Simon Schama on The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand
dsharavi
Review by Simon Schama
Financial Times, London
Published: November 13 2009 23:34
From its splashy title on, Shlomo Sand means his book to be
provocative, which it certainly is, though possibly not in the way he
intends. Its real challenge to the reader is separating the
presentation of truisms as though they were revolutionary
illuminations and the relentless beating on doors that have long been
open, from passages of intellectual sharpness and learning.
Sand’s 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.
Sand’s sense of grievance against the myths on which the exclusively
Jewish right to full Israeli immigration is grounded is one that many
who want to see a more liberal and secular Israel wholeheartedly
share. But his book prosecutes these aims through a sensationalist
assertion that somehow, the truth about Jewish culture and history,
especially the “exile which never happened”, has been suppressed in
the interests of racially pure demands of Zionist orthodoxy. This, to
put it mildly, is a stretch.
To take just one instance: the history of the Khazars, the central
Asian kingdom which, around the 10th century, converted to Judaism and
which Sand thinks has been excised from the master narrative because
of the embarrassing implication that present day Jews might be
descended from Turkic converts. But the Khazars were known by every
Jewish girl and boy in my neck of Golders Greenery and further flung
parts of the diaspora, and celebrated rather than evaded.
For Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, the antidote
to a national identity based on what he argues are fables, is to shed
the fancy that there is any such thing as a shared Jewish identity
independent of religious practice.
By this narrow reckoning you are either devoutly orthodox or not
Jewish at all if you imagine yourself to have any connection to Israel
past or present. Sand confuses ethnicity – which, in the case of the
Jews, is indeed impure, heterogeneous and much travelled – with an
identity that evolves as the product of common historical experience.
Rabbinical arguments may rest on an imaginary definition of ethnicity,
but the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland does not. Ultimately, Israel’s
case is the remedy for atrocity, about which Sand has nothing to say.
His book is a trip (and I use the word advisedly) through a landscape
of illusions which Sand aims to explode, leaving the scenery freer for
a Middle East built, as he supposes, from the hard bricks of truth.
This turns out to require not just the abandonment of simplicities
about race, but any shared sense of historical identity at all on the
part of the Jews that might be taken as the basis of common
allegiance, which is an another matter entirely. En route, he marches
the reader through a mind-numbingly laborious examination of the
construction of national identities from imagined rather than actual
histories. A whole literature has been devoted to the assumption that
nations are invariably built from such stories, in which, nonetheless,
grains of historical truth are usually embedded. The important issue,
however, is whether the meta-narrative that arises from those stories
is inclusive enough to accommodate the tales of those whose experience
is something other than racially and culturally homogeneous.
Sand’s point is that a version of Jewish national identity was written
in the 19th and early 20th centuries – by historians such as Heinrich
Graetz and Simon Dubnow – which took as its central premise a forced
dispersion of the Jews from Israel. 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 a second 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 Palestine rather 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. Scholarly consensus now places the creation of the earliest
books of the Old Testament not in the 6th or 5th centuries BC, but in
the 9th century BC, home-grown in a Judah which had been transformed,
as Israel Finkelstein has written “into a developed nation state”. The
post-David kingdom of the 10th century BC may have been a pastoral
warrior citadel, but the most recent excavations by Amihai Mazar have
revealed it capable of building monumental structures. And the Judah
in which the bible was first forged, its population swollen with
refugees from the hard-pressed northern kingdom of Israel, was a
culture that needed a text to bring together territory, polity and
religion. It was a moment of profound cultural genesis. And don’t get
me started again on the Khazars. No one doubts the significance of
their conversion, but to argue that the entirety of Ashkenazi Jewry
must necessarily descend from them is to make precisely the uncritical
claim of uninterrupted genealogy Sand is eager to dispute in the wider
context of Jewish history.
His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions
of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity.
[CONT'D]
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b74fdfd2-cfe1-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.html
Deborah