A talk was given by Shlomo
Sand Ph.D, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University and Author of “The
Invention of the Jewish People” which has newly been translated into
English. The event took place at the Brecht Forum on October 15, 2009. He
was introduced by Michael Smith. Commentary was made by Joel Kovel - Author
of “Overcoming Zionism” and questions were taken from the audience. The
event was approximately two hours duration. Video was produced and made
available to the public by Joe Friendly.
SHLOMO SAND Ph.D & The
Invention of the Jewish People
Shlomo Sand
Shlomo Sand (Hebrew:
שלמה זנד, sometimes
transliterated as "Shlomo Zand"), born 10 September 1946, is
Professor of History at
Tel Aviv University in
Israel
and the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso Books,
2009). His main areas of teaching are Cinema and History, French
Intellectual History, and Nation and Nationalism.[1]
Sand was born in
Linz,
Austria,
to Polish Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust. His parents had
Communist and
anti-imperialist views and refused to receive compensations from
Germany
for their suffering during the
Second World War. Sand spent his early years in a
displaced persons camp, and moved with the family to
Jaffa in
1948. He was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen, and only
completed his
bagrut
following his military service.[2]
His military experience during the
1967 war, and his boredom following its end, led him to leave the
Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki) and join the more radical, and
anti-Zionist,
Matzpen
in 1968. Sand resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment
with the organisation.[3][4]
He declined an offer by the Israeli Communist Party
Rakah to
be sent to do cinema studies in Poland, and in 1975 Sand graduated with
a BA in History from Tel Aviv University. From 1975 to 1985, after
winning a scholarship, he studied and later taught in
Paris,
receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis[5]
on "George
Sorel and
Marxism".
Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the
University of California, Berkeley and the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.[1]
In his book Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi? (The
Invention of the Jewish People), "[Sand] tries to prove that the
Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but
rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history
adopted the Jewish religion. He argues that for a number of
Zionist
ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led
to truly
racist thinking".[6]
One component of Sand's argument is that the people who were the
original Jews living in Israel, contrary to what is accepted history,
were not exiled following the
Bar Kokhba revolt. He has suggested that much of the present day
world Jewish population are individuals, and groups, who converted to
Judaism at later periods. Additionally, he suggests that the story of
the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the
new faith. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations of Jews
to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from
God."[7]
Sand argues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the
Romans, and were permitted to remain in the country. He puts the
number of those exiled at tens of thousands at most. He further argues
that many of the 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.[8]
Sand explains the birth of the concept of a Jewish people 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 Graetz 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."[6]
He also comments that: "It is true that I am an historian of
France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. (...)",[6]
and that: "I’ve been criticised 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."[cs
Israel Bartal, dean of the humanities faculty of the
Hebrew University, in a commentary published in Haaretz[9],
writes that Sand's basic thesis and statements about Jewish
historiography are "baseless". Bartal answers to "Sand's arguments (...)
that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really
believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically
"pure" [and that] Sand applies marginal positions to the entire body of
Jewish historiography and, in doing so, denies the existence of the
central positions in Jewish historical scholarship." 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." Bartel summarizes his critique of Sand's characterization of
Jewish historiography as follows: "as far as I can discern, the book
contains not even one idea that has not been presented earlier in their
books and articles by what he insists on defining as "authorized
historians" suspected of "concealing historical truth.""
[10]
Tom
Segev wrote that 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" and 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".[8]
Anita Shapira wrote "Sand bases his arguments on the most esoteric
and controversial interpretations, while seeking to undermine the
credibility of important scholars by dismissing their conclusions
without bringing any evidence to bear."[11]
For Ofri Ilani, "(...) most of [the] book does not deal with the
invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather
with the question of where the Jews come from."[6]
Hillel Halkin has cited the book as an example of the fact that
there apparently is "no book too foolish to go un-admired by someone."[12]
Jeffrey Goldberg likened the book to
Arthur Koestler's
The Thirteenth Tribe, another book with a controversial thesis on
the genesis of the Jewish people published in 1976.[13]
"Today," Jeffrey Goldberg said, "The Thirteenth Tribe is a combination
of discredited and forgotten." Goldberg also accused Sand of having
disingenuous motives:
"Sand is not publishing this book at a dignified conference in
Bern at which scholars of the Middle East debate the origins of the
Jews ... He is dropping manufactured facts into a world that in many
cases is ready, willing, and happy to believe the absolute worst
conspiracy theories about Jews and to use those conspiracy theories
to justify physically hurting Jews. ... It is nothing new ... We
[the Jews] survived ... The Thirteenth Tribe; we can survive this.”
The book was in the best-seller list in Israel for 19 weeks and
quickly went to 3 editions when published in French (Comment le people
juif fut inventé, Fayard, Paris, 2008). In France it received the "Aujourd'hui
Award", a journalists' award for top non-fiction political or historical
work.[14]
More translations are in progress and the book is scheduled for
publication in English by Verso in October 2009.[15]
Publications
L'Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat
intellectuel 1900 , Paris, La Découverte, 1984
Georges Sorel en son temps, with Jacques Julliard (eds),
Paris, Seuil, 1985
Intellectuals, Truth and Power: From the Dreyfus Affair to
the Gulf War, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2000 (in Hebrew)
Le XXe siècle à l' écran, Paris , Seuil, 2004 — also as Film
as History – Imagining and Screening the Twentieth Century , Tel
Aviv, Am Oved & Open University Press, 2002 (in Hebrew)
Cinema and Memory – A Dangerous Relationship?, with Haim
Bresheeth & Moshe Zimmerman (eds), Jerusalem , The Zalman Shazar
Center for Jewish History, 2004 (in Hebrew)
Historians, Time and Imagination, From the “Annales” School
to the Postzionist Assassin, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2004 (in Hebrew)
Les Mots et la terre - Les intellectuels en Israël, Paris,
Fayard, 2006
The Invention of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2008 (in
Hebrew) — also as Comment le peuple juif fut inventé - De la Bible
au sionisme, Paris, Fayard, 2008, and The Invention of the Jewish
People, New York, Verso 2009.
“Shlomo Sand has
written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose
he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history ...
Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary
Middle East should read this book.”
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 depravation 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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
Last
Friday’s monthly Marxist Theory Colloquium
featured Tel Aviv University history
professor Shlomo Sand. He discussed his
controversial book, “The Invention of the
Jewish People,” which proposes that the
majority of accepted Jewish history is
incorrect.
NYU politics professor Bertell Ollman
invited Sand to speak at the colloquium
after he learned Sand had come to New York
to publicize the English edition of his
book. While “The Invention of the Jewish
People” is not specifically about Marxist
theory, Ollman wanted Sand to speak because
he said he “found it a marvelous book.”
The book has stirred much controversy
since its release. In it, Sand said he
believes that the Romans did not expel the
Jews from Palestine and that today’s
Palestinians are actually partial
descendants of Jews. Sand believes the rest
of the Middle Eastern and European Jewish
population was converted to Judaism, which
directly challenges the Zionist idea that
Palestine is the rightful homeland of all
Jewish people. [click
to read full article]
