Acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for Truthdig.
Sand’s text has excited virulent denunciation in some quarters. My lack of expertise in its original Hebrew and in the detailed context of many of Sand’s quotations inhibits me from making any reliable judgment. I can say only that common sense supports much of his narrative and that its content, where I am qualified to assess it, is admirably and candidly presented. It may be that this book comes too late to help men arrive at a sane and rational compromise in the Middle East. Some situations are beyond repair, however much we wish it otherwise. Ideology and religion provide the basic framework of human thought and also supply the often antique racks on which we are all stretched. As Genet observed, “Nous ne sortirons jamais de ce bordel”—i.e., there is, to put it chastely, no way out of this mess.
READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.
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.
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.
Stephen Howe names The Invention of the Jewish People as The Independent’s Book of the Week, but sugggests that ‘It could, though, be argued that still more problematic and pernicious is the “negative” fear, hatred and contempt for Palestinians: that the trouble with Israel is less its character as a “Jewish state” than its being a non-Arab, indeed “anti-Arab” state.’
Read the full article here.
The debate about The Invention of the Jewish People continues in the FT here. Shlomo Sand was keen to respond to Simon Schama’s critical review of his book from last Saturday’s FT. However, the paper would only consider publishing a very short one paragraph response. Shlomo declined and has asked us to present the complete text of his response below.
“Dear Editor,
One of the most effective techniques adopted to ridicule or marginalize one’s ideological opponents is to create a caricatured and extreme version of their thesis. Some Zionist historians have become past masters with such methods, and Simon Schama seems to want to emulate them in his review of my book in the FT of 13 November.
Although most Zionist thought was ethnocentric and in some cases even defined Judaism in racial terms, I insisted in my book that Zionist thinkers had not thought in terms of a pure race and had no intentions of “purifying” it. After all, the Jewish religion would not have permitted such a conception (see pp. 265-6). Zionism did however reconfigure the many and diverse Jewish communities into an “ethnic” people in which most of its members were to be seen as the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. As is well-known, a religious community cannot possess historical ownership rights over a land, whereas a people can. Thus the famous Zionist motto, “A people without a land for a land without a people”. Thus also the evolution of the profoundly rooted myth concerning the “Exile of Jewish people” by the Romans in the first years of the first millennium. It is indeed true that specialists of Jewish antiquity knew that the Exile had never taken place, yet up to and including the present day, most ordinary Israelis are convinced that it did indeed occur – after all, it’s inscribed in the “Declaration of Independence of Israel” and even on Israeli money bills.
Schama’s remark regarding the question of the Khazars is even more problematic. It is not surprising that the young Schama had heard about the Khazars and I did not argue that I, or before me Arthur Koestler, had discovered the issue. I repeatedly emphasize in my book that, up until the 1960s, the best historians in the world, including Zionists, wrote extensively on the Kingdom of Khazaria. Moreover, almost everyone – from the Jewish-American historian Salo Baron to Ben-Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography and minister of education in Israel in the 1950s – explained the widespread Jewish presence in Eastern Europe by way of the Khazar immigration thesis (the Zionists added to this the absurd assumption that Palestine was the origin of the Jews in Khazaria). The problem is that ever since Abraham Pollack, the founder of the history department at Tel Aviv University, conducted his wide-ranging research, no serious work concerning the origins of the demographic weight of Yiddish-speaking Jews has been carried out. Maybe this is also the reason that Schama is the only historian who claims that the Kingdom of Khazaria converted to Judaism in the 10th century and not in the 8th.
And if we want to turn to questions of historical accuracy, Schama’s statement that the “mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture” in Judea after the two religious revolts at the beginning of our era is very odd: The Mishna, the greatest Jewish work after the Bible, was completed in 200 A.D – not long after those revolts. 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?
Nevertheless, the most surprising elements in Schama’s review are his notes regarding the Jews’ relationship to Palestine. If Schama had seriously read my book he would have learnt that there was indeed a profound affinity of Jewish believers with Jerusalem, but that it was a deep yearning for a sacred place. Jews, even those who lived nearby, never thought of immigrating to the holy city of Zion. Furthermore, even the few who lived within it saw their life as a kind of “Exile”. Jerusalem could not be ascended to without the arrival of the messiah and, with him, the revival of all the dead Jews. With all their great talents, the Zionists turned the metaphysical-theological paradigm “Exile–Redemption” into a physical-national paradigm of “Exile–Homeland”.
But the truth is that, even if there was great appeal in the Zionist myth, most of the Yiddish-speaking Jews did not want to emigrate to their “ancestral land”. Instead, they chose to emigrate to America. If the US had not blocked East European immigration from the 1920s onwards, it is highly questionable whether the state of Israel would ever have been founded. This merciless closing of the gates continued, as is well-known, before and after the Second World War and thus caused great suffering to the victims of the Nazi regime. It was much easier to compel the Arab population in Palestine to accept these miserable strangers that Europe had expelled rather than to receive them in the US. The majority of immigrants from Soviet Russia in the 1980s would also have preferred to emigrate to the West, but the State of Israel pressured the American president to help prevent such anti-patriotic tendencies. Eventually, these immigrants were obliged to land in Israel.
Most of those who see themselves as Jews, up until today, prefer not to live under Jewish sovereignty and not to send their children to risk death in Israeli wars. It seems to me that Schama can be counted amongst these, even if he thinks that Israel is his “ancestral land”. As for me, in contrast, I live in Israel and justify its continued existence, not on the grounds of past Jewish suffering – no suffering in the past can excuse creating suffering in the present – but because I have lived here all my life and I know that the denial of its existence would only lead to a new tragedy.
Professor Shlomo Sand
Tel Aviv University
19-11-2009″