Search

Current issue

Previous issues

Archive

Further Reading

Liturgical Calendar

The Tablet Radio Show

Manage your Subscription

Newsletter

Book Review

It ain't necessarily so

The invention of the Jewish people

To call Shlomo Sand’s new book “challenging” would be an understatement. The challenge begins with the English title: it goes  further than a literal translation of the original Hebrew, which would be “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” What is undoubted is that what Sand is attempting to expose has wide appeal: it is unusual to find a book by a university academic labelled “International Bestseller”. Indeed the book did well both in Israel and France.

In his introduction, Sand, a professor of modern European history at Tel Aviv University, makes clear that this is a work of history but confesses that some of the stories, “rooted in a collective memory”, have been “adulterated with a considerable degree of imagination”. While it would be going much too far to compare this to what The Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claim to be historical truths about the roots of the contemporary Catholic Church, it is intriguing to explore both what Sand professes, and the possible motivation for his claims.

His introduction, “Burdens of Memory”, presents a fascinating variety of characters with whom the author has been associated, who have found themselves in Israel or have aspired to go there. Two are Arabs, one is a Spanish anarchist who believed the kibbutz ideal in Israel might offer a way of life similar to what he failed to find in his native land; another is a Jewish Communist from Lodz and two are women of part-Jewish descent, precluded from being Jewish according to orthodox Jewish law. His aim is to show that they have as much right to the land as the stereotypical Jewish inhabitant of the “Jewish state”. While he accepts that Judaism has adherents in many parts of the world, he does not consider that they share a common ancestry.

The very human and engaging tone of this introduction develops into a much more academic key in the first formal chapter, in which the author considers how much the Jewish historians of the nineteenth century were influenced by the prevailing nationalism of the period. In the way the French purported to be the descendants of the Gauls, and the Germans of the Teutonic knights or the ancient Aryan tribes, the Jews were portrayed as descending from the People of the Book.

In “Mythistory”, Sand undermines the claims of the Bible to be historic truth. He cites recent archaeological discoveries, showing the mythical nature of many popular biblical landmarks, ranging from the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and entry into the land of Canaan to the supposed glorious kingdoms of David and Solomon. The third chapter, ‘The Invention of Exile”, challenges the received wisdom that the Jews were exiled from their land by the Romans, following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Sand accepts that the Romans persecuted the inhabitants of Judaea, but not that they were sent into exile. His contention is that many inhabitants of the land later converted to Islam, whereas many Jewish communities of the diaspora were descended from converts to Judaism in the surrounding lands, who later made their way across the world. The Eastern and Central European Jews, in their turn, were descendants of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism en masse.

It should be mentioned that prior to the prohibition on making conversions imposed by the Emperor Constantine, Judaism was, unlike today, a missionary religion. Sand claims that “Realms of Silence” were imposed on these areas, in order to propagate the myth of a people returning to its ancient land. However, some of his critics, even those who share his desire for Israel to become a state representing all its citizens, assert that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever believed the origins of the Jews to be ethnically and biologically pure.

To quote Professor Israel Bartal of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, “No ‘nationalist’ Jewish historian has ever tried to conceal the fact that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history. Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions.”

It is possible that Sand’s thesis is not as original as it appears to be. His book, well translated by Yael Lotan, is readable, although the extremely long chapters are a little daunting.

Back to homepage