By Evan R. Goldstein in The Wall Street Journal.

This much is known: In the mid-eighth century, the ruling elite of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe in Eurasia, converted to Judaism. Their impetus was political, not spiritual. By embracing Judaism, the Khazars were able to maintain their independence from rival monotheistic states, the Muslim caliphate and the Christian Byzantine empire. Governed by a version of rabbinical law, the Khazar Jewish kingdom flourished along the Volga basin until the beginning of the second millennium, at which point it dissolved, leaving behind a mystery: Did the Khazar converts to Judaism remain Jews, and, if so, what became of them? [click to read full article]

Converts to Colonizers?

By Gabriel Piterberg, in New Left Review 59 Sept/Oct 2009

The foundational myths of the state of Israel rest on the notion that, throughout history, the Jews have been descended from a single ethno-biological core of Judean exiles who had been removed from their ancestral lands in the first two centuries CE. Shlomo Sand’s [The Invention of the Jewish People] sets out to refute such claims of organic ethnic continuity, arguing that the idea that the Jews had been exiled across the Mediterranean world was a creation of the Christian Church—mass displacement as punishment and constant reminder of who is Israel Veritas—which was conveniently embraced by 19th-century Jewish scholars. Their narratives of a centuries-long Galut, ‘exile’, and by extension the Zionist project of ‘returning’ to reclaim ancient territories, are based on historical fictions.

Against these, Sand offers an alternative history in which the striking demographic growth of the Jews in the Hellenistic Mediterranean was the product not of mass exile, but of an energetic drive of proselytism and conversion that had begun under the Hasmonean Kingdom in the second century BCE and lasted till the fourth century CE. Conversions were also, Sand holds, the source of the large Jewish populations at the margins of the Hellenistic world—Arabia, North Africa and the area between the Black and Caspian Seas—as Judaizing currents met repression in Christian territories and fanned out into the largely pagan lands beyond. Sand offers a cautious endorsement to the thesis, earlier popularized by Arthur Koestler, that East European Jewry—what he and others call the Yiddish Nation—originated not from any eastward migration of ‘German’ Jews, themselves supposedly descended from pure Judean exiles, but from the Khazars, Jewish converts whose empire on the Volga–Don steppe disappears from the historical record in the 13th century. This contention has far-reaching implications, for it is the Yiddish Nation that is in many ways the real foundation for the two largest and most vociferous Jewish communities of the past half-century—the Israeli and the American. [click to read full article]

Tel Aviv University historian, Professor Shlomo Sand, opens his remarkable study of Jewish nationalism quoting Karl W. Deutsch:

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours”.

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism, and especially within the concept of Jewish identity.  It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

[The Invention of the Jewish People] is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative. [click to read full article]

Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 22 October 2009

In 1967 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his poem “A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies,” only to be accused of “collaboration with the Zionist enemy” for his sympathetic depiction of an Israeli soldier’s remorse of conscience. Forty years later that soldier has identified himself as the historian Shlomo Sand. He has translated his remorse into a book that has become a bestseller in Israel and France, where the award of the Prix Aujourd’hui has made the author something of a TV star.

Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century “[t]he national project was … a fully conscious one … It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation.” [click to read full article]

By Aaron Leonard

Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand recently spoke at NYU about his newly translated book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a book that challenges conventional wisdom and deeply entrenched myths about the foundations of the state of Israel.

Among the revelations in the book is the fact that the ancient kingdoms of Solomon and David did not exist as the Bible describes. He also challenges the myth of the Exodus of ancient Jews from Egypt, noting “the Ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records of every event … yet there is not a single mention of any ‘children of Israel’ who lived in Egypt.” He further points out that an exodus from Egypt would have involved moving across the Sinai peninsula into lands Egypt ruled over — thus escaping from Egypt to … Egypt.

He also describes the process of proselytizing and conversion that led to whole populations converting to Judaism, thus explaining the dispersal of the religion throughout Europe and Asia.

Sand writes in his introduction, “I don’t think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change it looks for different books.” This book is an important contribution to the debate on the future of the Middle East. I sat down with professor Sand last Friday to talk about “Invention” while he was in New York. [click to read interview]

By Jack Ross, From Mondoweiss.

Last Spring, I asked my father over dinner why it was such an outrageous proposition, leaving aside whether or not true, that Judaism is solely a matter of confession, as opposed to an ethnonational identity. He answered with some trepidation “because it contradicts 2,000 years of history.” When I went on to concede that for most of Jewish history there existed isolated ethnic-tribal groupings who adopted Judaism – in other words, numerous Jewish peoples – but that the idea that they constituted a single pan-Jewish volk was absurd, my father rigidly retorted “they just are.”

I was struck, first, by the sharp contrast to a Reform Rabbi friend who had months earlier given a thoughtful if less than satisfactory answer to the question. But the reality exposed right before my eyes was stunning. I remember growing up how odd I found it that my father, a serious Jew and a physicist, was deeply ambivalent about any notion of reconciling science and religion, and more recently was practically on the fence about even believing in God. But the quasi-racialist imperative of “Jewish peoplehood” – this was what, in the phrase of Maimonides, he believed with a perfect faith.

Norman Podhoretz, in his recently published angst asking why Jews are liberals, finally concludes what may be his most totally self-regarding work yet by describing the “Torah of liberalism” to which most American Jews subscribe. This Torah of liberalism does exist, and I am not a fan (notwithstanding my own lefty shul which the Commentary set would surely argue is its ultimate expression). The bottom line is that Podhoretz and his followers are the last people who can credibly criticize the Torah of liberalism, for it merely follows in the precedent set by their Torah of Jewish nationalism.

I frankly never got the Torah of Jewish nationalism until I was an adult. My formal Jewish education (Conservative) very clumsily hobbled together Hebrew instruction so that one could recite but not understand a traditional prayer service with the teaching of Zionist history to 5th graders at an 8th grade level, with the apparent intention of instilling an identification with these things deliberately lacking in substance. Never was it spelled out for us explicitly that this meant we were some kind of nation within a nation and not merely what we were instead of being Christian – presumably even the teachers were not quite credulous enough to say so. Finally, by the time I grew up my father would say to me point blank that “Judaism is a national religion” and that he had no problem with me being a “secular Jew”, from both of which statements I recoiled. For a time I completely despaired that there was no alternative.

For God so loved the Jews that he sent unto them his only begotten nation-state so that the Jewish people would not perish but have everlasting life – this is the Torah of Jewish nationalism in a single verse. The thing that, whatever their attitudes about the existence of God or the Jewish religion generally, Jews are expected by their self-appointed leaders to believe with a perfect faith. And now, at long last, we have a definitive and learned polemic against this idea which has caused so much terror in our world today with The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, finally released in its English translation. [click to read full article]

By Philip Weiss from Mondoweiss.

Of all the events I’ve covered surrounding Jewish identity and Israel in the last year, none has given me so much pleasure as the lecture last night by Shlomo Sand at NYU on the Invention of the Jewish People. Most events I go to are grinding, awful, heartrending; often with lamentations and pictures of mutilated children. This one was pure intellectual deviltry of the highest order by a Pavarotti of the lecture hall. And while it was fiercely anti-Zionist and included references to the mutilated children, it left me in just an incredibly elated mood. For I saw real light at the end of the tunnel, and not the horrifying dimness that surrounds almost all other events that deal with Israel politics here– for instance with the neoconservative Weekly Standard’s disgusting pursuit of J Street.

This pleasure was entirely Shlomo Sand’s achievement. He walked by me going down to the lectern and I noticed his physical vanity at once. He had expensive shoes on, designer jeans or cords, a zipup black jacket and a black shirt under that unbuttoned to the sternum. He is lean and mid-60sish, and behaves like a player. His beard is cut in an interesting manner, he wears designer glasses. I wondered if he dyed his hair. All glorious devil.

Sand has an excitable, self-referential style, and he began the lecture by breaking his guitar. “Jewish history is not my field.” No, but once he had discovered that the story of the connection of the Jewish people to the Holy Land was a myth, he decided that he would secretly explore the history but not publish until he got tenure for doing other work. Because if he published this first, “there would not be any chance of being a full professor. Not only in Tel Aviv. But at NYU too.”

Everyone laughed, but Sand said, “That is not a joke. I must write the book after I see that no one could touch me really.” More devil. Though Sand is right. This is no joke. [click to read full article]