In 73 A.D., legend has it, 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the
ancient desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than
surrender to a Roman legion. Recorded in only one historical
source, the story of Masada was obscure for centuries. In The
Masada Myth, Israeli sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda tracks the
process by which Masada became an ideological symbol for the State
of Israel, the dramatic subject of movies and miniseries, a shrine
venerated by generations of Zionists and Israeli soldiers, and the
most profitable tourist attraction in modern Israel. Ben-Yehuda
describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and
unsubstantiated narrative of a Romanized Jew, Josephus Flavius, was
edited and augmented in the twentieth century to form a simple and
powerful myth of heroism. Ben-Yehuda looks at the ways this new
mythical narrative of Masada was created, promoted, and maintained
by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army,
archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the
tourist industry, and the arts. He discusses the various
organizations and movements that created "the Masada experience"
(usually a ritual trek through the Judean desert followed by a
climb to the fortress and a dramatic reading of the Masada story),
and how it changed over decades from a Zionist pilgrimage to a
tourist destination. Placing the story in a larger historical,
sociological, and psychological context, Ben-Yehuda draws upon
theories of collective memory and myth-making to analyze Masada's
crucial role in the nation-building process of modern Israel and
the formation of a new Jewish identity. An expert on deviance and
social control, Ben-Yehuda looks inparticular at how and why a
military failure and an enigmatic, troubling case of mass suicide
(in conflict with Judaism's teachings) were reconstructed and
fabricated as a heroic tale.
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