The Invention of the Jewish People
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.
Paperback, 344 pages
ISBN: 9781844676231
June 2010
$18.95 / £9.99
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Reviews
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Sand's questions about how Israel's democracy can be liberalized and stabilized are thought-provoking and deserve serious discussion.
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Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.
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[Sand's] quiet earthquake of a book is shaking historical faith in the link between Judaism and Israel.
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Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.
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Extravagantly denounced and praised.
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No discussion of the region any longer seems complete without acknowledgement of this book.
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A radical dismantling of a national myth.
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Almost too baseless to debunk.
Blog
"Sand debunks the historical Moses" - Chomsky on Shlomo Sand
In a recent interview for Tablet, Noam Chomsky discusses the idea of Jewish identity, describing the methods that Ahad Ha'am and Shlomo Sand (author of The Invention of the Jewish People and the new On the Nation and the Jewish People) have used to confront national mythmaking:
I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha'am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses-the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.
Shlomo Sand on Netanyahu's identity crisis and the impossibility of a ‘Jewish democracy’
Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, writes for Ha'aretz that "Benjamin Netanyahu is unsure of his identity: His insecurity is behind his pointless demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as uniquely Jewish."
Discussions
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Jews and genes
Several critics of Shlomo Sand’s book have seized on recent scientific studies that supposedly proved "that Jewish communities in places as far afield as Europe and the Caucasus are genetically linked, and that their DNA ancestry traces back to the Middle East" and thus that "demonstrate conclusively that the theories propounded by Sand and others ring visibly and unmistakably hollow". Sand himself, in the postface to the paperback edition of his book, argues that: "After exhausting all the historical arguments, several critics have seized on genetics. The same people who maintain that the Zionists never referred to a race conclude their argument by evoking a common Jewish gene. Their thinking can be summed up as follows: ‘We are not a pure race, but we are a race just the same.’ ... As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will." Is Shlomo Sand’s argument—especially where it concerns the role of conversion in the spread of Judaism—vulnerable to objections based on genetic science?
Other books by Shlomo Sand
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On the Nation and the Jewish People
by Shlomo Sand, and Ernest Renan
Two classic texts on nationalism introduced by the author of The Invention of the Jewish People.