The Invention of the Jewish People

When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi? ) is a "controversial", book by professor Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian.

Sand's argument

In the book Sand argues that most contemporary Jews don't originate from the ancient Land of Israel. They never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin. Most of them are decendents of European, Russian and African groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. Just like others adopted Christianity. He also argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, "the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking".

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. Just like most contemporary Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, nót of the first Christians and Muslims: Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, Islam and Christianity, a converting religion.

Additionally, he suggests that 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.

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. This was, in fact, how the book was born. He started looking in studies about the exile from the land, which is a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. Sand claims that he could discover no literature about the Jewish expulsion from Israel. His explanation is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans sometimes committed etnocide but they didn't exile peoples. Sand claims that mass exile wasn't logistically possible until the 20th century.

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.

Sand explains the birth of the myth of a Jewish people as a group with a common, ethnic origin 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, they didn't differ from other national movements in Europe at the time. They invented a splendid Golden Age - for example, classical Greece, the ancient 'Belgians', the Dutch 'Bataven' or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed as a separate people since the beginnings of history. Before this, according to Sand, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. Just like Christians think of themselves as Christians, only because they share a common religion. Not a common ethnic background.

Sand further claims that the idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism before the birth of zionism. He claims that the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. On the contrary, according to Sand, for 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came.

Scholarly evaluations

Sand knew that the moment he would start dealing with historical periods that didn't belong to his field of expertise, he would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas.

In a commentary published in Haaretz, Israel Bartal, dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University writes that Sand's claims about Zionist and contemporary Israeli historiography are baseless. Sand, for example, does not mention the fact that, from 2000 onwards, a team of scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem labored on a monumental task: the production of a three-volume study on the history of the Jews of Russia.

According to Bartal, "No historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically "pure." Bartal writes that Sand applies academically 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."

Historian Anita Shapira criticizes Sand for, in his survey of three thousand years of history, regularly "grab(ing) at the most unorthodox theory" in a field and then stretching it "to the outer limits of logic and beyond."

Political motivations

According to Tom Segev, 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." Segev adds 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".

Sand told an interviewer that "The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us.... There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist." However, Sand thinks that fear isn't justified. For him, the historical diaspora myth isn't the source of the legitimization for him being in Israel. He believes that the Israeli nation shouldn't be based on an ethnocentric, 19th century, biological myth, but on the promise of a better future, like the American nation.

Due to this political program, his book has been criticized as an attempt to "drag history into a topical argument, and with the help of misrepresentations and half-truths to adapt it to the needs of a political discussion."

Sand's qualifications

Experts on the Jewish history have said that Sand is dealing with subjects about which he has no understanding and that he bases his book on work that he is incapable of reading in the original languages.

Most of the book deals with the question of where the Jews come from, rather than questions of modern Jewish nationalism and the - according to Sand - modern invention of the Jewish people." Sand admits that he is "An historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. (...)", and that he has "been criticised in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty."

Popular success

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. More translations are in progress and the book is scheduled for publication by Verso in English in 2009..

External links

• Anita Shapira, Review Essay: The Jewish-people deniers, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 28, No. 1, March 2009, 63-72