The Invention of the Jewish People » The book

INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE out now in an affordable paperback edition

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:48:01 +0000

Shlomo Sand’s intellectual bestseller is now available in an affordable paperback edition. Priced at US$16.95 and £9.99, this edition includes an all-new afterword in which Professor Sand responds to critics.

Dissident Voice calls THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE “earth-shattering.”

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:01:52 +0000

In a new piece today, Dissident Voice writes “Shlomo Sand argued with meticulous scholarship in his earth-shattering book, The Invention of the Jewish People, that the claim that the Jews of today are the ethnic offspring of the biblical Jews is yet another Zionist myth…”

The full article is here.

The Jewish Daily Forward discusses Sand’s book and genetic research

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:36:49 +0000

Deborah Nussbaum Cohen reviews Sand’s book for the Jewish Daily Forward in an article entitled “The Ties That Bind: As Scientists Explore the Genetic Links Between Jewish Populations, Rabbis and Thinkers Wrestle With the Question of What This Means for Jewish Identity.”

Reporting on the two recent Jewish population genetics studies, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade went so far as to argue that their findings “refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.”

Sand, however, was dismissive of the significance of the new genetic research. “It is a pity and sad that a people have to prove that it is a people by genetics and not by a secular culture,” Sand wrote in an e-mail to the Forward. “The new ‘discoveries’ are not different from the old ones.”

While Sand, who is known for his far-left views, occupies the political margins, many more mainstream figures also believe that genetics should have no bearing on Jewish peoplehood. “It can point to some interesting data about Jewish marriage patterns and perhaps tell us something about historical patterns of Jewish settlement, but it doesn’t tell us anything about Jewish peoplehood,” said Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

The full article is available here

Guardian reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People – OUT NOW in paperback

Sarah — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:12:30 +0000

Ian Pindar reviewed the paperback edition of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for The Guardian on Saturday 26th June. Full review below (not yet available online):

The idea of the Jews as a single people or race is a myth, a fi ction based on Old Testament “mythistory”, argues Shlomo Sand, a Jewish historian based at the University of Tel Aviv. It is also one of the founding assumptions of the state of Israel, and throughout this polemical, revisionist history Sand has Zionist ideology in his sights. (He is not anti-Israel, but he is “post-Zionist”.) In essence, his book undermines the moral right of the state of Israel to define itself as exclusively Jewish and how you respond to it will very much depend on your political views. Sand admits none of his findings is new and there are no revelations, but what he offers is a radical dismantling of a national myth. He can find no evidence of any Jewish exile, and without exile there can be no right to return. However, even if it is founded on a myth, the state of Israel exists. Sand wants it to abandon ethnic nationalism and to modernise and democratise, and as this controversial book was a bestseller in Israel, perhaps there is hope that some Israelis want this too.

The Jewish Chronicle on Shlomo Sand’s shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize

Sarah — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:41:06 +0000

The Jewish Chronicle reported on the ‘controversial’ shortlisting of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2010.

A controversial book which argues that the idea of a Jewish people descended from the ancient Israelites is a Zionist myth, has been shortlisted for British Jewry’s main literary award…

…Alan Mendoza, director of the Israel-Diaspora Trust, said: “The cultural, historical and religious roots of the Jewish people are self-evident and Sands’ desire for self-immolation is not shared by Anglo-Jewry. Was this decision motivated by intellectual navel-gazing of the most banal kind, or does it reflect an attempt to appease those viscerally anti-Israel elements within the broader liberal intelligentsia? Either way, this is a pathetic attempt at gesture politics, and one that cheapens the Wingate Prize.”

The Invention of the Jewish People by Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand is one of four books up for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize.

Read the full article here.

Shlomo Sand clashes with Meyer Habib

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:39:12 +0000

Shlomo Sand clashes with Meyer Habib, Vice President of France’s Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF). Fréderic Taddai hosts Sand and Habib on the program Ce Soir ou Jamais; discussion available in French.

Ha’aretz on Shlomo Sand and what it means to be Jewish

Sarah — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:34:04 +0000

Shlomo Sand’s Invention of the Jewish People is mentioned in a Ha’aretz article by Matt Lerner on Jewish identity:

Traditional knowledge holds that there was once a distinct nation of people who all practiced the Jewish religion, a Hebrew people with a common geographic origin and, in all likelihood, relatively uniform physical appearance.

But there are those, like Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand, who question both the relevance and validity of this notion in modern discourse.

Sand is the author of a book called “The Invention of the Jewish People”, and a proponent of the belief that today’s Jews are the descendants of different global populations who converted to Judaism over the ages, rather than the offspring of an exiled Hebrew nation.

Sand rejects the traditional narrative of a Roman-instigated diaspora and views the notion of Jewish ethnicity as a racist one used to perpetuate a Zionist myth of ownership of the land of Israel.

Read the full article here.

Joel Shalit reviewed Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of Jewish People for Forward

Sarah — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:08:11 +0000

In last issue of Forward, Joel Schalit’s review entitled “We Are All Simon Schama: The Threat of an Undefined Jew” praises The Invention of the Jewish People, and reflects on the furore around the reception of the book:

It was the year’s biggest helping of humble pie. Less than a month after a heated takedown of Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” in the Financial Times, the very same reviewer, writing in Italy’s respected business daily Il Sole 24 Ore, offered the book qualified praise, calling it his book of the year. So distinct was this follow-up appraisal, it could have been written by a different person.

Read the full article here.

Read Shlomo Sand’s response to Simon Schama’s review here.

Shlomo Sand responds to Martin Goodman’s TLS review

Sarah — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:16:02 +0000

Shlomo Sand responds to Martin Goodman’s recent review of The Invention of the Jewish People in the Times Literary Supplement. Goodman had neglected to mention that he was criticised in Shlomo’s book:

The least one might expect from an honest book reviewer is that he inform his readers when he is himself the subject of criticism of the book under review. However, Martin Goodman (February 26) has chosen not to do so. Against all standard conventions, he hides from his readers the fact that his ethnocentric approach to Jewish history was explicitly criticized in my book The Invention of the Jewish People.

Read the entire letter here.

Frederic Raphael reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People for Truthdig

Sarah — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:23:47 +0000

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.