No, Slezkine writes, they helped make the world into something they thought would be amenable to themselves — which had, however, unforeseen consequences. It is truly brilliant, while Sand's book is, well, plodding and dull. In short, Sand wishes to convey the message that Jews, as a collective entity in the modern world, have an unusually slender claim on people-hood, or status as a nationality, and even worse, a particularly questionable tie to Palestine and the Land of Israel.
Even the establishment Zionist historians such as Walter Laqueur and David Vital were emphatic that the nationalist impulse was largely dormant, if not moribund, until Herzl came on the scene. But Schorske, and even Herzl, evince infinitely more historical savvy than Sand. Although there were obviously different preconditions, including shockingly few prerequisites for Jewish statehood in , Herzl saw that his own effort at nation-building demanded practices akin to those of Bismarck. Sand does not seem to understand the complex relationships and tensions between Central European nationalisms and Zionism, as illuminated by scholars such as Mark Gelber, Steve Aschheim, and Adi Gordon.
Sand, appropriately, cites the foundational work on the erection of the French nation by Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France. What makes Peasants Into Frenchmen so remarkable is its survey of how remote most Frenchmen were to national ideals, even well into the nineteenth century. Given Sand's old-fashioned type of 'history of ideas' that favors 'great men' as much as he means to criticize them , it is little wonder that signal moments are given short shrift.
To give but four examples: James Renton has shown, in his analysis of the politics surrounding the inception and early implementation of the Balfour Declaration , how much Zionism was shaped by British perceptions of race, nationality, and empire. Generally speaking, the author also underestimates the radicalization of Zionist Revisionism the right-wing, anti-socialist, militaristic branch of the movement during the Second Word War, as recently illuminated by Colin Shindler 22 , and too easily subsumes their luminaries, Joseph Klausner and Vladimir Jabotinsky, into the mainstream.
Zionists continually defined themselves over and against each other. None of this is to deny that Israel, especially since the s, has lurched toward policies normally associated with European right-wing nationalism, Christian and Islamic religious extremism, and racist xenophobia.
The Invention of the Jewish People
Sand paints this as part of a long-term, intentional progression, as largely a reaction against its ephemeral people-hood. In this he misses or undervalues a great number of salient points. The study of accommodation to right-wing ideologies in the name of consolidating power especially during and after wartime , the piecemeal integration of religious fundamentalism, restrictions on liberties of individuals and minority groups in the name of national security, and greed under the guise of national self-interest may not be sensational, or sexy ways to move books — but they remain a large part of the story.
In Sand's bizarre concoction, nearly everyone who written about the Jews, in any collective form, has contributed toward the venal fiction of a Jewish nation. If not, the engines of nationalization have done their utmost to muzzle or force-fit them into the mold.
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand | Book review | Books | The Guardian
But it remains an extremely attractive theory to those who maintain that there is no connection whatsoever between Jewry, historically, and Palestine. This is one of numerous segments of the book that can be easily picked apart. He does not, for instance, grasp the extent to which much of this work, such as that pioneered by Tudor Parfitt, explicitly contradicts the absurd notion of a 'Jewish race'. It is indeed true that it took a great amount of effort to nationalize Jews in the form of modern politics. Such activities were creative and borrowed heavily from the cultures Jews knew, as the historiographical investigations of scholars such as David Myers and Natalia Aleksiun have shown.
The challenge to the national-minded among the Jews was to make the national dimension vital, meaningful, and the pretext for action. Zionism was, after all, but one of several manifestations of nationalism, while the Bund , which envisioned national-cultural autonomy in Europe based on Yiddish culture, was a more popular alternative in late 19th and early 20th-century Eastern Europe. The problem was not whether or not Jews were a people — but what kind of people they should become, and the specific means by which they should transform themselves.
According to Sand, though, the Roman Empire, Christendom, and Islamic civilization must have suffered fantastic common delusions in recognizing Jewry as a people, as well as members of a religious community. The modern nationalization of Jewry was a process that began late, and proceeded with fits and starts.
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Historian Anita Shapira criticizes Sand for regularly "grab bing at the most unorthodox theory" in a field and then stretching it "to the outer limits of logic and beyond" during Sand's survey of three thousand years of history. Carlo Strenger writes that Sand's book is "not a pure work of history" and argues that, "in fact, it has a clearly stated political agenda.
It might come as a surprise to some who have not read the book that Sand's goal is to preserve Israel as a democracy with a Jewish character based on a Jewish majority. According to historian Shaul Stampfer , "even though it's a wonderful story", the mass conversion of Khazars to Judaism never took place. According to Daniel Lazare the Invention of Jewish people is "messy polemic — helter-skelter, tendentious and ill-informed". Accoriding to Lazare, Sand "rightly insists on the relevance of the ancient past to contemporary politics, but his distortions are an obstacle to a full understanding of the modern Israeli-Palestinian predicament.
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It is flimsy, haphazardly built, slap-dash. There is no foundation in archival research, and Sand does not seem to have fully read or understood many of the secondary works on which his thesis relies. He apparently has never heard of Aviel Roshwald and George Mosse , who are among the first names that should spring to mind in any consideration of Jews and nationalism Writing in The New Republic , Hillel Halkin calls assertions made in the book "the exact opposite of the truth" and goes on to say that "Believing Jews throughout the ages have never doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra'el, a people of Israel—nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish identities.
It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior existence. In contrast, Israeli historian Tom Segev writes that 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. British historian Simon Schama , reviewing the book in the Financial Times , argues that Sand misunderstands Jews in the diaspora, specifically, that he thinks that "the Khazars , the central Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism have been excised from the master narrative because of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be descended from Turkic converts.
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. Sand responded to Schama's critique on his website by summarising the methodology Schama had used: Some Zionist historians have become past masters with such methods and Simon Schama seems to want to emulate them in his review of my book.
British historian Max Hastings , in his review for the Sunday Times , writes that the book "represents, at the very least, a formidable polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish society, in which non-Jews, such as Palestino-Israelis, are culturally and politically marginalised. Yet Sand, whose title is foolishly provocative, displays a lack of compassion for the Jewish predicament. Making a comparison already voiced elsewhere, [36] he compares Sand's book to Assaf Voll 's A History of the Palestinian People , blank pages, stating Sand's argument is the reverse of Voll's, with the former attempting to disprove Jewish origins, and the latter, doing the same for Palestinians, each undermining an adversary's national claim.
According to Ilani, most of Sand's book deals with the question of where the Jews come from, rather than questions of modern Jewish nationalism and the modern invention — according to Sand — of the Jewish people. Sand admits that he is "a historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period…" [18] and that he has "been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.
This isolation, Sand states, dates to a decision in the s to separate history into two disciplines: Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique. Only history is taught this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research. Sand's book has occasionally been mentioned in the press in the context of studies in Jewish population genetics.
This has been the case in June , as the popular press reported on two studies in this field, Atzmon et al. Thus, Newsweek mentions Sand's book as having "revived" debate on the Khazar hypothesis. Nevertheless, the study by Ostrer 's group concluded that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genomewide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations.
Geneticist Harry Ostrer presented findings that were generally viewed as disproving Sand's notion that the Jewish people is an ex-post invention. Shlomo Sand has contested the claim that his book has been contradicted by recent genetic research published in Nature journal and the American Journal of Human Genetics.
This attempt to justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics of Europeans. As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will.
It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Sand traces a line from Graetz to the Zionist historians who, he argues, employ such bioethnic concepts to invent an imaginary entity, a racially continuous Jewish people who were exiled from their land, and therefore deserve to return to it 2, years later. Such continuity, argues Sand, is a fiction and the Jewish people are therefore an "invention".
Sand attempts to prove that the exile of the Jews in the wake of this and subsequent defeats never happened. It is a fiction of modern Jewish historiography: Therefore there is no genetic continuity between today's Jews and those who once inhabited ancient Judaea. The flaws in Sand's argument are both historical and conceptual.
The idea of exile, he suggests, was adopted from the Christian view that the Jews were punished with dispersion for the crime of killing Jesus. But this makes no sense. The paradigm of exile and return is found in the Bible in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah in relation to the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians in BCE. It is thus part of the Jewish narrative centuries before Christianity.
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Further, contrary to what Sand maintains, serious historians of the period consider that the Romans did indeed kill or sell as slaves very many thousands of Jews. The rest of the population was banned from access to Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina. This would surely engender a sense of exile in any people.