Jabotinsky depicted Jewish religious law as alienating and pagan Mediterranean culture as liberating

Evidence

Samson in Jabotinsky’s novel was a complex character driven by discontent and by a constant search for an alternative way of life. As the literary scholar Alice Stone Nakhimovsky has shown, one of the phrases that he repeated throughout the novel was “Here I am not myself.” He did not find happiness at home fulfilling his duties as a judge, nor did he find it in his endless wanderings, except among the Philistines: “Here, in the land of the Philistines, he was used from an early age to play the game of life without any questions or fears.” In the religious tradition of the East, living as a Nazarene, Samson could not uncover the basic truths that would serve him as a leader. The moral and religious fundamentals of Jewish monotheism left him torn and alienated. Only his experience with pagans who carried the ancient traditions of the Mediterranean world and were descended from the Minoan civilization, provided him with real peace, and only with them did he discover his true nature. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 552

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Philistines descended from Minoan civilization — is this Jabotinsky’s own invention or from a specific 19th/early-20th century theory of Philistine origins?