Amazing! Shlomo Sand resigns from being an invented Jew (or something like it)

...Reportedly, he did express concern about “how the forthcoming Arabic translation might be received in the Muslim world” – but it seems that ultimately, he was just “disappointed” that he wasn’t even invited when the Arabic-language edition of his book was published in Ramallah. However, Sand was hosted at Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University by Professor Sari Nusseibeh, who served as the university’s president at the time, and this was certainly an honor that would not have been bestowed on anyone who had written books on “The Invention of the Palestinian People” and “The Invention of the Land of Palestine.” Indeed, one shudders to think how an author promoting those titles would be received by Sand’s admirers.

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
12 October '14..

Tel Aviv University, which was recently ranked Israel’s best, also has the doubtful distinction of employing a professor of history who is regarded as a first-rate authority on Jews by lots of first-rate Jew-haters. Shlomo Sand earned the admiration of antisemites everywhere with his “Invention of the Jewish People,” a book that was hugely successful as it appealed to both old-fashioned Jew-haters and supposedly progressive “anti-Zionists”. In a comprehensive review that takes Sand’s ramblings perhaps too seriously, his truly accomplished Tel Aviv University colleague Anita Shapira has politely noted that 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.”

Needless to say, Sand enjoyed his new-found celebrity and eventually delighted his fans with yet another fanciful screed, this time on the “Invention of the Land of Israel.” Since he apparently promised to come up with a trilogy, he has now published another volume where he announces his resignation from being a – presumably invented – Jew. In response to this publication, my very erudite Facebook friend David Sigeti wrote a comment that echoes Shapira’s point quoted above and highlights the important question how Sand’s specious “scholarship” could be so shamelessly promoted by many academics and intellectuals:

“I think that the best short phrase to describe Sand is ‘serial crackpot’. [According to Sand] All the genetic evidence is fabricated and the Ashkenazim are really from Central Asia, Yiddish is a Slavic language in spite of being mutually comprehensible with various dialects of German, the ancient Romans were incapable of transporting large numbers of slaves across the Mediterranean in spite of having fed Italy from Egypt for centuries etc., etc., etc. He is almost certainly the only author in the modern, democratic world to write a book that relies on so many crackpot hypotheses in fields as diverse as genetics, linguistics, and history and to get it taken seriously by other academics and intellectuals.

(Continue)

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Review of Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
09 October '10

What if you wished to explode as myth a consensus national narrative? The ultimate dream of an iconoclast. How would you go about it, if you wished to be taken seriously? Would you seriously study the narrative, sifting through its content and its details, plumbing its historical depth and breadth? Would you strive mightily to understand it's compelling force, and trace the causes of its vitality?

Or would you create a shallow straw-man caricature and poke triumphal holes in it? Would you collect any shred of complication and shadow of uncertainty, string them together regardless of coherence, and refuse to recognize any attempts of synthesis? Would you brand adherents as malicious fools who invent and believe falsehoods?

Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, disdains the serious options and embraces the trite. The history of the Jews as an ancient nation is false, he claims; rather, the Jewish people are an artificial and unnatural invention, conjured in the 19th century and embellished in the 20th. Had he backed this with seriousness it might at least have been challenging. Instead, the result is a cringe inducing piece of astonishingly unconvincing scholarship.

The straw-man caricature: Sand seems to have read quite a bit about modern European nationalism. As he tells it, in the 19th century intellectuals overemphasized the longevity and coherence of their national pasts to bolster the national cohesiveness, strengthen its credibility and generally convince people how important their nation needed to be for them. Later, as the 20th century waned, these goals fell out of fashion, and the histories were changed to fit the new, multi-cultural Zeitgeist. This new narrative, we are expected to accept, is solidly true where its cynical and manipulative predecessors were not.

Sand neglects to discuss the non-Western world. Do his paradigms fit Asia, Africa, the Arab world or Latin America? He doesn't say. Yet he insists Jewish nationalism is European and shares its trajectory. As early European nationalism was based on bad history, so that of the Jews.

(Read full review)

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Journalists From The West Always Collaborate With Me

Tuvia Tenenbom
Hudson New York
29 March '10

Mahmoud Darwish, heard of him? His books are sold here at the “Yafa: Book Store & Coffee Shop,” where you sip your sweet and bitter coffee at about quadruple the cost other cafés in the area charge, but you get the chance to entertain your mind with the loftiest of issues.

Haven’t heard of him? Don’t feel bad. Mahmoud Darwish, who passed away in August of 2008, is the most celebrated Palestinian writer of our time. Many of the books sold here are in Arabic, and nine out of ten Israeli intellectuals who come by don’t read Arabic to start with.

Relax. Sip your hot coffee a while longer, drink a cold soda in between. You certainly won’t be bored here. There are a few books in Hebrew as well, for those Jews who insist on reading, but no pressure to buy.

Drinks are more expensive than paper in this establishment and the owner will be thankful to you no matter how you spend your time. Some folks, those who don’t like to read or to drink, come here to listen. This is a place for peace, anti-war; everyone in sight is peaceful and accommodating.

Most who enter -- surely you won’t be surprised by this -- are left-wing Israelis for whom the Coffee Shops is a Mecca. Some Jews come here to give a speech and sell their wares. Like Prof. Shlomo Sand. Heard of him? If you didn’t, maybe you should. Michel, the Coffee Shop’s owner, for example, is an admirer. “Usually,” Michel tells me as he pours his expensive coffee for me, “I give people one hour to talk. But to Prof. Sand I gave three hours.” Michel is an Arab, Prof. Sand is a Jew, and the love between them crosses borders of national identities. “He has an exceptionally good mind,” Michel says to me. “Did you read his recent book?”

(Read full article)
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An ethnocracy or multiethnic democracy?

Seth Frantzman
Op-Ed/JPost
02 March '10

One of the newest code words for condemning Israel is describing the state as an “ethnocracy” or “ethnocratic settler state.” According to a widespread definition, an ethnocracy is “a form of government where representatives of a particular ethnic group hold a number of government posts disproportionately large to the percentage of the total... and use them to advance the position of their particular ethnic group(s) to the detriment of others.”

Israel, according to those who accuse the state of fitting this description, joins apartheid South Africa, Uganda under Idi Amin, Sudan, Rwanda, Estonia, Latvia, Serbia and Malaysia. It also joins former “settler regimes” such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and French Algeria. Unsurprisingly Israel is set alongside regimes that ceased to exist, apartheid South Africa being one example, but Australia during the period of the “white Australia policy” (when preferred immigrants were confined to Europeans) being another.

Those who speak of Israel as an ethnocracy therefore insinuate that the current manifestation of the Jewish state will soon be abolished or destroyed, like French Algeria, or repent for its racist sins like South Africa.

THE NEW ethnocratic slander appears to have its origins, sadly, in grants given by the Israel Academy of Sciences. In 2002 Alexander (Sandy) Kedar of the University of Haifa received a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation which was founded by the Israel Academy of Sciences. His proposal was for research into “The Rise of a New Land Regime: Changes in Israeli Legal Geography 1992-2002” and he received the grant for four years with Prof. Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University. In the same year he received a grant from the French Embassy’s Center for Cultural Cooperation for research comparing Israel to the French regime in Algeria.

(Read full article)
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Book Review: "The Invention of the Jewish People"

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA
Media Analysis
30 December 09

The Invention of the Jewish People
Shlomo Sand, Translated by Yael Lotan
Verso, London New York, 2009

When it comes to undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state, there is no thesis too absurd to be published. In fact, one can assume that any book attacking the idea of Jewish nationalism will gain a following (and even garner awards), regardless of how preposterous the underlying thesis.

Such is the case with "The Invention of the Jewish People" a book by Shlomo Sand who teaches French history at Tel Aviv University. The thesis: There is no such thing as a Jewish people; today's Jews have no connection to biblical Israelites or to Jews who inhabited Israel during the time of the Second Temple; rather, they are descended from disparate groups of people who converted to Judaism and had no ties to the land of Israel. Conversely, there was no exile of Jews from the land of Israel; most Jews remained in the land, converted to Islam and were the progenitors of present-day Palestinians.

Sand acknowledges his mission is to prove invalid the foundation of Zionism – the idea of a Jewish state built on a Jewish ancestral homeland -- and to promote instead the idea of a single non-Jewish state of Arabs and Jews. His qualifications for this project lie – not in Jewish history scholarship (his field is French nationalism and cinema), but – in his communist, anti-nationalist and anti-Zionist background and politics (which he proudly mentions in the book's preface). His thesis whereby Arabs – and not Jews– are the rightful inheritors of the land provides the support for his political argument.

What about the earlier historical writings that negate his theories? Sand discards them as the fabrications of 19th and 20th century Jewish historians who fabricated "myths" and constructed "memories" of Jewish nationhood. Moreover, he contends the invented version of events was kept alive in Jewish history departments throughout Israel, the U.S. and Europe by Zionists who "created an iron-jawed vise that prevented any deviation from the dominant narrative."

The author does not pretend to reveal any new primary source material. His conceit is that he is keener and more honest than the "authorized" experts in Jewish history whom he disparages, and that he, by contrast, is uncovering "surprising connections" and offering "unexpected insights."

(Read full review)

Related: Review by Simon Schama
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Thank You, Tony Judt

Emmanuel Navon
For The Sake of Zion
20 December 09

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don't actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their "imagined self."

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn't exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn't been invented. There is also no point in making such a point –except, that is, if you manage to prove that what you believe to be real is just an illusion. Pull the fighting Jews out of Plato's cave, make them realize that what they thought to be true and real is just a fiction and a sham, and you've solved the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand's contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history "is at best redundant" ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth," Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand's book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

(Read full post)
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The myth of Jewish colonialism

Point of No Return
15 December 09

In much discourse about the Middle East, there is a widespread myth that Jews are interlopers from Europe and the US - white westerners who came to ‘colonise’ and ’steal land’ from the ‘native’ Palestinian people to whom it rightfully belongs. This myth, drawing on Marxist terminology, gained increasing legitimacy after 1967 when Israel annexed East Jerusalem and ‘conquered’ the West Bank. The notion of 'occupation' and the use of the word ‘settlers’ reinforce the concept of Israeli ‘colonisation’ of ‘Arab’ land.

Aside from assuming that the Palestinians must be the true natives because they look authentically ‘brown’, the colonialism myth supports another myth: Jews are not a people, deserving of the right to self-determination, but a religion. Thus anti-Zionists habitually talk about of US citizens of the Jewish faith, Germans of the Jewish faith and even Arabs of the Jewish faith. At the time of the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre said of the emancipation of Jews: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” The Jewish community would somehow disappear, leaving only French citizens of Jewish religion or ancestry.

Lately, the notion that Jews are not one people but a motley collection of converts has been given a boost by Tel Aviv Professor Shlomo Sand, whose bestselling book, The Invention of the Jewish People, is now out in English. Sand’s theories build on the work of Arthur Koestler, who popularised the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Turkic tribe, the Khazars. Both men undermine the legitimacy of Israel by inferring that Jews have no link to Palestine. Genetic studies, however, discredit Koestler’s theory: they find that Jews from East and West have more in common with each other, and are genetically closer to non-Jews of Middle eastern origin – the Kurds in particular – than they are to the non-Jewish populations they lived amongst.

Last June President Obama articulated another myth: Israel was created as a penance for the Holocaust in Europe. This myth obscures the truth that every Arab state is equally a creation of western colonialism. It also ignores the fact that the institutions of a Jewish state-in-waiting were established decades before Ben Gurion read out Israel’s declaration of independence.

We often hear or read about Israel being populated by pork-munching non-Jewish Russians and settlers from Brooklyn. But these groups are marginal. We almost never hear that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews trace their ancestry from Muslim and Arab lands. The vast majority of these Jews merely moved from one corner of the ‘Arab’ world to that Middle Eastern coastal sliver known as Israel.

Until their expulsion 50 years ago, Jews had been settled in Iraq, for example, since the Babylonians exiled Jews from Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago. In the early 20th century, Baghdad was the most Jewish city in the world, after Salonica and Jerusalem. The Jews can be said to have as legitimate a claim on Baghdad as Palestinians on Jerusalem.

(Full article)
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The Invention of the Jewish People

Review by Simon Schama
Financial Times
13 November 09

The Invention of the Jewish People
By Shlomo Sand
Translated by Yael Lotan

(This book is popping up in many places and should be addressed. While not agreeing with every point made by the reviewer, his critique is about as good as will be found in a major publication. Y.)

From its splashy title on, Shlomo Sand means his book to be provocative, which it certainly is, though possibly not in the way he intends. Its real challenge to the reader is separating the presentation of truisms as though they were revolutionary illuminations and the relentless beating on doors that have long been open, from passages of intellectual sharpness and learning.

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

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.

To take just one instance: the history of the Khazars, the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism and which Sand thinks has been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic converts. But the Khazars were known by every Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Greenery and further flung parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded.

For Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, the antidote to a national identity based on what he argues are fables, is to shed the fancy that there is any such thing as a shared Jewish identity independent of religious practice.

By this narrow reckoning you are either devoutly orthodox or not Jewish at all if you imagine yourself to have any connection to Israel past or present. Sand confuses ethnicity – which, in the case of the Jews, is indeed impure, heterogeneous and much travelled – with an identity that evolves as the product of common historical experience. Rabbinical arguments may rest on an imaginary definition of ethnicity, but the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland does not. Ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity, about which Sand has nothing to say.

His book is a trip (and I use the word advisedly) through a landscape of illusions which Sand aims to explode, leaving the scenery freer for a Middle East built, as he supposes, from the hard bricks of truth. This turns out to require not just the abandonment of simplicities about race, but any shared sense of historical identity at all on the part of the Jews that might be taken as the basis of common allegiance, which is an another matter entirely. En route, he marches the reader through a mind-numbingly laborious examination of the construction of national identities from imagined rather than actual histories. A whole literature has been devoted to the assumption that nations are invariably built from such stories, in which, nonetheless, grains of historical truth are usually embedded. The important issue, however, is whether the meta-narrative that arises from those stories is inclusive enough to accommodate the tales of those whose experience is something other than racially and culturally homogeneous.

(Read full review)

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