Jew's Muse / Erasing Jewish heritage, one historical omission at a time

Diligent media watchdogs such as CAMERA have documented the BBC'schronically hostile coverage of Israel in its conflict with its Arab neighbors. My own ears are exposed to this biased barrage daily on my drive to work.

I grudgingly tune in nevertheless - after all, the BBC does produceother segments of interest to the intellectually curious, ostensiblyunrelated to the Middle East conflict.

And yet even among such benign reports, there are those that - while notintentionally hostile to Jews or Israel - are potentially inimical to Jewish interests not for what they report but for what they don?t.

The BBC recently presented just such a report, on the recovery, digitization and online availability of the so-called Codex Sinaiticus, billed at the onset as 'the world?s oldest Bible'.

While of immediate interest to Christians, the subject matter would attract any avid student of scripture and so I turned up the volume onthe car radio.

The segment was indeed illuminating, and I found myself considering its implications for Jewish tradition. But what was left unsaid was downright deafening.

Here then is the gist of the segment: the Codex is a 16-century old bound bible stowed away for many centuries at St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. It contains the entire Christian bible, comprising the Greek translation of the Tanakh, Apocrypha (books left out of the Tanakh), Gospels and other Christian scriptures.

The manuscript fascinates Bible historians for many reasons but what intrigued me most were its layers upon layers and 800 years worth of monastic editing, alterations, corrections, deletions and rewrites on each of its pages, reflecting the evolution of Christian dogma from the late Roman period to the Medieval era.

I soon detected parallels between the centuries-long development of the Codex by the monks and the creation of the Talmud and itscommentaries by the rabbinic sages. Perhaps this was no coincidence, considering that the monks of Sinai and Galilean Rabbis lived both contemporaneously and in relative proximity.

Secular biblical scholarship demonstrates that even the authorized version of the Tanakh evolved from a similar scribal editing process, lasting from about 1000 BCE to 150 BCE.

Nevertheless, I found the segment as troubling as it was enlightening, since its crucial omissions would have the effect of misleading a radio audience of millions.

BBC's website describes the Codex as 'the world's oldest bible'. But it isn't. And while the broadcast itself called it 'the oldest surviving bound bible, such a distinction is easily lost on the program's worldwide audience.

For the record, the oldest books of the bible were uncovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and predate the Codex by sixcenturies.

Secondly listeners could easily assume that the bible was originally written in Greek 1600 years ago. Considering that Hebrew isn't mentioned even once throughout the segment, listeners would never know that the bible was first composed in Hebrew beginning 3000 years ago.

While misleading, these omissions by the BBC are unlikely to have been intentional - at least not in this instance. On the other hand, in the hands of Israel's adversaries, omission and the related act of denial are potent weapons used to sever the Jewish People's bonds to its ancient heritage in the eyes of the world.

Historical omission and denial is a particular expertise ofPalestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose 1982 doctoral dissertation espouses views identical to those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the holocaust denying President of Iran.

Abbas, widely viewed as 'moderate', earned his doctorate from Moscow Oriental College by arguing, among many things, that that six million were not murdered during the Holocaust and that gas chambers were not used to exterminate them.

Similarly, Yasser Arafat, Abbas' mentor, adamantly denied theexistence of the ancient Jewish Temple that is buried beneath thegold-domed Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Omission and denial has given license to the Muslim religiousauthorities on the Temple Mount (Mt Moriah in the Hebrew bible) totrample the Jewish presence there that preceded the Muslim conquest by 14 centuries.

During recent renovations in and around the famous gold-domedMosque, bulldozers shoveled through deep layers of previously buried ancient Jewish artifacts, and dumped them outside the city walls in haphazard trash piles. The damage done to the Jewish historical record is irreversible and criminal.

Historical omission is a worrying trend worldwide. The SimonWiesenthal Center reports on a growing phenomenon of Holocaustomission and denial in schools in Britain and throughout Europe.

Meanwhile, Phil Orenstein of the Democracy Project blog anecdotally relates that, "half of the teachers in (a certain Queens public school) social studies department refuse to teach the Holocaust ... for fear that it might offend Muslim students."

Overt demonization of Israel is detected easily enough; historical omission, intentional or purposeful, and whether by BBC correspondents or outright foes of the Jewish State, is more insidious. Unless confronted, we Jews may find ourselves pushed off Mount Moriah, tumbling down the slippery slope and into Gehena below ? the biblical Valley of Hell.