I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People, and am thrilled by it, by Sand’s moral engagement with Zionist foundational myths, and his brilliant, incisive effort to unravel the questionable historical sources of a Jewish identity rooted in fables of exile and nationhood rather than in a long "religious civilization." If some of the scholarship is synthesized from others’ groundbreaking academic studies, big deal. It’s news to me. Isn’t that just what Elaine Pagels did with gospels research, got it to a wider audience? (Without getting slammed in the Times by the usually-superb and dispassionate Patricia Cohen).
Tony Judt has an amazing piece at Financial Times that says this better than I can: that Shlomo Sand’s book is important as a rethinking of Jewish and Israeli identity outside of religious mythology, and that Americans don’t have a clue about this undertaking. Notice that Judt ends with a slam of the Israel lobby as the most powerful force in Middle East policy. Walt and Mearsheimer opened the door here; and yet the lobby obviously involves issues of identity-construction.
The story went like this. Jews, until the destruction of the Second Temple (in the First century), had been farmers in what is now Israel/Palestine. They had then been forced yet again into exile by the Romans and wandered the earth: homeless, rootless and outcast. Now at last “they” were “returning” and would once again farm the soil of their ancestors.
It is this narrative that the historian Shlomo Sand seeks to deconstruct in his controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People. His contribution, critics assert, is at best redundant. For the last century, specialists have been perfectly familiar with the sources he cites and the arguments he makes. From a purely scholarly perspective, I have no quarrel with this. Even I, dependent for the most part on second-hand information about the earlier millennia of Jewish history, can see that Prof Sand – for example in his emphasis upon the conversions and ethnic mixing that characterise the Jews in earlier times – is telling us nothing we do not already know.
The question is, who are “we”? Certainly in the US , the overwhelming majority of Jews (and perhaps non-Jews) have absolutely no acquaintance with the story Prof Sand tells. They will never have heard of most of his protagonists, but they are all too approvingly familiar with the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit. If Prof Sand’s popularising work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile.
But there is more to it than that. While there were other justifications for the state of Israel , and still are – it was not by chance that David Ben-Gurion sought, planned and choreographed the trial of Adolf Eichmann – it is clear that Prof Sand has undermined the conventional case for a Jewish state. Once we agree, in short, that Israel ’s uniquely “Jewish” quality is an imagined or elective affinity, how are we to proceed?
Prof Sand is himself an Israeli and the idea that his country has no “raison d’etre” would be abhorrent to him. Rightly so. States exist or they do not. Egypt or Slovakia are not justified in international law by virtue of some theory of deep “Egyptianness” or “Slovakness”. Such states are recognised as international actors, with rights and status, simply by virtue of their existence and their capacity to maintain and protect themselves.
So Israel ’s survival does not rest on the credibility of the story it tells about its ethnic origins. If we accept this, we can begin to understand that the country’s insistence upon its exclusive claim upon Jewish identity is a significant handicap. In the first place, such an insistence reduces all non-Jewish Israeli citizens and residents to second-class status. This would be true even if the distinction were purely formal. But of course it is not: being a Muslim or a Christian – or even a Jew who does not meet the increasingly rigid specification for “Jewishness” in today’s Israel – carries a price.
Implicit in Prof Sand’s book is the conclusion that Israel would do better to identify itself and learn to think of itself as Israel . The perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory is dysfunctional in many ways. It is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. It is bad for Israel and, I would suggest, bad for Jews elsewhere who are identified with its actions.
