ltlee1
2024-02-02 15:26:16 UTC
"Sand is a professor at Tel Aviv university and author of The Invention of the Jewish People. His quiet earthquake of a book is shaking historical faith in the link between Judaism and Israel.
...
The modern Israeli state was founded on belief in a "Jewish people" as a unified nation, established in biblical times, scattered by Rome, stranded in exile for 2,000 years, then returned to the Promised Land.
But according to Sand there was no exile, and as he seeks to prove by dense forensic archaeological and historical analysis, it is meaningless to talk today about a "people of Israel". At least not if by that you mean the Jews.
It is hard to imagine a more fundamental challenge to the idea of a modern Jewish state on the site of ancient Judea.
...
In Sand's analysis, early Judaism pioneered the art of conversion. To spread as quickly as it did, Christianity must have exploited an earlier Jewish expansion.
Later, another mass conversion took place in the Black Sea kingdom of Khazaria towards the end of the eighth century. The Khazar elite acquired Judaism as a form of diplomatic neutrality in the surrounding clashes between Christianity and Islam. That conversion gradually scooped up people of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, Sand believes, the main ancestors of Eastern European Jewry.
The Khazar conversion is no revelation. It was the basis for a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, which was reviled, then ignored, by mainstream Zionism. But the Jewish Khazars were recognised by early Zionist historians, albeit as a numerically insignificant curiosity. They were only dropped from the story in the 1960s. After the 1967 Six Day War, to be precise.
Sand notes that the disappearance of converts from Israeli history books coincides with increased occupation of Arab land. This is not a conspiracy theory. Zionism was a typical modern nation-building exercise. It followed the pattern by which most European national identities were forged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Intellectual elites propagated myths that met "the deep ideological needs of their culture and their society". In Israel's case that was the myth of ethnic origins in a biblical kingdom based around Jerusalem."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/17/shlomo-sand-judaism-israel-jewish
...
The modern Israeli state was founded on belief in a "Jewish people" as a unified nation, established in biblical times, scattered by Rome, stranded in exile for 2,000 years, then returned to the Promised Land.
But according to Sand there was no exile, and as he seeks to prove by dense forensic archaeological and historical analysis, it is meaningless to talk today about a "people of Israel". At least not if by that you mean the Jews.
It is hard to imagine a more fundamental challenge to the idea of a modern Jewish state on the site of ancient Judea.
...
In Sand's analysis, early Judaism pioneered the art of conversion. To spread as quickly as it did, Christianity must have exploited an earlier Jewish expansion.
Later, another mass conversion took place in the Black Sea kingdom of Khazaria towards the end of the eighth century. The Khazar elite acquired Judaism as a form of diplomatic neutrality in the surrounding clashes between Christianity and Islam. That conversion gradually scooped up people of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, Sand believes, the main ancestors of Eastern European Jewry.
The Khazar conversion is no revelation. It was the basis for a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, which was reviled, then ignored, by mainstream Zionism. But the Jewish Khazars were recognised by early Zionist historians, albeit as a numerically insignificant curiosity. They were only dropped from the story in the 1960s. After the 1967 Six Day War, to be precise.
Sand notes that the disappearance of converts from Israeli history books coincides with increased occupation of Arab land. This is not a conspiracy theory. Zionism was a typical modern nation-building exercise. It followed the pattern by which most European national identities were forged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Intellectual elites propagated myths that met "the deep ideological needs of their culture and their society". In Israel's case that was the myth of ethnic origins in a biblical kingdom based around Jerusalem."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/17/shlomo-sand-judaism-israel-jewish