Tony Judt on Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People in the Financial Times

I am a PhD student immersed in many of the primary sources to which Shlomo Sand, specialist in modern French history, refers. 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 know 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 Christian 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, whether 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.

Sand writes in response to Simon Schama:

“It is also quite peculiar that a serious historian should assume that in the 9th century B.C there was a “developed nation-state” in the Middle-East. Perhaps we are to imagine the existence of a flourishing print industry, book market and compulsory education during that period, thereby forging ancient Israel into a nation-state?”

This is just silly. It sounds as though Sand is saying that, because an ancient Judean state does not match up to the French Republic, ergo it cannot have been a state that originates the traditions that go on to comprise the Tanakh, not to mention the ethnic group that goes on to become the Jews. Briefly, Sand’s assertion that there could have been no such thing as a state in 9th century Judah only rather shows that specialists in modern French cinema shouldn’t dabble in ancient historiography. Schama’s asserting Rome extirpated “everything” Jews is a mistake. But Rome did destroy and forbid the temple cultus, various aspects of Judaism at various times, Jewish habitation of Jerusalem, and effected ethnic cleansing from its surroundings and Judea more widely. It was not complete. But then it was not complete for Palestinian Muslims or Christians, either. They destroyed and depopulated hundreds of Jewish villages, as archeology bears out: most Jewish remains are in the Galil, and date from the third-fourth century. At that time the Roman state seems to have largely left Judeans alone. Then came the Christian state, and that changed. In any case, as I wrote earlier, Rome, pagan and Christian, punished all Jews as de facto Judean.

Further Sand’s adducing Mishna and Talmud does not help his case: the catalyst for their production is the great national disaster the rabbis perceived had befallen Israel, and their response is, as I write above, the every scrap of Jewish law, lore, custom and memory be retained in the face of the catastrophic loss of temple, Jerusalem, Judea and state. The Talmuds and Mishna witness to the Jewish experience of Nakbah. And these are the very books that assume an exile that Sand claims not to have found. Perhaps if he had looked a little harder?

And perhaps if Verso was as interested in deconstructing the ethnicity of some other groups that have ethno-national states and movements (Palestinian and other Arab Muslim and Christian springing to mind), it might appear a little less uniquely interested in intellectually deconstructing Jews even as conventional antisemites did, in their converse way, before any state of Israel existed, and thus paving the way to their physical deconstruction, in a stateless diaspora.