The sequel was met with a response, no warmer. The cardinal sin of Shlomo Sand was to rupture the conventional self-serving Zionist narrative which had weaved its way through the grand theft colonial project. Zionism in the century before the creation of the state of Israel had manufactured myths about the origin of the supposed Jewish people. Along came Sand and turned the ostensible firm ground Zionism pretended to stand on into sand beneath its jackbooted feet.
Sand, a socialist - unlike many on the so called Israeli Left - did not usurp evidence and logic for the purpose of replacing it with fiction. The Invention Of The Jewish People quickly became a best seller in both France and Israel, topping the list in the latter for nineteen weeks. It prompted the Jewish Chronicle to ask if Jewish history was a case of hit and myth.
Like the Nazis who had mythologised the German Volk to stake their claim on whatever it was they wanted to plunder, the Zionists conjured into existence a mythical people and a nation with long antecedents. Zionist historians, unpardonably deferring to ahistoricism, created a Zionist historiography that disingenuously identified Palestine as the original Jewish homeland.
Sand insists that there was no Jewish exodus from Egypt; that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were a mere fable; that the Jews were not a common diaspora which wandered from Jerusalem to Moscow and then back to their homeland after a period of almost two thousand years. He does grant that neither the Jews nor the Zionists were responsible for creating the myth. That was down to Christians who claimed the Jews were kicked out of the Holy Land because they were Christ killers: their perennial earthly punishment - a life in exile as the wandering Jew.
Sand does not pretend that the Zionists were unique in myth building. It has long been accepted particularly since the conceptualisation of imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, that creation myths abound and are not exclusive to religions. God's chosen people is as much a figment of imagination as the Kuba god, Bumba. What Sand does do is argue that the provenance of the mythology for the existence of the Jewish people is to be found in another book of myths, the Bible. Rather than treat the Bible as theology, Zionism has promoted it as history. Children in Israeli schools are taught the bible in history class. This is as ludicrously flawed and fraudulent as that of Young Earth Creationists demanding that their rubbish be taught in the science class so that their self delusion that the planet we humans inhabit is merely six thousand years old be legitimised. This in spite of an overwhelming abundance of meticulously gathered scientific evidence to show the age of the earth is billions of years. All because in 1650 the Bishop Of Armagh, James Ussher, toted up the years in the Bible since Genesis and the magic garden, home to a talking snake, and imparted his wisdom to those unscientific enough to swallow it. It might be a bit churlish to blame the scientifically illiterate bishop for what he did not know - that the Sumerians had somehow invented glue a thousand years before the world of the Bible was brought into being. That gives us some sense of the type of fallacy Zionism promotes.
Not the type of book the average reader grabs for leisure, it is a detailed, complex and deep dive into serious history and archeology including the work of Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow, both eager to invent a Jewish people. While easy enough to grasp the argument being made, to fully appreciate the weight of the evidence it would be necessary to have considerably more knowledge than the average reader.
Sand refers to an ethnonationalist historiography which seeks to create a Jewish state by excluding those who originally inhabited the land of Palestine and were then displaced and disempowered by a colonial Zionist project.
He stresses there was no Jewish exodus that was flung to the four corners of the earth. Across Egypt, parts of Asia and elsewhere there were Jewish communities, the aggregate population of which numbered in their millions. They grew in size not because they were descendants of ancestors who previously lived in and worked the Holy Land but because they were converts in their own lands from other religions.
His account of the Central Asian Khazars is instructive. They had no lineage they could trace back to the Holy Land, they were instead converts to Judaism. Yet they provided the birth canal out of which poured the colonisers who would eventually steal Palestine much like the Dutch Boers stole South Africa.
Confronted with his research, the best that Israeli academics seemed able to do was to dispute charges of their ignorance of the processes that invented the Jewish people but maintain that somehow Israel was not an aberration that had no right to be created in 1948. Simon Schama opined that 'ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity.' Despite being a weak return of serve it nevertheless begs the question of what remedy the Palestinians deserve for Israeli atrocity.
Sand for his part thinks that while it was a terrible idea to create the state of Israel in the first place, it would be even worse to dry to dismantle it. This has brought him some criticism from the anti-Zionist lobby which feels he does not go to the logical terminus of the road his intellectual journey has taken him on.
Nevertheless, the type of courage required to produce a book of this nature in a society as supremacist and racist as Israel is rare, on a par with the unrelenting fortitude so tenaciously displayed by Gideon Levy of Haaretz.
Reading this work a decade and a half after it was first published is a timely reminder of just how nefarious and malign the persecution of the Palestinians actually is. A mindset similar to that of Nazism with which Zionism shares so many traits, the Zionist state of Israel has as much right to exist as the Apartheid state of South Africa.
Sand, a socialist - unlike many on the so called Israeli Left - did not usurp evidence and logic for the purpose of replacing it with fiction. The Invention Of The Jewish People quickly became a best seller in both France and Israel, topping the list in the latter for nineteen weeks. It prompted the Jewish Chronicle to ask if Jewish history was a case of hit and myth.
Like the Nazis who had mythologised the German Volk to stake their claim on whatever it was they wanted to plunder, the Zionists conjured into existence a mythical people and a nation with long antecedents. Zionist historians, unpardonably deferring to ahistoricism, created a Zionist historiography that disingenuously identified Palestine as the original Jewish homeland.
Sand insists that there was no Jewish exodus from Egypt; that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were a mere fable; that the Jews were not a common diaspora which wandered from Jerusalem to Moscow and then back to their homeland after a period of almost two thousand years. He does grant that neither the Jews nor the Zionists were responsible for creating the myth. That was down to Christians who claimed the Jews were kicked out of the Holy Land because they were Christ killers: their perennial earthly punishment - a life in exile as the wandering Jew.
Sand does not pretend that the Zionists were unique in myth building. It has long been accepted particularly since the conceptualisation of imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, that creation myths abound and are not exclusive to religions. God's chosen people is as much a figment of imagination as the Kuba god, Bumba. What Sand does do is argue that the provenance of the mythology for the existence of the Jewish people is to be found in another book of myths, the Bible. Rather than treat the Bible as theology, Zionism has promoted it as history. Children in Israeli schools are taught the bible in history class. This is as ludicrously flawed and fraudulent as that of Young Earth Creationists demanding that their rubbish be taught in the science class so that their self delusion that the planet we humans inhabit is merely six thousand years old be legitimised. This in spite of an overwhelming abundance of meticulously gathered scientific evidence to show the age of the earth is billions of years. All because in 1650 the Bishop Of Armagh, James Ussher, toted up the years in the Bible since Genesis and the magic garden, home to a talking snake, and imparted his wisdom to those unscientific enough to swallow it. It might be a bit churlish to blame the scientifically illiterate bishop for what he did not know - that the Sumerians had somehow invented glue a thousand years before the world of the Bible was brought into being. That gives us some sense of the type of fallacy Zionism promotes.
Not the type of book the average reader grabs for leisure, it is a detailed, complex and deep dive into serious history and archeology including the work of Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow, both eager to invent a Jewish people. While easy enough to grasp the argument being made, to fully appreciate the weight of the evidence it would be necessary to have considerably more knowledge than the average reader.
Sand refers to an ethnonationalist historiography which seeks to create a Jewish state by excluding those who originally inhabited the land of Palestine and were then displaced and disempowered by a colonial Zionist project.
He stresses there was no Jewish exodus that was flung to the four corners of the earth. Across Egypt, parts of Asia and elsewhere there were Jewish communities, the aggregate population of which numbered in their millions. They grew in size not because they were descendants of ancestors who previously lived in and worked the Holy Land but because they were converts in their own lands from other religions.
His account of the Central Asian Khazars is instructive. They had no lineage they could trace back to the Holy Land, they were instead converts to Judaism. Yet they provided the birth canal out of which poured the colonisers who would eventually steal Palestine much like the Dutch Boers stole South Africa.
Confronted with his research, the best that Israeli academics seemed able to do was to dispute charges of their ignorance of the processes that invented the Jewish people but maintain that somehow Israel was not an aberration that had no right to be created in 1948. Simon Schama opined that 'ultimately, Israel’s case is the remedy for atrocity.' Despite being a weak return of serve it nevertheless begs the question of what remedy the Palestinians deserve for Israeli atrocity.
Sand for his part thinks that while it was a terrible idea to create the state of Israel in the first place, it would be even worse to dry to dismantle it. This has brought him some criticism from the anti-Zionist lobby which feels he does not go to the logical terminus of the road his intellectual journey has taken him on.
Nevertheless, the type of courage required to produce a book of this nature in a society as supremacist and racist as Israel is rare, on a par with the unrelenting fortitude so tenaciously displayed by Gideon Levy of Haaretz.
Reading this work a decade and a half after it was first published is a timely reminder of just how nefarious and malign the persecution of the Palestinians actually is. A mindset similar to that of Nazism with which Zionism shares so many traits, the Zionist state of Israel has as much right to exist as the Apartheid state of South Africa.
Shlomo Sand, 2010, The Invention Of The Jewish People. Verso. ISBN-13: 978-1844674220
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