‘There are Israeli, not Jewish people’ –Sand

by on October 11, 2009 26
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Interview with Shlomo Sand from last summer about "human groups." Very beautiful. Thanks to Jack Ross, whose sand Post is our traffic leader this weekend!

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in US Politics

{ 26 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Colin Murray says:
    October 11, 2009 at 10:11 am

    This clip is very much worth watching. His book will be finding its way into my ‘in’ stack.

    • Psychopathic god says:
      October 11, 2009 at 11:04 am

      indeed.
      Dr. Sands stretched his neck out, but not quite far enough.
      At about 3.25 min, he says, (paraphrased): The central Jewish contribution was monotheism; without monotheism, therefore Jews, Christianity and Islam would not exist.”

      Abba Eban says something similar in “Heritage: Civilization & the Jews:”
      Eban says, (1) “Jews are a PEOPLE.”
      (2) “Jews don’t have a land, no notable architectural monuments; but Jews gave to civilization its most important principle: an IDEA, the IDEA of one god.”

      Neither Sands nor Eban is quite accurate. The IDEA of one god came from the Persians, hosts to Jewish elite exiles in Babylon (Baghdad) at the time those Jewish elites made use of their ‘down time’ to WRITE their history — or, perhaps, frame their historical narrative in a way that would both reflect the values of the culture they were enjoying — Persia — and rationalize the situation that had gotten them to Babylon.

      But Zoroaster was/is the prototype of monotheism, of ethical religion, of the notion that one’s behavior in this life presages how one will spend eternity.

      Roman former slave Epictetus lived and wrote in the era when Christianity was still an ember glowing on Jewish coals. The core principles of the philosophy of Epictetus were these: the only things you ‘own’ as a human being are your thoughts, your words, your deeds. My simple mind sees a similarity between this statement and the central dictum of Zoroastrianism: “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Constantine’s army pledged allegiance to Mithra, the Persian god, itaque Zoroastrian principles, until Constantine observed that Perthians were no longer a winning bet, so Constantine wagered on the side of the Christians, who had morphed ancient Jewish customs and ethics based on Zoroastrian principles with the renaissance story that Jesus told, namely, Return to your ethical roots, not your tribal customs and observances.

      Paul, of course, was the Proselytizer-in-chief of Judeo-Christianity, but he was not the Idea man. So it has ever been, and so Schlomo Sands failed to emphatically elucidate: Jews are the salesmen, the merchants, the proselytizers of the IDEA of monotheism and of ethical religion, but Jews did not invent the idea of monotheism and ethical religion, Zoroaster did.

      imo, that is the major grudge zionist Israel has against Iran: Persian Iran is still, at its heart and soul, Zoroastrian — Obama’s Nou Rooz message to Iran celebrates a Zoroastrian feast and custom. This challenges zionism’s thinking about itself that it is the ‘most moral,’ the center of the moral universe. Ahmadinejad’s challenge to the other pillar of zionist supremecism/exceptionalism/choseness, the holocaust, was a bridge too far and a convenient casus belli for zionists.

      • Psychopathic god says:
        October 11, 2009 at 11:10 am

        amended:
        should say:

        Paul, of course, was the Proselytizer-in-chief of Judeo-Christianity, but he was not the Idea man. So it has ever been, and so Schlomo Sands failed to emphatically elucidate: Jews are the salesmen, the merchants, the proselytizers of the IDEA of monotheism and of ethical religion, but Jews did not invent the idea of monotheism and ethical religion, Zoroaster did. Persians were the inventors, the Idea men; Jews marketed and sold the idea the length and breadth of the Silk Road; on the edges of the Rhine River where Jews established trading posts before the close of the first millenium; then on Portuguese sailing routes; and with the Spanish to the Americas.

  2. Taxi says:
    October 11, 2009 at 10:25 am

    Zionism uses fraud and deception to fool even it’s own supporters.

    How else was it ever going to succeed with it’s diabolical plan to colonize the mideast?

  3. Richard Witty says:
    October 11, 2009 at 10:34 am

    His definition of what constitutes a people is flawed.

    A people are a people if they self-identify, period. If Marakesh Jews describe themselves as part of the Jewish people, that is the same as London Mizrahi or London Ashkenazi, that is what they are, however they come to that.

    • Richard Witty says:
      October 11, 2009 at 10:35 am

      Further he asks “Why is a Marakesh Jew and London Jew the same people?” imagining that the question itself equates to the answer “no”.

      • Citizen says:
        October 11, 2009 at 10:41 am

        I disagree. He actually spends considerable time showing how little various self-defined Jews across the diaspora have in common–but readers can go to the source
        url for the video clip and judge for themselves who is being glib.

      • Richard Witty says:
        October 11, 2009 at 11:09 am

        It doesn’t matter what they have in common.

        I have little in common with many Americans, but we are still Americans.

      • Psychopathic god says:
        October 11, 2009 at 11:22 am

        I have little in common with many Americans, but we are still Americans.

        hmm.
        I was just designing (in my head) the flag of the Palisraeli people: a blue star of david on a green, white, red striped banner.

        And the Palisraeli Pledge of Allegiance:

        “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United State of Palisrael, and to the republic for which it stands, ONE NATION, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

        Do you have at least that much in common with Americans, Witty?

      • Citizen says:
        October 11, 2009 at 5:02 pm

        Witty is not an American at all. He has worshipped Israel since he was a kid. He has never entered the US military service in behalf the USA. He worships at the religious altar that make the USA a horse for Israel’s cart. He is a true believer in the world view
        that puts Israel uber alles. He’s like a German bund member in 1936 USA. The only difference is his Lindbergh is less impressive for onlookers.

    • Donald says:
      October 11, 2009 at 11:34 am

      This is one of the rare occasions where I am inclined to agree with Richard to some extent. What constitutes a people isn’t some purely objective question of fact. If a group of people self-identify as Jews and other Jews accept them as such, it doesn’t much matter whether their identity meets some criteria others think it should meet.

      The reason actual Zionists have been wrong is not because of some flawed theory about who the Jews are, but because they put their desire for a Jewish state above the rights of the Arabs already living there.

      • Psychopathic god says:
        October 11, 2009 at 12:30 pm

        If a group of people self-identify as Jews and other Jews accept them as such, it doesn’t much matter whether their identity meets some criteria others think it should meet.</blockquote?

        You have point, Donald.
        And also true, perhaps, with respect to where zionists went wrong.

        A problem that Jews may have run into in the various states where they have sojourned — Spain, Germany, Poland — is that Jews strongly suggested to the host nation that the host should conform to Jewish identity expectations. When I hear someone like Robert Lieber of the brothers (et ux) Kagan, or the dynamic duos of Kristol or Podhoretz insist to me that American values are identical with Jewish values; that Jewish values are the SOURCE of American ethical and social consciousness; that Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and opposed to Palestine, I bristle: first of all, they’ve got the history wrong: America’s founders were far more conversant with the Greek and Roman writers and philosophers than with Old Testament. Second, who are they to define my values? This America is MY home, the land of “my dreams my holy shrine.” link to mindfully.org
        It is not for any zionist or Israeli or Jew to tell me what I think or what I value, or even to attempt some Jewish sumo tactic of overwhelming American intellectual culture and values with Jewish/European overlays.

      • olive says:
        October 11, 2009 at 9:54 pm

        I think what Sand is trying to say(and rightly so) is that Judiasm should really only be seen as a religion, not as an ethnicity or a nation-state.

      • Mooser says:
        October 13, 2009 at 2:11 am

        Well Gosh, I hate to ber sticky about it, but actually it was the British who put their desire (for whatever reason) to give the Zionists what they wanted above the rights of the people already living there. There is no way the Jews at the time had the power to do that.

    • jimby says:
      October 11, 2009 at 1:30 pm

      Witty says:” A people are a people if they self-identify, period. ”

      I ask why. Just because you say so? The thing I find most obnoxious of Witty’s remarks is his desire to define everything, the second most obnoxious is his desire to speak for all the Jewish people. It would be better if somehow he could couch his comments as opinions instead of words from on “high”.

    • tree says:
      October 11, 2009 at 2:44 pm

      Sand’s book discusses the changing meanings of the word “people” that have existed over time, and discusses its use today as an equivalent to the word “nation”.

      From Sand’s book, discussing another book by prominent Israeli authors that sought to justify Israel as a democratic state of the Jews:

      Rubinstein and Yakobson argued that, since the UN recognized in 1947 the right of the Jews to self-determination, the Jewish state must be preserved until the last Jew “makes aliyah.” They did not claim this right for the Jewish Israeli people that had come into being in the Near East -they did not recognize any Israeli national entity. But reality can be problematic for Zionist legal theoreticians; in the early twenty-first century, Jews are nowhere barred from leaving their countries, and still they refuse to implement their right to national sovereignty. Migration to Israel has been reversed; as of the time of writing, more people are leaving Israel than are entering.

      …….

      Throughout [Rubinstein's and Yakobsen's] book, the genuine attachment that many Jews feel for Israel is presented as a national consciousness. This lack of discrimination between, on the one hand, an attachment based largely on painful memories and post-religious sensibility with a touch of tradition and, on the other hand, desire for national sovereignty diminishes the work. Unfortunately, the authors seem unaware that nationality is not merely a sense of belonging to some collective body; it is more than a feeling of solidarity and a common interest, for otherwise Protestants would be a nation, and so would cat lovers. A national consciousness is primarily the wish to live in an independent political entity. …

      But since the Jewish masses are not keen to live under the Jewish sovereignty, the Zionist arguments have had to be stretched beyond all national reason. The weakness of today’s Zionist rationale lies in its failure to acknowledge this complex reality, in which Jews may be concerned about the fate of other Jews, yet have no wish to share a national life with them.

  4. Citizen says:
    October 11, 2009 at 10:37 am

    I agree, Colin. I wonder what sort of impact his book is having in Israel and (gulp) its settlements in the OT?

  5. munro says:
    October 11, 2009 at 11:40 am

    A repost buried in an earlier Sand thread. Paul Wexler (his wiki page keeps disappearing) is an important linguist whose work supports Sand.

    Paul Wexler – Linguist Tel Aviv Univ – uses the relexification hypothesis to support his claim that ”the contemporary Ashkenazic Jews are not, in any significant sense, the direct descendants of the Palestinian Jews of the Roman period”. Specifically, he proposes that Yiddish underwent relexification twice: once in western Slavic (Upper Sorbian), and secondly in the eastern Slavic (Ukraine and Belarus’) language area. This second relexification occurred relatively recently (he dates it to the 15th/16th centuries), which suggests that an eastern Slavic speaking Jewish population was already in place at an earlier date. This population was, in Wexler’s view, descended from the Khazars and other groups of converts.
    link to linguistlist.org

    • Mooser says:
      October 13, 2009 at 2:15 am

      The funniest thing, in an ironic way, is that anybody who listened to the personal and family history of Jews as the lived through the diaspora would know that any kind of complete genetic, religious, social or marital insularity would have been impossible under those circumstances, and their very own stories reflect that.
      But yet a completely dissonant meta-narrative of an almost racial Jewish “purity” is also accepted as true. Crazy!

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