03-27-2011, 06:21 AM
Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo:
Idea of a Jewish People Invented, Says Historian
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list -- and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo.
Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation -- whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel -- is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more -- all equally controversial.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel, and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
[..]
Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.
[..]
Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
[..]
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.
"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.
"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelmingly peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."
[..]
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?
Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."
Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.
Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.
Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/cook091008.html
Idea of a Jewish People Invented, Says Historian
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list -- and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo.
Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation -- whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel -- is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more -- all equally controversial.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel, and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
[..]
Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.
[..]
Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
[..]
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.
"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.
"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelmingly peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."
[..]
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?
Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."
Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.
Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.
Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/cook091008.html
![[Image: Zy3rKpW.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Zy3rKpW.png)
