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A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

Main findings:

• The expulsion of Jews from Judea did not happen.
• Many Judean Jews accepted Islam and are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians.
• The “nation-race” of Jews with a common origin doesn’t exist and the “Jewish diaspora” is a modern invention.
• The ancestors of European Jews mostly converted to Judaism and have no origin in Palestine.

After a long stay on Israel’s bestseller list, and winning the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is finally available in English. The central importance of the conflict in the Middle East ensures that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well beyond the historians and politicians that he takes to task. Without an adequate understanding of Israel’s past, capable of superseding today’s opposing views, diplomatic solutions are likely to remain elusive. In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

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Shlomo Sand is a Jewish Professor of History at Tel Aviv University

(Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.)

Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. His cultural background was grounded in Yiddish culture. His father, having taken an aversion to rabbis, abandoned his Talmudic studies at a yeshiva and dropped attendance at synagogues, after his mother was denied a front seat after her husband’s death, and they could not afford the seat price.^[6][7] Both his parents had communist and anti-imperialist views^{[citation needed]} and refused to accept compensation from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War. Sand spent his first two years in a displaced persons camp near Munich, and moved with the family to Jaffa in 1948, where his father got a job as night porter in the headquarters of the local Communist party.^[6] He was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen,^[8][9] studied electronics by night and found employment by day in a radio repair business. Drafted in 1965, he served at the communist kibbutz of Yad Hanna.^[6] According to one interview, “Sand spent the late 1960s and early 1970s working a series of odd jobs, including several years as a telephone lineman.” He completed his high-school work at age 25 and spent three years in the military.^[10] The Six-Day War, in which he served – his unit conquered at heavy loss the Abu Tor area in East Jerusalem^[6] – pushed him towards the radical left.^[10] After the war he served in Jericho, where, he says, Palestinians trying to return to the country were gunned down if they infiltrated at night, but were arrested if caught doing so by day. Such experiences, particularly one incident in which he reports his fellow soldiers beat and tortured a restrained Palestinian man to death,^[6] left him with a sense that he had lost his homeland.^[6]

He was friends with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, with whom he was involved in the Rakah communist party,^[11] and a conversation between the two inspired Darwish’s 1967 poem “A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies,”^[a] though it was not revealed at the time that the soldier was Sand.^{[12][13][14]: 19}

Quitting the Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki), Sand joined the more radical, and anti-Zionist, Matzpen in 1968. He resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment with the organisation.^[8][15][16]

Declining an offer by the Israeli Maki Communist Party to be sent to do cinema studies in Poland, Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University in 1975. Determined to “abandon everything” Israeli,^[17] he moved to France, where, from 1975 to 1985, after winning a scholarship, he studied and taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis on Georges Sorel and Marxism.^[18] Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.^[4]

In 1983, according to one source, Sand “took part in a heated exchange over Zeev Sternhell‘s Ni droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France, and later drew the ire of Claude Lanzmann with his 2002 book in Hebrew, Film as History, in which he not only passed scathing judgement on Lanzmann’s Shoah, but also revealed that the film had been secretly funded by the Israeli government.”^[9]

Vir: Wikipedia