- Dr. Shlomo argues that the idea of a Jewish nation
is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
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- TEL AVIV -- 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.
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- Dr Shlomo 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. The success of "When and How Was the Jewish People
Invented?" looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French
edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already
had three print runs. 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.
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- In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not
exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev,
one of the country's leading journalists, called the book "fascinating
and challenging". Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic
colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One
exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily
newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr Sand's claims.
Paradoxically, he dedicated much of his article instead to defending
his profession. He suggested that Israeli historians were not as
ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr. Sand
contends. The idea for the book had come to him many years ago, Dr.
Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. "I
cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book
now," he said. "I waited until I was a full professor". There is a
price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this
sort.
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- 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. Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews
being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely
alien to Judaism, he added. Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem.
Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be
lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because
they could not return but because their religion forbade them from
returning until the messiah came
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- 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 overwhelming peasants and all the
evidence suggests they stayed on their lands". Instead, he believes an
alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by
early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. Christians wanted
later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been
exiled as a punishment from God. 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"?
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- Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately
preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytising
religion, desperate for converts. This is mentioned in the Roman
literature of the time. Jews travelled 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.
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- 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. Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues' reticence to
engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole
edifice of "Jewish history" taught at Israeli universities is built
like a house of cards. The problem with the teaching of history in
Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate
history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish
history.
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- Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of
study because Jewish experience was considered unique. "There's no
Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only
history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in
Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where
they are not touched by modern developments in historical research.
I've been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when
European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a
historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical
inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world".
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- *Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in
Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
<http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net
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