The Invention of the Jewish People
Encyclopedia
The Invention of the Jewish People is a study of the historiography
of the Jewish people by Shlomo Sand
, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University
. It has generated a heated controversy.
The book was in the best-seller list in Israel
for nineteen weeks. It was reprinted three times when published in French (Comment le peuple juif fut inventé, Fayard
, Paris, 2008). In France, it received the "Prix Aujourd'hui", a journalists' award given to a non-fiction political or historical work. An English translation of the book was published by Verso Books
in October 2009. More translations are in progress.
. The conclusion he came to from his subsequent investigation is that the expulsion simply didn't happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region, and that the Diaspora
is essentially a modern invention. He accounts for the appearance of millions of Jews around the Mediterranean and elsewhere as something that came about primarily through the religious conversion of local people, saying that Judaism, contrary to popular opinion, was very much a "converting religion" in former times. He holds that mass conversions were first brought about by the Hasmonean
s under the influence of Hellenism
, and continued until Christianity rose to dominance in the fourth century CE.
and that a "nation-race" of Jews with a common origin never existed. Just as most contemporary Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, not of the first Christians and Muslims, Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, a proselytising
religion. Many of the present day world Jewish population are descendants of European, Russian and African groups.
According to Sand, the original Jews living in Israel, contrary to popular belief, were not exiled following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Sand argues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the Romans
, and were permitted to remain in the country. Many Jews converted to Islam
following the Arab conquest, and were assimilated among the conquerors. He concludes that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews.
Sand writes that the story of the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. They portrayed that event as a divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel
. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."
on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace."
In this, Sand writes, they were similar to other nationalist movements in Europe at the time that sought the reassurance of a Golden Age
in their past to prove they have existed as a separate people since the beginnings of history. Jewish people found theirs in what he calls "the mythical Kingdom of David". Before this invention, he says, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not a common ethnic background.
was alien to Judaism before the birth of Zionism
, and that the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. On the contrary, for 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem because their religion forbade them from returning until the Messiah came. According to Sand, the ancestry of Central and Eastern European Jews stems heavily from mediæval Turkic Khazars
who were converted to Judaism
, a theory which was popularized in a book written by Arthur Koestler
in 1976.
Second, I wrote the book against Jewish essentialism."
Sand explained in the same interview that what he means by 'Jewish essentialism
' is the tendency in modern Judaism to make shared ethnicity the basis for faith. "That is dangerous and it nourishes antisemitism. I am trying to normalise the Jewish presence in history and contemporary life."
, Israel Bartal
, dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University, writes that Sand's claims about Zionist and contemporary Israeli historiography are baseless, calling the work "bizarre and incoherent," and that Sand's "…treatment of Jewish sources is embarrassing and humiliating." According to Bartal, "No historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure'."
Bartal writes that Sand applies academically marginal positions to the entire body of Jewish historiography and, in doing so, "denies the existence of the central positions in Jewish historical scholarship." Sand, for example, does not mention the fact that, from 2000 onwards, a team of scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem labored on the production of a three-volume study on the history of the Jews of Russia. He adds that "the kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy."
Zionist Historian Anita Shapira
criticizes Sand for regularly "grab(bing) at the most unorthodox theory" in a field and then stretching it "to the outer limits of logic and beyond" during Sand's survey of three thousand years of history. Shapira says that the Sand's political program makes the book an attempt to "drag history into a topical argument, and with the help of misrepresentations and half-truths to adapt it to the needs of a political discussion."
A critic of the book has called it, in part, a recycled version of The Thirteenth Tribe
, another book with a controversial thesis on the genesis of the Jewish people published in 1976 by Arthur Koestler
. "'The Thirteenth Tribe' was received coolly by critics, and Mr. Sand's repackaging of its central argument has not fared much better," commented Evan R. Goldstein. There is not enough known about the 13th century demography of Eastern European Jews to credibly make as bold a claim as Sand's.
In response to criticism of the aspects of the book which deal with history, David Finkel
wrote that the book's chapter on 'Mythistory' is "where Sand fully hits his stride. It is not so much Jewish history but rather historiography that's decisive, in other words the history of history, the ways in which and the purposes for which that history came to be written." Finkel argued that Bartal
disputed little of Sands’ history but focused on his historiography, and suggested, "doesn’t all this precisely prove Sand’s point? The professional intellectuals, ...have no need for crude myths. Yet this does not prevent every Israeli government, right, center or 'left', through which many of these same intellectuals may rotate as ministers, advisors or spokespersons, from justifying land grabs, settlements and demolition of Palestinian homes all over 'Greater Jerusalem' under the banner of 'the eternal capital of the Jewish people.'" "
Carlo Strenger
regards Sand's book as "not a pure work of history". He has written in an opinion piece for Haaretz where he argued that "in fact, it has a clearly stated political agenda. ...It might come as a surprise to some who have not read the book that Sand's goal is to preserve Israel as a democracy with a Jewish character based on a Jewish majority."
, Hillel Halkin
calls assertions made in the book "the exact opposite of the truth" and goes on to say that "Believing Jews throughout the ages have never doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra'el, a people of Israel—nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish identities. It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior existence."
British-Jewish historian Simon Schama
, reviewing the book in the Financial Times
, argued that Sand misunderstands Jews in the diaspora, specifically, that he thinks that "the Khazars
, the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism
have been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic
converts." Schama pointed out that, on the contrary, when he was a child, "the Khazars were known by every Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Green
ery and further flung parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded." The uncritical assumption "that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews" is "a position that no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking," Schama goes on, "Sand's sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history, especially the 'exile which never happened', has been suppressed in the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to put it mildly, is a stretch." The review went on to make other criticisms of the book. Sand responded to Schama's critique on his website. by summarising the methodology used: "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."
British historian and author Sir Max Hastings
, in his review for the Sunday Times, writes that Sand "rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in defiance of evidence or probability... Yet Sand, whose title is foolishly provocative, displays a lack of compassion for the Jewish predicament." Hastings continues, stating that "It is possible to accept his view that there is no common genetic link either between the world's Jews or to the ancient tribes of Israel, while also trusting the evidence of one's own senses that there are remarkable common Jewish characteristics — indeed, a Jewish genius — that cannot be explained merely by religion." Hasting notes that "Sand produces some formidable arguments about what Jews may not be, but he fails to explain what it is they are." Hastings concludes that "His book serves notice on Zionist traditionalists: if an Israeli historian can display such plausible doubts about important aspects of the Israeli legend, any Arabs hostile to the state of Israel can exploit a fertile field indeed."
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
Sand admits that he is "a historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period…" and that he has "been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."
"There is no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research."
commented, "Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history"
More pointedly, British historian Eric Hobsbawm
selected Sand's book as one of his "Books of the Year" for 2009: "Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark."
In a similar vein, Israeli historian, Tom Segev
, says Sand's book "is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a 'state of all its citizens' – Jews, Arabs and others – in contrast to its declared identity as a 'Jewish and democratic' state." Segev adds that the book is generally "well-written" and includes "numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time".
titled "The DNA Of Abraham's Children" addresses through genetic analysis the centuries-old assertion, which the article claims has been revived by the book, that modern European Jews are descended from Khazars, a Turkic group, and not from the Middle East: "The DNA has spoken: no."
A New York Times article on the same studies notes they "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." Michael Balter, reviewing the study in the journal Science
, says the following:
Ostrer said, "I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest." However, geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that although the study "does not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, it "doesn't entirely eliminate it either."
Shlomo Sand has contested the claim that his book has been contradicted by recent genetic research published in Nature
journal and the American Journal of Human Genetics
. In a new afterword for the paperback edition of The Invention of the Jewish People, Sand writes:
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
of the Jewish people by Shlomo Sand
Shlomo Sand
Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People . His main areas of interest are nationalism, film as history, and French intellectual history.- Biography :Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish survivors...
, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University is a public university located in Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. With nearly 30,000 students, TAU is Israel's largest university.-History:...
. It has generated a heated controversy.
The book was in the best-seller list in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
for nineteen weeks. It was reprinted three times when published in French (Comment le peuple juif fut inventé, Fayard
Fayard
Fayard is a French Paris-based publishing house established in 1857. Fayard is controlled by Hachette Livre.-Works published:Works published by Editions Fayard include:...
, Paris, 2008). In France, it received the "Prix Aujourd'hui", a journalists' award given to a non-fiction political or historical work. An English translation of the book was published by Verso Books
Verso Books
Verso Books is a publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review. The company claims "global sales approaching $3 million per year and over 350 titles in print," possibly making it "the largest radical publisher in the English-language...
in October 2009. More translations are in progress.
Book summary
Sand began his work by looking for research studies about forcible exile of Jews from the area now bordered by modern Israel, and its surrounding regions. He was astonished that he could find no such literature, he says, given that the expulsion of Jews from the region is viewed as a constitutive event in Jewish historyJewish history
Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their religion and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Since Jewish history is over 4000 years long and includes hundreds of different populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad strokes...
. The conclusion he came to from his subsequent investigation is that the expulsion simply didn't happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region, and that the Diaspora
Jewish diaspora
The Jewish diaspora is the English term used to describe the Galut גלות , or 'exile', of the Jews from the region of the Kingdom of Judah and Roman Iudaea and later emigration from wider Eretz Israel....
is essentially a modern invention. He accounts for the appearance of millions of Jews around the Mediterranean and elsewhere as something that came about primarily through the religious conversion of local people, saying that Judaism, contrary to popular opinion, was very much a "converting religion" in former times. He holds that mass conversions were first brought about by the Hasmonean
Hasmonean
The Hasmonean dynasty , was the ruling dynasty of Judea and surrounding regions during classical antiquity. Between c. 140 and c. 116 BCE, the dynasty ruled semi-autonomously from the Seleucids in the region of Judea...
s under the influence of Hellenism
Hellenization
Hellenization is a term used to describe the spread of ancient Greek culture, and, to a lesser extent, language. It is mainly used to describe the spread of Hellenistic civilization during the Hellenistic period following the campaigns of Alexander the Great of Macedon...
, and continued until Christianity rose to dominance in the fourth century CE.
Jewish origins
Sand argues that it is likely that the ancestry of most contemporary Jews stems mainly from outside the ancient Land of IsraelLand of Israel
The Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
and that a "nation-race" of Jews with a common origin never existed. Just as most contemporary Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, not of the first Christians and Muslims, Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, a proselytising
Proselytism
Proselytizing is the act of attempting to convert people to another opinion and, particularly, another religion. The word proselytize is derived ultimately from the Greek language prefix προσ- and the verb ἔρχομαι in the form of προσήλυτος...
religion. Many of the present day world Jewish population are descendants of European, Russian and African groups.
According to Sand, the original Jews living in Israel, contrary to popular belief, were not exiled following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Sand argues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the Romans
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
, and were permitted to remain in the country. Many Jews converted to Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
following the Arab conquest, and were assimilated among the conquerors. He concludes that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews.
Sand writes that the story of the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. They portrayed that event as a divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel
Gospel
A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."
Jewish peoplehood
Sand's explanation of the birth of the "myth" of a Jewish people as a group with a common, ethnic origin has been summarized as follows: "[a]t a certain stage in the 19th century intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich GraetzHeinrich Graetz
Heinrich Graetz was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective....
on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace."
In this, Sand writes, they were similar to other nationalist movements in Europe at the time that sought the reassurance of a Golden Age
Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
in their past to prove they have existed as a separate people since the beginnings of history. Jewish people found theirs in what he calls "the mythical Kingdom of David". Before this invention, he says, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not a common ethnic background.
Return from exile, Zionism
Sand believes that the idea of Jews being obliged to return from exile to the Promised LandPromised land
The Promised Land is a term used to describe the land promised or given by God, according to the Hebrew Bible, to the Israelites, the descendants of Jacob. The promise is firstly made to Abraham and then renewed to his son Isaac, and to Isaac's son Jacob , Abraham's grandson...
was alien to Judaism before the birth of Zionism
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
, and that the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. On the contrary, for 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem because their religion forbade them from returning until the Messiah came. According to Sand, the ancestry of Central and Eastern European Jews stems heavily from mediæval Turkic Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
who were converted to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
, a theory which was popularized in a book written by Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
in 1976.
Overall intent of the book
Sand explained during a newspaper interview his reasons for writing the book: "I wrote the book for a double purpose. First, as an Israeli, to democratise the state; to make it a real republic.Second, I wrote the book against Jewish essentialism."
Sand explained in the same interview that what he means by 'Jewish essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
' is the tendency in modern Judaism to make shared ethnicity the basis for faith. "That is dangerous and it nourishes antisemitism. I am trying to normalise the Jewish presence in history and contemporary life."
As a work of history
In a commentary published in HaaretzHaaretz
Haaretz is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It was founded in 1918 and is now published in both Hebrew and English in Berliner format. The English edition is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune. Both Hebrew and English editions can be read on the Internet...
, Israel Bartal
Israel Bartal
Israel Bartal, born October 22, 1946 in Tel Aviv, Israel, is Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Hebrew University...
, dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University, writes that Sand's claims about Zionist and contemporary Israeli historiography are baseless, calling the work "bizarre and incoherent," and that Sand's "…treatment of Jewish sources is embarrassing and humiliating." According to Bartal, "No historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure'."
Bartal writes that Sand applies academically marginal positions to the entire body of Jewish historiography and, in doing so, "denies the existence of the central positions in Jewish historical scholarship." Sand, for example, does not mention the fact that, from 2000 onwards, a team of scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem labored on the production of a three-volume study on the history of the Jews of Russia. He adds that "the kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy."
Zionist Historian Anita Shapira
Anita Shapira
Anita Shapira is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, a Ruben Merenfeld Professor of the Study of Zionism and head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University...
criticizes Sand for regularly "grab(bing) at the most unorthodox theory" in a field and then stretching it "to the outer limits of logic and beyond" during Sand's survey of three thousand years of history. Shapira says that the Sand's political program makes the book an attempt to "drag history into a topical argument, and with the help of misrepresentations and half-truths to adapt it to the needs of a political discussion."
A critic of the book has called it, in part, a recycled version of The Thirteenth Tribe
The Thirteenth Tribe
The Thirteenth Tribe is a book by Arthur Koestler, which advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people...
, another book with a controversial thesis on the genesis of the Jewish people published in 1976 by Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
. "'The Thirteenth Tribe' was received coolly by critics, and Mr. Sand's repackaging of its central argument has not fared much better," commented Evan R. Goldstein. There is not enough known about the 13th century demography of Eastern European Jews to credibly make as bold a claim as Sand's.
In response to criticism of the aspects of the book which deal with history, David Finkel
David Finkel
David Louis Finkel is an American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as a staff writer at the Washington Post. He is currently assigned to the national staff as an enterprise reporter. He has also worked for the Post's foreign staff division...
wrote that the book's chapter on 'Mythistory' is "where Sand fully hits his stride. It is not so much Jewish history but rather historiography that's decisive, in other words the history of history, the ways in which and the purposes for which that history came to be written." Finkel argued that Bartal
Israel Bartal
Israel Bartal, born October 22, 1946 in Tel Aviv, Israel, is Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Hebrew University...
disputed little of Sands’ history but focused on his historiography, and suggested, "doesn’t all this precisely prove Sand’s point? The professional intellectuals, ...have no need for crude myths. Yet this does not prevent every Israeli government, right, center or 'left', through which many of these same intellectuals may rotate as ministers, advisors or spokespersons, from justifying land grabs, settlements and demolition of Palestinian homes all over 'Greater Jerusalem' under the banner of 'the eternal capital of the Jewish people.'" "
Carlo Strenger
Carlo Strenger
Carlo Strenger is a Swiss-Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst and public intellectual. He is Chair of the Clinical Graduate Program at the Department of Psychology of Tel Aviv University. His research centers on the impact of globalization on meaning, personal and group...
regards Sand's book as "not a pure work of history". He has written in an opinion piece for Haaretz where he argued that "in fact, it has a clearly stated political agenda. ...It might come as a surprise to some who have not read the book that Sand's goal is to preserve Israel as a democracy with a Jewish character based on a Jewish majority."
As an argument about Jewish identity
Writing in The New RepublicThe New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling Letters to an American-Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic and Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel. He is a prominent translator of Hebrew and Yiddish Literature into English, including...
calls assertions made in the book "the exact opposite of the truth" and goes on to say that "Believing Jews throughout the ages have never doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra'el, a people of Israel—nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish identities. It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior existence."
British-Jewish historian Simon Schama
Simon Schama
Simon Michael Schama, CBE is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain...
, reviewing the book in the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
, argued that Sand misunderstands Jews in the diaspora, specifically, that he thinks that "the Khazars
Khazars
The Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
, the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
have been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic
Turkic peoples
The Turkic peoples are peoples residing in northern, central and western Asia, southern Siberia and northwestern China and parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family. They share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds...
converts." Schama pointed out that, on the contrary, when he was a child, "the Khazars were known by every Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Green
Golders Green
Golders Green is an area in the London Borough of Barnet in London, England. Although having some earlier history, it is essentially a 19th century suburban development situated about 5.3 miles north west of Charing Cross and centred on the crossroads of Golders Green Road and Finchley Road.In the...
ery and further flung parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded." The uncritical assumption "that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews" is "a position that no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking," Schama goes on, "Sand's sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history, especially the 'exile which never happened', has been suppressed in the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to put it mildly, is a stretch." The review went on to make other criticisms of the book. Sand responded to Schama's critique on his website. by summarising the methodology used: "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."
British historian and author Sir Max Hastings
Max Hastings
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. He is the son of Macdonald Hastings, the noted British journalist and war correspondent and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.-Life and career:Hastings was educated at Charterhouse...
, in his review for the Sunday Times, writes that Sand "rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in defiance of evidence or probability... Yet Sand, whose title is foolishly provocative, displays a lack of compassion for the Jewish predicament." Hastings continues, stating that "It is possible to accept his view that there is no common genetic link either between the world's Jews or to the ancient tribes of Israel, while also trusting the evidence of one's own senses that there are remarkable common Jewish characteristics — indeed, a Jewish genius — that cannot be explained merely by religion." Hasting notes that "Sand produces some formidable arguments about what Jews may not be, but he fails to explain what it is they are." Hastings concludes that "His book serves notice on Zionist traditionalists: if an Israeli historian can display such plausible doubts about important aspects of the Israeli legend, any Arabs hostile to the state of Israel can exploit a fertile field indeed."
As an argument about the position of "Jewish history" in Israeli universities
Some historians of Judaism have said that Sand is dealing with subjects about which he has no understanding and that he bases his book on work that he is incapable of reading in the original languages. Most of the book deals with the question of where the Jews come from, rather than questions of modern Jewish nationalism and the — according to Sand — modern invention of the Jewish people."The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
Sand admits that he is "a historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period…" and that he has "been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."
"There is no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research."
Other reviews
Writing in The Financial Times, British historian Tony JudtTony Judt
Tony Robert Judt FBA was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute...
commented, "Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history"
More pointedly, British historian Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...
selected Sand's book as one of his "Books of the Year" for 2009: "Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark."
In a similar vein, Israeli historian, Tom Segev
Tom Segev
Tom Segev is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives.-Early life:Segev was born in Jerusalem in 1945...
, says Sand's book "is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a 'state of all its citizens' – Jews, Arabs and others – in contrast to its declared identity as a 'Jewish and democratic' state." Segev adds that the book is generally "well-written" and includes "numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time".
DNA analysis
In June 2010, an article in NewsweekNewsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
titled "The DNA Of Abraham's Children" addresses through genetic analysis the centuries-old assertion, which the article claims has been revived by the book, that modern European Jews are descended from Khazars, a Turkic group, and not from the Middle East: "The DNA has spoken: no."
A New York Times article on the same studies notes they "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." Michael Balter, reviewing the study in the journal Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
, says the following:
Ostrer said, "I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest." However, geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that although the study "does not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, it "doesn't entirely eliminate it either."
Shlomo Sand has contested the claim that his book has been contradicted by recent genetic research published in Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
journal and the American Journal of Human Genetics
American Journal of Human Genetics
The American Journal of Human Genetics is a medical journal in the field of human genetics. Since its inception in 1948 by the American Society of Human Genetics, the journal has provided a record of research and review relating to heredity in humans and to the application of genetic principles in...
. In a new afterword for the paperback edition of The Invention of the Jewish People, Sand writes:
External links
- The Invention of the Jewish People — Official web site of book, including reviews and discussion