Shlomo Sand

The Invention of the Jewish People is an often fascinating, often frustrating, account of the history and historiography of the Jewish ethnicity, Zionism, and modern Israel. Sand follows Benedict Anderson in assessing nationality as a potent and also ontologically weak framing. Nationhood is one of the things people are most willing to kill and die for, but trying to define a nation, as opposed to the political limits of a given state, or the cultural practices of an ethnicity, is an show more exercise in contradictions. But it is a necessary exercise, if you want to understand your own present.

The first fascinating bit was that Sand notes that every Israeli university has two history departments: one of General History which is pretty similar to a European or American history department, and one of Jewish History which has a unique intellectual orientation as the keeper of the national political mythology, and has it closest intellectual links to American Evangelical Biblical archeology. The political mythology is fairly simple. While the Torah doesn't have to be read literally as book of divine commandments, it can be read literally as history. The land between the Jordan river and the sea was home to Abraham, was conquered by exiles returning from Egypt, was ruled by the powerful kingdoms of David, Solomon, and the Hasmoneans, was taken from the Jews by the Romans, and was restored to the Jews in 1948.

Where this gets frustrating is a long historiographic dive into 19th century historians writing the history of the Jews against other Eastern European nation movements. I have no doubt that the basic question of whether a Jew could be German was of great import to these people, but I also think the matter was effectively settled by other political developments in the 1940s.

Sand then loops back to the ancient world to argue rather convincingly that Judaism expanded across the Mediterranean by conversion between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century, making substantial progress against pagan beliefs before being forced into a subsidiary role against Constantine's state Christianity. The last great conversion was the Caucasian (in the exact sense of the mountains rather than the imprecise racial sense) kingdom of the Khazars. In Sand's history, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, and the people living in Palestine in the 19th and 20th century were the descendants of the common people of the Jewish kingdoms who were not removed by the Romans, as no evidence of this explusion exists, who converted to Islam for tax reasons under the Caliphate.

Those closing chapter loops around to the modern contradictions between Israel, a political and cultural entity, and the Jewish Nation, which exists everywhere there are Jews but is specifically instantiated in the borders of Israel and the occupied territories. Sand has something to say about Israeli politics around the time he was writing this book, and the politics have only gotten worse since, but I'm not entirely sure I follow. Most national mythologies are ultimately incoherent and built on racist nonsense; Israel has unfortunately chosen to double down on the worst aspects of its own mythology, since it must justify not only its recent historical existence, but the ongoing policies of the occupation. show less

Fantastic little number, very accessible.

Shlomo Sand is lovely to contextualise Renan in the frame of Said villanising him as a key founder of race theory. He is generous is explaining that Said was not wrong, but only that Renan's views changed over time. In this way, Sand brings another progressive Palestinian voice into his hopeful dialectic.

Of course the only people who push the ridiculous and dangerous notion that Jews are a race are Nazis and UltraZionists. Here, with direct citation show more in original languages of antiquity is Renan demonstrating quite clearly this is not true. And together with Said and Sand we span almost 3000 years of history up to the present - an argument that can only bring hope for the kind of alliances and new formations that will be necessary to defeat racism and ensure mutual communal flourishing for all in Palestine in the years ahead.

Shlomo Sand is an inspiration. show less

This book argues that despite its claims, Zionism has produced in the Israeli state not a democracy, but a “liberal ethnocracy” (307) based on fictitious claims about “the Jewish people” that derive from a “nationalization of the Bible and its transformation into a reliable history book” that took place between the 1850s and the 1930s. Bold, highly intelligent, artfully written, and well translated, this scholarly volume on the historiography of the notion of a “Jewish show more people” was a best-seller in Israel in 2008. Sand is a notable historian of ideas with extraordinarily acute powers of analysis, and he is able dispassionately and with flair to unravel the elements of intricate combinations of history, culture, and religion. Americans used to reading mainstream media fodder about Israel and the Middle East will find Sand’s approach eye-opening and presented at a level that is several orders of intellectual magnitude removed from the tired shibboleths with which they are familiar. The book is addressed to an educated readership cognizant both of world history and of modern politics. show less

All cultures have their myths, and Jews and the modern nation-state Israel are no exceptions.
For instance, in the United States we have the bowdlerized myths of Christopher Columbus "discovering" the "New World" and the Pilgrims first Thanksgiving, etc.
Identifying these myths and understanding their implications is certainly a legitimate exercise, and long overdue efforts such as The 1619 Project have attempted to do that.

But Sand's book is not that. Although he frames his arguments as a show more scholarly analysis utilizing the techniques and terminology of serious academic work, that is just window dressing to support his own biased political and religious beliefs. In order to make his case, he resorts to all sorts of devious tactics, such as presenting well-substantiated and widely accepted conclusions as far-fetched while conversely presenting extremely speculative assertions as established fact. He touts long debunked claims, and ignores reams of evidence that undermine his arguments.

Despite the catastrophic shortcomings, he does raise some interesting questions about identity, nationalism, and the influence of the perception of a shared history on modern Israeli politics. show less