Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
Tout le monde devrait lire ce livre ça devrait être obligatoire tant c’est instructif et important. J’ai appris tellement de choses et c’est expliqué de façon si pédagogique, rigoureuse et méthodique. Une lecture majeure qui s’impose à tous ceux qui veulent comprendre l’essence historique du sionisme et ses conséquences dramatiques sur la Palestine.
This book is rather dense and I do not feel equipped at the moment to absorb it.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
a genealogy of the idea of a unified, discrete & continuous group of Jewish people, as an unbroken chain of an ancient biblical ethnos upon which Israel/Zionism is founded. it's obviously written for an audience with much more familiarity with the bible & Jewish history, so a lot of details were lost on me. but as a layman it helped me to understand the broad strokes of how European notions of nations, states, eugenics, race & anti-Semitism influence the Zionism employed in the creation of the settler-colonial apartheid in Israel today
maybe i've read this wrong, but Sand presents very disappointing recommendations to solve the problem of the Israeli ethnostate. he offers a more democratic Israel & a more inclusive Israeli identity, one that includes Palestinians, rather than considering any efforts towards decolonization and/or reparation at all. it might not be in his capacity to do so as a historian, or in this book's capacity as the history of an idea, but it ended on a very lukewarm, if not sour note
maybe i've read this wrong, but Sand presents very disappointing recommendations to solve the problem of the Israeli ethnostate. he offers a more democratic Israel & a more inclusive Israeli identity, one that includes Palestinians, rather than considering any efforts towards decolonization and/or reparation at all. it might not be in his capacity to do so as a historian, or in this book's capacity as the history of an idea, but it ended on a very lukewarm, if not sour note
informative
slow-paced
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
HOLY GUACAMOLE WAS THIS THOUGH TO READ!
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration of their political freedom” - The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948
“The Invention Of The Jewish People” is a controversial, but interesting book. I’ve learned a lot by Sand and his explanations on how Jewish people became a religious group living in today’s Israel.
The quote I included from the Declaration says the Jewish (or Israelites) were “exiled” - well - they were not. The Romans had never exiled the population in the countries they conquered - from the Kingdom of Judea to the Assyrians and Babylonians, an then the exaggeration of how many died during the massacre in Jerusalem.
“And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even unto the other, and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known” (Deut. 28:64) - I mean this is just something I’m curious about - if it said in The Torah that the Jews were going to get scattered, why are the Jews saying they were “exiled”? WELLL, the paradigm of deportation was important on constructing something that would stay as a long-term memory. BUT, the myth of exile ITSELF came apparently from the Christian tradition, which flowed into the Jewish tradition and became a part of the history.
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration of their political freedom” - The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948
“The Invention Of The Jewish People” is a controversial, but interesting book. I’ve learned a lot by Sand and his explanations on how Jewish people became a religious group living in today’s Israel.
The quote I included from the Declaration says the Jewish (or Israelites) were “exiled” - well - they were not. The Romans had never exiled the population in the countries they conquered - from the Kingdom of Judea to the Assyrians and Babylonians, an then the exaggeration of how many died during the massacre in Jerusalem.
“And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even unto the other, and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known” (Deut. 28:64) - I mean this is just something I’m curious about - if it said in The Torah that the Jews were going to get scattered, why are the Jews saying they were “exiled”? WELLL, the paradigm of deportation was important on constructing something that would stay as a long-term memory. BUT, the myth of exile ITSELF came apparently from the Christian tradition, which flowed into the Jewish tradition and became a part of the history.
Shlomo Sand is one of the academic writers that Israel loves to hate. He vigorously researches his work and turns up evidence of things that the Israeli leadership, and Zionist academia would rather keep hidden. The more evidence unearthed that disproves the fictitious historic claim to the land of Israel, the more grasping and ill-tempered these people get. This book is a wide ranging work detailing the early history of the Jewish people and their subsequent diaspora which came about largely as a matter of choice for proselytising Jews, eager to welcome more members to their burgeoning faith. This method of spreading the word continued through the Hasmosean kingdoms through to the Khazars and beyond.
In the latter stages of the book there is a very disturbing chapter detailing the errors the Israeli government are making in their research of the genetic “design” of Jews. This ludicrous policy takes from the works of the early geneticists who brought about the theories of supreme beings and master-races, ideologies which the Nazi’s were to exploit so rigidly many years later. The intermarriage and multicultural relationships down the centuries will have mixed any real purity from the Jews of today, and even if it hadn’t, what would be the point of the research other than to create a tiered system of Judaism?
Judaism is a religion and like all religions it spread through legitimate and illegitimate means. There have always been Jews to some extent in the land of Palestine, or Israel as we now call it, but they have almost certainly always been a minority, even today. This gets to the crux of the matter. Zionists dislike the facts that are laid bare here about an Arab population continually being the dominant one in the middle east, demographically speaking. First it was polytheistic pagan peoples and latterly the followers of Islam.
As is tradition now in book reviewing, most reviews (particularly from the Hebrew press, the language in which the book was first published) label the author as an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew. These unfair and illegitimate tropes have no place in the sober analysis of a text. They give the reviewer the excuse to not thoroughly examine the work and rely on cheap personal attacks which have no basis in reality. The truth is that Shlomo Sand gets far more right than he gets wrong, and his politics are not matched by those of the Zionist state. It is an excellent book that at its very core extols the belief that the Palestinian Arabs of today can co-exist peacefully with the Jews in Palestine as traditionally they always did before the creation of the modern state of Israel, for it is a modern creation.
In the latter stages of the book there is a very disturbing chapter detailing the errors the Israeli government are making in their research of the genetic “design” of Jews. This ludicrous policy takes from the works of the early geneticists who brought about the theories of supreme beings and master-races, ideologies which the Nazi’s were to exploit so rigidly many years later. The intermarriage and multicultural relationships down the centuries will have mixed any real purity from the Jews of today, and even if it hadn’t, what would be the point of the research other than to create a tiered system of Judaism?
Judaism is a religion and like all religions it spread through legitimate and illegitimate means. There have always been Jews to some extent in the land of Palestine, or Israel as we now call it, but they have almost certainly always been a minority, even today. This gets to the crux of the matter. Zionists dislike the facts that are laid bare here about an Arab population continually being the dominant one in the middle east, demographically speaking. First it was polytheistic pagan peoples and latterly the followers of Islam.
As is tradition now in book reviewing, most reviews (particularly from the Hebrew press, the language in which the book was first published) label the author as an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew. These unfair and illegitimate tropes have no place in the sober analysis of a text. They give the reviewer the excuse to not thoroughly examine the work and rely on cheap personal attacks which have no basis in reality. The truth is that Shlomo Sand gets far more right than he gets wrong, and his politics are not matched by those of the Zionist state. It is an excellent book that at its very core extols the belief that the Palestinian Arabs of today can co-exist peacefully with the Jews in Palestine as traditionally they always did before the creation of the modern state of Israel, for it is a modern creation.
Per the editorial blurb, this is a historical tour de force indeed.
The introduction tells Sand’s story and reason for writing. Noting that multiple women wanting to do aliyah were told no because of non-Jewish mothers, I thought that this issue itself could be a full chapter.
Around 150, he talks about Maccabean forcible conversion. I knew it well re the Idumeans, like Herod’s ancestors. Forgot about the Samaritans, and in grokking Josephus, don’t think I’d read about the Itureans in Galilee.
In conjunction, he notes something I already knew in part: That the revolt was purely religious freedom related, and not anti-Hellenism. After all, by John Hyrcanus, Maccabees are using Greek names.
He also notes Hanukkah was originally pagan. And he’s right! And, this explains why it was relatively “low” in Jewish life until modern times. It was too Messianic. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-the-more-likely-explanation-of-the-menorah-1.5346542
More here https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hanukkah-and-the-winter-solstice/
He’s good on describing Judaism’s expansion by evangelism in the eastern Mediterranean, then Rome itself, then down to late classical antiquity Yemen. He also offers plausible reasons why Jews in Palestine declined after the Islamic conquest, including the tax-free Muslim advantage, plus Islam being more congenial than Christianity. (Besides hating Byzantium and “orthodox” Christianity, it’s arguable that Jacobites, if they took the “two persons as well as two natures” far enough, could see Jesus in a quasi-Ebionite way and convert to Islam as well.) He notes that pre-statehood Zionists in 20th century Palestine even presumed that the Palestinians were ethnic kin.
Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv Univ. used philology to conclude that most (now former) Spanish Sephardim were of Berber origin, or Arab-Berber, and not Jewish by ethnos.
Next, he goes to the Khazar Khanate. He does NOT just recapitulate Koestler. First, he notes that both Jewish and Russian historians in the first half of the 20th century did sound work on the Khanate history. In short, it lasted long enough that Judaism surely became the religion of at least a fair chunk of the masses, not just the rulers. Second, at least one subtribe can be clearly shown to have migrated with the Magyars when they left the Khanate and headed to the Hungarian plain.
He also goes beyond (from what I remember) of Koestler to pull in linguistics and philology. Everybody knows that Yiddish is a Germanic language, but one with a number of Slavic words and a few Hebrew ones. Not everybody knows that it also has a number of Turkic words, including the word “to pray.” Oops. (For the anti-Khazar Zionists, that is.) It’s things like this, given that the work on the history side by Abraham Polok is pre-WWII, at least in his earlier work, that has historians like Tony Judt saying the book has little new for the academic.
Related, Sand notes that the number of Rhineland German Jews simply wasn’t great enough to have caused the mass of Eastern European Jewry. Conclusion? Some version of the “Khazar hypothesis” is surely true.
From this, Sand does some speculating on the origins and development of the Yiddish language.
He then goes beyond Koestler in one other way, since such things didn’t exist in the 1970s. He addresses DNA testing, and not just that narrowly and specifically related to the Khazar theory. He notes that DNA testing is still in its infancy, that because it offers inconclusive results in many cases it can be (and is) “spun,” and this:
“Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Lapps in northern Scandinavia, and so on, such Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude and dangerous racism.”
Earlier, he notes the irony of descendants of Jews who suffered brutally from the race-essentialist ideas of the Nazis now engaging in race-essentialism themselves. He adds that some early Zionists supported eugenic ideas.
He also notes that words like “Sephardi” and above all “Ashkhenazi” are cultural, ultimately religious (and linguistic, I would add) markers, not ethnic ones.
Sand wraps his last chapter by noting the development of “Israeli identity” in the new state, and Ben-Gurion engaging in a mix of apparent surrender to and actual manipulation of the rabbinate. The flip side, he says, is many Zionists refusing to talk about an Israeli people. That may be in part because an Ashkenazi Eastern European culture has not been forcible on other Israeli Jews.
He concludes with a brief response to his critics.
One thing is missing from this book. It’s not huge, but it’s not minuscule, either. Based on his introductory passage about matrilineality, and on things from the Christian New Testament, and other evidence from that time about how this wasn’t always the case, it would have been nice for Sand to spend, oh, half a dozen pages more directly on this issue, especially with the rise of genetic testing.
Sand’s original conclusion, that Israel as we know today cannot stand with its current citizenship definition as the Arab population inside its 1948 boundaries grows, seems too wishful today. Only time will tell.
Why is this book so controversial? In part, from being translated into the language in which I read it, as well as French. Being published in Hebrew, it made only a modest stir inside Israel. But, when translated, Zionists could see a cat being let out of the bag.
Related? I rarely do this, but most one-star reviewers have to be critiqued. They basically fall into two camps. One, on the Khazar issue, claim this is nothing but a repeat of Koestler. LIE.
Another claims that he never talks about the Jewish people. (He notes people raised Jewish, who converted to Christianity, then applied for Israeli citizenship based on Israeli nationality and were denied, with Israel’s supreme court saying a “Jewish nationality” existed but an “Israeli nationality” did not.) Given what I have shown he does in the first chapter, talking about “people” vs “nation” and his recap at the end, this too is a LIE.
LIE is the only word that can be used.
The introduction tells Sand’s story and reason for writing. Noting that multiple women wanting to do aliyah were told no because of non-Jewish mothers, I thought that this issue itself could be a full chapter.
Around 150, he talks about Maccabean forcible conversion. I knew it well re the Idumeans, like Herod’s ancestors. Forgot about the Samaritans, and in grokking Josephus, don’t think I’d read about the Itureans in Galilee.
In conjunction, he notes something I already knew in part: That the revolt was purely religious freedom related, and not anti-Hellenism. After all, by John Hyrcanus, Maccabees are using Greek names.
He also notes Hanukkah was originally pagan. And he’s right! And, this explains why it was relatively “low” in Jewish life until modern times. It was too Messianic. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-the-more-likely-explanation-of-the-menorah-1.5346542
More here https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hanukkah-and-the-winter-solstice/
He’s good on describing Judaism’s expansion by evangelism in the eastern Mediterranean, then Rome itself, then down to late classical antiquity Yemen. He also offers plausible reasons why Jews in Palestine declined after the Islamic conquest, including the tax-free Muslim advantage, plus Islam being more congenial than Christianity. (Besides hating Byzantium and “orthodox” Christianity, it’s arguable that Jacobites, if they took the “two persons as well as two natures” far enough, could see Jesus in a quasi-Ebionite way and convert to Islam as well.) He notes that pre-statehood Zionists in 20th century Palestine even presumed that the Palestinians were ethnic kin.
Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv Univ. used philology to conclude that most (now former) Spanish Sephardim were of Berber origin, or Arab-Berber, and not Jewish by ethnos.
Next, he goes to the Khazar Khanate. He does NOT just recapitulate Koestler. First, he notes that both Jewish and Russian historians in the first half of the 20th century did sound work on the Khanate history. In short, it lasted long enough that Judaism surely became the religion of at least a fair chunk of the masses, not just the rulers. Second, at least one subtribe can be clearly shown to have migrated with the Magyars when they left the Khanate and headed to the Hungarian plain.
He also goes beyond (from what I remember) of Koestler to pull in linguistics and philology. Everybody knows that Yiddish is a Germanic language, but one with a number of Slavic words and a few Hebrew ones. Not everybody knows that it also has a number of Turkic words, including the word “to pray.” Oops. (For the anti-Khazar Zionists, that is.) It’s things like this, given that the work on the history side by Abraham Polok is pre-WWII, at least in his earlier work, that has historians like Tony Judt saying the book has little new for the academic.
Related, Sand notes that the number of Rhineland German Jews simply wasn’t great enough to have caused the mass of Eastern European Jewry. Conclusion? Some version of the “Khazar hypothesis” is surely true.
From this, Sand does some speculating on the origins and development of the Yiddish language.
He then goes beyond Koestler in one other way, since such things didn’t exist in the 1970s. He addresses DNA testing, and not just that narrowly and specifically related to the Khazar theory. He notes that DNA testing is still in its infancy, that because it offers inconclusive results in many cases it can be (and is) “spun,” and this:
“Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Lapps in northern Scandinavia, and so on, such Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude and dangerous racism.”
Earlier, he notes the irony of descendants of Jews who suffered brutally from the race-essentialist ideas of the Nazis now engaging in race-essentialism themselves. He adds that some early Zionists supported eugenic ideas.
He also notes that words like “Sephardi” and above all “Ashkhenazi” are cultural, ultimately religious (and linguistic, I would add) markers, not ethnic ones.
Sand wraps his last chapter by noting the development of “Israeli identity” in the new state, and Ben-Gurion engaging in a mix of apparent surrender to and actual manipulation of the rabbinate. The flip side, he says, is many Zionists refusing to talk about an Israeli people. That may be in part because an Ashkenazi Eastern European culture has not been forcible on other Israeli Jews.
He concludes with a brief response to his critics.
One thing is missing from this book. It’s not huge, but it’s not minuscule, either. Based on his introductory passage about matrilineality, and on things from the Christian New Testament, and other evidence from that time about how this wasn’t always the case, it would have been nice for Sand to spend, oh, half a dozen pages more directly on this issue, especially with the rise of genetic testing.
Sand’s original conclusion, that Israel as we know today cannot stand with its current citizenship definition as the Arab population inside its 1948 boundaries grows, seems too wishful today. Only time will tell.
Why is this book so controversial? In part, from being translated into the language in which I read it, as well as French. Being published in Hebrew, it made only a modest stir inside Israel. But, when translated, Zionists could see a cat being let out of the bag.
Related? I rarely do this, but most one-star reviewers have to be critiqued. They basically fall into two camps. One, on the Khazar issue, claim this is nothing but a repeat of Koestler. LIE.
Another claims that he never talks about the Jewish people. (He notes people raised Jewish, who converted to Christianity, then applied for Israeli citizenship based on Israeli nationality and were denied, with Israel’s supreme court saying a “Jewish nationality” existed but an “Israeli nationality” did not.) Given what I have shown he does in the first chapter, talking about “people” vs “nation” and his recap at the end, this too is a LIE.
LIE is the only word that can be used.
A very interesting critique of national myths and nationalism in home and foreign affairs. Valid for almost every country.