The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand (author), Yael Lotan (translator), English
edition published by Verso, 2009, ISBN 13:978-1-84467-422-0
Shlomo Sand’s history of the mythology underlying the concept of a Jewish people caused a sensation
when it was first published in Israel, In Hebrew, in 2008. Sand writes about topics that had either been
ignored, or deliberately forgotten, in the forging of modern Israel and the asserted right of Jews as a
Chosen People to their land in Palestine. Sand reviews the mythology behind Jewish scriptures, which
have been the principal documents supporting the concept of a Jewish birthright to ancient Judea and
Israel. He then discloses why the notion of a Diaspora – the forced expulsion of the Jews from their
promised land – is entirely wrong. He looks next at the active proselytizing of Jews for new converts,
beginning before the Roman Empire was founded, and continuing until modern times, when converts
flourished in northern Africa, Spain, and in the Caucasus. Finally, he chronicles the unsuccessful attempts
of modern Israeli scientists to find some genetic or racial characteristic that defines a Jew, so that modern
Israel can persist in its notion that as a Jewish state, it has some definitive way to say who is or is not a
Jew. Sand’s conclusions regarding modern Israel are pessimistic. Let’s look at the salient points he makes
in his four major analyses of the concept of a Jewish People.
Mythistory
In this chapter, Sand reviews the mythology behind the idea that the Jews are an ancient people with
exclusive rights to land in the Middle East. He begins with the only document available to us from the
ancient world (other than the Bible) – Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus. Josephus figures
prominently in both my historical fiction novels on Jehoshua, so I won’t go into detail regarding his history,
other than to say he was active in the middle of the first century, was a participant and not merely a
witness to the Jewish Wars which resulted in 70 CE in the destruction of Jerusalem, and he retired to
Rome to write two extensive histories, on the Jews, and on the Jewish Wars. Josephus relies on the Bible
to describe the Jews as a people, from Adam and Eve to Noah. This information was new to most of his
readers in the Roman world, but it helped solidify the idea of the Jews as a very ancient people.
No scholar took to writing any further history of the Jews until very early in the 18th century, when Jacques
Basnage wrote his history of the Jews. Basnage was a Protestant and an opponent of Catholicism, and so
his treatment of the Jews was sympathetic, as victims of the Papacy. Basnage influenced another scholar,
Isaak Markus Jost, who wrote a nine volume history of the Jews a century later, in 1820. Like Basnage,
Jost skipped over the entire Biblical era, and started his history from the late 4th century BCE, when Judea
was subsumed under the Hasmonean kings following the death of Alexander the Great. Shlomo Sand
describes the importance of this approach:
He [Jost] knew that the Scriptures were written fairly late by various authors and, in
addition, lacked external evidence that could substantiate them. This does not mean he
doubted the truth of the myth about the rise of the Hebrews and the later consolidation of
their kingdom. But he assumed that the period in question was too obscure to serve as the
basis for a meaningful historical study. Moreover, the Hebrews in Canaan, despite having
the laws of Moses imposed upon them, did not differ from the surrounding pagan peoples.
In other words, the Jews worshipped multiple gods, including Yahweh, Baal, and Astarte, and monotheism
we now know was something that would take hold among Jews centuries later. The other importance of
Jost’s work is that as a German Jew, he was among a generation of intellectuals trying to find their way in
a landscape of developing German nationalism, and as such, he considered himself a German first, and a
Jew second.
Thirty years later, a more important work was to emerge – History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to
the Present, by Heinrich Graetz. Sand describes Graetz as a proto-Zionist, or someone who paved the
way for the development late in the 19th century of the Zionist movement. Graetz was a Jew born in
Posnan, but refused to have his book translated into Yiddish, his first language, which he thought was
disgracefully backward (the book was, however, translated into Hebrew and other languages). The
influence of Graetz’s worked extended well into the 20th century and to the foundation of Israel, and
Sand explains why:
The reason for this massive presence is clear: this is the first work that strove, with
consistency and feeling, to invent the Jewish people – the term “people” signifying to some
extent the modern term “nation.”
Graetz created an “unbroken history” that defined the Jews as “an ancient people or race that was
uprooted from its homeland in Canaan and arrived in its youth at the gates of Berlin.” To accomplish this
redefinition, Graetz took apart Jost’s work, criticizing it for ignoring completely the ancient heritage of the
Jews, from Genesis to the Prophets to Psalms, and further, to the rabbinical writings, all of which Graetz
felt were instrumental in his definition of this new people.
The reaction to Graetz’s work was largely positive among Jewish leaders and intellectuals, but there was
criticism among German scholars, which boded poorly for Jewish-German relations. It must be
understood, that by 1880, anti-Semitism was rising in Germany and elsewhere, and it often trumped
German nationalism. One German critic wrote: “A full merger of Jewry with the peoples of the West will
never be achieved. It may only be possible to soften the opposition, since it is rooted in ancient history.”
In others words, if Jews adopted Graetz’s view of themselves as a distinct and separate people, they would
never be able to fully assimilate in Germany, because they would become a nation within a nation. This
concept was just one of many that Hitler would develop 25 years late in Mein Kampf.
Over the next fifty years, other writers expand on Graetz’s work, until the publication in 1936 of a
culminating historical statement by Yitzhak Baer, in his book Galut (the Exile):
God gave to every nation its place, and to the Jews he gave Palestine. The Galut means
that the Jews have left their natural place. But everything that leaves its natural place loses
thereby its natural support until it returns. The dispersion of Israel among the nations is
unnatural. Since the Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than other
nations, it is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity…”
Baer offers a breathtaking set of arguments in Galut. The Jews are a nation. In fact, they are a nation “in
a higher sense than other nations.” Their right to Palestine comes directly from God, and it is therefore
necessary that they reunify in their homeland. This is Zionism expressed as a core principle, the
fundamental argument being that God granted Palestine to the Jews. The minute God enters any such
argument, all discussion is instantly closed off.
Baer was to participate in the establishment of Israel as a state, and live there for the remainder of his
career. Much of what he wrote about the God-given land of Israel was repeated by Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion and other leaders of the new government, who found it extremely useful to use the Bible as
the source not only for the establishment of Israel, but for its forcible expansion into Palestinian areas.
The successful takeover of the West Bank during the 1967 war opened exciting new areas for
archaeological research, which would give Israel an opportunity to further solidify its claim to all of
Palestine. Unfortunately, the archaeological findings did not corroborate much of the history of the Bible.
For one thing, it was impossible to establish that someone named Abraham moved from Mesopotamia
somewhere around 2000 BCE into Canaan as the Promised Land. Israel’s enemies, such as the Philistines,
were shown by the evidence to be in the area no earlier than the twelfth century BCE. Even an animal as
basic as the camel, which appears in Genesis and throughout the Old Testament, was not even
domesticated until around the eighth century BCE. Suddenly, it began to look like what was written in the
Torah (the first five books of the Bible) more than likely took place in the fifth century BCE, about one
hundred years before Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens.
And so it went. No scholar could provide definitive evidence of a large Hebrew community in Egypt, of
someone named Moses, and of an Exodus out of Egypt. Worse still, no one could produce proof of the
existence of David or Solomon, or their fabled kingdoms. As Sand puts it,
The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in
tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified
stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the
House of David…but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel
to its north, and apparently far less developed.
And what about monotheism? There is no evidence it was a religious concept developed in the tenth
century, as supposed. Instead, it seems to have been brought to Judea from the exile in Babylonia.
We may therefore propose the following hypothesis: the exclusive monotheism that stands
out on almost every page in the Bible was the result not of politics…but of culture: the
remarkable encounter between Judean intellectual elites, in exile or returning from exile,
with the abstract Persian religions. It is no accident that the Hebrew word dat (“religion”)
is of Persian origin. This early monotheism would become fully developed in its later
encounter with Hellenistic polytheism.
In other words, Israel did not truly adopt its monotheism until early in the fourth century, after the death
of Alexander the Great, who had ushered in the Hellenistic period that was prevalent until the expansion
of the Roman Empire. The cult of Yahweh as the only God was not of interest to the Jews until perhaps
two hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Shlomo Sand concludes this chapter:
Above all, the Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for people of
very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which
they barely observed. That was the meaning that underlay this image of an ancient nation,
dating back almost to the Creation, that came to be imprinted in the minds of people who
felt themselves dislocated in the rough-and tumble of modernity.
The Invention of the Exile: Proselytism and Conversion
In this chapter, Sand investigates the widespread belief that the Jews are a people of the Diaspora,
condemned to wander the world homeless forever – at least until Israel was created and they were able
to return to their rightful home. The problem with this narrative is that there is no evidence for the
Diaspora.
It is generally believed that the Diaspora began in the year 70 CE when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem,
and sent most of the adults of the city into slavery. The evidence for this comes from Josephus, but even
he admits that the Romans left some community in Jerusalem, which obviously began to flourish again,
for the Jews organized yet another revolt in 130 CE. This time, Emperor Hadrian vowed to exterminate
the Jews, but only in greater Judea, which he decided to call Palestine.
In neither case, however, was there a mass expulsion of the entire population. Hadrian’s vow – if he did
indeed make it – was unenforceable in any event, because the Empire was flooded with Jews in all major
cities, many of whom came from families resident for hundreds of years, and sharing no affinity with
Judea, Jerusalem or any aspect of the Promised Land.
A point which Sand makes which is unappreciated is that many of these Jews outside of the Roman
provinces of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, were forced into Judaism by Herod the Great or previous rulers.
It was the practice of the Hasmonean kings, for example, to force conquered men to undergo circumcision
to mark their new status as Jews. Even more striking, however, was the practice of Jewish leaders to
travel far out into the Empire to seek converts to Judaism. Here too, men had to undergo circumcision,
but conversion was often first accomplished with the wife, who caused her husband to join as well.
There are multiple references in Roman literature to the expansion of Jewish communities in Rome and
elsewhere, as a deliberate practice of conversion. We often read about the aggressive conversion
techniques of the early Christians, but they were doing nothing more than following the practice of their
fellow-Jews, and to the pagan world, a Jew and a Christian in the first century CE were indistinguishable.
Both of them caused a problem for the Roman administrators, because they were converting people to
monotheism, which was a threat to the polytheistic religion of the Romans.
Throughout the first century, and continuing into the third century CE, Roman emperors and their
administrators found it necessary to expel Jews from their cities for their aggressive recruiting efforts, or
they outlawed circumcision of converts. The record seems to indicate that Jewish conversion efforts
continued right up until the time Constantine in 333 CE laid claim to a decisive military victory with the
help of the Christians. Laws passed after that made it much harder for Jews to continue with conversions,
and it was illegal, for example, for a slave of a Christian to be circumcised.
What Sand’s research shows is that the myth of the Diaspora is countered by the reality of something far
more significant. Rather than the Jews being forced to wander helplessly in the outer world, Jews sought
actively to expand their number and their religion in every major urban center of the Empire. This process
had been underway from 200 BCE and continued for five hundred years. In some cities like Rome, Jews
constituted the largest religious constituency outside of the state religion, and they were troublesome as
well because of their monotheism. Nor is there any evidence that the Jews living in these cities were
connected to or ever interested in returning to live in Jerusalem or the ancient Biblical lands cited in their
scriptures.
Realms of Silence; In Search of Lost (Jewish) Time
In this chapter, Sand observes the unique situation of Jewish communities in places like North Africa and
in Eastern Europe. The eastern communities were fabled to be large and wealthy, inhabiting a kingdom
called (in the tenth century CE) Alkhazar. An extant letter from that time, written by a king named Yosef,
describes his kingdom as one located north of the Black Sea, and founded by a wise ruler who looked at
all three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), and chose Judaism as most suitable for
his people. The Arabs came into periodic conflict with Alkhazar and its leader, the Kagan, and they praised
the Jews as fierce and determined warriors. The Arabs also reported that the Khazars spoken and wrote
in Hebrew.
Alkhazar thrived for hundreds of years, but eventually it succumbed, as did all neighboring communities,
to the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan. Normally, this would be the end of the story, but in the 19th
century, scholars began to wonder about the long term influence of the Khazars. At this point, large areas
of Eastern Europe, the Ukraine, and Russia were populated with Jews living in shtetls, or ghettoes, and
speaking both Hebrew and Yiddish. Where did these people come from, and where did they get their
Jewish religious traditions? Studies were done on the linguistics of these Jews, and their command of
Hebrew, which seemed to be a much more ancient version of the language than spoken in 19th century
Jerusalem. There were also extremely bogus studies done on the shape of skulls, to determine if the
Eastern European Jews fit the accepted definition of Jews by brain size and skull shape. All of this research
suggested that these Jews were not related directly to Jews in the Holy Land or anywhere else, yet they
were extremely numerous and were Jews by religious practice, if nothing else.
It was the Eastern European Jews who principally fed Hitler’s ovens during the Holocaust, and to that
extent, it was therefore the descendants of the ancient Khazar realm that gave their lives simply because
they were Jews. Survivors were therefore welcome in the new Israel after the war, but there has always
been a level of discomfort in official circles between Jews descendant from families in Germany or France
or England (often with impeccable educational backgrounds), and Jews from Eastern Europe with simply
a peasant background. The last chapter of Sand’s book looks into this problem.
The Distinction: Identity Politics in Israel
We come now to the development of Zionism, of which Sand says:
The Zionist idea was born in the second half of the nineteenth century in Central and
Eastern Europe, in the lands between Vienna and Odessa. It grew uneasily on the fringes
of German nationalism and reached the lively cultural marketplaces of the Yiddish
population. While a significant number of its ideological progenitors belonged more or less
to the Germanic culture – Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau – those who developed,
disseminated and implemented its theories came from the intelligentsia of the widespread
Yiddish-speaking population, which was densely packed in the cities and towns of Poland,
the Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Romania.
While these passions were developing in the Jewish communities, Sand points out the contemporaneous
development of anti-Jewish sentiment, with a desire to expel Yiddish communities in particular. AntiSemitism existed in England, France, and the U.S., but democratic institutions in these countries made it
easy for Jewish immigrants to fit into the culture. Not so in Eastern Europe, Russia or Germany. Shlomo
Sand says the virulent anti-Semitism of Germany is difficult to explain, even today, but somehow Judaism
in Germany by the 20th century “comprised an alien, wandering people, unrelated to the territories it
inhabited.”
With the arrival of the Nazis, German scientists and biologists tried to determine the definition of a Jew.
Eventually a genetic definition was created, following on the traditional idea that Judaism is passed down
through the mother. At the same time, and even earlier than the Nazis, Jewish scholars also tried to
identify Jewish markers. Nathan Birmbaum, writing at the turn of the century, define Judaism by biology
alone, something separate from culture and language. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist
movement, disagreed somewhat, but settled on the term “the Jewish race,” which is an ethnic rather than
a biological or blood-line definition. Max Nordau, another founder of Zionism, took the biological
definition a step further, arguing that Jews were weak and degenerate given the conditions of their
repression, and needed to build themselves up through gymnastics. It was an argument that curiously
would find favor among Nazi geneticists.
Other intellectuals preferred a more generic description of Judaism, relating to religious belief and
custom, but all of these arguments were set aside during World War II, when survival for Jews became of
paramount concern. It was only with the organization of the Jewish state that these discussions resumed
within Israel itself, which struggled from the very beginning to provide a definition of who would be
allowed or encouraged to emigrate to the new country. The development of DNA testing and research in
Y chromosomes at first promised to be a fruitful ground for study. In 2000, a study was published by
Hebrew University which showed that two-thirds of Palestinians and about the same proportion of Jews
shared the same three male ancestors eight thousand years ago. Initially, this study was well-received,
but Sand suggests that the Intifada soon caused many to wish the results weren’t true, and sure enough,
a clarification from the authors came out rebutting the conclusions of the first study. Now, they said, their
research showed that Jews were most closely related to the Kurds, which would support the ancient
Biblical claim that Abraham came forth from the land of the Euphrates.
All seemed well until a third study, focusing on mitochondrial DNA associated with the female line,
showed that Jewish women were not from the Near East at all. They were more than likely converted to
Judaism when they married a Jew. In short, all that this genetic work shows is either contradictory or
inconclusive evidence of Jewish origins. It certainly has not come up with a Jewish genetic marker.
Sand concludes this chapter, and his book, with the sober reflection that the Jewish state is not only in
conflict with itself as to who is or is not a Jew – it is in conflict with the concept of democracy it purports
to uphold (“the only democracy in the Middle East,” is how Israel is often described). The only problem
with this claim is that Israel is the only democracy which refuses to accept any responsibility for one-third
of its citizens. Its behavior in Gaza, for example, indicates that Palestinians are viewed as enemies within,
and not citizens worthy of basic human rights.
Epilogue
Sand ends the book with one pertinent question;
And now the last, perhaps the hardest, question of them all: To what extent is Jewish Israeli
society willing to discard the deeply embedded image of the “chosen people,” and to cease
isolating itself in the name of a fanciful history of dubious biology and excluding the
“other” from its midst. If the nation’s history was mainly a dream, why not begin to dream
its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?”
The situation for the Palestinians under Israeli control is already a nightmare, and it has been for a long
time. Sand does not mention a development of importance to the U.S., which is the complete dominance
of national politics by what is called the Jewish lobby, which maintains deep ties to the conservative wing
of the Likud government. It is impossible given the power of this lobby for Washington to do anything but
cater to the most reactionary elements of Israeli politics. A further complication has arisen in the past
few years, and that is the collaboration of the Jewish lobby with far right, evangelical Christian groups.
The Rev. John Hagee, one of the leaders of this evangelical effort, places Israel in the middle of a cosmic
war that heralds the Second Coming of Jesus. He and millions of conservative Evangelicals,
Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals believe the End Times are upon us, but that Jesus will not yet return
until the Temple in Jerusalem is restored (as required by the book of Revelation).
There is something unholy about the Evangelical fascination with Israel and the Temple. It is as if
Christians have a death wish: they want the Middle East to blow up and Israel to take complete control of
all of ancient Judea, Samaria, Galilee and so on, and expel the Muslims from the Temple Mount. Then
Biblical prophecy will be fulfilled, and God’s elect (namely, Mr. Hagee and his followers) will be brought
up to heaven in the Rapture, as the Time of Tribulations afflicts mankind.
John Hagee and many pastors like him have been preaching about the End Times for all their lives. They
have an interest in being proven correct, and an obvious desire to be alive to see the wonderment of the
Second Coming. They are convinced of their righteousness, they are convinced that developments in the
Middle East now foreshadow the fulfillment of prophecy, and they are also convinced that millions of Jews
will die during the Second Coming because Jews are apostates. This last part is overlooked by Likud party
officials and conservative rabbis in Israel, who are happy to accept money from American Christians.
If only these men would read Shlomo Sand’s book with an open mind, and realize the foolishness of their
assumptions about Jews and Judaism. Even Sand has his doubts that will happen any time soon. As he
says in his preface:
I could not have gone on living in Israel without writing this book. I don’t think books can
change the world – but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.”
Rather than wait for the Second Coming, we would all be better off hastening the day when the world
understands and acts upon Shlomo Sand’s research and conclusions.
Garrett Glass
jehoshuathebook.com