Shlomo Sand Ridiculed by Historian Simon Schama
Beit She'arim Menorah - you know, just a little like the one we light 2000 years later because of our vivid imaginations
Some of you may recall our celebration of French journalistic standards which permitted “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a sad, ideologically bent book by Shlomo Sand to win the Aujourd’hui Award, “given to the best non-fiction political or historical work from French journalists.”
That version of Sand’s book, published originally in Hebrew, was the French language version. Unfortunately, the English speaking world is now in possession of this ode to hatred of the Jewish people and it is on sale in England and the US. It’s actually ranked in the mid-2000s on Amazon, which means books are selling.
What kind of person is Shlomo Sand? He is the kind of person who compares Israel in an interview to a child born of a rape.
“Most Israeli Jews believe in a historical right. If there is no such right, what justifies our existence here? Arabs also ask me, after writing this book, how can I justify the existence of Israel. I say to them that even the son of a rape has the right to live. It was a kind of rape in 1947 and ’48 and the Palestinian tragedy continues. But you can say the same about the USA and Australia.”
…“I think Israel belongs to the Israelis, not the Jews. We have a language, a culture, a theatre, a literature, our jokes our football and our politics. We are a people but we are not just a Jewish people. I want to change the borders and definition of the state. I want to make it a more civil nation — to separate religion from its existence, to normalise and democratise Israel. I think that Israel has to belong to all its citizens, not just the Jewish ones. People call me radical but from a democratic perspective this is not so radical.”
Therefore, we glean that he’s a scholar working at an Israeli university which affords him the freedom to attack his country and society viciously and then have his ideas travel the world with him so he can call the country subsidizing his salary, the child of a rape.
And you can imagine he has serious support from the anti-Israel crowd, Jewish especially.
In our previous post, we brought in some scholarly attacks that decimate his book, but my favorite new critique of his book is by prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama, definitely not an intellectual slouch.
Schama writes:
Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.
…
But, he argues, there actually was no mass forced “exile” so there can be no legitimate “return”. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so contentious. It is undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of this idea of the exile survives in most fundamentalist accounts of Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish children still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued that following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans emptied Judea. But what the Romans did do, following the Jewish revolt of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after a second rebellion in AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social annihilation – mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there was also the mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture; the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals and prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews remained in what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews in Rome had already gone there, not as a response to disaster but because they wanted to and were busy proselytising.
All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.
There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your patience.
…
His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been shown by those who think they know what “real jews” should look like. Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical.
Sand would counter that such a refuge for the victims could have been in China, or on the moon, for all that Palestine had to do with the Jews. But since his book fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience ever since, it seems a bit much to ask Jews to do their bit for the sorely needed peace of the region by replacing an ethnic mythology with an act of equally arbitrary cultural oblivion.
Be sure to read the entire article in the Financial Times.
Very soon, expect to hear on campuses, in news programs on the radio and occasionally in TV programs that the Jewish people are a myth. This stuff used to be said by the neo-Nazi loonies who inhabit this world, but now we have a Jewish, son of Holocaust survivors, professor from an Israeli university, ideologue whose ideology so blinds him to the basic identity of the Jewish people that he has put this lie into the mainstream.
The problem with his argument is that HE’S the one who is touting the biological issue. It is clear to most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isn’t material whether my genes are directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago – although they might well be – it’s that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with our identity. They define who we are, and not because of a couple of 19th Century historians, but precisely because our traditions, our shared histories, our literature and even the enduring hatred we’ve suffered, are a part of every Jew. If a prayer was being said 2000 years ago, and then 1000 years later a Jew who descends from a convert says the same prayer and teaches it to his children, and that prayer is repeated 500 years later and again a thousand years later by Jews, even if they are descended from converts to Judaism, that does not lessen their connection to the place where that prayer, language and culture originated. It does not change the fact that they faced Jerusalem when praying and wished that they could visit it and even live there upon the messiah’s arrival.
Whether Sand approves or not, these ideas that form us exist because our ancestors – and here I may mean biological and I could mean ancestry in terms of ideas, faith and religious practice – lived in Jerusalem and Hebron and Shechem and Judea and Samaria.
If his problem is that Israel, a state defining itself as a Jewish state, exist on disputed land that the Palestinians claim as theirs, then that’s an entirely different issue and question. Trying to use questionable history to address this complex situation is reprehensible.
If Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby” wins TheMiddle’s “21st Century Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Award, Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” wins the “Temple was Never Here, It Was in Nablus” Upside Down History Prize, which I dedicate to Yasser Arafat.
(photo is from this article about the Beit She’arim site)
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Most significant historians posit that the Hebrews, Bnei Israel, are an amalgam, which the author here notes. Personally, I happen to like Shaye Cohen’s book “The Beginnings of Jewishness” which describes the transformation of a people from Judea – the Judeans, into the Jews, which is the great mixture.
Sand has added that the founders of Israel used a mythic historical narrative, Yerushalmi’s collective memory, to make a claim on the Land. In fact the author of this piece does distinctly that when he writes,
“It is clear to most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isn’t material whether my genes are directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago – although they might well be – it’s that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with our identity.”
themiddle speaks of thousands of years of common heritage directly linked to our past in Israel, despite the fact that as Rabbinic Jews, most of our traditions were developed outside of the Land of Israel. The question that Sand asks then is a poignant one, and we can disagree with the answer, but it is a question that we all as Jews living after information must ask.
In light of historical inquiry which undermines exclusive claims, what is the right of Jews to be in Israel?
I agree with our author that it does not matter if my genes are directly connected, the fact of the matter is people of all types were conquered and infiltrated, assimilated new types and assimilated into other types. Our collective memory is one that assigns Zion a special status.
I find it difficult to say that our entire tradition comes from Israel as most of our tradition does not. Most of the greats that we study never made it to Israel and many of the books we read were written in North Africa, Spain and Vilna. Don’t claim that our entire tradition is monolithic and expects one thing, it is demeaning and simply incorrect.
Finally, Sand’s statement about Israeliness is one that I have felt deeply as an American who lives in Jerusalem. There is a distinct Israeli culture that does not understand me as an American Jew and which I myself do not understand.
I do not suggest for a minute that our heritage isn’t an amalgam shaped by centuries in the diaspora. Of course that’s the case. That’s not the point. The point is that everything in our culture as Jews originates in Israel. Without the Torah, without Hebrew, without Aramaic, without synagogues (which exist before the Temple’s destruction, without the 3 regalim, without sacrifices, and arguably even without the concept of oral law and priesthood, you do not have Judaism.
Even if something is a reaction to the absence of Israel, say like locking in the oral laws or establishing prayer instead of sacrifice and rabbis instead of priests because of the destruction of the temple, it inflences the development and evolution of Judaism.
Sand tries to negate all of this because it’s not convenient for him in terms of his personal ideals to use this historic link as justification for a Jewish state. The way he gets around it is by saying that Jews aren’t really the heirs of the Israelites. By doing so he ignores the fact that israel has been integral to Jewish prayer and concepts throughout our history.
You know what? Arafat was Egyptian and so was Edward Said. Does Sand intend to claim they’re not Palestinian? What about a third generation Palestinian living in the US? Is he rooted to Palestine? What if his Palestinian father married a non-Arab or a non- Palestinian?
It seems to me that Sand created his theory in pursuit of his own philosophies and ideology, not in pursuit of objective truth. That’s his right, but he deserves the criticism he has received. His supporters tend to fall into the anti-Israel/Zionism and even anti-Semitic camp while his opponents are scholars like Schama and Anita Shapira. That tells the tale.
Btw, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comment.
Sh.S. vs S.S[c]h.
I see a pattern there. (day 1 of deliberate conspiracy theory hints)
I recommend that anyone interested in the genetic aspect of this discussion read Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, by Jon Entine (available very inexpensively at bookcloseouts.com). He delves deeply into the real and perceived genetic links between Jews (and other ethnic groups). Very well researched, and without an axe to grind.
I second Yaakov’s recommendation of the book “Abraham’s Children”. I was interviewed in that book and I know from meeting Jon Entine and having other discussions with him that he had the highest journalistic standards. The DNA evidence showing common roots for most Jewish populations in the world today is valid science performed in an objective fashion even though Shlomo Sand tries to dismiss it. In my book “The Jews of Khazaria, Second Edition”, which comes out in softcover format in 12 days, I refute Sand’s ideas about the extent of convert ancestry in Ashkenazic Jews (which Sand got largely from Wexler and Koestler) and present the DNA evidence showing Ashkenazim are closely connected to Samaritans and Palestinian Arabs. Please read Chapter 10 in my book for the genetic as well as name evidence and other evidence – remember it’s only in the second edition. Disclaimer: I am proud to say I have sold many copies of Entine’s book.
Could you say that Sand’s deficit is that he does not apply his reasoning to other groups? Clearly, I am more happy than themiddle to place Jewish development outside of the Land. This is not a problem if we have a phenomenological approach to Jewish life. The nature of Israel is a group of people came here during a 100 year stretch during a time when the international zeitgeist was nationalism. Now in our postmodern world, we (some) see those reasons as less legitimate.
As an aside, I have strong difficulty with the essentialist perspective on Israel, in viewing it within a hierarchical relationship to the diaspora. Too much of what I love about Judaism is classically diaspora and much of what I struggle with in Israel is for lack of a better term cannanite. I mean why is the secular Israeli living in ashdod “more Jewish” than the committed Reform or Conservative Jew living in Phili?
Sand has an advantage in dealing only with the Jewish people because our history is fairly unique among the nations. It is precisely the dispersal of Jewish life across so many places and over so many centuries which opens the door for his theories.
Again, I am not attempting to dismiss or discount the importance of Judaism’s evolution over the course of the centuries in which the majority of Jews lived in places other than Israel/Judea. I am stressing that the faith, traditions, culture and collective longing of the Jewish people were always rooted in Israel and are founded on that lengthy period when Israelites and early Jews lived in what we know today as Israel and Judea and Samaria. Even the hatred and persecution of Jews for the centuries when they are in the diaspora, are rooted in early Israel. Without early movements like those of early Christianity or early Judaism, you don’t get Jesus and Paul and the enmity of Christians for so many centuries. Even Islam’s treatment of Jews and the results of that treatment and their influence over the lives of many Jewish communities can be related distantly to events that take place potentially in Israel.
Your second paragraph is interesting and I believe this has to do with the tension between the diaspora and Israel and their respective communities. I don’t think the typical diaspora Jew thinks of herself as a lesser Jew than the Israeli Jew, but the Israeli Jew is a product of a movement whose ideology is that of return to this historic land. Just by living out this part of his ideology, he is bound to feel that he is closer to the centrality of his being a Jew. This isn’t so far-fetched if you consider Jewish messianism, a foundation of Jewish faith for many centuries, which calls for a return to Israel and to Jerusalem. That Ashdod secular Jew is physically closer to Jerusalem than the Philadelphia Jew. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, but I do think that’s where it originates.
Oh, I forgot. Your point about post-modernism and how nationalism is anachronistic is valid, but it happens to be applied to Israel in a way that no other country seems to have to apply it. France isn’t planning to pack itself up and neither are more modern creations like Jordan or Lebanon which have roots that only go back several decades. Sand isn’t telling Lebanon to absorb its Palestinians and become a new Lebanon as a result. He is asking that of Israel, however.
Only Israel is asked to deny its own Jewish nationalism in order to facilitate this new “Israeli nationalism” that incorporates the Palestinians. Sand wants to take away the Jewish right to self-determination and his clever trick is to do it by eliminating critical elements of Jewish history, because they don’t suit him. If my Jewish, Israeli friend doesn’t look like a Beduin and has blue eyes and pale skin, then she must be the product of a conversion, of a made-up nationalism, and has no historic claim to the land which she must now share with its native sons, the Palestinians, even if they are born in Lebanon, Kuwait or London.
Why? Why is her claim to nationalism and her right to self-determination as part of a people living on a particular land less important or valuable than the claim of any other person who is part of a nation? In some ways, actually, her claim is stronger, not just because of these ancient historic links that Sand tries to obfuscate, but also because of the modern wars and losses among her nation to secure this land; losses that came after they were attacked, not the other way around. Losses which, by the way, give Sand the security and peace of mind to work where he does and publish what he does.
HEY MIDDLE… great post. Even Tikkun Magazine’s review of the book criticized it. Hey.. to be on the Board of Directors… you gotta be affiliated with McGill University, Harvard, Wachtell, CSFB, Koor, ML, or all of the above. Hehe.. JUST KIDDING
Oh wow!
How wonderful of you to bring in Simon Schama to tear apart an argument by Sand that had nothing to do with the quote you supplied!
I bet Sand is on firmer ground advocating a secular, pluralistic state – a normative argument and one different to, and in no way dependent upon, the imaginative historical argument that he promotes.
It is much easier to accept that the religious tribalism that forms the basis for Jewish history is increasingly irrelevant to the identity of a modern, heterogeneous state. Especially one that claims to be disinterested in theocracy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that I believe Jews shouldn’t comprise a majority, or that Jewish culture shouldn’t predominate – at least until Arab Israeli identity relinquishes its captivation by “Palestinianization”. And that is a crucial caveat for the “post-Zionists” (or whatever) to consider.
Glad you enjoyed it, MUL.