Martin Goodman reviewed Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People for the Times Literary Supplement, but neglected to mention that he was criticised in the book. Shlomo Sand replied last week, and now Martin Goodman has responded—you can read his letter here.
The Invention of the Jewish People
by Shlomo Sand
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
It is very easy to prove that “exile” is a myth – after the mythical exile Jews had at least 4 wars/rebellions against the Romans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_wars
First Jewish-Roman War (66–73) — also called the First Jewish Revolt or the Great Jewish Revolt.
Kitos War (115–117) — sometimes called the Second Jewish-Roman War.
Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135) — also called the Second Jewish-Roman War (when Kitos War is not counted), or the Third (when the Kitos War is counted).
Jewish revolt against Gallus (351) — the Jewish revolt originating in Sepphoris.
Revolt against Heraclius (613) — the Jewish revolt originating in Tiberias.
The fact that exile never happened does not delegitimize israel.
What delegitimizes israel is the policy of apartheid.
Jews could live in peace as do white Europeans in South Africa or Russians in Muslim regions of the Russian Federation.
Behruz “apartheid” my Tuchas! Over a million Arabs live in Israel and if things were so bad for them I don’t see them running away to Jordan, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Beruit or Damascus. As to “white” Europeans..check history, Behruz..the white Euros caused millions of murders and killing thru war than anyone in the universe! After 4000 years of Jewish history of Pogroms..we Jews are again sipping tea in Jerusalem! NEVER AGAIN!
Yeah Behruz.. you have the tapes of that time what news tv station had all your crap info..CBS NBC ABC..CNN or Fox…When in Rome I pissed on the arch of Titus! Caeser is dead but Jews are here..stick that in your Jew Hating tuchas!
ben Zalman, what makes you think I am a “Jew hater”? I believe that all peoples are entitled to peace and security.
You are not a descendant of Hebrew people. Just throw away your emotions. However if you were born in the Middle East, that makes the native of the land, not a myth about people who did not assimilate for 2000 years. You would simply disappear!
When I mentioned apartheid, I did no mean the israeli arabs, the citizens. I meant that there are about 4 million palestinians who live under full control of your country, but are denied their natural rights.
Your country neither leaves them alone with their own state nor annexes their land and issues them citizenship.
Russia has done so with Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Daghestanis, etc. China has done so with tibetans, uyghurs, etc. South Africa has done so. USA and Canada have done so with the Native Americans.
Your country has two choices both of which she denies. This can’t last forever.
The narrative that the new genetic study (link below) disproves Schlomo Sand’s thesis that ancient Israel is largely, from a genetic point of view, the Palestinian people is in the New York Times.
The Jews of Europe were not, according to Mr. Sand, the ancestors of the Judeans who left Israel after 70AD.
The narrative is in the New York Times and will quickly become orthodox: this guy Sand gave it the college try, but Zionism remains standing, taller than ever.
The fact that European Jewish populations have disproportionate overlap with Cypriots and Lebanese Druse but not “other Levant” populations is being taken to mean that the narrative of Zionism circa 1890 is largely correct. (See the links below)
If the other Levant population is the Palestinians, it may PROVE Mr. Sand’s argument, if the Cypriots and the Druse are NOT from the Middle East (Greeks?). That’s only one possibility.
Then the “Middle Eastern” core in the study below is actually a Hellenistic remnant.
And what of the Palestinians? Do they not have a core of Middle Eastern ancestry too? If it is more Middle Eastern than the Jews of Europe, which it should be, why is the hypothesis that ancient Israel is primarily the Palestinian people wrong?
I feel that this study does not mean what the new narrative says it means but I did not pay to see the whole thing and weed through it.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature09103.html
The questions I have are about this “other Levant” population and about using the Druze and Cypriots as the baseline… and whether the Palestinians are one of the new populations included in the study.
Who is going to pay $5, read the articles, consult with appropriate people, including the authors of the study, and check this Zionism-proof narrative? Do you know someone for the job?
If it validates Zionism, then it validates it. I’ll believe when I see the results taken apart more carefully.
http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(10)00246-6
Here is the review by Goodman, possibly the leading UK academic in Roman Jewish history. It is indeed most scathing of Sand’s work:
Secta and natio
MARTIN GOODMAN
Shlomo Sand
THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
Translated by Yael Lotan 332pp. Verso. £18.99.
978 1 84467 4220
In ad 67, a year after the Jews of Jerusalem had begun their war against Rome, a certain Antiochus, the son of the leader of the local Jewish community in the great city of Antioch in Syria, brought about a massacre of some in this community by alleging that his fellow Jews were plotting to burn the city to the ground. Those who survived were compelled, at Antiochus’s instigation, to sacrifice in the pagan manner: Antiochus wanted to prove his change of allegiance, and he knew the most effective way to attack his fellow Jews. Soon afterwards the remaining Jews were accused of responsibility for a fire which did in fact burn down the market square and surrounding buildings. The Roman authorities only with great difficulty restrained the local mob from killing the rest of the Jews in the city, even though it turned out on investigation that the incendiaries had been not Jews, but debtors who had hoped to free themselves from their burdens by destroying the public archives.
What was to happen to these diaspora Jews when, some three years later, the city of Antioch was visited by Titus, conqueror of Judaea, who had destroyed Jerusalem so thoroughly as to “leave future visitors to the spot no ground for believing it had ever been inhabited”? The people of Antioch greeted Titus with acclamations and a petition to expel the Jews from their city, to which Titus responded that this was not possible: “their own fatherland, to which, being Jews, they ought to be banished, has been destroyed, and no place would now receive them”.
These stories and quotations come from the last book of Josephus’s account of the Jewish War, which was composed soon after the events as a work of history for Roman readers, including Titus himself. If what Josephus wrote was true, what is one to make of the claim in Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, that there was no exile of the Jews in ad 70, that the notion of such an exile was the product of Christian theology later adopted by the rabbis, that modern Jews are all the descendants of gentiles from outside Judaea who converted to Judaism as a religion, and that the Jews were not, and should not now, be considered as a people until the Jewish people were “invented” in the nineteenth century? Is there anything at all to be said for Sand’s much-hyped hypotheses? Certainly it is true, and has always been well recognized, that the dejudaization of Jerusalem was not instantaneous in ad 70. A Roman legion was quartered there, but the early rabbinic sources (almost totally ignored by Sand) refer to Jews among the ruins, and it was not until the failure in ad 135 of another uprising, the Bar Kokhba war, that Jews were forbidden to enter into the territory of the city. The explicit testimony to this ban in the writings of Justin Martyr in around the 140s ad is incomprehensibly dismissed by Sand as the product of Christian theological bias, but it is hard to know why Justin, who came from Palestine and was a sophisticated author in the Greek rhetorical tradition, would lay his argument open to easy refutation on the grounds that his assertion about the exclusion of the Jews from their home city was simply not true.
It is also a well-known fact that exile for these Jews was only from Jerusalem and its environs, not from all the areas that had at times been part of the Roman province of Judaea in the first century ad or constituted “the land of Israel” for the rabbis – indeed, much of the rabbinic literature of late antiquity was composed in Galilee, including the Mishnah. It is hard to imagine that this information can come as a surprise to Israelis of any background in the light of the considerable efforts made in recent years to build up tourism to sites of Jewish settlement in late Roman Palestine, such as Sepphoris.
But (as everyone also knows) many Jews in late antiquity were to be found scattered arou
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXaK5w3WAyCmYWg2c3hqbmRxOXFxXzQzNHhwdHA1NWhm&hl=en
But (as everyone also knows) many Jews in late antiquity were to be found scattered around the wider Roman world, not just in the diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean coastlands where Jews had been established long before ad 70, but also in parts of the western Mediterranean and in northern Europe where they are attested only after Jerusalem had been destroyed. Where did these Jews come from? Sand claims that not just some, but the great majority, of these diaspora Jews were descended not from inhabitants of Judaea, but from converts, and this is where his discussion substitutes belligerence for argument. Sand’s analysis starts from the assumption that the total population of Jews in the Roman Empire was so huge that it can only have come about through widespread conversion, but this assumption itself is faulty. He confidently cites the figure of a total of 4 million Jews in the Roman Empire in the first century ad, a number derived, via a series of wholly random guesses, from a figure which was itself long ago shown to be an error which crept into scholarly literature in the nineteenth century on the basis of a confused reference by the thirteenth-century Syriac author Bar Hebraeus to the total number of Roman citizens in the time of Claudius.
And if the Jewish population did indeed grow disproportionately to the non-Jewish population in the early centuries ad, the impact of Jewish opposition to abortion and infanticide deserves to be taken a great deal more seriously as an explanation than it is by Sand, who seems to be totally ignorant of the standard methods of population control, including child exposure, in the pagan Roman Empire. That some non-Jews converted in this period, not least for intermarriage, is not in doubt, and the evidence adduced by Sand (as for many of his allegedly radical assertions) is all standard. But to imagine that mass conversion to Judaism could have taken place in this period on the same lines as the conversions of whole populations to Christianity within the Christian Roman state from the fourth century, without evoking considerably greater hostile evidence from the Roman state in either its pagan or its Christian guise, is desperately implausible, given the illegality of male conversion to Judaism in the Roman world from the mid-second century.
No less implausible is Sand’s claim that the Jews were regarded only as a religious group after ad 70, and not as a people. It is of course true that the complex identity of Jews as both a religion and a nation is a stock topic of undergraduate essays in the (perfectly respectable) academic field of Jewish History so despised by Sand, and the same topic has recently absorbed the energies of the Supreme Court in London. And the Christian Roman state, which from the late fourth century categorized all its inhabitants to a considerable extent by religious identity, referred to the Jews also primarily in religious terms — as a “secta”, “superstitio”, or (on rare occasions, more politely) as a “religio”.
But there is also no doubt that both pagan and Christian Romans sometimes thought of the Jews as a people (and in this respect the terminology used about Jews is very different from that used about Christians, about whom Sand has remarkably little to say). Near the end of the third century, 200 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple but still under a pagan Roman emperor, the author of a legal tome called the Sententiae referred to these “iudaei” as a “natio”, which is unambiguous, and the same terminology can be found in a law, preserved in the fifth-century Theodosian code, of the Christian Emperor Constantine II: on August 13, 339, he gave judgement on the punishment to be inflicted on Jews who bought a slave “of another secta or natio”. The same term “natio” was employed about the Jews by the aristocratic pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus when he vented his rage in verse against a Jew whose bad temper ruined a visit he made, at some time between 415 and 417, to some particularly pleasant fish-ponds near Faleria, which he encountered on the way from Rome to his property in his native Gaul.
What has possessed Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv historian of contemporary European history, to write about a subject of which he patently knows so little? The answer is refreshingly simple. His aim, which he does not try to disguise, is to undermine the claim of Israeli Jews who come from diaspora communities to have returned to the land from which their people originated. He hopes thereby to help to turn the state of Israel into a more equal democratic society in which the origins of its Jewish and Arab inhabitants are ignored.
Now, Sand’s political concerns for the present and the future may indeed be justified, since there is no doubt that keeping the state of Israel both Jewish and democratic is proving by no means easy – not at all a new insight, as the many studies cited by Sand himself in his final chapter go to show. But this political stance cannot be justified by an appeal to invented history. It is not just Sand’s ancient history that is faulty. His account of the historiography of the Jews over the past two centuries, with his constant polemic against Zionist historians, is ludicrous.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish intellectuals referred to the notion of race no more than others in Europe at the time, and such language fell out of use among Jewish historians long ago. A concern with the racial genetics of contemporary Jews is Sand’s, not theirs: anyone walking down the street in Tel Aviv can see the genetic diversity of modern Israeli Jews. It is extraordinary to claim, as Sand does, that Jewish historians have suppressed knowledge of the remarkable conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in or around the ninth century; on the contrary, they have frequently revelled in it. Sand’s whole discussion of this topic is, as the historian Israel Bartal put it in a devastating review published in the French journal Cités, “l’invention d’une invention”. One can only speculate about the reasons for Sand’s so frequent misrepresentation of the books he quarries, but the result is farcical.
Why bother at all to review such a book? So far as I know, no scholar who works on Jewish history in the Roman period has deigned to pay it any attention. But such lordly disdain is dangerous. The cover of Sand’s book proclaims it an international bestseller, and it has been widely discussed by journalists and on television and radio both in Israel and France, and now in Britain. For the general public, what catches the attention are the headlines, not the arguments or the evidence, and it is revealing that there is evidently an appetite for such claims among secular Israeli Jews.
But, more worryingly, the book has also received praise from historians and others who ought to have known better. These enthusiasts do not presumably know the material about which Sand writes, but they like his conclusions, and they have presumably been taken in by the impression that his book is scholarly history – an impression created by large numbers of footnotes referring to a wide array of scholarship (much of it only in fact half-digested) and an opening chapter which gallops competently enough through standard discussions about the construction of national identities and the notion of ethnicity before the author turns to his highly dubious claims about the Jews.
In a self-glorifying preface to this book, Sand describes his role as that of a revealer of inconvenient facts suppressed by a malicious political and academic establishment. Some of those who have expressed approval of his book may believe that, like the Israeli New Historians whose discovery of genuinely new data on the events of 1948 has indeed caused much discomfort to that establishment, Shlomo Sand, too, has faced opposition because he has unearthed something new. Nothing could be further from the truth.