The invention of the Jewish people

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Shlomo Sand 2014

The invention of the Jewish people - Israel's founding myth on trial (original "? מתי ואיך הומצא העם היהודי") is a book by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand .

The book, the original title of which is directly translated as “When and how was the Jewish people invented?”, Sparked controversy in Israel and France , among others .

In the foreword written in 2009 for the German edition, Sand states "that the gap between my research results and the view of history widespread in Israel and elsewhere is alarmingly large". In doing so, he had done nothing other than to process material that had long been presented by the Israeli Zionist historiography, but had been forgotten, whereby “nothing really new” had appeared in his work.

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After the introduction on “Identity and Memory”, the headings for the five chapters of the book read: “I. Creating Nations: Sovereignty and Equality ”; "II. Myth history: In the beginning God created the nation ”; "III. The Invention of Exile: Conversion and Conversion ”; "IV. Regions of Silence: In Search of Lost (Jewish) Time ”; "V. 'We' and 'They': Identity Politics in Israel ”.

In the first two chapters, Sand follows the critique of the concept of nation as it was developed by Karl W. Deutsch , Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson . In doing so, he appeals to an understanding of the nation, as Ernest Renan in particular outlined in 1882.
As everywhere in Europe of nationalism , Jewish intellectuals would have constructed a long common history of identity with regard to the Jews by reading the Bible no longer as a theological work but as a history book. The Germans, for example, led the national search for roots to Arminius , the French to Vercingetorix or Clovis I. This need for a national history stretching far back into history also worked for Thomas Jefferson . While these founding stories can now be considered to have been overcome, Sand finds it astonishing that this does not apply to Israel today, because the Bible continues to be read and interpreted as a founding book.

In central Chapter III, Sand rejects the conception of Jewish exile as a historical reality. He mainly refers to the book The Land of Israel Past and Present , published in New York in 1918 , which David Ben Gurion and Jizchak Ben Zwi wrote in Hebrew before translating it into Yiddish for the American audience. They are convinced that the modern inhabitants of Palestine are ethnically closely linked to the dispersed Jews. Based on these authors, the first prime minister and the second president of the State of Israel, Sand concludes that the Jews dispersed in the course of natural and voluntary migrations. Many pagans in the Mediterranean were converted to Judaism, including in the Roman Empire , where Christianity soon established itself as a competitor. In Chapter IV. He follows up the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar , the Khazars and the Berbers in the Maghreb ; there were conversions everywhere.

Sand ends his book with a plea for a state of Israel in which citizenship is no longer related to religion and ethnocracy becomes a real democracy so that Jews and non-Jews can live side by side on an equal footing.

Reception of the book

Reception in Israel

The historian Israel Bartal, dean of the social sciences faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , was irritated by Sand's claim that the Khazars had systematically hushed up a Zionist-motivated falsification of history. Rather, this and the missionary phase of Judaism had already been explicitly presented in the standard work Mikhal Encyclopedia recommended by the Israeli Ministry of Education in the 1950s. Sand also did not mention current Israeli research projects on the subject. Bartal agrees with Sand that some Israeli state agencies instrumentalized history to justify inequality of treatment of minorities, but Sand mixes methodology and ideology, works intellectually superficial and supports his theses with shortened or edited passages from the works of other authors. In his endeavors to expose Zionist historians as ethnocentric nationalists and racists, Sand does not care about the facts and is also not up to date with the current scientific status of the national theories. Sand's source work is shameful: in one case he even evaluated a literary-satirical source from the 18th century as a non-fictional text, another time he made a literature professor cited as evidence professor of history. However, Bartal predicted the sad combination of aggressive one-dimensional terminology and blatant ignoring of details with great popularity in the electronic media. In book reviews, some of Sand's considerations met with approval, including his theses on the reasons why many Jews today are not descended from those of biblical Israel, the lack of a common language or culture among many diaspora Jews, and problems with the self-definition of the State of Israel ( e.g. to the extent that Judaism is defined in terms of traditional religious law). The reader, however, has great difficulty in distinguishing scientifically conclusive passages from the reproduction of banalities which are passed off as revolutionary insights; Furthermore, doors that have been open for a long time are constantly being smashed. The genetic findings will for example not sufficiently taken into account. The tendency to trace all of today's Jews back to converts fails u. a. on these facts. The return of the Sephardic Jews to Berber tribes is criticized as an absurd fallacy.

Sand's argument is based in part on hypotheses about the Khazars , which were already represented by Arthur Koestler in his book The Thirteenth Tribe . According to this, the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of converted Khazars. Such theses have often been described as untenable in specialist science and by journalists. Koestler himself was a Zionist, but his theses were also propagated by neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and the Iranian state. Journalists and historians object that there is definitely archaeological and historical evidence of the presence of Jews after the Bar Kochba uprising .

Some commentators classify Sand's approach as part of the constructivist turn in research on nationalism , as it was e.g. B. was established with Benedict Anderson , as well as in the tendencies of the so-called New Israeli historians . According to Sand, the concept of a Jewish people was an invention of Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the 19th century. This conclusion is characterized as "absurd" in discussions, especially since Israel or Judaism saw itself as a specific (chosen) people early on; Hardly any modern nation could fall back on 2500 years of efforts in this regard to construct its national identity. It is hardly plausible that, for example, the Jewishness of an Ethiopian Jew was invented in Germany in the 19th century.

Sand is held responsible for using extremely unclean individual quotations methodically isolated from their textual and historical context and for misusing them for hypotheses that cannot be proven. He also bases his arguments on the most esoteric and controversial interpretations. Experts in the history of Judaism accuse Sand of doing things of which he does not understand and that he relies on works that he cannot read in the original. Since he previously dealt mainly with the Marxist history of ideas of the 20th century, his expertise in ancient Judaism is questioned. Sand is called a pseudo- historian, his monograph a fiction.

International voices

For the French historian Maurice Sartre, it is not enough to question the book, which is understood as a polemical essay, because of its factual errors, but rather to examine whether his general theses are valid. The fact for him is that for the Jews, as for other peoples of the Middle East, the five or six centuries after the conquest of Alexander the Great was a period of extraordinary cultural, social and religious upheaval. It was a time of opening and mixing, from which everyone emerged changed on a large scale. Genetics have not yet provided any clarification for these processes. In addition, trusting their results would give priority to the stability of people over the duration of cultures. For example, it is unclear how many Jews converted to the dominant Christianity in the 4th century, especially since the multiplication of Christians in Palestine cannot only be explained through the conversion of pagans. There is still a need for research here.

Tony Judt states that sand challenges the traditional justification of a Jewish state. Because Israel's survival is not based on the credibility of the account of its ethnic origins. A major handicap is that the country insists on the exclusive demand for a Jewish identity. However, this insistence leads to non-Jewish citizens or residents of Israel being downgraded to second class. Because what is defined as “Jewishness” has fatal effects on those who are not seen as part of it. Judt sees the implicit conclusion from Sand's book that Israel would do better to identify itself as Israel and to learn to assess itself as such. For states would be recognized on the basis of their very existence as long as they can maintain and protect themselves and therefore count among the internationally accepted actors.

Reception in Germany

The educational scientist Micha Brumlik emphasizes that Shlomo Sand is trying to refute the self-portrayal of the Jews as an ethnic collective in barely interrupted continuity since the Augustan period, just as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer once did the self-portrayal of the Greeks as descendants of the ancient Hellenes tried to deconstruct. Sand himself made explicit reference to this orientalist. His Israeli critics such as Israel Bartal or Anita Shapira missed the fact that Sand did not accuse Zionist historiography of withholding important facts, but rather that its refinement consists in "re-presenting the results of 'Zionist' research that have been ignored by the public". Sand's argumentation allows no other conclusion than that the narrative of expulsion and repatriation, as contained in the proclamation document of the State of Israel of May 15, 1948, is a “historical myth” that “has nothing to do with the real history of the Jews Has". By distinguishing between ethnos as a community of origin and descent and demos as a voluntary association of citizens to establish a free political community, he advocates an Israel as the state of all its citizens: "If the historical community of descent does not exist, the declaration of independence was wrong and the Zionist state no longer has a historical reason. "

For Klaus Bringmann , the review that appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on April 13, 2010 reads the book “as a historical work and at the same time as a general attack on the Zionist national consciousness with therapeutic intent”. This is because 25 percent of the nominal citizens of Israel are second-class citizens who are denied recognition as Jews as descendants of non-Jewish mothers in accordance with the provisions of the religious law. According to Sand's idea, however, they should be integrated into the common democratic state. This intention leads to an "alarmist tone" in which Sand calls for a return from a dead end into which he sees his country falling.
The historical derivation of his theses convinced Bringmann. Judaism was a successful missionary religion, because in its monotheism religion was ethicalized and led to social welfare, which had an attractive effect on the pagan environment. So there is "much to be said for the thesis that the majority of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe were descendants of the Khazarian converts". Bringmann therefore agrees with Sand when he states that today's Jews cannot be a society of descent in the succession of the ancient Judeans in any historical, but at most in a symbolic sense. Sand called the meaningful Zionist view of history "radically, knowledgeable and with great courage" into question, which made the irritations triggered in Israel understandable.

Sand defends his theses in an interview with the structure in May 2010. An attached article by Jörg Bremer shows in his sense that there is no archaeological evidence for a “ kingdom of David ”, as the Israeli state myth claims.

For the Judaist Edna Brocke , Sand belongs to the group of "Canaanites", who had a relative heyday in the pre-state period and in the early days of the State of Israel and who would have opposed the Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The background is a socialist idea, Judaism is just a religion and has nothing to do with an ontic level, certainly not with a territorial affiliation. Shlomo Sand did nothing else than to repackage these ideas in such a way that they looked like a scientific work. Edna Brocke criticizes: “He does not argue in an internal Jewish way, he argues like someone who looks at it from the outside by saying that I dissociate myself from this group, even if my mother was Jewish and I am the son of a Jewish mother, I understand myself in my being a Jew only as a member of the religious community. I reject this and the other dimension, I claim, does not exist. "

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Christian Weber evaluated the research results of a team led by the geneticist Harry Ostrer from the School of Medicine at New York University as a refutation of Sand's theses. This published a study in June 2010, according to which the different groups of Diaspora Jews have common genetic characteristics.

The Judaist Luise Hirsch found on H-Soz-Kult to the indignation or approval of the title that the fundamental "inventiveness" of every nation was a sociological truism. Belonging to Judaism is also unspectacular, "like every modern nationality based on descent or a legal act". The fact that Judaism always "also included converts was never a secret or even a taboo." Sand attributes this popular invention above all to Heinrich Graetz and tries to completely refute his theses as an "anti-Graetz". In doing so, he would make a “highly critical” selection of documents. Even more annoying is the conspiracy-theoretical tenor that runs through the book that historians corrupted by Zionism have only suppressed the truth while the author reveals that everything was very different. Sand also did away with some popular historical legends such as the Exodus or the complete dispersion of the Jews as God's punishment for the murder of Christ , but this has long been refuted by Israeli archeology. Nevertheless, Sand accuses Jewish historians of keeping silent about what z. B. according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica is untrue. Rather, he himself conceals facts that contradict his “extremely simplistic view of history”. Sand opposes "the idea (nowhere seriously represented) that 'all' Jews are biologically related, with the assertion that the entire Jewish presence outside Palestine, with insignificant exceptions, goes back to conversion". In contrast, the only real Jews for him are the Palestinians, whom he regards as descendants of the ancient Hebrews. He always endeavors to "become more absurd [de] allegations" such as the Khazar thesis advocated by "historians who are not to be taken seriously", but deny the extensively documented migration of large parts of German Jews to Poland-Lithuania and thus place himself outside of the specialist field Minimal consensus. In the absence of sources, Sand falls back on ethno-romantic speculations by the early Zionist Israel Belkind that the Arabs living in the country were part of his people because their mentality was reminiscent of that of the Jewish patriarchs , so that they would soon be absorbed by the Jewish immigrants. This lacked any empirical basis and, as history showed, also proved to be completely useless. Sand also ignores the findings of population genetics , as there is no place in "his Manichaean worldview" for a "mixed people". On the one hand, genetic similarities of Jewish populations all over the world made it possible to draw a cautious conclusion about common ancestors going back to antiquity. On the other hand, there are significant genetic similarities between Palestinians and Jews that they do not share with others. Sand's concern, "that Israel should no longer define itself as an ethnic, but as a political nation of equal citizens, that its right to exist is based simply on its existence and not in a mythical 'homecoming'", is respectable, but his argumentation proves the one bad service.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Page 16, page number according to the 2010 edition by Propylaea
  2. ↑ Cf. Shlomo Sand, De la nation et du “peuple juif” chez Renan , Les liens qui libèrent, Paris 2009. - In this book he shows that Theodor Mommsen in the second volume of his Roman history , Marc Bloch and Raymond Aron a similar one Draw up an image of Judaism, as is the case with Renan and himself (pp. 39–43).
  3. ↑ pp. 279-283
  4. ↑ a b Israel Bartal: Inventing an invention in Haaretz , June 7, 2008, online: [1]
  5. ^ A b c Hillel Halkin: Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel's Foes Applaud in Forward , June 24, 2009
  6. ↑ Simon Schama : The Invention of the Jewish People - Review in Financial Times , November 14, 2009, excerpts online Shlomo Sand Ridiculed by Historian Simon Schama
  7. ↑ a b Anita Shapira : The Jewish-people deniers in The Journal of Israeli History , Vol. 28, No. 1, March 2009, 63–72, online [2]
  8. ↑ Nadav Shragai: It's in our DNA ( Memento of March 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) in Yisrael Hayom , March 5, 2010
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g Seth J. Frantzman: Shlomo Sand's Revisionist Pseudo-History of the Jewish People December 5, 2008
  10. ↑ a b c Lee Kaplan: Shlomo Sand - the Professor of Pseudo-History October 5, 2009
  11. ↑ Ofri Ilani: Shattering a 'national mythology' in Haaretz , March 21st 2008
  12. ↑ Martin Goodman : Secta and natio ( Memento of July 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), book review in: The Times Literary Supplement February 26, 2010.
  13. ↑ Maurice Sartre, “ At-on inventé le peuple juif? ", Pp. 178, 184, in: Le débat, janvier-février 2010, numéro 158, ed. by Pierre Nora , Gallimard, Paris 2010, pp. 177-184.
  14. ↑ Tony Judt, Israël et les juifs , pp. 174–175, in: Le débat, janvier-février 2010, numéro 158, ed. by Pierre Nora, Gallimard, Paris 2010, pp. 172–176.
  15. ↑ Micha Brumlik, The Jews - in the end not a people? In: Insight 03 . Bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute . Spring 2010, 2nd year ISSN  1868-4211 , p. 49 f. - In a similar version on April 27, 2010 in the “Frankfurter Rundschau”.
  16. ↑ Here read. (Accessed May 12, 2010.)
  17. ↑ No. 5/2010. Sand: S. 5. - Bremer: Analysis: Archeology and Nationalism. An unholy alliance: Israel's founding myth literally builds on King David and his successors. The modern nation of Israel appeals to him. If archaeologists doubt this reading, they trigger far more than a dispute between scholars. Pp. 6-11. Readable online
  18. ↑ Deutschlandfunk day after day: Conversation with Edna Brocke. The Role of Religion in Israel, Part 5 , from Aug. 23, 2013, viewed on Aug. 29, 2013.
  19. ↑ See Gil Atzmon, Li Hao, Itsik Pe'er, Christopher Velez, Alexander Pearlman, Pier Francesco Palamara, Bernice Morrow, Eitan Friedman, Carole Oddoux, Edward Burns & Harry Ostrer: Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. In: The American Journal of Human Genetics. Volume 86, Issue 6, June 3, 2010, pp. 850–859 ( doi : 10.1016 / j.ajhg.2010.04.015 )
  20. ^ Christian Weber: Genesis research - ancestors from Judea . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 4th 2010
  21. ↑ The American geneticist Noah Rosenberg came to a more cautious assessment: The Khazar theory is neither supported nor completely brought down by this study, according to Michael Balter: Tracing the Roots of Jewishness ( Memento of March 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) , in : Sciencemag dated June 3, 2010
  22. ↑ Luise Hirsch about sand, Shlomo: The invention of the Jewish people. Israel's founding myth put to the test. Berlin 2010 , (PDF, 76kb) H-Soz-u-Kult from May 2, 2011