The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, translated by Yael Lotan, Verso. 2009. ISBN: 978 1 84467 422 0. £18.99.

Spanish Jews are largely descended from converted Berber tribes from North Africa; Yemenite Jews are descendents of an Arabian tribe; many Jews from Eastern Europe come from Turkic Khazar stock; modern Palestinians are largely Judean converts to Islam and so closer to ancient Hebrews than many modern Jews. Such are the claims of Shlomo Sand and you can well imagine the response in many quarters! In his The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand pulls no punches.

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Comments

• Posted by Roger W on December 07, 2009

  The Romans would not have deported everyone - those at the bottom of the social heap who till the land are also the people who ultimately generate taxes. The cost of shifting them and replacing them with people who have the same skills would not be one that the Romans would have willingly incurred. It was only in rare cases that they ‘..made a desert, and they called it peace”.
  So, yes, it is quite possible that genetically the Palestinian people have a significant fraction of their ancestry derived from Jews who were never part of the diaspora with descendants who later converted to Islam. From this we can infer that God’s chosen people will certainly inherit the Promised Land.
  Why is it that brothers who fight seem to do so with such excessive violence and hatred? Is it that we are fighting something in ourselves that we are ashamed to own?

• Posted by woundwort on December 16, 2009

  Had I been present one time when Harvey visited Edinburgh, there would have been two people in the room who recognized his name.

  Whilst I agree the poster above - same chap here? [1] - I have to take exception to his repetition of the Chosen People meme.  This reading of Amos 3:2 did not come into being until the Church Fathers of the 4/5th Centuries.  Maimonides, the Jewish scholar of Andalus writing in the 11th Century, did not include it as part of his 13 Articles of Faith.

  Over the centuries, it has been used as a term of abuse against Jews - who rejected the *true* Chosen People and their Faith; supersessionary Christianity or Islam.

  As for Shlomo Sand; it should be remembered his academic area is in cinema, nationalism and French intellectualism.  That is, firmly rooted in the 20th Century.  His thesis, such as it is, ignores the fact that national myths are held by all national groups, the Palestinian Arabs no less [2]: but, it would seem, some national myths are more suspect than others.

  Furthermore, a flaw is that the genetic links he seeks to dismiss tell the opposite - namely, conversion from Khazar steppe-dwellers or Berber hill-tribes was minimal, and the disparate Jewish populations have greater similarities between one another than they do/did with neighbouring non-Jewish populations.  When this is been pointed out to Sand, he throws his hands up in horror (literally) and declares that such science has been discredited by the Nazis… one cannot have it both ways.

  Eurocentric is a term bandied around… yet it can also apply to the insistence that modern Israel be seen through the arrival of European Jews.  Even if Maghrebi Jews could be dismissed as Berbers, those expelled from modern Egypt or Jordan or Syria or Iraq do arguably have the historical link to the region which Sand is seeking to deny them.

  Just as it was the Chosen People meme was pushed by Christians rather than Jews, it is not Israelis and Zionist Jews who’re pushing the idea that they are a homogenous group with a verfiable genetic providence stretching back further than the Icelanders.

  A nation is what it believes itself to be.  To insists a racial link is, well, racist… as the same reasoning would decree recent immigrants to Britain to non-British.  In light of the historical mistreatment of European Jews, and contemporary acts of religiously-mandated terror against Israelis, to deny them their own identity is surely the final insult.

  My view is that by saying that Israelis should face up to the ‘facts’ he has uncovered, Sand is simply presenting himself as the gatekeeper of a community which does not hold the beliefs he says it does.

  [1] Internetting since the 20th Century?
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/apr/29/guardianletters1

  [2] Yehoshua Porath, who is academically trained in the area (and a co-founder of the modern Israeli peace-movement), has written extensively on Palestinian nationalism; charting its path from Arabs who defined their identity according to family or clan, to appropriating a non-Arabic word which had previously been used to describe Jewish inhabitants of the region.  In The Blood Donor sketch, Tony Hancock offered to donate to “Arab refugees”, not “Palestinian refugees”.

• Posted by Roger W on December 16, 2009

  I would not wish to give offence, even inadvertently, and of course it is almost impossible to explore anything of the background to this tragic conflict without being taken to task. One may wish to be neutral, but that requires some common ground on which the neutral may stand. It’s hard to see any.

  In using the phrase ‘chosen people’ (no capitalisation, deliberately) I had in mind the West Bank settler who has come recently from outside Israel justifying the expulsion of non-Jews from their olive groves and villages in terms of God’s purpose, oblivious of the fact that he may well share his ancestry with the folk he is displacing. In my mind, that meant both could have some claim to be beneficiaries of the covenant with pre-diaspora Jewry.

  I understand now that from his point of view descent is of no consequence in this matter; religion alone defines ownership, and the owner of the olive trees may not convert back to Judaism, if he wished to. The logical consequences of this belief have been terrible in the past, but in the future may yet be more so.

  I personally know of former colleagues on both sides, individuals that I respect. They could easily be brothers, but they cannot agree. Friends are prone to think that everyone can agree, that common ground and common interest can always be recognised, but my former colleagues are each gentle, humane and intelligent people and on this matter they could not even sustain a civil discussion, one with another. The ironic possibility that they may be of common ancestry is of very little practical weight, and (who knows) may even be part of the difficulty.

  Friends acknowledge that we can’t speak for God, and so we should not be tempted into such presumption. We are not called to judge, but can only try to hold both sides in the light.

• Posted by woundwort on December 16, 2009

  No bad intent was read whatsoever, and - as someone who always is careful when he uses capitalization or hyphenation - I also immediately take your your point about c/Chosenness.  Taking “exception” to your words was far too strong a word for me to have used, and I withdraw that.

  You’re quite correct this is a situation in which there is more than enough hatred and emnity to go around, and seeking to further divide people - as I content that Sand is doing - is not welcome.