The Invention of the Jewish People [Paperback]

About a fifth of this book shows how Biblical criticism and archaeological discoveries have undermined the reliability of the Hebrew Bible as history. Archaeology, among other things, has played havoc with the chronology of the Bible, especially in connection with the invasion of Canaan, nor has it found any evidence that would support the story of the Exodus or the splendour of Solomon's kingdom.

But the main subject of the book is the denial that there is such a thing as the Jewish People, descended from the inhabitants of Biblical Palestine from which they have been scattered, and that they are a nation which has now returned to the land of its ancestors. This undermines one of the principal arguments with which the State of Israel legitimizes itself. (There are, of course, other arguments which Sand does not discuss in any depth.)

He says that the Jews began to see themselves as an ethnic people, rather than as a religious community, in the 19th century. (In a 40 page long and massively theoretical opening chapter, Sand explains why for him the word `people' implies ethnicity - hence the provocative title of his book. Others might well say that what has for centuries kept the Jewish `people' together was not their ethnicity but their religion, and even secular Jews belong to that people because their ancestors were religious Jews.) He traces the claim of the Jews to be a nation from the 1880s - when scholars like Heinrich Graetz described the work of Julius Wellhausen, the father of modern Biblical Criticism, as anti-Jewish - to those who present the Biblical account as the foundation charter of the State of Israel, where it is the staple of the state educational system.

During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, aided by the Septuagint (the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), "hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions" of gentiles around the South-Eastern Mediterranean, from Rome to Armenia, converted to Judaism. A substantial proportion today's Jews cannot be linked genetically to the Jewish Homeland at all. Roman writers expressed unease at the growing number of converts. Around 400 CE the king of Himyar, in Yemen, converted to Judaism and so did many of their Arabic subjects in his and the following reigns during the next century. Most of the strong Yemenite community of Jews would be descended from these converts. There was a strong Jewish presence among the Berbers of North Africa, who took such a part in the later Arabic conquest of Spain. Sand thinks that many of these Berber Jews were also converts, though his formulations here are more tentative than elsewhere, and to support this idea he produces few hard facts beyond a complaint by the Christian Tertullian (2nd c.) against proselytes in North Africa and one quotation from the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (14th c.). The best known conversion is that of the Khazar kingdom (between the Volga and the Dnieper) in the 8th century CE. In his famous book Arthur Koestler called the Khazars `the Thirteenth Tribe', and Sand espouses the notion that after the Khazar kingdom was destroyed in the 11th century, many of its people fled westwards to form a substantial proportion of the Jews in the Ukraine, in Poland and in Hungary.

Sand shows the resistance of many Israeli historians to the idea that so many Jews might not be descendants of the Jews of Israel and Judah: they either deny it or ignore it in their researches and their text books.

He also supports the notion, advanced in 1918 even by the young Zionists Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, that the majority Muslim fellahin in Palestine were the descendants of Jewish peasants who had converted to Islam, perhaps to escape the jizyah (poll tax) which was levied on all non-Muslims after the Arab conquest. This idea was swiftly abandoned in the face of Arab nationalism, to be replaced by the notion that the Arab invaders had expelled the Jews (for which there is no evidence) and therefore had no right to the land which the Jews who had been forced into exile were now reclaiming.

The last chapter falls into two parts. The first part discusses the debate about whether there is any genetic evidence for the theory that most Jews are descended from the original Jews of Palestine. Students of genetics are apparently divided about this, and while Sand gives the supporters of the theory a good run for its money, it is clear that he sides with their opponents, and sees a conscious or unconscious agenda in those Israeli studies which have been looking for a widespread common ancestry. Sand quotes many Zionist sources which claimed (as the Nazis did) that the Jews were indeed a race. That EXPRESSION has now lost all respectability, but the debate is still carried on, though now in terms of genetics rather than of `blood'.

Sand never leaves any doubt about the political conclusions he draws from all this. They are spelt out most explicitly in the second, hard-hitting, part of the last chapter, which dismisses the definition of the State of Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. It not only implies but in many ways acts in such a way that its non-Jewish people, though technically Israeli citizens, cannot be part of an Israeli nation, in the way in which, for example, Scots and Welshmen are part of the British (not English) nation. With little hope that it can happen, Sand calls for the Jews of Israel to transform their ideology into one that would "grant the Palestino-Israelis not only complete equality but also a genuine and firm autonomy" - not only in the interests of justice, but also to save the state from ultimate disaster.

With its political implications, it is no surprise that this book has attracted both hatred and enthusiasm.

Shlomo Sand's `The Invention of the Jewish People' is fascinating. It is a wide ranging study that is well written, well translated and easily read. It is about how, when, why and by whom the notion of the Jews as a people was invented and the consequences of this invention.

Sand starts with an exploration of theoretical understandings of nationalism and references such authors as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. I found this chapter a little bit scatter-gun and readers don't really need to read chapter 1. Nevertheless, Sand makes his case that nations are the product of nationalism - not the other way around.

Chapter 2 launches straight into what Sand calls `Mythistory'. Here he examines the evolution of historiography of the Jews and how this has been distorted by both the Bible and by nationalist and racial ideologies. When was the Old Testament written? By whom? Why? Sand then goes on to show that philological and archaeological research has undermined the notion that the Old Testament is older than the Persian and Hellenistic periods and that events such as the arrival of the Patriarchs and the Exodus did probably not occur.

Sand then tackles the myth of exile. The fact that Jews were not exiled from Judea in 71 CE upon the destruction of the Temple. Nor were they exiled after the Bar Kochba revolt some 80 years later. Sand follows the Zionist historiography as it tries to settle on it's third choice of when exile occurred after the 7th century Arab conquest. Here Sand is a little weak, I feel, in that he doesn't make the obvious link in Zionist ideology between the concept of Arab dispossession and the later justification of the dispossession of Arabs in 1948. Sand also points out that the idea of exile was initially a Christian idea that was adopted by Jews.

As Sand points out, the logical conclusion for the disappearance of Jews in Palestine after the Arab conquest was that they converted to Islam and that today's Palestinian are the descendents of these converts. Such was recognized by Zionists such as Ben-Gurion, although here Sand again fudges somewhat as he seeks to blame Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation for the fact that Zionist and Palestinian societies did not merge in the Mandate period and ignores the inbuilt urge to ethnic cleansing in Zionism as something which would always have precluded such a merging. It's a failing which runs through Sand book that he sees Zionism as simply a nationalist movement rather than appreciaiting it's inherent racism and colonialism.

Sand points out and amply illustrates the rise of Jewish proselytism from Hasmonean times onwards as Judaism merges with Hellenism to form a dynamic monotheistic religion that spreads throughout Judea and then beyond into the Greek and then Roman world. Sand takes us through the spread of Judaism to the kingdom of Himyar in Yemen, the conversion of the Berbers in N.Africa and the origins of the great Jewish society in Spain - all of these the product of proselytisation rather than emigration. Sand then moves on to the Khazar Kaganate in S.Russia/Caucasus, itself also the product of proselytisation, and the relationship between this society and the emergence of the E.European Ashkenazi Jewish society and Yiddish civilization. The evidence here is not quite so clear cut, but Sand makes a good case that Yiddish civilization owes a great deal to the Khazars.

Sand next tackles modern controversies and handles well the attempts by Zionists to bring genetics to the rescue of the failing notion that Jews are a race-nation. He points to contradictory findings, dubious sampling techniques and the financing of research by interested organizations to cast doubt on the validity of this approach.

Sand concludes with a chapter on Israeli politics and, essentially, a plea to create a secular democratic state for all the people rather than a Jewish democratic state which, as Sands rightly points out, is an oxymoron.

Very little of what Sand says is actually new. What Sand does is draw together all the diverse scholarly objections from, for example, history, philology and archaeology to the notion that Jews are a distinct race/nation/people into a coherent synthesis.

Essential reading for the debate around Zionism and racism.

Most of what you think you know about Jewish history is a myth, from the kingdoms of David and Solomon, through the Romans' exile of the Jews from Palestine, to the emergence of the Yiddish-speaking milieu of Eastern Europe by German Jews migrating eastwards to escape persecution.

That's the claim of Shlomo Sand's book, provocatively titled "The Invention of the Jewish People". By choosing the word `invention', Sand begins to stake his claim that the account of Jewish history with which we are familiar is not reliable - so `invention' in the sense of inventing the facts - and has been consciously created.

This is a fascinating, dense but patchy work, and one that requires careful reading.
Some of the patchiness comes from the fact that this is really three quite different books locked inside a single cover.

The first book is a scholarly account of developments in the writing of Jewish history - a history of historians and histories. Here we are introduced to pioneers like Isaak Marcus Jost, to Heinrich Graetz, and to the arrival of Zionism in the making of Jewish history (and History Departments). This part of the book is based on a very strong theoretical approach to the relationship between nationalism and emergent national intelligentsias; Sand argues that though we tend to think of nationalism as premised on a pre-existing entity called the nation, in real history nationalism often comes before the nation - with nationalist movements bringing into being the entity that they claim to represent. This is particularly the case in the multi-national empires of Central and Eastern Europe, where intellectuals who couldn't get their share of state patrimony created their own small ponds in which they could be the big fish. Sand recognises that all nations are to some extent "invented" - not only the later arrivals of Eastern Europe but also the major players like the English and the French.

The second book is a popular account of some key episodes in Jewish history. Sands debunks the widely held belief that the Bible can be relied on as a historical source, marshalling arguments from Biblical criticism and archaeology. (This shouldn't really be necessary at all in the twenty first century, but a surprising number of intelligent people think that the stories in the Bible of the Exodus, or the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, are grounded in history rather than in myth).

More important, he examines the historical evidence for the Romans' exile of the Jews from their land, and finds it wanting. And he shows the importance of conversions in the creation of large Jewish populations, both in the ancient world and in the middle ages - there are long treatments of the Jews of Southern Arabia, North Africa and Spain, and of course the Khazars.

The third book is the most polemical, focusing on the way that the specifically Zionist account of Jewish history has been used to construct a sense of Jewish identity that serves particular political ends. It looks at the impact of this process on Palestinian Arabs, Jews in Israel, and Jews elsewhere. It's hard to find fault with much of this analysis, or with Sand's conclusion that Israel is a `liberal ethnocracy' - with the word `liberal' used in a technical sense rather than as a term of approbation. One almost wishes that Sand had also taken aim at diasporic constructions of Jewish identity - the recent rows over the admissibility of converts to faith schools in the UK would have been an interesting addition to the story.

However, while this section will certainly be the part that is most interesting to readers of Jewish Socialist, but the latter should be aware that Sand is throwing a lot of secular Jewish identity baby out with the Zionist bathwater. He quotes with approval Rabbi Yeshaiahu Karelitz's dictum that "the [secular-Jewish] cart is empty", to bolter his argument that "There has never been secular Jewish culture common to all the Jews in the world". He puts the boot in Simon Dubnow as a proto-Zionist, even though Dubnow's thinking on Jewish nationality inspired alternative strands of Jewish nationalism and Dubnow himself was an inconstant Zionist and more often association with Diaspora autonomism.

Sand seems to be a very nice, thoughtful person. Some of the hatchet-job reviews on his book are unfair, if not unsurprising. Although he's been accused of lack of sensitivity to the Jewish predicament, a prologue to the book full of quite moving personal anecdotes shows the very opposite. On the issue of how Israelis and Palestinians might be reconciled he is a pragmatic post-Zionist rather than an `Arab Nationalist of the Jewish Persuasion', with lots of useful insights - and some wonderful stories about the early Zionist settlers hoped to recruit the Palestinian fellahin to an ethnically-based secular Jewish identity.

But he's not been too well served by his editors. The book contains at least one howler that I spotted (in which the `Marxist Zionist' Borochov changes his mind as a result of an episode twelve years after his death), and there may be more. There's a long digression on recent research into Jewish genetics that doesn't seem particularly well informed or useful. There are some odd omissions in the sources that Sand acknowledges - no mention of Ilan Halevi's `History of the Jews' which covers much of the same ground, no mention of Abram Leon (though a longish account of Kautsky's views on the Jewish Question), not even a mention of Hobsbawm on `the invention of tradition'. The discussion of Khazar history says much about how it has been ignored by Zionist historians, but nothing about how it has been appropriated by anti-semites (including Henry Ford's "Dearborn Independent").

Ultimately, Sand's book is an important one. It deserves reading, and Sand deserves some support for writing it - though of course, in the great tradition of the left, such support should be critical if unconditional.