An invented people?
Harvey Gillman reviews a book with new insights into the complexities of the Middle East
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.
For all the controversy, this is a scholarly book, exploring concepts of race, nation, people and statehood. History is a projection onto the past in reply to the dilemmas of the present to buttress dreams for the future. The question Shlomo Sand poses is what sort of state Israel should be. By its constitution Israel is a democracy respecting the rights of its people. But it is a Jewish state and its non-Jewish population are second-class citizens. Zionists of various hues have largely accepted the specialness of the Jewish people, either as a chosen people descendents of patriarchs to whom God made certain promises; and/or as a biological entity, which has the right to return to land which was once theirs, in order to protect itself from disappearing through assimilation or oppression. In order to bolster these ideas, archaeology, genetics and historical research have been used to underpin state policy. Research that threatens the majority ideology is frowned upon and under-funded.
For Sand, Jews are not homogeneous as a people. They are a religious community. He recognises the need for the Israeli state but pleads for a state not of ethnic unity (ethnarchy) but of equal citizens (liberal democracy). The irony of the state of Israel today is that many newer immigrants have little connection with traditional Judaism at all. With the fall of communism in Russia, many Russians have become citizens under a law that states that you can become an Israeli citizen if you have one Jewish grandparent. And yet there is a movement to expel from the land those indigenous people who have been there for centuries and who according to Sand and other historians may well be the Judean peasants who actually were never exiled in the first place.
If Jews are not a people in any biological sense, it may be said that they have become a people through historical experience. Dreams, aspirations, fears, oppression, and a shared mythology may well be at the heart of many a community. After the shoah, known as the holocaust, many Jews who did not regard themselves as such had an ‘ancestral’ identity forced upon them. Israel seemed like the answer to a religious prayer, or a solution to a political dilemma. But the dreams of some become the nightmares of others. The land to which they ‘returned’, if all their ancestors had ever been there, was not empty. It was not a desert simply waiting to bloom under their cultivation. Sand wants ‘Israeli’ to mean more than ‘Jewish’. He wants respect given to minorities discriminated against both by secular authorities and by the rabbinate who police ‘ethnic purity’. He also wants them to be part of a single state whose political system confers on all its inhabitants equal rights and equal opportunities. Towards the end of the book he poses what he calls the hardest question: ‘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 or dubious biology and excluding the “other” from its midst’? Sand is not optimistic, but for him it is a matter of Israel’s very survival. I am no expert on all of the theories Sand puts forward, and certainly his views on the origins of the Yiddish language seem very odd, but his is a courageous voice and, though correspondence on the book has already become quite bitter, I hope his voice will not be silenced.
Comments
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?”
By Roger W on 7th December 2009 - 10:17
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”.”
By woundwort on 16th December 2009 - 11:36
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.
By Roger W on 16th December 2009 - 13:53
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.”
By woundwort on 16th December 2009 - 14:19
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