Simon Schama, for The Financial Times, and Max Hastings, for The Sunday Times, have both reviewed Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People. While both reviewers attack the book’s title – with Hastings calling it ‘foolishly provocative’ and Schama ’splashy’ – both recognise the power of Sand’s seminal text. Hastings states that the book ‘represents, at the very least, a formidable polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish society, in which non-Jews, such as Palestino-Israelis, are culturally and politically marginalised.’
“Sand’s fundamental thesis is that the Jewish people are joined by bonds of religion, not race or ancient nationhood. He deplores the explicitly racial basis of the Israeli state, in which the Arab minority are second-class citizens. No Jew who lives today in a western democracy would tolerate the discrimination and exclusion experienced by the Palestino-Israelis… The state’s ethnocentric foundation remains an obstacle to [its liberal democratic] development.
It is easy to see why Sand’s book has attracted fierce controversy. The legend of the ancient exile and modern return stands at the heart of Israel’s self-belief. It is no more surprising that its people enjoy supposing that Joshua’s trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho — at a time when, Sand says, Jericho was a small town with no walls — than that we cherish tales of King Alfred and his cakes.
The author rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in defiance of evidence or probability.” – Max Hastings, The Sunday Times
Read Max Hastings’ review of The Invention of the Jewish People here and Simon Schama’s review here. 
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Who is this guy Sand? He lives in israel..what womb did he come from…Jezabel from Ahab’s seed? Does he relaize how much damage he does to the Jewish people, not only to Israel but the diaspora Jews too. As if we Jews don;t have enough enemies..we need a meshugee Jew yet? Khazers? Who care about these nut cases who thought they were Jewish. They dont sound Jewish to me. Ask any American Jew who the Chazers were…they’ll say..”WHO? Bury this guy’s book, Mr Sand in the Sahara!
I still don’t get it..with the whole world of Islam (over a billion) and the UN and much of Europe all ranting about Israel’s crime of defending it self (a luxory Jews don’t seem to have and even it’s right to exist in a land that has had Jews/Hebrews extant there for about 4000 years) we have this guy Sand come’s along and starts claiming Zionism’s history with Israel’s is questionable. Does Sand deny the Holacuast too? I can imagine all the Jew haters that must love his book!
ben Zalman
If Sand is right then Israel does not have to defend itself. Its largely Hazar descended population just has to recognise the rights of the descendants of the Hebrews who converted to Islam and are now known as Palestinians.
Lets try to discuss the facts and the logic Professor Sand is showing in his book instead of attacking him. Answers like ben’s show that Professor Sand is so right about the ignorance of most people when it come to their own history and believes.
Perhaps, Prof. Sand’s book is laying the foundation of a one state solution in the area of Israel/Palestine. Both Israelis and Palestinians seem to share common ancestry and could share a common future as well.
They could share Jerusalem without political complications too. Quarrels would be restricted to religious causes and controlled by secular police.
All of the “oh, so now the Jews can drop their whole nation claim and get along with Palestinians” inferences are idiotic. Whether or not the Israeli Jews are related to Palestinians does not affect the security threat posed by the Palestinians. It is incredibly ego-centric of westerners to think that Palestinians will care about the western reaction to this book; that they have enough in common with Jews to get along.
Sand has learned the lesson of Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe. If you’re Israeli, and you pander to the world’s anti-semites by writing an anti-Zionist book, you’ll get famous.
Those who are serious about the history of Judea, should check out F.E. Peters extensive lectures on the history of the City of Jerusalem, available on CD. It is very enlightening. After a Jewish insurrection starting in A.D. 66, not only was the temple destroyed, the city itself was set into ruin, (see Josephus, historian… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus ). Once again, after another insurrection around A.D. 132, Jerusalem was destroyed by Roman order, and by Roman law, Jews were banned from Judea. This is a matter of record.
It is important to note that almost every person living today in Europe is directly descended from forefathers and foremothers who were living in Judea at the beginning of the Common Era. It would be virtually impossible to prove you are not a descendant. Your DNA doesn’t lie.
While I agree that most if not all Palestinians are surely a mix and of some Hebrew descent, (as I am as well), the contention of Shlomo Sand’s, that “no book exists” about the exile is false. Regarding first century Jewish events, Josephus, a first century Jewish historian who survived and recorded the destruction of Jerusalem, wrote the book “The Jewish War”. Much research and many books have been written about the events from A.D. 66 to A.D. 135. Shlomo Sand is falsely claiming otherwise. He hasn’t done his homework.
And could someone please tell what kind of property rights laws exist in Israel, that allow for persons to be driven from their homes?
I honestly don’t really get that part.
I am a PhD student immersed in many of the primary sources to which Shlomo Sand, specialist in modern French history, refers. There are plenty of British academics in Jewish history. Conspicuously, none were present here, or in any discussion with Sand.
The exile is assumed in rabbinic and Talmudic literature, as it is in Christian and Islamic. The Talmud is an expression of the rabbis’ resolve that every scrap of Jewish law, lore, custom and memory be retained in the face of the catastrophic loss of temple, Jerusalem, Judea and state.
In the Bellum Judaeorum. Josephus is too early to realise the loss of temple and Jerusalem is permanent, and he likely hoped for their return to the Jews. But there is no question that he perceives the loss of a Jewish state, of which Jerusalem is the capital.
Soon after Jews fall from favour. We hear no more of Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals, like Philo, whether Roman citizens or no. The destruction of the Alexandrian Jewish communities signals a decline in Hellenistic Jewish civilisation, a decline completed by the Christians. Jews no longer write Greco-Roman historiography. Hellenistic and Roman Jewish works, the provenance, in any case, of an elite, are lost. All Jews, empirewide, are punished for the rebels of Judea by collection of the temple tax. Indeed this likely plays a part in triggering the revolts in Alexandria and Cyrenaica. All Jews are thus identified as “Judeans”, and the Christians continue the policy. But now Jews are not only treated as de facto rebels, or potential rebels, against the Roman state and its gods, they are rebels against their own God, who now favours Greco-Roman gentile Christians, who inherit Jerusalem and Judea, now renamed “Palestine”, from their pagan predecessors, who acted as agents of divine wrath against Israel for rejecting or slaying Christ.
The “myth” of exile arises precisely because it is no longer possible to retain or research information about the past in detail. Except, for Jews, in the Talmud. It is a shorthand that most neatly encapsulates the Jewish experience of dispossession, disfavour, subjugation and displacement. Jews intermingle and intermarry, and the rabbis forge a pan-Jewish identity precisely because they fear Israel will be lost among the nations. Thereafter the tendency is less to convert new as to retain old Jews.
The assumption, indeed the necessity, that Jews are a people dispossessed of temple, city and land for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets only bolsters Jewish self-definition.
And the Christians continue the process of Jewish dispossession of the land of Israel by laws seeking to alienate or marginalise them. Yes, a sizable Jewish community remains in the land, largely in the Galil, whither many Judean refugees likely went.
Shlomo’s assertion that Romans did not exile peoples is idiotic: they certainly carried out tranfer or genocide against Dacia, the only other province, other than Judaea, to be renamed as a consequence.
Cassius Dio says 500 000 Judeans were killed during the suppression of the second Jewish revolt. Exaggeration? Possibly. But ethnic cleansing even by modern standards (and the Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian experience springs to mind).
Judaea is changed to Syria Palaestina both to likely reflect that “demographic” change and to alienate Jews from the land for ever. It was never complete, sure. But I can tell you that every ancient Christian author, even those living in Palestine, speaks as though Israel has been completely dispossessed from the land, not because it necessarily reflects reality, but because it reflects things as they think they should be.
Which is why Jews have been regarded as a people dispossessed of temple, city and land, in Christendom and Islam, for most of Christian and Islamic history.
Especially Palestinian Christian and Islamic history.
In any case, one consequence of this is that, even in the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews in Europe, North Africa and Asia are regarded as more nationally Judean than, say, European or Arab, and are either killed, or effectively driven out: before 1914, mostly to America, after 1914, mostly to Palestine, or what became Israel.
Which is why the Jewish state of Israel is the second or largest Jewish community today, and certainly the one most identifiably Jewish (hence, unsurprisingly, the especial focus of hatred of antisemites today).
Sand’s holding a post-Revolutionary French notion of nationality as the touch stone of its definition is absurd: the Greeks and the Romans regarded Jews as a distinct ethno-national group, along with Syrians and Egyptians.
But, more to the point, Sand’s criterion proves the very opposite of his thesis: the granting to Jews of French citizenship was significant precisely because it was the first time since antiquity that Jews could transcend their (anciently regarded) Jewish ethno-nationality without having first to convert from Judaism to Christianity.
The intellectuals of the French Republic all assumed the Jews were an ethno-national group historically dispossessed because this was not merely how Jews saw themselves, it had been a datum of European culture for nearly 2000 years.
It was precisely this identity Jews were supposed to surrender in order to become French citizens. That was why orthodox rabbis viewed emancipation with such ambivalence, and why Liberal Judaism evolved as a response.
Conte de Clermont-Tonnerre to the General Assembly of the Republic ‘To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing.’
It goes without saying that this presupposes Jews to have been a national group of some kind, although this was what Jews needed to abandon to become French citizens.
“There is a law in Israel, passed in 1985, which forbids political parties to openly oppose the principle of a Jewish state. Neither are they allowed to work for a change of this principle through democratic means. A party so doing will be banned from elections to the Knesset.
Democracy is thus denied to those citizens – even Jews – who wish to work within the parliamentary system towards replacing the Jewish state with a secular state which represents all its citizens’ equal rights regardless of religion or ethnic origin. This law alone prevents Israel from being seen as a liberal democracy of Western type.
All Jews living outside Israel are entitled by law to immigrate and become citizens immediately, while the Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes are prohibited from returning. This is a violation of international law.” For full article here is the link:http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/middle-east/115326-zionism-more-than-traditional-colonialism-and-apartheid
What about the idea that the original jews were black people and not the white people that so many are so fondly descriptive of. From My understanding after the flood noah had three sons shem, ham and japheth. From what I have read japheth started the caucasion race while ham preceded the black race and the children of israel lineage. In the book genesis the tenth chapter ashkenaz came from the seed japheth. How then has black jews turn white? Maybe it’s true that the people who are called the jews today are nothing but jewish converts who for so long become quite fond of such a relationship that they decided to make the claim real, at least in their own minds.