The term Cananéens comes from the name of Canaan, black grandson of Noah and indicates, in the Bible, the people living the Pays of Canaan before its conquest by the Jews under the direction of Josué.

For some, Cananéen can in fact being considered as a synonym of Phénicien , because the two people spoke the same language and had the same gods. They estimate that the Hebrew did not make disappear Cananéens but would have mixed with them and would have adopted some their habits. Certain biblical passages and the fact that biblical Hebrew is linguistically very close to the phenician would prove it. The king Hiram of Byblos, whose sarcophagus was preserved, was friendly with Solomon, king d' Israël.

However, the recent discovered ones carried out in the years 1990 by the archeologist Israel Finkelstein would call into question the myth of a massive invasion of the Hebrews on the country of Canaan carried out by Josué. According to its thesis, retained by the commauté scientific one, the appearance of the first communities Jews on the highlands of Canaan as of -1200, would tend to prove that the latter would be in fact themselves primarily of stock cananéenne (probably of the dissenting, refractory groups with the occupation égytienne of this time).

Language cananéenne

The cananéen indicates also a group of Semitic languages of the North-West. They are the Hebrew dialects X of Israel and Juda, the Phénicien, (including the language of Carthage, the Punique, the moabite, Arabic, the édomite and the amorrite, as well as the Araméen).

Homonymy

The term of " Cananéen " will be employed again by a group nationalist Zionist of right-hand side marginal, credit of years 1940 at the years 1970 and which intended to operate a néo-pagan rupture with the Judaïsme.

This néo-paganism was the product of their engagement Zionist without concession: by preaching the rooting in the ground of the Hebrew ancestors and by asserting some independence, they had discovered the specific gods to their ground, the gods venerated by their ancestors before those do not keep any more, in their Babylonian exile, that the memory of a single god. But the evolution towards néo-paganism led these ultra-Zionists to break with this ideology.

The first intellectual who developed these pagan ideas was a Juif Russo-Italian Adyah Gurevitch (it adopted the pseudonym of Gur Horon, in reference to a god cananéen) which shared its life between France - where it taught the Semitic languages with the Sorbonne and where it was first leading Betar - and the U.S.A. In various conferences, then in the Shem review (Semitic), it stated that Yahvé belonged to the Pantheon cananéen, that Phéniciens were Hebrews with whole share and that it was necessary to separate the Zionism from the Judaism.

He found a disciple enthusiastic in the Polish Jew Uriel Halperin (alias Yonatan Ratosh), a friend close and an adviser to Abraham Stern, the chief of the Lehi. This wire of Rabbin was a poet and a recognized Philologue. In 1942, it created the “Committee for the crystallization of Hebraic youth”. Its members, who were defined as “the Young Hebrews”, made fun of the Jewish religion, its ritual and the Yiddish. They reviewed honor to pronounce Hebrew in the possible way more gutturale, as were supposed to have spoken it their ancestors, and they idealized the gods cananéens as well as old Mediterranean civilization. Ratosh, in its writings, exhorted its fellow-citizens to be broken with the diaspora, to redécouvrir the pre-judaïque Hebraic past and to build a Hebraic future without bond with the Judaism. According to its own terms, it was necessary “to clean the country of the Hebrews of the Zionism and to clean the heart of the Hebrews of the Judaism”.

November 6th, 1944, the Lehi organized an attack against the minister-resident British in Cairo, Lord Moyne. The two authors of the attacks were called Eliahou Beit Tsouri and Eliahou Hakim and were members of the Committee for the crystallization of Hebraic youth. Decrees a little later they were considered to be the year following. At the time of their lawsuit they declared clearly that they were not Zionists and that they did not fight to constitute a Jewish national Hearth but for the freedom of all “wire of Palestine” against Great Britain. Condemned to death, they will be carried out on March 22nd, 1945. They will remain faithful to their cananeism until the end, and will refuse the assistance of a Rabbin at the time of their last moments.

After the birth of the State of Israel, the “Young Hebrews” published the review Alef which had an important audience. But the massive arrival of new immigrants Zionists organized by the Jewish Agence modified quickly and radically the political scene, cultural and sociological of Palestine and involved the marginalisation then disappearance in Israel of the cananeism.

However the judéo-pagan current had not died. Until its death, in 1981, Yonatan Ratosh evoked it in its poems érotico-mystics. Paradoxically, its references cananéennes found an echo far from Israel: in the important Jewish community of the United States. Giving up the considerations political and adding to the religious theses of Gurevitch and Ratosh of the references to the worship of the Goddess and the magic, were born thus various organizations: Q adash Kinannu , according to its own definition “a Temple phénicien-cananéen”; Beit Ashera Congregation (Congregation of the temple of Ashera) or the Sanctuary Phoenicia (Sanctuary phenician).

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