Shlomo SandThe Invention of the Jewish People

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People is a bold and revolutionary work that challenges long-held assumptions with intellectual fearlessness and historical precision. In this meticulously researched masterpiece, Sand takes readers on a provocative journey through the myths and constructions of national identity, daring to ask the question so few have had the courage to voice: What if the story of a unified Jewish people, exiled and then miraculously returned, is more legend than fact?Sand doesn’t merely poke holes in the official narrative, he deconstructs it with scholarly depth and a profound moral compass. From tracing the complex origins of Jewish communities around the world to exposing the 19th-century nationalist frameworks that shaped modern Zionist ideology, Sand reveals how history has been bent to serve political ends.What makes this book extraordinary is not only its academic weight, but its clarity and accessibility. It opens a space for honest conversation about identity, diaspora, and historical memory, not as tools for division, but as windows into our shared humanity.Courageous, unsettling, and essential, The Invention of the Jewish People is a literary and intellectual earthquake. It is a must-read for anyone who believes that truth matters more than dogma, and that history must be examined, not weaponised.

What I particularly liked about this book is that Sand takes a lot of time to give his potential oppenents a run for their money. It is a very impressive work of scholarship - the reading list is amazing - though there is certainly no sense of laboured prose in the sprightly English translation. All national and communal self images are exercises in imagination - I'm a Scot, so I know - so criticing them in the light of scholarly research is pretty easy, and can cause offense. This does not invalidate the scholarship, and Sands takes us through not only the history of Jewish communities, but the history of the development of the idea of a special type of biological/racial community, calling themselves Jews. He is pretty convincing that this is an implausible idea, based on the Christian myth of the wandering Jew (punished for murdering God) amd married to 19th Century German racial theories. I doubt if a dispassionate observer would be able to demolish this thesis, at least so long as they are not living in the Middle East. But if you are a Jew living in Israel, it is hard to see how you can give up the current myths in favour of others, unless you can see some security for the future, and it is not obvious how this can be done. It is hard to think of Palistinian "Israelis" happily becoming full citizen "Israelis" - the name would not endure, or Jewish Israelis giving up the idea of Israel. Still, it is a step forward to do away with, or at least question, the more obviously racist forms of Zionism, and this book is a formidable challenge to that idea. Maybe there is some value in the idea of a "Jewish Democracy" (I live happily in a Monarchical democracy, with Republicanism as a respectable weekend pursuit). Great book, but no real road map anywhere at present, so perhaps it is meant only to ginger up intenal Israeli debates.

I bought and read this book in Kindle form after the outbreak of yet another military Israel-Palestine conflict with terrible consequences for civilians. I thought that I had a reasonably good grasp of the history of the conflict but Shlomo Sand has proven me wrong with his masterful book.The emphasis of the book is on identity and the concepts of ‘people’ and ‘nation’, as applied to the state of Israel. He sets the scene in the first chapter, where he explains that in the Israeli university system there is a complete separation between departments of ‘History’ and ‘Jewish History’, the latter being where the Biblical myths of Jewish origin, exile and the Chosen People are preserved and disseminated within the school education system.One reason why I was attracted to this book was that back in the seventies I read Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe about the Khazar kingdom, which converted en masse to Judaism during the so-called ‘dark ages’ (I had also read Koestler’s excellent Thieves in the Night about the early post-war Palestine during the British Mandate).Shlomo Sand provides a convincing historical context for the Khazar conversion by considering it in the context of many other accounts of conversion to Judaism across North Africa and in the Arabian peninsula, all of which are denied or ignored by the Jewish History establishment.I finished the book this morning by reading the Afterword, in which Shlomo reflects in depth on the issues raised in the book and the angry criticism that it has generated in some quarters, before discussing the global trends that he sees as challenging for the current Israeli state and the identity myths that it conserves and propagates. As I write this review, some of his predictions seem to be borne out by a shift in global sentiment. Thank you for such a powerful educational experience, Shlomo!