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Recently,  UNESCO inscribed Ancient Samaria-Sebastia as a World Heritage property under the State of Palestine. Qumran, inseparable from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, is on Palestine’s tentative list. So is Jabal al-Fureidis/Herodium, the monumental complex built by Herod the Great.

The archaeology has not changed. Ancient Samaria remains the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Qumran remains central to the history of Judaism. Herodium remains Herod’s creation in Judea. What has changed is the framework in which these places are classified.

David M. Weinberg recently described this process in The Jerusalem Post as “cultural genocide.” I think he is right. His argument sent me back, however, not only to archaeology but to the word Israel itself.

On August 17, 1938, Nazi Germany issued a decree concerning Jewish names. Jewish men who did not already bear a name the regime regarded as recognisably Jewish were required to add Israel to their first name. Jewish women had to add Sara. From January 1939, the additional names had to be registered and used in official and business dealings.

Israel was not yet the name of a modern state. It was the ancient name of a people. In Genesis, Jacob receives the name Israel after wrestling through the night. His descendants become the Children of Israel, Bnei Yisrael. Kingdoms bearing that name rose and fell, but the name outlived them. Through conquest, exile and dispersion, Jews continued to understand themselves as part of Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.

That makes the Nazi choice of the name particularly sinister. The regime did not invent Israel as a label for Jews. It took one of the oldest names by which Jews understood themselves and converted it into compulsory identification. A name that had carried Jewish continuity for millennia became a mark imposed by the persecutor.

The decree belonged to an expanding bureaucracy of separation. Passports were marked. Professions were closed. Property rights contracted. The administrative state learned to identify the Jew before the regime proceeded to dispossess, deport and murder him. Israel became a mark of separation, a bureaucratic nametag attached to people who would soon be marked for destruction.

Nothing happening in contemporary Europe is equivalent to Nazi persecution, still less to the Holocaust. As a Holocaust historian, I reject that equivalence. The murder of six million Jews was a specific historical crime. Historical comparison has another purpose: it allows us to examine ideas and mechanisms across time without pretending that their intentions or consequences are the same. The idea that concerns me is simpler. Israel has again become something whose removal can be imagined as desirable.

Long before 1948, Israel was the name of a people. It is now also the name of a state. Behind both lies a civilisation whose history remains embedded in texts, language, coins, religious practice, architecture, burial places and archaeology.

UNESCO’s own documentation does not simply deny that history. It identifies Sebastia with ancient Samaria and describes it as the capital of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)