Shlomo Sand's Groundbreaking Work: The Invention of the Jewish People

Prof. gerald Watts: I bought and read this book in Kindle form after the outbreak of yet another military Israel-Palestine conflict with terrible consequences for civilians. I thought that I had a reasonably good grasp of the history of the conflict but Shlomo Sand has proven me wrong with his masterful book.
The emphasis of the book is on identity and the concepts of ‘people’ and ‘nation’, as applied to the state of Israel. He sets the scene in the first chapter, where he explains that in the Israeli university system there is a complete separation between departments of ‘History’ and ‘Jewish History’, the latter being where the Biblical myths of Jewish origin, exile and the Chosen People are preserved and disseminated within the school education system.
One reason why I was attracted to this book was that back in the seventies I read Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe about the Khazar kingdom, which converted en masse to Judaism during the so-called ‘dark ages’ (I had also read Koestler’s excellent Thieves in the Night about the early post-war Palestine during the British Mandate).
Shlomo Sand provides a convincing historical context for the Khazar...

United Kingdom on Dec 03, 2023

RAWAD: thanks'

United Kingdom on Nov 03, 2023

danT: also read: Evron's JEWISH STATE OR ISRAELI NATION?

Sands is a scholar's scholar. I think any Arab or Palestinian who decides to take revenge on Israel and kill all the Jews should first spend a year at an Israeli university. There you find truly beautiful minds with giant hearts. There you find the real Jewish Ethic struggling with the Zionist Myth. There you find thinking, debating, talking and delving into complexity as you find nowhere else.

If you think we need another Holocaust to rid the world of Jews,then write down your reasons on a paper, put it in your pocket, and go to any Israeli university. There you will see that your reasons apply to no one there. You will see that Jewish intellect-- even Israeli intellect-- cannot be characterized in any generality as Jewish/Israeli intellect is always: SIX OF THE WORLD'S BEST MINDS ARGUING ENDLESSLY OVER SEVEN OPINIONS. So how could you have a reason to love them, to hate them, to be neutral towards them....IT IS AN ENDLESS ROLLERCOSTER RIDE!!!! Their intellect cannot be pinned down to this and that. All you can say is that Israelis/Jews are divers. They love to dive into the darkness of complexity and bring back to...

United States on Feb 11, 2011

E. Clarke: What I particularly liked about this book is that Sand takes a lot of time to give his potential oppenents a run for their money. It is a very impressive work of scholarship - the reading list is amazing - though there is certainly no sense of laboured prose in the sprightly English translation. All national and communal self images are exercises in imagination - I'm a Scot, so I know - so criticing them in the light of scholarly research is pretty easy, and can cause offense. This does not invalidate the scholarship, and Sands takes us through not only the history of Jewish communities, but the history of the development of the idea of a special type of biological/racial community, calling themselves Jews. He is pretty convincing that this is an implausible idea, based on the Christian myth of the wandering Jew (punished for murdering God) amd married to 19th Century German racial theories. I doubt if a dispassionate observer would be able to demolish this thesis, at least so long as they are not living in the Middle East. But if you are a Jew living in Israel, it is hard to see how you can give up the current myths in favour of others, unless you can see some security for the...

United Kingdom on Feb 11, 2011

Michael T. Ballard: Schlomo Sand is employed as a professor of contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. The Invention of the Jewish People was originally published in Hebrew in Israel. Translations of his work are now being published throughout the world in many languages, including English.

Sand is the son of a World War II era veteran of the Polish Communist Party. He is also the son-in-law of a Spanish anarchist who fought Franco nationalists in the streets of Barcelona during the Civil War/Revolution. Professor Sand would probably describe himself as an apple, fallen somewhat distant from those trees, perhaps as a cosmopolitan liberal. His view of Israel is that it would better off giving up being an `ethnocracy'--Sand's term for the ethno-biologically defined Jewish political State. Professor Sand's preference is for Israel to become a garden variety, secular capitalist democracy like France or the United States of America.

Dr. Sand gives his readers many insights into the general intellectual foundations of the modern era's nationalist ideological project and of Zionist nationalist project in particular. In this reviewer's opinion, The Invention of the Jewish People is...

United States on Nov 25, 2010

Ralph Blumenau: 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...

United Kingdom on Nov 07, 2009

Germinal: 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...

United Kingdom on Oct 16, 2009