The Invention of the

Jewish People

Shlomo Sand

Translated by Yael Lotan

English edition published by Verso 2009

© Verso 2009
Translation © Yael Lotan
First published as
Matai ve’ekh humtza ha’am hayehudi?
[When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?]
© Resling 2008
All rights reserved

e moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-422-0

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To the memory of the refugees who reached this soil
and those who were forced to leave it.
Contents

preface to the english-language edition ix

introduction: burdens of memory 1

Identity in Movement 1
Constructed Memories 14

1. making nations: sovereignty and equality 23

Lexicon: “People” and Ethnos 24
e Nation: Boundaries and De nitions 31
From Ideology to Identity 39
From Ethnic Myth to Civil Imaginary 45
e Intellectual as the Nation’s “Prince” 54

2. mythistory: in the beginning,

god created the people 64
e Early Shaping of Jewish History 65
e Old Testament as Mythistory 71
Race and Nation 78
A Historians’ Dispute 81
A Protonationalist View from the East 87
An Ethnicist Stage in the West 95
e First Steps of Historiography in Zion 100
Politics and Archaeology 107
e Earth Rebels against Mythistory 115
e Bible as Metaphor 123

3. the invention of the exile:

proselytism and conversion 129
e “People” Exiled in 70 ce 130
Exile without Expulsion—History in the Twilight Zone 136
Against Its Will, the People Emigrate from the Homeland 143
“All Nations Shall Flow Unto It” 150
e Hasmoneans Impose Judaism on eir Neighbors 154
 viii

From e Hellenistic Sphere to Mesopotamian Territory 161

Judaizing in the Shadow of Rome 166
How Rabbinical Judaism Viewed Proselytizing 173
e Sad Fate of the Judeans 178
Remembering and Forgetting the “People of the Land” 182

4. realms of silence:
in search of lost (jewish) time 190
Arabia Felix: e Proselytized Kingdom of Himyar 192
Phoenicians and Berbers: e Mysterious Queen Kahina 199
Jewish Kagans? A Strange Empire Rises in the East 210
Khazars and Judaism: A Long Love A air? 218
Modern Research Explores the Khazar Past 230
e Enigma: e Origin of Eastern Europe’s Jews 238

5. the distinction: identity politics in israel 250

Zionism and Heredity 256
e Scienti c Puppet and the Racist Hunchback 272
Founding an Ethnos State 280
“Jewish and Democratic”—An Oxymoron? 292
Ethnocracy in the Age of Globalization 307

acknowledgments 314
index 315
Preface to the English-Language Edition

is book was originally written in Hebrew. My mother tongue is actually

Yiddish, but Hebrew has remained the language of my imagination, probably of
my dreams and certainly of my writing. I chose to publish the book in Israel
because initially my intended readers were Israelis, both those who see them-
selves as Jews and those who are de ned as Arabs. My reason was simple
enough: I live in Tel Aviv, where I teach history.
When the book rst appeared in early 2008, its reception was somewhat
odd. e electronic media were intensely curious, and I was invited to take
part in many television and radio programs. Journalists, too, turned their
attention to my study, mostly in a favorable way. By contrast, representatives
of the “authorized” body of historians fell on the book with academic fury, and
excitable bloggers depicted me as an enemy of the people. Perhaps it was this
contrast that prompted the readers to indulge me—the book stayed on the
bestseller list for nineteen weeks.
To understand this development, you have to take a clear-eyed look
at Israel and forgo any bias for or against. I live in a rather strange society.
As the closing chapter of the book shows—to the annoyance of many book
reviewers—Israel cannot be described as a democratic state while it sees itself
as the state of the “Jewish people,” rather than as a body representing all the
citizens within its recognized boundaries (not including the occupied
territories). e spirit of Israel’s laws indicates that, at the start of the twenty-
rst century, the state’s objective is to serve Jews rather than Israelis, and to
provide the best conditions for the supposed descendants of this ethnos rather
than for all the citizens who live in it and speak its language. In fact, anyone
born to a Jewish mother may have the best of both worlds—being free to live
in London or in New York, con dent that the State of Israel is theirs, even if
they do not wish to live under its sovereignty. Yet anyone who did not emerge
from Jewish loins and who lives in Ja a or in Nazareth will feel that the state in
which they were born will never be theirs.
Yet there is a rare kind of liberal pluralism in Israel, which weakens in times
of war but functions quite well in peacetime. So far it has been possible in
Israel to express a range of political opinions at literary events, to have Arab
parties take part in parliamentary elections (provided they do not question
 x preface to the english-language edition

the Jewish nature of the state), and to criticize the elected authorities. Certain
liberal freedoms—such as freedom of the press, of expression and of associa-
tion—have been protected, and the public arena is both variegated and secure.
at is why it was possible to publish this book, and why its reception in 2008
was lively and aroused genuine debate.
Furthermore, the tight grip of the national myths has long been loosened.
A younger generation of journalists and critics no longer echoes its parents’
collectivist ethos, and searches for the social models cultivated in London
and New York. Globalization has sunk its aggressive talons into the cultural
arenas even of Israel and has, in the process, undermined the legends that
nurtured the “builders’ generation.” An intellectual current known as post-
Zionism is now found, though marginally, in various academic institutions,
and has produced unfamiliar pictures of the past. Sociologists, archaeologists,
geographers, political scientists, philologists, and even lmmakers have been
challenging the fundamental terms of the dominant nationalism.
But this stream of information and insights has not reached the
plateau on which resides a certain discipline, called “The History of the
Israelite People” in Hebrew academies. ese institutions have no depart-
ments of history as such, but rather departments of general history—such as
the one I belong to—and separate departments of Jewish (Israelite) history. It
goes without saying that my harshest critics come from the latter. Aside from
noting minor errors, they chie y complained that I had no business discussing
Jewish historiography because my area of expertise is Western Europe. Such
criticism was not leveled against other general historians who tackled Jewish
history, provided they did not deviate from the dominant thinking. “ e
Jewish people,” “the ancestral land,” “exile,” “diaspora,” “aliyah,” “Eretz Israel,”
“land of redemption” and so forth are key terms in all reconstructions within
Israel of the national past, and the refusal to employ them is seen as heretical.
I was aware of all this before I began writing this book. I expected my
attackers to claim that I lacked a proper knowledge of Jewish history, did not
understand the historical uniqueness of the Jewish people, was blind to its
biblical origin, and denied its eternal unity. But it seemed to me that to spend
my life at Tel Aviv University amid its vast collection of volumes and documents
about Jewish history without taking time to read and tackle them would have
been a betrayal of my profession. Certainly it is pleasant, as a well-established
professor, to travel to France and the United States to gather material about
Western culture, enjoying the power and tranquility of academe. But as a histo-
rian taking part in shaping the collective memory of the society I live in, I felt it
was my duty to contribute directly to the most sensitive aspects of this task.
 preface to the english-language edition xi

Admittedly, the disparity between what my research suggested about the

history of the Jewish people and the way that history is commonly under-
stood—not only within Israel but in the larger world—shocked me as much as
it shocked my readers. Generally speaking, educational systems teach you to
begin writing a er you have nished your thinking—meaning that you should
know your conclusion before you start writing (that was how I obtained
my doctoral degree). But now I found myself being shaken repeatedly as I
worked on the composition. e moment I began to apply the methods of
Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and others, who instigated a conceptual
revolution in the eld of national history, the materials I encountered in my
research were illuminated by insights that led me in unexpected directions. I
should emphasize that I encountered scarcely any new ndings—almost all
such material had previously been uncovered by Zionist and Israeli histori-
ographers. e di erence is that some elements had not been given su cient
attention, others were immediately swept under the historiographers’ rug, and
still others were “forgotten” because they did not t the ideological needs of
the evolving national identity. What is so amazing is that much of the infor-
mation cited in this book has always been known inside the limited circles of
professional research, but invariably got lost en route to the arena of public and
educational memory. My task was to organize the historical information in a
new way, to dust o the old documents and continually reexamine them. e
conclusions to which they led me created a radically di erent narrative from
the one I had been taught in my youth.
Unfortunately, few of my colleagues—the teachers of history in Israel—
feel it their duty to undertake the dangerous pedagogical mission of exposing
conventional lies about the past. 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 di erent books. I may be naive, but
it is my hope that the present work will be one of them.

Tel Aviv, 2009