The Invention of the Jewish People [Paperback]

Shlomo Sand (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 14, 2010

Bestselling new analysis of Jewish history by a leading Israeli historian.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Sand's questions about how Israel's democracy can be liberalized and stabilized are thought-provoking and deserve serious discussion.” (Haaretz)

“Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.” (Eric Hobsbawm - Observer)

“Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.” (Tony Judt)

“Extravagantly denounced and praised.” (New York Times)

“No discussion of the region any longer seems complete without acknowledgement of this book.” (Independent on Sunday, Best History Books of 2009)

About the Author

Shlomo Sand studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris. He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. His books include The Invention of the Jewish People, On the Nation and the Jewish People, L’Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Georges Sorel en son temps, Le XXe siècle à l'écran and Les Mots et la terre: les intellectuels en Israël.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Verso (June 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844676234
• ISBN-13: 978-1844676231
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.3 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #15 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Judaism > History of Religion
  • #22 in Books > History > World > Religious > Judaism
  • #31 in Books > History > Middle East > Israel

More About the Author

Shlomo Sand studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris. He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. His books include The Invention of the Jewish People, L'Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Georges Sorel en son temps, Le XXe siècle à l'écran and Les Mots et la terre: les intellectuels en Israël.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

377 of 410 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Return to the ancestral land? November 7, 2009

By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

About a fifth of this book shows how Biblical criticism and archaeological discoveries have undermined the reliability of the Hebrew Bible as history. Archaeology, among other things, has played havoc with the chronology of the Bible, especially in connection with the invasion of Canaan, nor has it found any evidence that would support the story of the Exodus or the splendour of Solomon's kingdom.

But the main subject of the book is the denial that there is such a thing as the Jewish People, descended from the inhabitants of Biblical Palestine from which they have been scattered, and that they are a nation which has now returned to the land of its ancestors. This undermines one of the principal arguments with which the State of Israel legitimizes itself. (There are, of course, other arguments which Sand does not discuss in any depth.)

He says that the Jews began to see themselves as an ethnic people, rather than as a religious community, in the 19th century. (In a 40 page long and massively theoretical opening chapter, Sand explains why for him the word `people' implies ethnicity - hence the provocative title of his book. Others might well say that what has for centuries kept the Jewish `people' together was not their ethnicity but their religion, and even secular Jews belong to that people because their ancestors were religious Jews.) He traces the claim of the Jews to be a nation from the 1880s - when scholars like Heinrich Graetz described the work of Julius Wellhausen, the father of modern Biblical Criticism, as anti-Jewish - to those who present the Biblical account as the foundation charter of the State of Israel, where it is the staple of the state educational system....

During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, aided by the Septuagint (the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), "hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions" of gentiles around the South-Eastern Mediterranean, from Rome to Armenia, converted to Judaism. A substantial proportion today's Jews cannot be linked genetically to the Jewish Homeland at all. Roman writers expressed unease at the growing number of converts. Around 400 CE the king of Himyar, in Yemen, converted to Judaism and so did many of their Arabic subjects in his and the following reigns during the next century. Most of the strong Yemenite community of Jews would be descended from these converts. There was a strong Jewish presence among the Berbers of North Africa, who took such a part in the later Arabic conquest of Spain. Sand thinks that many of these Berber Jews were also converts, though his formulations here are more tentative than elsewhere, and to support this idea he produces few hard facts beyond a complaint by the Christian Tertullian (2nd c.) against proselytes in North Africa and one quotation from the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (14th c.). The best known conversion is that of the Khazar kingdom (between the Volga and the Dnieper) in the 8th century CE. In his famous book Arthur Koestler called the Khazars `the Thirteenth Tribe', and Sand espouses the notion that after the Khazar kingdom was destroyed in the 11th century, many of its people fled westwards to form a substantial proportion of the Jews in the Ukraine, in Poland and in Hungary.

Sand shows the resistance of many Israeli historians to the idea that so many Jews might not be descendants of the Jews of Israel and Judah: they either deny it or ignore it in their researches and their text books.

He also supports the notion, advanced in 1918 even by the young Zionists Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, that the majority Muslim fellahin in Palestine were the descendants of Jewish peasants who had converted to Islam, perhaps to escape the jizyah (poll tax) which was levied on all non-Muslims after the Arab conquest. This idea was swiftly abandoned in the face of Arab nationalism, to be replaced by the notion that the Arab invaders had expelled the Jews (for which there is no evidence) and therefore had no right to the land which the Jews who had been forced into exile were now reclaiming.

The last chapter falls into two parts. The first part discusses the debate about whether there is any genetic evidence for the theory that most Jews are descended from the original Jews of Palestine. Students of genetics are apparently divided about this, and while Sand gives the supporters of the theory a good run for its money, it is clear that he sides with their opponents, and sees a conscious or unconscious agenda in those Israeli studies which have been looking for a widespread common ancestry. Sand quotes many Zionist sources which claimed (as the Nazis did) that the Jews were indeed a race. That EXPRESSION has now lost all respectability, but the debate is still carried on, though now in terms of genetics rather than of `blood'.

Sand never leaves any doubt about the political conclusions he draws from all this. They are spelt out most explicitly in the second, hard-hitting, part of the last chapter, which dismisses the definition of the State of Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. It not only implies but in many ways acts in such a way that its non-Jewish people, though technically Israeli citizens, cannot be part of an Israeli nation, in the way in which, for example, Scots and Welshmen are part of the British (not English) nation. With little hope that it can happen, Sand calls for the Jews of Israel to transform their ideology into one that would "grant the Palestino-Israelis not only complete equality but also a genuine and firm autonomy" - not only in the interests of justice, but also to save the state from ultimate disaster.

With its political implications, it is no surprise that this book has attracted both hatred and enthusiasm. Read more ›

424 of 489 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Confused Nation Pretending to be a Wandering People October 4, 2009

By F. Bernadotte

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Although he never mentions the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in "The Invention of the Jewish People" Israeli historian Shlomo Sand implicitly rejects it in favor of what has come to be called the "one-state solution":

"The ideal project for solving the century-long conflict...would be the creation of a democratic binational state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River." (p. 311)

Sand, however, is deeply pessimistic concerning the likelihood of any solution being reached at all. Implicitly he takes the position that the possibility of peace rests not so much on the Palestinians, or on the Arabs in general, as on the Israeli Jews themselves. They must somehow come to understand that the Israeli policy of apartheid (Sand's term, p. 309), and the false notion that Israel can be a "Jewish state" and yet a democracy at the same time, doom the chances of peace. But is it possible that the Israelis will ever come to believe that they must share the land on an equal basis with the Palestinian non-Jews?

Sand identifies two major factors - two associated myths -- which stand in the way. These have served the Zionist cause well but they are historically false: the myth of the Jewish "people" and the myth of the "exile" of this people from the land of Israel. If essentially there is no Jewish people -- rather only a Jewish religion; and if the Jewish diaspora was driven not by forced exile -- rather by the impulse to proselytize, then the Zionist-sponsored "return" of the Jewish "people" to the land of Israel in the mid twentieth century has lost its entire theoretical framework.

Sand is a scholar and in style the book is a scholarly work. The general reader may be put off at first.... I suggest the book may be more approachable if you begin by reading Chapter 2, "Mythhistory: In the Beginning God Created the People". The first chapter "Making Nations" is a bit difficult to get through, and might be dispensed with. The Introduction contains four personal histories whose relevance is at first obscure. I suggest you read the Introduction after you finish the rest of the book, not before. For only then is the point of these personal stories, which are quite moving, readily understood.

According to Sand Zionism's traditional discrimination against non-Jews ("gentiles") has rested upon and required the false notion that Jews constitute a distinct biologically-grounded race. This idea originated and first thrived amidst the nineteenth century obsession with "nations". Political Zionism grew up in the atmosphere of that obsession. But the history of Judaism undercuts it. In three cases in particular Sand demonstrates that gentile populations found the religion attractive enough to adopt it en masse. Thus there is no racial or biological distinction between Jews and gentiles. These are the case of the Himyarites in what is now Yemen, the Berbers in northwest Africa and the Khazars who lived in what is now southern Russia. Zionist historians, for whom Sand has special scorn, have downplayed or ignored the facts surrounding this history.

If proselytizing Jews have spread Judaism to gentile populations, it could still be true that the movement of Jews into gentile lands in the first place was due to their having been expelled long ago from the land of Israel. According to traditional Jewish thinking, this expulsion happened after the Roman emperor Titus destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the year 70AD - or, perhaps it was after 135AD when the Bar Kochba revolt was put down by the Romans. Or again, perhaps the forced exile of the Jews occurred in the 7th century after the Muslims took ownership of Palestine. In fact the historical record contains no evidence of any forced exile of Jews from Palestine - ever -- according to Sand. He believes that a significant portion of the Arab population in Palestine is probably descended from early Jewish inhabitants of that land - who were never expelled but who were eventually converted to Christianity or to Islam in later centuries. Sand points out that some of the early Zionists, including Ben-Gurion himself, believed the same thing (until it eventually became inconvenient for them to do so.)

Unsurprisingly "The Invention of the Jewish People" has aroused controversy well before its publication in English translation. That will only increase now. The fact that it is the work of an Israeli academic will make it so much harder for Zionists in America to ridicule or ignore it.

(The title of this review comes from p. 13 of the book.) Read more ›

211 of 253 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely brilliant, one of the most interesting books I've read this year October 24, 2009

By D. ROSEN

Format:Hardcover

(this review is of the Hebrew edition, published by Resling in 2008)

"The Invention of the Jewish People" is one of the most original, intriguing and thought provoking book I have read this year. Professor Sand begins by laying out the difficulties in "objectively" determining identity through the stories of 4 different people he has interacted with in Israel and abroad, and then proceeds to discuss how the concept of national identity as a core tenet of European nationalism evolved, with important differences in how it did so in Eastern versus Western Europe. He discusses the importance of promulgating and emplying founding myths in creating cohesive nations out of the hitherto mostly indifferent and politically nonincluded masses, and then proceeds to examine those of the Jewish People, which, despite what one might think, was not always regarded as such, either by itself or others throughout the ages (similar to the French People, German Volk, or Russian People). He starts by examining the biblical history of the Exodus from Egypt, the traces of which, despite its described magnitude, have never been found by archeologists, proceeds to explore the exile from Judaea after the destruction of the temple (which seems to have been a Christian theological concept and not one embraced by Jewish or non-Jewish historians of the first half millenium). He continues to discuss the mass conversions to Judaism in Arabia, North Africa, and Khazaria, and ends by analyzing identity politics in Israel and their significance to Israel's future....

While there has been (and is sure to be more) controversy about some of Professor Sand's conclusions, it cannot be denied that this is a brilliant piece of scholarship, and it should be read by anyone, Israeli and non-Israeli, Jewish or not, who is interested in getting a broader perspective on how identity is defined, and how mutable these definitions can be over time. Read more ›