Q&A: Requesting a response to Yigal Ben-Nun’s remarks
Requesting a response to Yigal Ben-Nun’s remarks
Question
Yigal Ben-Nun (the fashionable historian among the Israeli “intelligentsia”) says that the Mishnah and the Talmud were written only in the tenth century CE. He also claims that all the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud are literary figures invented by the imagination of writers in the ninth and tenth centuries. And his proof is that in Josephus, who lived in the first century and described the Great Revolt in detail, there is no mention of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai or the other tannaim of that generation, nor even of the foundational story of Yavneh and its sages. How can it be that these great events took place and the most important Jewish historian of the period does not write a single line about them? Would you please address these arguments?
Answer
You were right when you said he’s a historian who is in fashion, because I’ve heard so much nonsense quoted in his name that only fashion could save him and make him popular. He seems to me a complete ignoramus and no small idiot. (He even accompanied and moderated Iskov’s idiotic lecture that I analyzed here in column 676.)
Sorry for addressing the man rather than the issue, but I can’t avoid that introduction, especially in light of what I’m about to write now (namely, that I have no information about the substance of his claims, so it’s hard for me to address them).
As for these arguments, I haven’t checked the facts (what does and doesn’t appear in Josephus) or the claims themselves. I suggest you turn to people whose field this is. On the face of it, I don’t see any necessity that a historian would write about Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. He describes the wars and how they unfolded. It’s roughly like asking why a historian of the twentieth century didn’t write about Radin and the Chafetz Chaim, when Jewish tradition talks about him more than about World War I. Among Jews, the angle of interest is the sages and spirituality, and therefore the focus is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Chafetz Chaim. Historians were more interested in political processes and wars.
But as I said, I haven’t checked, and I’m just writing off-the-cuff speculation. If I were Yigal Ben-Nun, people would already be quoting what I wrote here as a scientific source, and I’d get a headline in Haaretz.
It’s very characteristic of this sensation-chaser to take one difficulty, even if it is significant (and as noted, I don’t know whether it is), and build on it an entire populist edifice whose head is in the heavens. Infantile historical hair-splitting that denies the existence of an entire period against thousands of testimonies and a living tradition. That’s the only way to get a headline in Haaretz and an academic chair in the science of nonsense.
Discussion on Answer
As for Persico, actually I don’t agree.
Alex Zeitlin did a project called “Coming to the Professors,” where he went to professors (and other educated people) in Bible, archaeology, understanding other cultures, and so on, and they gave him filmed lectures. It was very interesting. At a certain point a strange process happened: on the one hand, he had more or less run out of interesting subjects and interesting people, and on the other hand, his viewer numbers had already grown and he himself wanted more by then (better filming and editing quality, the ability to make a living from it, expansion into current-events discussions like wars and armies, a bigger personal dominance). In my impression, that led him to join forces with the strange charlatan Yigal Ben-Nun as a way of breaking into additional audiences and continuing to operate the channel. At first I thought Alex was an intelligent and serious person, even if not exactly overflowing with knowledge, but when I saw that he held Yigal Ben-Nun in such high regard and actually brought him in as a partner, I realized that apparently embarrassing charlatanism nests in Alex too. By the way, the strange process I described is actually not strange at all, but common. Pumping out an oil reservoir that accumulated over millions of years makes it possible to expand the operation, and in the end you reach a situation of a large operation with a depleted reservoir. Then the operation wanders around looking for a new target, and sometimes has trouble meeting the standard it set for itself, because now the rate of renewal has to keep up with the rate of consumption.
Actually Alex is well versed in a lot of material and a lot of topics, and during the conversation he shows—sometimes almost in an offhand way—impressive knowledge in so many fields. Whereas the interviewees are usually experts on one specific subject, he’s actually quite a decent generalist.
Yigal Ben-Nun’s logic is very puzzling. After all, even if there was no person named Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, it would still be hard to explain why Josephus didn’t mention some other name of a spiritual leader who lived and had influence in that generation. Should we conclude from this that the Jews had no spiritual leaders with public influence at all, contrary to what has always been accepted in all religions?
What answers all the questions in almost one line is that Yigal Ben-Nun is a fictional character created by artificial intelligence (in the 25th century). The best proof of this is that Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel (who lived in the 20th century) does not mention him in any of his writings.
Even the name Yigal Ben-Nun raises suspicion of an anachronism with the period of Joshua son of Nun, who in fact redeemed the Jewish people from wandering in the wilderness and settled them in the land. It is reasonable to assume that the appearance of the character Yigal Ben-Nun in the early Zionist period is an attempt by the narrator to draw a comparison between entering the land from Egypt and entering the land from exile. And now that we have seen that the writer tends to use fictional characters, we must proceed from the assumption that Joshua son of Nun is also merely a literary character. After the secular Zionists received from the British government a promise to establish a national home for them at the remote edge of the British Empire, they turned to producing an entire myth that would tie them to that plot of land. Thus the name Israel was invented, which originally was an antisemitic nickname for the liquor mixer at the inn in the shtetl, who was usually Jewish—“poison liquor”—and it was attached to that plot of land, and thus the character Joshua son of Nun was created. With a sober look one can understand that the land in question also does not exist and never existed outside the imagination of the narrator, whose goals we may never know. You too, my reader friend, do not exist at all, to my great sorrow. There is nothing in this world except a giant pool of melted marshmallow in which floats peacefully the entire congregation of isosceles triangles.
Sometimes you behave like the worst kind of keyboard thug. If Yigal Ben-Nun responds here, you’ll immediately apologize and try to philosophize your way out of the situation, exactly like what happened in the column with Ariela Kazin, may she live a good long life.
You’ve also heard drivel seasoned with condescending certainty (3…2…1…) in the podcasts with Aviv Franco and Eilam Gross, and even so you replied with sharp points elegantly, and kept the insults and jabs inside. May we merit to see you insulting people in the real world too, and let us say amen.
Yigal Ben-Nun is a historian in the same way that Tomer Persico is an intellectual. Both of them are very stupid and very ignorant. The only thing that makes them popular is their academic titles.