Watch Shlomo Sand’s contribution to Reuters’ Great Debate here:
In his controversial book, The Invention of the Jewish People, author Shlomo Sand challenges historical notions of the link between Judaism and Israel, and argues that there is no record of exile of the Jewish people.
Photo: Olivia Grabowski-West
Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People is one of the Independent on Sunday’s history books of the year:
There’s nothing retiring about Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, £18.99).
The outrage surrounding Sand’s book in Israel has positioned him as an enemy within, an arch-revisionist working out of the university of Tel Aviv. Sand’s contentions – that much Zionist history derives from deeply unreliable sources and that Jewish identity is essentially defined by religion rather than race or nationalism – are thorough and reasonable, but this has not prevented his attackers from claiming he wants to write Israel out of history. Sand’s arguments are considerably more subtle; he does not question the right of Israel to exist; rather, he calls for a more rigorous examination of the premises on which that existence is based and suggests that they require redefinition. Sand takes on a formidable tradition in claiming that moral validity in the Middle East needs good history, and no discussion of the region any longer seems complete without acknowledgement of his book.
John Rose reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People and Avi Shlaim’s Israel and Palestine for Issue 125 of the journal International Socialism.
I’ll risk a prediction. Shlomo Sand’s book, already a best seller in Israel and France, will
accelerate the disintegration of the Zionist enterprise. Of course Israel’s military force as well as its usefulness to Western governments can allow it to hang on for some time, but its ideological credibility, already severely shaken, will now shatter more quickly. Furthermore Sand is immune to any accusation of anti-Semitism. His book, with tremendous elan and gusto, is a celebration of an unknown early history of the Jewish religion…
There is of course, as always with Shlaim, a great deal of enormous value in this book, particularly his blistering assault on the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s thoroughly nauseating record in creating the Zionist state.
Read the full review here.
In the Observer‘s Books of the year 2009, historian Eric Hobsbawm selects Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People 
as one of his books of the year:
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don’t change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People was reviewed by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times. Cohen notes the controversy the book has caused and offers her own mixed opinions:
Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish
history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity…
But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.
Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.
The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory…”
Read the full article here.
Rafael Behr meets Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, for the Observer books interview:
Sand is a professor at Tel Aviv university and author of The Invention of the Jewish People. His quiet earthquake of a book is shaking historical faith in the link between Judaism and Israel.
Sand’s hands are depicting how most Jews are descended from converts who never set foot in the Holy Land. That has come as a bit of a surprise to many Jews and as a colossal affront to Zionism, Israel’s national ideology. The modern Israeli state was founded on belief in a “Jewish people” as a unified nation, established in biblical times, scattered by Rome, stranded in exile for 2,000 years, then returned to the Promised Land.
But according to Sand there was no exile, and as he seeks to prove by dense forensic archaeological and historical analysis, it is meaningless to talk today about a “people of Israel”. At least not if by that you mean the Jews.
It is hard to imagine a more fundamental challenge to the idea of a modern Jewish state on the site of ancient Judea. Yet the book was a bestseller in Israel and is spreading worldwide. It won a prestigious literary award in France, where Sand is currently on sabbatical. But the reaction of the Jewish community there was hostile. “Hysterical,” he says.
Sand’s own manner in print and in person is urgent rather than polemical; more deadpan than diatribe. He understands the controversy. “After years and years of using phrases like ‘Jewish people’ and ‘Jewish nation for 4,000 years; it isn’t so easy for them to accept a book like mine.”
Read the full article here.
Tony Greenstein of the Weekly Worker has reviewed Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People – describing it as “an important book” which hammers another nail into the Zionist coffin.
Sand’s assault on the biblical foundations of Zionism comes as a far greater shock to the Zionist psyche than the impact of Israel’s new historians such as Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, who destroyed the myths that alleged that the Palestinians went into voluntary exile in 1947-49 in order to facilitate an attack on the Israeli state. The acceptance that the Palestinians were expelled at the point of a gun is quite compatible with the idea of that the Zionists had a right to the land of Palestine. Sand’s argument is on an altogether different plane. It strips Zionism of its self-serving mythical identity, leaving it historically and culturally naked.
Simon Schama, despite his critical review in the Financial Times, has chosen Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People as his book of the year in Italy’s leading business daily Sole 24 Ore.
The historian Tony Judt in an article on Israel’s ethnic myth in today’s Financial Times discusses Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People. 
Referring to the story of exile and return, he says:
It is this narrative that the historian Shlomo Sand seeks to deconstruct in his controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People. His contribution, critics assert, is at best redundant. For the last century, specialists have been perfectly familiar with the sources he cites and the arguments he makes. From a purely scholarly perspective, I have no quarrel with this. Even I, dependent for the most part on second-hand information about the earlier millennia of Jewish history, can see that Prof Sand – for example in his emphasis upon the conversions and ethnic mixing that characterise the Jews in earlier times – is telling us nothing we do not already know.
The question is, who are “we”? Certainly in the US, the overwhelming majority of Jews (and perhaps non-Jews) have absolutely no acquaintance with the story Prof Sand tells. They will never have heard of most of his protagonists, but they are all too approvingly familiar with the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit. If Prof Sand’s popularising work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile.
But there is more to it than that…
Read the full article here.