A polemic written in sand

Shlomo Sand has failed to demolish the "myths" on which the history of the Jewish people has been constructed.

By ROBERT WISTRICH
sand (photo credit: Courtesy)
sand
(photo credit: Courtesy)
DURING THE PAST 20 YEARS THE PREVIOUSLY dominant Zionist narrative of the history of the Jewish people has taken something of a battering, not least in Israel itself. The Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand perhaps intended his own debunking of the idea of “the Jewish people” to be the final coup de grace.
A key point in his counter-narrative has been well summarized by Israeli author and translator Hillel Halkin as follows: the Jews are “a non-people masquerading as a people to justify stealing another people’s homeland.” The “myth” of Jewish peoplehood, according to Sand, was first concocted by German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in the mid-19th century, under the influence of German völkisch nationalism. He gave the lead to other Jewish historians like Simon Dubnow (a non-Zionist) and Ben-Zion Dinur to fabricate a mythical ethnocentric link to the Holy Land and to invent the historical hoax of a long, unbroken genealogy linking Jews to their Biblical ancestors.
Sand depicts this narrative as an invaluable fiction conjured up by the Zionist movement to justify its conquest of Palestine. The fable of continuity was then reinforced by successive waves of eminent Israeli scholars (whose work Sand simultaneously relies on and then cavalierly dismisses), who were determined to reinforce the unitary narrative that Jews constitute a single ethnic group.
For Sand it is important to insist that there was no Jewish “exile” following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Jews of Palestine were never forced out and hence they never “returned” – making the entire Zionist narrative of “exile” and “return” null and void. But that is not all, since Sand’s real purpose is to show that contemporary Jewry has absolutely no historical, cultural or biological link to the Jews of biblical antiquity.
According to his version of history we are certainly not the descendants of King David nor of the prophets of Israel. We have our roots in forgotten peoples like the Himyars of Southern Arabia, North African Berbers and, especially, the Turkic Khazars from Central Asia, who converted to Judaism more than a thousand years ago. When it comes to Palestine, therefore, we are basically impostors with little, if any, historic connection to the land beyond artificially “implanted memories.” Palestinian Arab villagers on the other hand, are not merely the land’s indigenous inhabitants but the true descendants of those ancient Jews who converted to Islam after the Arab conquest of Palestine.
SAND’S DISCUSSION OF THE KHAZARS (WHICH IS IN part a recycling of Arthur Koestler’s best-selling “The Thirteenth Tribe,” published in 1976) is both typical of his methodology and, at times, unintentionally comical in its assumptions. He claims that the story of the Khazar kingdom that ruled the steppes of southern Russia was suppressed since these Turkicspeaking converts to Judaism did not fit the ethno-nationalist Zionist narrative, even though they formed the core of East European Jewry. Be that as it may, the Khazar hypothesis was never covered up by anyone. As a child in London in the late 1950s I knew about these blue-eyed, red-haired warriors of Central Asia – where my parents had been deported by Stalin. In my experience, most Israeli students today have also heard about the Khazars, too.
The Khazar theory is above all a favorite theme of anti-Semites and anti- Zionists. Among the enthusiasts are White Power supremacists, Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis who think the US government is in the grip of “Khazar” Jews; Russian Orthodox and neo-pagan nationalists who believe that “Khazar-Zionists” imposed the gulag penal system on their countrymen in revenge for past persecution; and, above all, Arab nationalists, as well as Islamists, delighted to “discover” (like Sand) that Ashkenazi Jews are “Asiatic” interlopers with no link to Palestine or the biblical Israelites. It is striking how uninterested Sand is in this tainted company or in the wider issue of anti-Semitism as a fundamental component in Jewish collective memory and national consciousness.
THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, SAND often appears obsessed by the question of “origins” while sliding over the racist layers that underlay so much discussion of the subject. Ironically, he expends a great deal of energy in ridiculing genetic studies yet more recent scientific research in this field goes completely against his assumptions. It indicates that there are strong genetic links across the Diaspora between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews; that Jews do have a common origin in the Middle East; and that there is more genetic similarity between Jews than with non-Jews in the same geographic area.
Such evidence will not, of course, shake Sand from his a priori conviction that Zionism deliberately promotes a sense of biological difference and separation from other nations. However, few if any mainstream Zionists, let alone historians of Jewish nationalism, have ever believed in or espoused the idea of an ethnically pure Jewry. Nor did they have any need to “invent” a concept of Jewish peoplehood, since it had indeed existed throughout the ages and without it Zionism would have had no resonance at all. The entire biblical text is, after all, permeated with the sense of Israel’s distinct and unique peoplehood, which lies at the very core of the Jewish religion.
Until the late 18th century this selfunderstanding that Jews were indeed a nation was widely shared by virtually all the peoples among whom they lived, whether Christian, Muslim or others. In comparison, even such older European nations like the French and Spanish are relative newcomers, not to mention the Italians, Germans or Americans.
The case of the Palestinian Arabs whose national consciousness is less than a century old (as against more than 2,500 years of Jewish peoplehood) is an even more glaring example of the inverted world that Sand – like so many “post-Zionists” – appears to inhabit. This was, of course, no barrier to Sand’s book achieving constant exposure, publicity and even best-seller status in France, Israel and a few other countries. The market for negating Israel’s rights and moral or historical legitimacy is, after all, continually expanding.
Almost anyone who steps forward today to suggest that the Israeli nation is a fiction or a Zionist fabrication is likely to receive a sympathetic hearing. Israelis (especially academics) who do so are particularly lionized in the wider world – rapidly acquiring celebrity status, and praised to the skies as brave dissidents. Sand’s work clearly fits this Zeitgeist in which delegitimization of Israel is rampant. To go against this current is what requires real courage.
Sand’s book, it should be said, sold well and was widely discussed in the same “Jewish State” whose moral or historical rights he seeks to demolish. A proof perhaps that there is more liberalism and tolerance in the so-called Israel “ethnocracy” than in many Western democracies.
Sand not only reduces Judaism to a mere religion but denies there is something that can be called “Jewish” as opposed to “Israeli” culture or identity. Yet, he has nothing to say about the content of Jewish religious life, literature or culture in the Diaspora, which is simply ignored as if it had never existed. Torah, Talmud, Jewish liturgy, the prayers for Zion or the power of Jewish collective memory are virtually absent along with any sense of Jewish communal solidarity or transnational bonds among Jews. The author has, in effect, taken us back to the French Revolution and its dogmatic de-nationalization of Judaism as a “confession” on the Christian model.
His polemical screed freezes us in time as if Zionism and Israel had never happened, returning us to the kind of Jewish polemics with which Theodor Herzl had to contend when he first launched the world Zionist movement in 1897. What a strange regression to be told by a contemporary Israeli historian that the Jewish nation is nothing but a nebulous, amorphous and almost supernatural fiction, based on more or less petrified religious rituals. After all, that was exactly what the young Joseph Stalin (no great maven of Jewish history!) wrote in 1913 in his less-than-memorable pamphlet on “Marxism and the National Question.”
Despite his erudition, self-dramatization and periodic flashes of insight, I do not think that Sand’s exercise in iconoclasm has really illuminated the way forward, let alone demolished the “myths” on which the history of the Jewish people have hitherto been constructed.
After reading this book, what strikes me much more than the largely irrelevant polemics over genetics or common descent is the astonishing power of Jewish national self-awareness and its ability to transcend the more mundane issues of language, territory or ethnicity. Only a simpleton could seriously believe that the Jewish people are a pure homogenous ethnic group, fixed in the stars for all eternity. To that extent, Sand is obviously correct. But, unfortunately, he wastes far too much effort in breaking down an open door with a battering ram.
Much more interesting is to fathom why this “mythical” Jewish nation (which supposedly never existed) has not only survived against all the odds but still remains so creative, innovative and pivotal to contemporary history.

Professor Robert S. Wistrich is head of the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University and author of “A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.”