- 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. 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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, has called the book
"fascinating and challenging."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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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.
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- Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being
obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien
to Judaism, he added.
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- "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.
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- "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.
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- "But once I started looking at the evidence, I
discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
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- "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.
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- "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."
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- 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."
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- 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 proselytizing
religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman
literature of the time."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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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- This article originally appeared in
<http://www.thenational.ae/>The National, published in Abu
Dhabi.
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