Yehuda D. Nevo

Yehuda D. Nevo (Hebrew: יהודה נבו; 1932 – 12 February 1992) was an Israeli archaeologist and historian, best known for his revisionist studies of early Islam.^[1]

Yehuda was born in Haifa. His father died when he was nine months old and his mother chose not to raise him. He moved between various foster families, and grew up with Nachshonim ('Pioneers') youth company A of Kibbutz Beit Alfa. He married Miriam Dayan, and divorced her after a short period.

Nevo became an officer even though he did not finish an officer course, and he guided a MK course in Damon. During this, the relationship was lost with two soldiers.

Nevo said that Bibi was initially torture and later a better attitude.^[2] Shoshana Har-Zion was later imprisoned in that prison, with two other Israelis, and they will be communicated by the wall, but did not meet.^[3] Nevo returned to Israel in a captive exchange deal at the end of 1951. After returning from captivity, he passed the intelligence officers' and worked in the Northern Command.^[2] On July 12, 1953, Nevo participated in a retributory operation in Nabi Samuel, after two soldiers were murdered in Even Sapir. With the establishment of Unit 101 in August 1953, he was among the first fighters in the unit and participated in the Kibbia massacre, after which he left the unit. To his testimony, the events in its Tibetan chased him all his life.

After his release, Nevo was a shepherd in Kibbutz Beit Alfa and also worked as a publisher in Jerusalem. He then served as an archaeology researcher. Among other things, Nevo conducted an archaeological survey in the Hula Valley together with Miriam Dayan, as well as an archaeological survey around Kibbutz Metzer. In addition, I recognized the city "watched", which is mentioned in the triple of the third Misss in a nearby Tel and east of Givat Ada. In the early 1960s, he worked for several years on a historical novel dealing with Judaea, but finally chose not to publish it.

Nevo was the pioneers of the first period in Israel. For his research, he lived in Sde Boker Midrasha and from there he left with research expeditions to carry out his research on the ground. He chose to change his original last name Dayan to change Nevo, to avoid being constantly asked if he was a relative of Moshe Dayan.

Nevo has been ill and on February 12, 1992, he put an end to his life in Beiria.^[4] Yehuda was buried in Kibbutz Sde Boker's cemetery, near the place of his main research at the kibbutz called "Lost City".^[5]

On his childhood and his choice a writer in Michael Lev-Tov's "spirit of things", which scratched the story of the kibbutz in Israel. At the opening of the film, the story is presented on Yehuda Dayan Nevo, based on a French mute film made in 1952 on Kibbutz Beit Alfa.

On his tombstone, he was engraved in accordance with his caption "I saw - Yehuda Nevo". Probably a paraphrase of changing his family's name to Nebo/Nevo, which is known as Moses' burial place, and on the poet's song "On the other hand".

Nevo was active in the Negev Archaeological Project on the Early Muslim period and the rural settlement in the Negev in the 6-8 centuries AD, under the management of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). He undertook much of the excavations with his own hands, without workers, with the help og his friends Amnon Rotenberg and Nurit Tsafrir.

In 1981, he and his research group discovered four hundred rock inscriptions in ancient Arabic scripts at a site in the Negev Desert near Sde Boker. The site is known as 'The Lost City' (Site 92, Israel Survey, map of Sde Boker West). This discovery led him, along with Judith Koren, Academic information from the University of Haifa, to reexamine the sources of Islam and early Muslim history.

Nevo presented the first results of the said project at the 3rd International Colloquium organised by the Hebrew University in 1985 on the topic From Jahiliyya to Islam, under the title "Sde Boqer and the Central Negev, 7th-8th Century AD".^[6] He continued his research and published the results in an article on Arab paganism in the Negev during the Byzantine period, which he presented at the fifth Colloquium in this series, in 1990.^[7] His last article on the subject, "Towards a Prehistory of Islam" ("ahead of Islamic History") was published in 1994 after his death, edited by the journal editors.^[8]

The full texts of the Negev rock inscriptions, including copying, decoding and translation, were published by Nevo, Zemira Cohen and Dalia Heftman in their book Ancient Arabic Inscriptions from the Negev.^[9] Before publishing this book, the findings were gradually published in 1981-1982 and 1986-1988. These inscriptions were the basis for questioning Islamic sources and Early Islamic history, which led to conclusions that contradict the official history of Islamic sources. Nevo belongs to the Revisionist school of Islamic studies.

In his book Crossroads to Islam: the origins of the Arab religion and the Arab state ^[10] (in free translation of the Hebrew title: intersections on the way to Islam: the origins of the Arabic religion and the Arab state), which he wrote with Judith Koren and which was published after his death, he presented a theory about the origins and development of the Islamic state and Islamic religion. Like a number of Western researchers before of him, each for other reasons, he doubted the historical validity of classical Islamic traditions about the early days of Islam. The first part of the book describes, based on archaeological findings published by other archaeologists in the academic literature, the cessation of maintenance of the distant province of the Middle East by the Byzantine Empire and the Amphia's withdrawal from the region, after the economic motive for holding the province. Based on these findings, there was no Arab occupation from the south, but the Arabs who seized power following the empty space in the Sasanian left, or local, or tribes from the desert recruited before the empire to maintain its borders with the desert, only at one point it stopped paying them and disappearing from the field. Although a condition for "partnership" with the Byzantines was the adoption of Christianity, in practice the head of the tribe declared it (and therefore including every member of the tribe), in actualitu they remained idol worshippers as before. Continuing the book, based on the analysis of historical sources and the Negev inscriptions, he describes how, over time, these Arabs adopted the Christian monotheism of the sedentary population which they began to control, and subsequently established an independent religion. According to this reading of the historical findings, the stories of Muhammad and the Qur'an are not completely true.

This strong skepticism led to a poignant criticism by other historians. However, Koren and Nevo published a paper explaining their approach to the study of Islamic history,^[11] which was published in 1991 and was later included in a collection of "revisionist" articles, "The Quest For the Historical Muhammad", which he published with scholar Ibn Warraq.^[12]

As stated, other researchers came to similar conclusions before him, such as John E. Wansborough,^[13] who investigated in depth the Qur'an text, and reached the concludion that it was a collection of sayings that "were in the field" and joined together into a holy book only in the mid-8th century, an opinion that Nevo also came from his research on the sails he found in the play.

German theologian Karl-Heinz Ohlig, in an extensive article,^[14][15] built on Nevo's theory as detailed in his book Crossroads to Islam and developed it on to another. But a few years later, in the book Die dunklen Anfänge (lit. 'The Dark Beginnings'), which appeared in German only,^[16] co-edited by Ohlig, he developed his theory in a completely different way and no longer mentions Nevo's work. In this book, Ohlig claims that while Muhammad was a title ("the acclaimed") and not a personal name (a claim that was taken directly from Nevo's research), he follows up with thr claim that it was a degree attributed to Jesus, which means the acclaimed prophet of the Arabs was the Christian Jesus^[17] - something completely contrary to Nevo's theory.

Nevo's theory of many connections as Polish researcher M. Grodzki ^[1] and more.

Theory is similar to his research ^[18] on the formation of Islam is called "Grileh". It also turns out that about 100 years ago, before the development of the "Grone" school, researcher Reinhart Dozy ^[19] wrote in his book De Israelietan Te Mekka ("The Israelites in Mishnah"), 1864, that Islam was influenced by the beginning of the Simon, retired from the Jewish people and the Head of the Hashavim. Our rabbi and settled in the Arabian Peninsula. And that, following the sons of Simon, the belief in Tahlia was not as described in an Islamic idols but a belief in one invisible god 'Abrahami'. In his opinion, even in the Bible, there are clear clues to this, such as the unreasonable diminishing of the Bnei Shimon tribe among the terms in the book of the desert.

The stone by Ezra Beer Hamzim in Mecca) was in the south and because there was also the "Beit Midrash of the name and past."

In practice, his opinion in Yehuda Nevo's study of the failure of Islamic traditions about Muhammad has also existed for many years at the opinion of Shi'ite Islam.^[20]

Nevo discovered Kufic inscriptions in the Negev desert in Israel, four hundred of which were published in Ancient Arabic Inscriptions from the Negev. This led him and Judith Koren, a librarian at the University of Haifa, to re-examine the origins of Islam, and early Islamic history.^[21]

They fundamentally doubt the historicity of Islamic traditional accounts of early Islam, thus adhering to the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies. Nevo and Koren co-authored a work called Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State, which presents a theory of the origins and development of the Islamic state and religion. According to them, the Arabs conquered the Near East with a mixture of pre-Islamic pagan and "Indeterminate Monotheistic" beliefs.^[22] The Arab's beliefs were modified in contact with the Jewish-Christian monotheism they encountered in the conquered land. Nevo's research cast doubts on the historicity of the traditional narrative of Muhammad as a prophet and the traditional history of the Quran.^[23]

Some of Nevo's work is also published in the book Quest for the Historical Muhammad, edited by Ibn Warraq.

• Nevo, Yehuda D. (1990). "The Origins of the Muslim Descriptions of the Jahili Meccan Sanctuary", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, no. 1
• Nevo, Yehuda D. (1991). Pagans and herders: a re-examination of the Negev runoff cultivation systems in the Byzantine and early Arab periods, IPS, Negev, Israel, ISBN 965-435-000-9
• Nevo, Yehuda D.; Cohen, Zemira; Heftman, Dalia eds. (1993). Ancient Arabic inscriptions from the Negev, IPS, Negev, Israel, ISBN 965-435-001-7
• Nevo, Yehuda D.; Koren, Judith (2000). "Methodological Approaches to Islamic Studies". The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 420–443.
• Nevo, Yehuda D.; Koren, Judith (2003). Crossroads to Islam: the origins of the Arab religion and the Arab state, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, ISBN 1-59102-083-2

• His profile at National Library of Israel

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