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.
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.
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, has 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. He dedicated much of his article
instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli
historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of
Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.
The idea for the book came 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."
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."
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"?
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."
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. 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."
This article originally appeared in <http://www.thenational.ae/>The
National, published in Abu Dhabi.