The Invention of the Jewish People - by Shlomo Sand

ISBN: 1788736613
Date read: 2024-10-10
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.

my notes

This book is about a confused nation pretending to be a wandering people-race.

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.

Anyone born to a Jewish mother may have the best of both worlds - being free to live in London or in New York, confident that the State of Israel is theirs, even if they do not wish to live under its sovereignty.

Post-Zionism.

Every history is fundamentally a contemporary history.
The present conditions every account of the past and gives it, each time, a particular significance.

This position does not lead me to deny the right of the state of Israel to exist.
A child born of rape has the right to live.
The fact is there: refugees from Europe in the wake of the terrible Nazi genocide were forced to join the Zionist enterprise, to emigrate and settle on the land of another population.

There are no “pure” populations.

The concept of “a people”, sharing everyday culture, language, songs or diet.
There are “French people,” “Italian people” or “German people” today, whereas there were no French or Italian people a thousand years ago.
The “Jewish people,” in the modern sense of the word, were invented in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the emergence of modern peoples and nations in Western Europe - the large emerging Yiddish population in Eastern Europe.
Subsequently, Zionism included Jews from all over the world.

Before 1924, when racist laws in the United States curbed Jewish immigration, more than 2 million Yiddish-speaking people came ashore there, while in the same timeframe only a few thousand arrived in Palestine.

A Nation is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.

To promote a homogeneous collective in modern times, it was necessary to provide a long narrative suggesting a connection in time and space between the fathers and the “forefathers” of all the members of the present community.
Since such a close connection never actually existed, the agents of memory worked hard to invent it.
With the help of archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, a variety of findings were collected.
These were subjected to major cosmetic improvements carried out by essayists, journalists, and the authors of historical novels.
From this surgically improved past emerged the proud and handsome portrait of the nation.

The histories of peoples and nations have been designed like the statues in city squares - they must be grand, towering, heroic.
Influential textbooks transformed the ancient Romans into typical Italians.
Gallic tribes who rebelled against Rome in the time of Julius Caesar were described as true Frenchmen.
Arbitrarily mapping the boundaries of Iraq, a lazy British officer drew a dead straight line.
Those who had overnight become Iraqis soon learned from their authorized historians that they were the descendants of the ancient Babylonians.
Indians, Algerians, Indonesians, Vietnamese and Iranians are told that their nations always existed.
From an early age, schoolchildren memorize long historical narratives.

Imagining the nation was an important stage in the evolution of modernity.
It engaged many historians from the nineteenth century onward.

No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them, are ethnicized - that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community.

“People,” “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “nationalism,” “country,” and “homeland” have, over the course of history, been given countless meanings.
To the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs.
Words that have come down to us from the past and, in a different guise, continue to serve us in the present are sent back, charged with a new connotation.
In that way, distant history is made to look similar, and closer, to our present-day world.

Fundamentals of nation building included cultural components, linguistic or religious, contrived to make them into hooks on which the history of nations could be skillfully hung.

An ethnic group is distinguished by the sense of unique group origins, the knowledge of a unique group history and belief in its destiny, a sense of unique collective solidarity.
Ethnos need not have an actual history, for ancient myths can continue to serve this function equally well.
Nationalization creates a sense of ethnic identity in societies.

The culture of the English “people” became hegemonic in Britain.
By contrast, the Welsh “people,” the Breton, Bavarian, Andalusian, even the Yiddish “people,” have been almost entirely shredded in the process.

Religious cultures served as valuable raw material for the forging of nations, example: Belgium, Pakistan, Ireland and Israel.

Scholars of history lived in emerging national cultures, so they tended to think from within them and were unable to examine them from outside.
They wrote in the new national languages, and were thus held captive by their principal working tool.

Every community that is bigger than a tribe or a village is imagined, because its members do not know one another.

Universal primary education and literacy were the essential conditions for a developed, dynamic industrial society.
This, the formation of a national group, can take place only in the presence of some state apparatus whose presence facilitates a national consciousness, the construction of a national culture.
A nation is closely connected with the formation of a unified culture.
To forge itself into a single, firm entity, it had to engage in continual public cultural activities and to invent a unifying collective memory, namely, nationalism.

Only in the national democratic state are the citizens both formally and mentally the legitimate proprietors of the modern state.
Historical kingdoms belonged to the monarchs.

Printed maps familiarize people with the exact dimensions of their state, the boundaries of their property.

Identity is a lens through which the individual makes sense of the world.
National identity is a modern lens through which the state makes sense of a diverse population, making it feel it is homogeneous.

The nation worships itself.

It was only the use of ancient (and utterly fictitious) myths that made it possible to set “Catholic” Croatians against “Orthodox” Serbs, and these in an especially vicious way against “Muslim” Bosnians and Kosovars.

Racism is the snobbery of the poor.

Only the aristocrats had blue blood in their veins, which they inherited.
Membership of the “ethnic” nationality as blood-based (jus sanguinis).
Membership granted on grounds of birth in the territory (jus soli) was entirely absent in Europe.

Every step in defining the nation was taken deliberately, fully conscious.
It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation.
Intellectuals had to utilize popular or even tribal dialects, and sometimes forgotten sacred tongues, and to transform them quickly into new, modern languages.
They produced the first dictionaries and wrote the novels and poems that depicted the imagined nation and sketched the boundaries of its homeland.
They painted melancholy landscapes that symbolized the nation’s soil and invented moving folktales and gigantic historical heroes, and weaved ancient folklore into a homogeneous whole.

Taking events related to diverse and unconnected political entities, they welded them into a consecutive, coherent narrative that unified time and space, thus producing a long national history stretching back to primeval times.
They did not see themselves as the midwives of the new nation but as the offspring of a dormant nation that they were arousing from a long slumber.
Every nation had to learn who its “ancestors” were.

Of all the intellectual disciplines, the most nationalistic is that of the historian.
Nationalism is an essentially optimistic ideology.

The suffering of the past justified the price demanded of citizens in the present.

Reconstructors of the Israel past began in the second half of the nineteenth century.
They primarily collected fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memories, out of which they imaginatively constructed a long, unbroken genealogy for “the Jewish people.”
Before then, there had been no organized public remembering.

Venturing outside a specific field, or walking on the fences between several of them, may occasionally yield unexpected insights and uncover surprising connections.

Departments of Jewish history that are completely isolated from the departments of general and Middle Eastern history - have also contributed much to the astonishing paralysis and stubborn refusal to open up to new historiography that would soberly investigate the origin and identity of the Jews.

Israeli historians have always known a Jew is a descendant of the nation that was exiled two thousand years ago.

Historical irony: There were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belong to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-Semite.
Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that Jews have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.

Israel still refuses to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens.
One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it.
The excuse rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.

Isaak Markus Jost sat down to write a history of the Jews: A History of the Israelites, in 1820.
This first modern attempt to tell the complete history of the Jews, written by a historian who saw himself as a Jew, skipped over the biblical period.
It lacks the “beginning” that would later be viewed as integral to the history of Jews in the world.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the time of nationalist formation, which saw the “restoration” of the Bible to many Jewish literati in Europe, this historiographic feature must have seemed strange.
Its gifted author was not yet a national historian or, more precisely, not a national Jew.
For Jost, as for Leopold Zunz, the second important historian in the early days of the science of Judaism, Jewish history began with the return of the exiles from Babylonia, its culture having been forged by the experience of exile itself.
Jost’s premise was that the Jews might share a common origin, but the different Jewish communities were not separate members of a single body.
The communities differed widely from place to place in their cultures and ways of life, and were only linked by their distinctive deistic belief.
No supra-Jewish political entity separated Jews from non-Jews; hence in the modern world they were entitled to the same civil rights as all the other communities and cultural groups that were rushing to enter modern Post-Napoleonic Germany.

The more nationalistic the author, the more he treats the Bible as history - as the birth certificate attesting to the common origin of the “people.”
The Old Testament came to serve as the point of departure for the first historiographical exploration into the fascinating invention of the “Jewish nation,”

The first volumes of the History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present, by Heinrich Graetz, began to appear in the 1850s.
It was very successful,
His work fertilized the imagination of writers and poets eagerly seeking new fields of historical memory that were no longer traditional but nonetheless continued to draw on tradition.
The first Zionist settlers in Palestine used his work as their road map through the long past.
In today’s Israel there are schools and streets named after Graetz.
This was the first work to invent the Jewish people.
He succeeded in creating, with great virtuosity, a unified narrative that minimized problematic multiplicity and created an unbroken history, branching but always singular.

To create a new paradigm of time, it was necessary to demolish the “faulty and harmful” previous one.
To begin the construction of a nation, it was necessary to reject those writings that failed to recognize its primary scaffolding.
Graetz accused his predecessor Jost of “tearing holes” in the history of the Jews.
For there to be a national consciousness, a modern collective identity, both mythology and teleology are required.

The Old Testament was thought of as a marginal book that could be understood only through the Halakhah (religious law) - the interpretation and mediation of the “oral Torah” (the Mishnah and Talmud).

For most Jews through the centuries, the Bible was holy scripture and thus not really accessible to the mind, just as the Holy Land was barely present in the religious imagination as an actual place on earth.

Educated Jews who were feeling the effects of the secular age and whose metaphysical faith was beginning to show a few cracks longed for another source to reinforce their uncertain, crumbling identity.
The religion of history struck them as an appropriate substitute for religious faith.

For those who, sensibly, could not embrace the national mythologies arising before their eyes - mythologies unfortunately bound up with a pagan or Christian past - the only option was to invent and adhere to a parallel national mythology - namely the Old Testament, which remained an object of adoration even for confirmed haters of contemporary Jews.
And since presented evidence that Jews were a people or a nation - not merely a religious community that lived in the shadow of other, hegemonic religions - the awkward crawl toward the Book of Books turned into a determined march in the imagining of a Jewish people.

Like other national movements in nineteenth-century Europe that were searching for a golden age in an invented heroic past (classical Greece, the Roman Republic, the Teutonic or Gallic tribes) so as to show they were not newly emerged entities but had existed since time immemorial, the early buds of Jewish nationalism turned to the mythological kingdom of David, whose radiance and power had been stored across

Like other national movements in nineteenth-century Europe that were searching for a golden age in an invented heroic past (classical Greece, the Roman Republic, the Teutonic or Gallic tribes) so as to show they were not newly emerged entities but had existed since time immemorial, the early buds of Jewish nationalism turned to the mythological kingdom of David, whose radiance and power had been stored across the centuries in the batteries of religious belief.

By the 1870s - after Darwin and The origin of Species - early miracles were omitted to make the work more scientific.

Daily encounters with anti-Jewish expressions, political and philosophical, in Germany drove him to discover his “national being.”
Racist theories began to simmer in the 1850s.
Moses Hess’ conclusion: Until racial struggles come to an end, Jews should return to their place of origin, meaning the Holy Land.
Hess concluded that the reason Jews were in conflict with gentiles was that they had always been a distinct racial group.

Like all nation-fostering historians in the nineteenth century, Graetz assumed that the history of his nation was sublime and not to be compared with any other national history.
Graetz’s book became popular, indirectly prompting the invention of a collective national past.
The state is an outward social alliance, whose purpose is to secure the needs of its members, whereas the nation is an inward and natural association.

The Old Testament narrative required support from the new archaeological discoveries.
Christian excavators took pains not to contradict the Old Testament, which might undermine the New Testament.
In the creation of the national narrative, historians would prefer the theological text over the archaeological finding.

Nationalist historians to the new breed of Zionist rabbis turned the Old Testament from a holy book into a national one.

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion realized that the holy book could be made into a secular national text, serve as a central repository of ancient collective imagery, help forge the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into a unified people, and tie the younger generation to the land.

Did Abraham migrate to Canaan in the twenty-first or the twentieth century BCE?
The stories mention Philistines, Aramaeans, and a great many camels.
Yet all the archaeological and epigraphic evidence indicated that the Philistines appeared in the region no earlier than the twelfth century BCE.
The Aramaeans first appeared in the eleventh century and become a notable presence from the ninth onward.
Camels were first domesticated at the start of the first millennium BCE, and as beasts of burden in commercial activity from the eighth century BCE.
The old dating was illogical, as was the shaky chronology.
Treating the story as a conscious ideological composition made hundreds of years later.
Names mentioned in the Book of Genesis appeared in the seventh or even the sixth century BCE.
The authors of this book were undoubtedly familiar with the kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia, which of course arose long after the hypothetical first migration in the twentieth century BCE.

Ancient Egyptians kept meticulous records of every event, yet there is not a single mention of any “Children of Israel” who lived in Egypt, or rebelled against it, or emigrated from it at any time.

In the late thirteenth century BCE Jericho was an insignificant little town, certainly unwalled, and neither Ai nor Heshbon had yet been settled at all.
The same holds for most of the other cities mentioned in the story of the conquest.

Explorations failed to find any traces of an important tenth-century kingdom, the presumed time of David and Solomon.
No trace has been found of the existence of that legendary king Solomon.
The fact that the Bible does not name this large empire strengthens this conclusion.

Kings did not need to rally the masses around a national politics.

The Hebrew word dat (“religion”) is of Persian origin.

The Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for individuals of very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which they barely observed.

The Bible could provide a long, almost an eternal, sense of belonging.

The Old Testament, having been written by many authors and then edited and reedited by others over many years, is full of contradictions.
Deuteronomy, for instance, instructs very firmly, “Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto your son.”
Yet the heroes of biblical mythology ignored these divine prohibitions - Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David and Solomon are all shown as lovers of gentile women who never bothered to convert their chosen spouses.
Abraham lived happily with Hagar until forced by Sarah to send her away.
Joseph took the Egyptian Aseneth as wife.
David married a princess of Geshur.
And Solomon, the great lover, had no qualms about taking Edomite, Sidonite, Ammonite and Moabite women, among others.

Considerable likelihood that Judeans did convert to Islam.
Palestinians are the direct or exclusive descendants of the Judeans.
There was a demographic continuity in the agrarian “people of the land” from antiquity to our time.
The local Arabic dialect is strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic words, distinguishing it from literary Arabic and other Arabic vernaculars.
The local populace does not define itself as Arab - they see themselves as Muslims or fellahin (farmers), while they refer to the Bedouin as Arabs.
The particular mentality of certain local communities recalls that of their Hebrew ancestors.
The racial difference between the diaspora Jews and the Palestinian fellahin is no more marked than between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

He argued that it was imperative to revive the spiritual connection with the lost limb of the Jewish people, to develop and improve its economic condition, and to unite with it for a common future.
The Hebrew schools must open their doors to Muslim students, without offending their faith or their language,

To Zionist thinking, this pioneering discourse defined too loosely the parameters of the “ancient nation” - and worse, it might have granted too many historical rights to the “native populace.”
It was imperative to bury it as quickly as possible and erase it from the national agenda.
From now on, early Islam did not convert the Jews but simply dispossessed them.
The imaginary exile in the seventh century CE came to replace the baseless religious narrative about a mass expulsion after the fall of the Second Temple, as well as the thesis that the Palestinian fellahin were descendants of the people of Judea.
The time of the expulsion was unimportant - the main thing was the precious memory of a forced exile.
National mythology determined that the Jews - banished, deported or fugitive emigrants - were driven into a long and dolorous exile, causing them to wander over lands and seas to the far corners of the earth until the advent of Zionism prompted them to turn around and return en masse to their orphaned homeland.
This homeland had never belonged to the Arab conquerors, hence the claim of the people without a land to the land without a people.

Although most of the professional historians knew there had never been a forcible uprooting of the Jewish people, they permitted the Christian myth that had been taken up by Jewish tradition to be paraded freely in the public.
This myth would provide moral legitimacy to the settlement of the “exiled nation” in a land inhabited by others.
Had the memory of the mass conversion to Judaism been preserved, it might have eroded the metanarrative about the biological unity of the Jewish people, whose genealogical roots were believed to trace back all the way to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - not to a heterogeneous mosaic of human populations.

The First World War was the peak of mass nationalism in Europe.
Germanity needed abundant Aryanism to define itself,
Polishness needed Catholicism, and
Russianness needed Orthodox pan-Slavism to swaddle their national identities and imagery.
Zionism borrowed extensively from the dominant nationalist ideologies flourishing in the lands of its birth and infancy, and integrated them into its new platform.
To achieve their aim, the Zionists needed to erase existing ethnographic textures, forget specific histories, and take a flying leap backward to an ancient, mythological and religious past.

Jewish nationalism had undertaken an almost impossible mission - to forge a single ethnos from a great variety of cultural-linguistic groups, each with a distinctive origin.
This accounts for the adoption of the Old Testament as the storehouse of national memory.

Historians embraced uncritically the old Christian idea of the Jew as the eternal exile.
In the process, they erased and forgot the mass proselytization carried out by early Judaism, thanks to which the religion of Moses grew enormously, both demographically and intellectually.

Nathan Birnbaum coined the term “Zionism” in 1890.
As Birnbaum saw it, neither language nor culture, but only biology, could account for the rise of nations.
Otherwise it was not possible to explain the existence of the Jewish nation, whose progeny were immersed in various national cultures and spoke different languages.

Martin Buber, who was for several years the editor in chief of Die Welt (“The World”), the Zionist movement’s main organ, was a bold philosopher of religious existentialism, who would later become a man of peace and strive to bring about a Jewish-Arab state in Palestine.

Kautsky, though he accepted the Darwinist theories of evolution, he refused to apply them to the human sphere.
All living beings adapt themselves to their environment in order to survive, he contended, but humanity also adapts its environment to suit its needs.
Thus human labor creates a different kind of evolution, in which man’s consciousness changes as he works - in other words, in the process of altering his environment.

The United States, which before 1924 had taken in many of the Yiddish Jews, now refused to open its gates to the broken remnants of the great Nazi massacre.
So did the other rich countries.
In the end, it was easier for these countries to solve the troublesome Jewish problem by offering a faraway land that was not theirs.

The Nazis themselves - despite their biological race doctrine, had been unable to come up with a scientific yardstick by which to determine the origin of an individual Jew, so they ended up having to categorize Jews on the basis of bureaucratic documentation.

The 1947 UN resolution had clearly stated that the minorities remaining in both of the new states should have civil rights, and made this a condition of admitting them to the organization.
Israel therefore had to grant citizenship to the Palestinians who remained.

The choice of the new state’s name offer a glimpse into Jewish rebirth.
The ancient kingdom of Israel under the Omride dynasty did not have a good reputation.
But if the state were named “Judea,” then all its citizens would be called Judeans, meaning Jews, and if it were named “Zion,” its citizens would be called Zionists.
There was no choice but to call the new state “Israel.”
Ever since then, all its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike, have been called Israelis.
Because of its ethnocentric nationalist character, it would refuse to belong, formally and effectively, to all its citizens.
It had been created expressly for the “Jewish people”.

But who would be included among the authorized proprietors of the Jewish state that was being “reestablished” after two thousand years in “Israel’s exclusive land”?
Would it be anyone who saw himself or herself as a Jew?
Or any person who became an Israeli citizen?

Just as Israel was unable to decide on its territorial borders, it did not manage to draw the boundaries of its national identity.

As in such countries as Poland, Greece and Ireland before the Second World War, or even today’s Estonia and Sri Lanka, the Zionist identity contains a very distinctive blend of ethnocentric nationalism with traditional religion, where the religion becomes an instrument serving the leaders of the imaginary ethnos.

In 1970, under pressure from the religious camp, the Law of Return was amended to include, finally, a full and exact definition of who is an authentic member of the people of Israel:
“A Jew is one who was born to a Jewish mother, or converted to Judaism and does not belong to another religion.”
After twenty-two years of hesitation and questioning, the instrumental link between the rabbinical religion and the essentialist nationalism was now well and truly welded.
The rigid tradition was preferable to a serious blurring of the Jewish distinction and to turning Israel into a mere liberal democracy belonging to all its citizens.

Clause 4a was added to the Law of Return:
Dubbed the “grandchild clause,” it enabled not only Jews but also their “non-Jewish” children, grandchildren and spouses to immigrate to Israel.
This important clause would later open the door to the huge influx of immigrants that began in the early 1990s, with the fall of Communism.
This immigration, which had no ideological dimension - Israel had begun in the 1980s to urge the United States not to accept Soviet Jewish refugees.
Three hundred thousand new immigrants were not classified as members of the Jewish people.
It would be a serious setback for Israel if all the pro-Zionist lobbies were to immigrate en masse to the Holy Land.
It is much more useful for them to remain close to the centers of power and communications in the Western world - and indeed they prefer to remain in the rich, liberal, comfortable “diaspora.”