CHILDREN OF ISRAEL?

THE  INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
by Shlomo Sand, translated by Yael Lotan
Verso,2009

Review by Tzvi Marx

Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People is intended to debunk what Israeli historians and theologians have always known: "A Jew is a descendant of the nation that was exiled two thousand years ago."

Many of Israel's self-described "new historians" have set out to shake the structure of Israeli memory about how the State of Israel came into existence. Sand has a much broader goal: to question whether there was ever anything corresponding to the notion of "the Jewish people" before the nineteenth century. He argues that this concept was invented to justify the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

Sand seems to think that should it become widely known that the settling Jewish masses in Israel were not the direct descendants of the "Children of Israel," such de-legitimization might lead to a broad challenge against the State of Israel's right to exist. According to Sand, the Jews are not a people, they have not been in exile, and they are therefore not "re-turning" to a land that is their patrimony. He asserts that the knowledge of the "actual" Jewish origins — origins he traces to mass conversions in Alexandria (in the pre-Christian era) and to the Khazar kingdom in the Caucasus (in the eighth and ninth centuries) — is silenced in Israeli historiography.

Jews, Sand believes, are the descendants of converts in Alexandria, of the Berbers of North Africa, and of the Khazar kingdom of Eastern Europe. Zionists invented the myth of Jewish exile in order to justify the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael (the "Land of Israel") in the modern context of settling that "Land." It is this myth that sustains Israelis' claims to possession of the entirety of what the British called Palestine, and thus becomes a major obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Sand adopts the Hebrew University historian Israel Jacob Yuval's view that the renewed Jewish myth about the exile arose fairly late in Jewish history, as a response to the rise of a Christian mythology about the Jews being exiled in punishment for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. This mythology became embedded in the various non-Jewish definitions of the Jewish presence around the world.

Let us, for the sake of argument, concede the view that the Hebrew Bible is "full of imaginary tales" that are historically untrustworthy: these tales were imagined many years after the epochs in which they purportedly took place. And let us adopt the view of the Copenhagen/Sheffield school that the Bible is not a book but a grand library that was written, revised, and adapted over a long period of gestation, from the late sixth century BCE to the early second century CE, by authors seeking to create a "coherent religious community."

So what of it? Every nation has its own myths. This is how the group of Jews 2,500 years ago organized themselves around this myth: they construed themselves as a nation and not as a mere religious grouping. The Bible may not be "a reliable testimony to processes and events" in history, but it is surely an ethnic marker of how this group saw itself and organized its self-understanding. The Jews did not want to be a mere religious corporation like the Christian community of believers -- the Jews wanted to be a people, a folk. Sand argues that the Jews wanted to be a group with a common imagined ethnic origin that was nevertheless open to those who primarily wanted to join the Jewish people as a nation and who would thus join the religion second, as a byproduct of that national membership. In modern terms we call this naturalization; in religion we call it proselytism or conversion.

What is so instructive here — to get this point about Jewish self-understanding and self-perception — is that when someone wanted to become a member, he was not asked what he believed, as would have been appropriate when joining a faith community, but rather, "What reason have you for desiring to become a proselyte; do you not know that [the people of] Israel at the present time are persecuted and oppressed, despised, harassed, and overcome by affliction?" And if he replied, "I know and yet am unworthy," he was "accepted forthwith, and ... given instruction in some of the minor and some of the major commandments" (Talmud Yebamot 47a).

While the Jewish nation was spread over the globe and mostly did not dwell in the land of Israel for most of its history of the last 2,500 years, Jews nevertheless saw themselves in all those diasporas as belonging to one nation — am in Hebrew — and not merely a religion. It is "not an act of self-commitment to Torah," as a religious conversion connotes in Christianity, "but an event of joining a community — the ‘People of Israel,'" according to Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar of Bar Ilan University. Converting to Judaism "had always been a matter of changing one's national identity," Sagi and Zohar argue in their article "Giyyur, Jewish Identity, and Modernization" (Modern Judaism, volume 15).

Sand invests much effort in claiming that the biblical sense of the family of terms including le'om and umah (nation) and am (people) has a different connotation than the modern one of nation. The ancient term "am" in the expression "am Yisrael" — people of Israel in the sense of nation — is a "very fluid term and difficult therefore to include in any meaningful discourse," he writes. The evidence that such terms were used in ancient mythical writings is therefore not proof of actual nationhood. Nevertheless, in the Jews' mythically constructed biblical tales, they conceived and spoke of themselves in these very terms: "a holy nation [people], a kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6). In the myth of Rachel's twin birth, she is told that "two nations" (goyim) are wrestling within her womb, one of which is Jacob/Israel (Genesis 25:23). The same term "goy" is used by the prophet Isaiah to preach that "nation shall not raise sword against nation" (Isaiah 2:4). Strangely Sand does not mention that term in his review of the nomenclature.

It is easy to agree with Sand that in general "peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes, and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such." But why not also agree that sometimes when a group speaks of itself as a nation, the term can be valid if the group distinguishes itself with the essential signs of nationhood?

As early as 1861, John Stuart Mill, cited sympathetically by Sand, gives a good sense of this national glue that is relevant to the Jewish case:

A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be a government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.

This seems to be eminently suitable to the Jewish case. Sand introduces very interesting historical information on the diasporas of Alexandria and of the Khazars — for this reason alone it is worth reading. Nevertheless his main thesis remains his own invention.

Y.U.-ordained Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Marx, author of Disability in Jewish Law (Routledge, 2002), is  a publicist on Judaism in Holland and participates in interreligious activities internationally. He also edits Tenachon, a magazine on Jewish subjects.