וֹת אַלְפֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל

Psalms, esp  114 ‘When Israel came out of Egypt.’ Israel as contrapunctual with Jacob

Avinu Malkenu

אָבִֽינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ הָרֵם קֶֽרֶן יִשְׂרָאֵל עַמֶּֽךָ:

Our Father, our King! raise up the might of Israel Your people.

Deuteronomy 6:4

שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵ֖ינוּ יְהֹוָ֥ה ׀ אֶחָֽד׃

Hear, O Israel. יהוה is our God, יהוה alone.

Amos 9:14

וְשַׁבְתִּי֮ אֶת־שְׁב֣וּת עַמִּ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵל֒ וּבָנ֞וּ עָרִ֤ים נְשַׁמּוֹת֙ וְיָשָׁ֔בוּ וְנָטְע֣וּ כְרָמִ֔ים וְשָׁת֖וּ אֶת־יֵינָ֑ם וְעָשׂ֣וּ גַנּ֔וֹת וְאָכְל֖וּ אֶת־פְּרִיהֶֽם׃

I will restore My people Israel.
They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them;
They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine;
They shall till gardens and eat their fruits.

The two kingdoms

The two kingdoms were called Israel and Judah. They separated when there was a revolt among the tribes in the North against the authoritarianism of Rehoboam, son of Solomon. The kingdom was then divided, with Jeroboam as king of Israel in the north and Rehoboam as king of Judah in the South. Only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained in Rehoboam’s kingdom with its centre in Jerusalem. The other ten tribes were in the northern kingdom, with its capital in Shechem, which is now known as Nablus in the West Bank. The modern name of the city can be traced back to the Roman period, when it was named Flavia Neapolis by Roman emperor Vespasian in 72 CE. Following the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, the city was given its present-day Arabic name of Nablus.

Jeroboam installed golden calves in the northern tabernacles. When you read the book of Kings, the kings in the southern kingdom were mixed, some good,some bad, but in the north nearly all were bad. The assessment of a king as good or bad depends on the extent to which he prioritises the Temple and its cult. The northern kings were therefore at a disadvantage, and Jeroboam’s altar at Bethel with its two golden calves is a symbol of corrupt kingship.

Were we called Israel in the diaspora?

Although we are called Jews in English speaking countries, in Russian and Italian, we are known as Yivrei and Ebrei (both variations of “Hebrew”), and in formal settings—such as the names of institutions—Israelite is often preferred in German, Spanish and French.

The previous siddur of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain offered six themed shabbat morning services, each with slightly different additions to the basic order of prayer, which was the same in each. Service number six was on the theme of ‘The Family of Israel’. The recommended psalm was 126, When God brought the captives to Zion,’ which is recited before Birchat Hamazon, often to the melody of Hatikvah. A biblical paragraph in the service is from 1 Kings 8:55ff where Solomon the king says ‘Blessed is God who has given rest to his people Israel, as He promised.’

The naming of Medinat Israel

Under the Persian Empire, when the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile, the land was called Yahud and under the Romans it became Judea.

Some of the Yishuv pioneers, settling in Israel in the 1880s called themselves Biluim, from a slogan whose acronym was Bilu, Beit Yaakov Lechu V’nelcha, from Isaiah: בֵּ֖ית יַעֲקֹ֑ב לְכ֥וּ וְנֵלְכָ֖ה בְּא֥וֹר יְהֹוָֽה. Another group were the Hovevei Zion, said to have founded Rishon L’Zion, meaning ‘First in Zion’.

On May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared statehood, he said: “We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

Why was it not called Judah or Zion? The locations designated by these names were outside the borders of the new state, as East Jerusalem was allocated to Jordan. In the various drafts of the declaration, the space for the name was left blank.

From Zeev Sharef, a minister in Ben Gurion’s Cabinet:

Most people had thought that the state would be called Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew). But Judea is the historical name of the area around Jerusalem, which at that time seemed the area least likely to become part of the state. Also, it applied only to a very small territory. So Judea was ruled out…“Zion” was also suggested, but Zion is the name of a hill overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

Again, the geographic Zion wasn’t going to be a part of the new Jewish state.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee during the Holocaust, and the first minister of interior of Israel, made the argument for the name Judea and against Israel, and years later explained his rationale in these words:

 I opposed the name Israel. It reminded me of the name israélite [in French] … instead of juif, which was considered derogatory. We Zionists embraced the derogatory “Jew,” which was the name of our people from the return from [Babylonian] exile.  I favoured the revival of this name, which the masses of the [Jewish] people accepted in their spoken languages. Another name was liable to divide the state from the Diaspora.

If Judah had been chosen instead of Israel, citizens of Israel, whether Jewish or Arab, would have been Yehudim, which seems unthinkable. And we can see how the name Israel makes a distinction between Israelis and the Yehudim of the Diaspora.

Enmity in the diaspora

There can be no doubt that Israel appears throughout the liturgy, in Tanakh and in the rabbinic writings as the collective term for our nation, our religion, our people. In contemporary debate, hostile persons often assert that we who consider ourselves B’nei Israel are imposters from some region remote from the land of Israel. They tell us to go back to Khazaria or go back to Poland, although it is unlikely that this is said by anyone actually in Poland. We know from history that our long sojourn in Poland ended badly. The antagonists dislike the creation of a modern Hebrew language, sometimes considering Yiddish more acceptable. Among antisemites, the word Ashkenazi is paired with the word Zionist but their hatred for the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel means they want the elimination of Mizrachim and Sephardim and the Beta Jews of Ethiopia, along with the Ashkenazim.

From Chief Rabbi Mirvis, in The New Statesman, this week.

It is said that Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of the State of Israel, was once asked by a member of the House of Lords why Jews were so fixated on one tiny, contested piece of land. Were there not other territories in which a Jewish state could be established? Weizmann responded that this would be like asking why he had driven 20 miles to visit his mother, when there were many other perfectly nice old ladies living on his street.” and that “… Today, Jews are extremely diverse politically, religiously and culturally, but remarkably are united by few things more than the centrality of Israel. 

In the last year, Israel has been present for us very much in the sense of geography, current politics and war. The atrocities of 7 October struck most of us to the core because many of us have family and friends in Israel and, even if not, diaspora Jews often have a strong association with the State of Israel and engagement with  it especially in time of danger. The war has ensued with Gaza and Lebanon while Israel is attacked also from Iran and Yemen and to some extent from the West Bank. It is in the eye of a storm reported every day all over the world, headlining above all other foreign news and generally the press, the UN and NGOs like Amnesty and many politicians in the west claim that Israel is conducting a brutal, expansionist war. To identify with Israel is to be called genocidal baby killer and, in some professions it is deleterious to acquire this reputation.

At the Academy Awards, Jonathan Glazer, an alumnus of JFS and director of the film ‘The Zone of Interest’ about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, made an acceptance speech in which he said:

‘…We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization — how do we resist?’

To give him the benefit of the doubt, he probably did not intend to do harm with these words to Jews worldwide. He probably was horrified by the effectiveness of Israel’s war on Gaza and the loss of life. A different perception is that, when prominent Jews use their public platform to excoriate Israel, they are harming us all. In the case of Glazer, he encouraged Israel’s critics to use the Shoah as an attack weapon against Israel, likening the government and the defence forces to nazis, a simile which is deployed daily by the far right, for example Nick Griffin, many on the left and unfortunately more and more in the soft centre.

Yidden

In my parents’ generation it was not uncommon to use the word Yiddish more than any other to denote Jews: ‘Not many Yidden there,’ ‘He has a Yiddisher punim,’ and so on. The mamalashon was Yiddish, not Hebrew. Yiddish is still preferred by anti Zionist orthodoxy, who do not use the holy tongue for everyday speech and, by contrast, the secular anti Zionists of the left approve of Yiddish rather than Hebrew which they consider the colonialist language.

The pronunciation in our shul and in the Reform movement is a nod to the Hebrew of Israel and of Sephardim. Saying Succos and Simchas Toirah sounds mildly out of step in our minhag although many of us had to learn to pronounce tav as a T not an S and cholem vav as o rather than oi.

I might say that while the antisemites of the far right call us Yids, the antisemites of the far left call us Zios. But in point of fact, they borrow from each other so one cannot always tell one from the other. Both extremities avoid saying the name Israel, preferring ‘The Zionist Entity,’ the slangy ‘Israhell’ and print variations where, for example, the dollars sign is substituted for the S in Israel.

The nation

The phrase עם ישראל חי has become a ubiquitous slogan among diaspora Jews although I’m told that in Israel it is used mainly by the right wing parties. As  עם means nation (cognate with Arabic umma) it is a declaration of the nationhood of the Jewish people.

October 2024