A controversial book written in Hebrew by a historian who teaches at Tel Aviv University has rocked Israel’s foundations as a state for the Jewish people. “When and How Were the Jewish People Invented?” by Professor Shlomo Sand has been a bestseller for months and is set to be translated into numerous languages with its launch in the US scheduled for later this year. Praised by some and vilified by others, it has certainly opened up intellectual debate and touched many nerves.
 

“When and How Were the Jewish People Invented?” attacks the roots of Zionist ideology, which holds to the core belief that Jews are not only adherents to a religion and members of a cultural group but also a displaced people with a common biological-genetic bloodline.

In his book, Professor Sand argues that Jews do not share a genetic bloodline while their so-called historical existence as a cohesive “nation-race” is mere myth. Instead, he postulates that the idea of a refugee Jewish people forcibly strewn around the Diaspora was cooked up by Zionist academics during the 19th century as a fictional pretext for the establishment of a Jewish state.

Sand believes that Jews are made up of ethnically diverse groups sharing religious beliefs. The ancestors of most converted during a period when Judaism encouraged its followers to proselytise, he maintains. He says there was no famous enforced exile from the Holy Land, which has naturally upset religious Jews. A Jewish people never existed, he says, only a Jewish religion. Moreover, those Jews originating from present-day Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have a greater genetic connection with Palestinians than with other Jews, he says. So how did Jews come to be scattered all over the planet? Tom Segev, who reviewed Sand’s work in the Israeli English-language daily Ha’aretz, answers this in his summary of Sand’s explosive thesis:

“Sand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians land from European-born individuals who had also become Jews”.

“The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Sand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East; some of them as merchants. We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers.”

The book undercuts the basis on which the Jewish state was built because while there are precedents for a people’s right to their own nation, there is little precedent for the establishment of a state exclusively reserved for any one religious group.

Indeed, as Tom Segev points out the book “is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a ‘state of all its citizens’ – Jews, Arabs and others – in contrast to its declared identity as a ‘Jewish and Democratic state’.” This adds grist to the mill of those now calling for a one-state solution.

Arguably if such a book had been published anywhere else in the world – or penned by anybody other than a respected Israeli Jewish historian – it would have been broadly labeled as anti-Semitic. Professor Sand, however, has impeccable credentials and is, therefore, not an easy target.

Born in Austria to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, Sand spent his formative years in a camp for displaced persons before immigrating with his family to the fledgling Israeli state in 1948. Like most Israelis, he completed his military service and in 1975 graduated from Tel Aviv University with a BA in history. The next 10 years were spent in Paris working towards an MA in French history and a PhD.

Despite his personal and academic resume, Sand’s critics are undeterred. His work has variously been described as a “final solution to the Jewish problem” and “another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic left in Israel”. Professor Israel Bartal, Dean of the Humanities Faculty of the Hebrew University, has taken aspects of the book to task and questions the author’s motives but he does admit this: “No ‘nationalist’ Jewish historian has ever tried to conceal the well-known fact that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and during the early Middle Ages. Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions”.

So there you have it! No doubt the discussion will continue for a long time to come and once the book is published in other languages non-Hebrew speakers will finally be able to join in.