Israeli
Best Seller Breaks
National Taboo
By Jonathan Cook
10 October,
2008
Countercurrents.org
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.
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 proselytising religion, desperate
for converts. “This is mentioned in the Roman literature of
the time.”
Jews travelled 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 criticised 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.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments
in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.