Shlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand (Hebrew: שלמה זנד, born 10 September 1946; sometimes transliterated as "Shlomo Zand") is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His main areas of teaching are Cinema and History, French Intellectual History, and Nation and Nationalism.

Biography

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. His father was active in the Israeli Communist Party. 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. His military experience during and after the 1967 war caused him to decide to leave the Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki) to join the more radical Matzpen. He refused the chance to be sent to cinema studies in Poland by the Israeli Communist Party Rakah. In 1975, Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University. From 1975 to 1985, he studied and taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History, and a PhD for his thesis on "George Sorel and Marxism". Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeleyand the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?

A basic part 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 he 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.

He argues that "[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."

For Ofri Ilan, "(...) 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." Israel Bartal, dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argued against Sand that conversion to Judaism throughout history was never concealed by the Zionist movement, and that Zionist historians never believed that the Jews were ethinically and biologically pure.

The book was in the best-seller list in Israel for 19 weeks and quickly went to 3 editions when published in French. More translations are in progress and the book is scheduled for publication by Verso in 2009. Sand says "I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now, I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort."

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
• When and How was the Jewish People Invented?, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2008 (in Hebrew) — also as Comment le peuple juif fut inventé - De la Bible au sionisme, Paris, Fayard, 2008

External links

• "Comment le peuple juif fut inventé" ("How the Jewish People was invented") by Shlomo Sand, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2008
• Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile: Israel deliberately forgets its history by Shlomo Sand, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2008
• Boycott Ariel college by Shlomo Sand, Haaretz
• Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo: Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian by Jonathan Cook
• Shlomo Sand's Revisionist Pseudo-History of the Jewish People