Twilight of History

Twilight of History

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The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history today

On its publication in 2009, Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People met with a storm of controversy. His demystifying approach to nationalist and Zionist historiography provoked much criticism from other professional historians, as well as praise. The furore gave him a privileged position to consider his academic discipline, which he reflects on here in Twilight of History.

Drawing on four decades in the field, Sand takes a wider view and interrogates the study of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. Over the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role for historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand’s perspective, since the role of history as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a source of historical fact. He asks such questions as: Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and “scientific” truth?

Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and finds reasons for hope in the work of Max Weber and Georges Sorel.

Reviews

  • Sand makes aconvincing case against linear history, retrospectively invented continuities, anachronistic or ahistorical transpositions. He stresses the necessity of situating one’s own point of view, contextualizing and historicizing events, bringing to light bifurcations, paths not taken, contradictions and possibilities. And above all, of never sticking to the views of the dominant and the victors.

    Roland PfefferkornLa Marseillaise
  • Shlomo Sand asks ironically and seriously whether Clio’s days are not numbered. In Twilight of History he retraces the broad lines of humanity’s evolution and questions our relationship to antiquity and Christianity as foundations of Western civilization… Sand recalls that the discipline owes its institutionalization to the establishment of nation-states, given the task of retracing their origins and fuelling their glory, and he asks how far it can survive these.

    Maialen BerasateguiLe magazine littéraire
  • After Israel, it is Clio, the muse of history, who is the object of Sand’s rigorous examination, with such painful questions as whether we have to accept the impossibility of a morally neutral history. Is history not basically a ‘concealed theology’, as Nietzsche saw it, designed to build and maintain the foundation myths of nations? At the end of an essay illuminated by personal touches, the pillars of historical self-evidence fall one after the other: Greek ‘heritage’, Eurocentrism, arbitrary periodization. Venturing outside the carapace of his specialization, Shlomo Sand sees far, and brings a fresh breeze to arid certainties.

    Emmanuel GehrigLe temps