Revisionist Zionists inverted Jewish theology from triumph into decline

Evidence

Achimeir examined Jewish history through what he regarded as strictly secular factors: the realization of national goals. Thus, the first two centuries of the Common Era were in fact the high mark in Israeli history and not, as modern Jewish and non-Jewish historians have suggested, a period of decline. At that period Judaism was a revolutionary force that dominated most of the Mediterranean east of the Greek mainland: what ended that great epoch were the internal conflicts in the homeland and the victory of Yavne over Jerusalem, of the religious and moralistic component in the Jewish community in Israel over the secular and nationalistic forces that brought about the imminent decline of the Jewish empire. Therefore, what many saw as the symbol of the greatest achievement of the ancient Israeli civilization—the Jewish theology—was for Achimeir and the Revisionists the sign of its decline. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Connect to the article ‘On Sacrifice’ and to religious nationalism debates; also parallels how political movements re-read sacred texts against their grain.
• DEEPTHINKING: The Revisionist inversion—that religious tradition is the cause of national decline, not its glory—reverses a foundational assumption shared by most Jewish historiography, showing how national-political aims can completely revalue a civilization’s central artifact.