Shlomo Sand Ridiculed

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Shlomo Sand Ridiculed by Historian Simon

SchamaPosted by themiddle on 11/16/2009 in Jewlicious 34 Comments

Beit Shearim Menorah you know, just a little like the one we light 2000 years later because of

our vivid imaginations

Some of you may recall our celebration of French journalistic standardswhich permitted The

Invention of the Jewish People, a sad, ideologically bent book by Shlomo Sand to win the

Aujourdhui Award, given to the best non-fiction political or historical work from French

journalists.

That version of Sands book, published originally in Hebrew, was the French language version.

Unfortunately, the English speaking world is now in possession of this ode to hatred of the Jewish

people and it is on sale in England and the US. Its actually ranked in the mid-2000s on Amazon,which means books are selling.

What kind of person is Shlomo Sand? He is the kind of person who compares Israel in an interview

to a child born of a rape.

Most Israeli Jews believe in a historical right. If there is no such right, what justifies

our existence here? Arabs also ask me, after writing this book, how can I justify the

existence of Israel. I say to them that even the son of a rape has the right to live. It was a

kind of rape in 1947 and 48 and the Palestinian tragedy continues. But you can say the

same about the USA and Australia.

I think Israel belongs to the Israelis, not the Jews. We have a language, a culture, atheatre, a literature, our jokes our football and our politics. We are a people but we are

not just a Jewish people. I want to change the borders and definition of the state. I want

to make it a more civil nation to separate religion from its existence, to normalise

and democratise Israel. I think that Israel has to belong to all its citizens, not just the

Jewish ones. People call me radical but from a democratic perspective this is not so

radical.

Therefore, we glean that hes a scholar working at an Israeli university which affords him the

freedom to attack his country and society viciously and then have his ideas travel the world with

him so he can call the country subsidizing his salary, the child of a rape.And you can imagine he has serious support from the anti-Israel crowd, Jewish especially.

In ourprevious post, we brought in some scholarly attacks that decimate his book, but my favorite

new critique of his bookis by prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama, definitely not an

intellectual slouch.

Schama writes:

Sands self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against

those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single

racial stock of ancient Hebrews a position no one who has thought for a minute about

the history of the Jews would dream of taking.
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But, he argues, there actually was no mass forced exile so there can be no legitimate

return. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so contentious. It is

undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of this idea of the exile survives in most

fundamentalist accounts of Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish

children still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued that following

the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans emptied Judea. But what the Romans

did do, following the Jewish revolt of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after asecond rebellion in AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social

annihilation mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there was also the mass

extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture; the renaming of

Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals

and prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews remained in

what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews in Rome had already gone

there, not as a response to disaster but because they wanted to and were busy

proselytising.

All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to notice that it

undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestinerather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life

outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you

have the makings of that group yearning the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as

imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of

which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still

there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the

writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.

There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research

in this book. To list them all would try your patience.

His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is

belied by the countrys striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the

Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that

acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been

shown by those who think they know what real jews should look like. Sand is right in

believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the

Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a true

Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not tohimself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the

country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on

the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over

centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were

not mythical.

Sand would counter that such a refuge for the victims could have been in China, or on

the moon, for all that Palestine had to do with the Jews. But since his book fails to sever

the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience ever

since, it seems a bit much to ask Jews to do their bit for the sorely needed peace of the

region by replacing an ethnic mythology with an act of equally arbitrary culturaloblivion.


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Be sure to read the entire article in the Financial Times.

Very soon, expect to hear on campuses, in news programs on the radio and occasionally in TV

programs that the Jewish people are a myth. This stuff used to be said by the neo-Nazi loonies who

inhabit this world, but now we have a Jewish, son of Holocaust survivors, professor from an Israeli

university, ideologue whose ideology so blinds him to the basic identity of the Jewish people that he

has put this lie into the mainstream.

The problem with his argument is that HES the one who is touting the biological issue. It is clear to

most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that

heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isnt material whether my genes are

directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago although they might well be

its that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with

our identity. They define who we are, and not because of a couple of 19th Century historians, but

precisely because our traditions, our shared histories, our literature and even the enduring hatred

weve suffered, are a part of every Jew. If a prayer was being said 2000 years ago, and then 1000

years later a Jew who descends from a convert says the same prayer and teaches it to his children,

and that prayer is repeated 500 years later and again a thousand years later by Jews, even if they are

descended from converts to Judaism, that does not lessen their connection to the place where thatprayer, language and culture originated. It does not change the fact that they faced Jerusalem when

praying and wished that they could visit it and even live there upon the messiahs arrival.

Whether Sand approves or not, these ideas that form us exist because our ancestors and here I

may mean biological and I could mean ancestry in terms of ideas, faith and religious practice

lived in Jerusalem and Hebron and Shechem and Judea and Samaria.

If his problem is that Israel, a state defining itself as a Jewish state, exist on disputed land that the

Palestinians claim as theirs, then thats an entirely different issue and question. Trying to use

questionable history to address this complex situation is reprehensible.

If Walt & Mearsheimers The Israel Lobby wins TheMiddles 21st Century Protocols of the

Elders of Zion Award, Sands The Invention of the Jewish People wins the Temple was Never

Here, It Was in Nablus Upside Down History Prize, which I dedicate to Yasser Arafat.

(photo is from this article about the Beit Shearim site)

UPDATE: Shlomo Sand responded to Schama in an interview. We covered his comments in the post

Shlomo Sand is Angry at His Critics.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b74fdfd2-cfe1-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.htmlhttp://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134088http://www.jewlicious.com/2010/01/shlomo-sand-is-angry-at-his-critics/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b74fdfd2-cfe1-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.htmlhttp://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134088http://www.jewlicious.com/2010/01/shlomo-sand-is-angry-at-his-critics/

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Shlomo Sand Ridiculed