Israel, the Impossible Land

Professor Jean-Christophe Attias holds the chair of the History of Rabbinic Culture at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne. Professor Esther Benbassa holds the chair of Modern Jewish History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne. Her books translated into English are: Haim Nahum: A Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Politics (1995); The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (1999); and, with Aron Rodrigue, A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe (1998) and Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries (2000).

"Jean-Christophe Attias and Esther Benbassa have written an elegant and erudite book demonstrating the complex relationship to the land of Israel throughout Jewish history."—American Historical Review

• Introduction Part One Genealogies 1. The Promised Land 7 "In the Beginning" Ambiguity 9 A Heritage Deferred 12 Exile and the Desert I6 The Memory of an Initial Expropriation 20 A Dismembered Land 24 Sedentary People, Nomadic God 27 If I Forget Thee, 0 Jerusalem... 30 2. The Holy Land 34 New Horizons 34 A Partial Reappropriation 37 The Center and the Periphery 41 Living Without the Temple 46 A "Deterritorialized" Judaism? 50 The Legal Land 52 Holy Land, Holy People 56 3. The Land of Dreams 60 Other Times: The Land's Middle Ages? 60 Stars and Climates65 The Heart of the World 69 Divine Land 71 The Land as Metaphor 75 A Taste of Paradise 79 Nearby Lands, Distant Lands 82 4. The Exiled Land 87 Land and Liturgy 88 The Land and the Law: Rabbinic Hermeneutical Exercises 94 The Duty of Aliyah or the Duty of Exile? 98 The Forbidden Land I02 Encounters with Palestine 107 Voyagers and "Geographers" IIo Nostalgia II6 Part Two Metamorphoses 5. The Rediscovered Land 121 "Here" and "There" I2I The Christian Rediscovery of Palestine I3 Palestine Revisited by the Jews 137 Ancient Land, New Land(s) I42 6. The Recreated Land 152 To Whom Does the Land Belong? 152 The Cult of the Land 157 The Symbolism of Pioneering I60 The Myths to the Rescue of the Land I68 The Land of Historians 179 Negation of Exile, Negation of Self 187 7. The Impossible Land I95 A Culture of Rootedness 195 Interminable Exile I99 The Return of the Promised Land 208 The Coming of Post-Zionism 212 The Wandering Israeli 224 Epilogue 231 Afterword 237