The Invention of the Jewish People () is a 2008 book by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, in which he challenges ideas of Jewish peoplehood developed in Jewish historiography since the 19th century. In the book, which has been widely discredited, Sand disputes the accepted narrative of forced exile of Jews from the Land of Israel under the Romans, who then renamed the land to Syria Palestina, claiming instead that modern Jews descend from converts to Judaism whose native lands were in locations across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The book was on the best-seller list in Israel for nineteen weeks and has generated heated controversy.
An English edition of the book, translated by Yael Lotan, was published by Verso Books in October 2009., English Edition (Verso Books, 2009) The book has also been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French and Russian, and further translations were underway.
Book summary
Introduction The introduction, subtitled "Burdens of Memory", is divided into two parts: Identity in Movement and Constructed Memories.
In Identity in Movement, Sand presents some personal anecdotes in the way of a positionality statement to indicate how some of his experiences influence his scholarly research. In one anecdote, Sand refers to his Rakah friend Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian present absentee and poet, and reveals that Darwish's poem "A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies" was about Sand as an Israeli soldier in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.
In Constructed Memories, Sand likens nationalist historical narratives to "statues in city squares—they must be grand, towering, heroic" and describes the works embodying a nationalist historiography that dominated until the late 20th century as reading like "the sports page in a local paper: 'Us' and 'All the Others'". Sand cites the development of various nationalist histories and their dependence on their own national myths, then gives his impression of the nationalist imagination of Jewish Israelis: For Israelis, specifically those of Jewish origin, such mythologies are farfetched, whereas their own history rests on firm and precise truths. They know for a certainty that a Jewish nation has been in existence since Moses received the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, and that they are its direct and exclusive descendants (except for the ten tribes, who are yet to be located). They are convinced that this nation "came out" of Egypt; conquered and settled "the Land of Israel," which had been famously promised it by the deity; created the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon, which then split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They are also convinced that this nation was exiled, not once but twice, after its periods of glory—after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE, and again after the fall of the Second Temple, in 70 CE. Yet even before that second exile, this unique nation had created the Hebrew Hasmonean kingdom, which revolted against the wicked influence of Hellenization.
They believe that these people—their "nation," which must be the most ancient—wandered in exile for nearly two thousand years and yet, despite this prolonged stay among the gentiles, managed to avoid integration with, or assimilation into, them. The nation scattered widely, its bitter wanderings taking it to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland, and distant Russia, but it always managed to maintain close blood relations among the far-flung communities and to preserve its distinctiveness.
Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, they contend, rare circumstances combined to wake the ancient people from its long slumber and to prepare it for rejuvenation and for the return to its ancient homeland. And so the nation began to return, joyfully, in vast numbers. Many Israelis still believe that, but for Hitler's horrible massacre, "Eretz Israel" would soon have been filled with millions of Jews making "aliyah" by their own free will, because they had dreamed of it for thousands of years.
And while the wandering people needed a territory of its own, the empty, virgin land longed for a nation to come and make it bloom. Some uninvited guests had, it is true, settled in this homeland, but since "the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion" for two millennia, the land belonged only to that people, and not to that handful without history who had merely stumbled upon it. Therefore the wars waged by the wandering nation in its conquest of the country were justified; the violent resistance of the local population was criminal; and it was only the (highly unbiblical) charity of the Jews that permitted these strangers to remain and dwell among and beside the nation, which had returned to its biblical language and its wondrous land.This narrative, according to Sand, was built with contributions from "gifted reconstructors of the past, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century." He reviews the literature of modern Jewish historiography and raises various questions that he says scholars of Jewish history do not regularly address, with many of these raising criticisms of Zionism and Israeli policies. Sand also acknowledges possible limitations in his own work—especially with regard to straddling fields in which he is a non-specialist and having to work alone when he would have liked to work collaboratively—and emphasizes: Please note: the present work, which proposes that the Jews have always comprised significant religious communities that appeared and settled in various parts of the world, rather than an ethnos that shared a single origin and wandered in a permanent exile, does not deal directly with history. Given that its main purpose is to criticize a widespread historiographic discourse, it cannot avoid suggesting alternative narratives.Sand began his work by looking for research studies about forcible exile of Jews from the region of Palestine and surrounding areas. 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 history. The conclusion he came to from his subsequent investigation is that the expulsion simply did not happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region, and that the Jewish 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 Hasmoneans under the influence of Hellenism, 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 Land of Israel and that a "nation-race" of Jews with a common origin never existed, and that just as most Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, not of the first Christians and Muslims, Jews are also descended from converts. According to Sand, Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, a proselytising religion, and mass conversions to Judaism occurred among the Khazars in the Caucasus, Berber tribes in North Africa, and in the Himyarite Kingdom of the Arabian Peninsula.
According to Sand, the original Jews living in Israel, contrary to popular belief, were not exiled by the Romans following the Bar Kokhba revolt. The Romans permitted most Jews to remain in the country. Rather, 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." Following the Arab conquest of Palestine in the 7th century, many local Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the Arab conquerors. Sand concludes that these converts are the ancestors of the contemporary Palestinians.
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 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."
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, Judaism, 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 Land 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.
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."Shlomo Sand: an enemy of the Jewish people? " Retrieved 2011-01-18.
Sand explained in the same interview that what he means by 'Jewish essentialism' is, in the words of the interviewer, "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," Sand said.
Reception Sand's book has provoked a range of responses from different points of view.
As a work of history Writing in the Financial Times, British historian Tony Judt commented that critics call Sand's work "at best redundant" because the sources he cites and the arguments he makes are not new, but the message is helpful to popular audiences familiar with "the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit". He concludes: "If Prof Sand’s popularising work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile."
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."