The other day the New York Times went out of its way to bash Shlomo Sand for his book, The Invention of the Jewish People. The Times reported on new genetic studies suggesting a close DNA relation among Jews of the world and hastened to add:
They refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.
This potshot deserves a strong response.
First, Sand’s book is not chiefly about genetics; genetics make up about 7 pages. He’s not a geneticist, he’s a historian, and his purpose in the book was to trace the rise of Jewish nationalism, and of a Jewish story about a common origin going back 3000 years (in Netanyahu’s view) so as to justify Israel’s Zionist project. The brilliance of the book (and it truly is that) is its exploration of the rise of nationalist ideology in the 19th century and the ways that proto-Zionist historians shaped their view of the Bible to serve a nationalistic quest.
Sand relates genetic explorations to 1850s studies of race that served nationalism in Europe and observes:
Israel’s rule since 1967 over a growing non-Jewish population intensified the urge to find an enclosing ethnobiological boundary.
Wow. That’s Sand’s method– the rapier thrust.
Now Sand may be wrong about his debunking of the genetic studies, I don’t know and don’t really care. As I say, it’s 7 pages in the book. Genetics is not destiny in any case. And this is where I urgently call on Roger Cohen to get engaged in this conversation– a conversation about the historical/religious myths that are created to justify nationalistic and racist separation.
Why Roger Cohen? I met him a month back in Qatar. He’s truly a worldly person who treats other groups than his own as equals. I read that his heart was broken by the partition of the former Yugoslavia; and you can see that passion in his great Iranian reporting of a year ago, and in his book on Yugoslavia, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo.
In that book, Cohen landed on the myths that nationalists produced to justify projects of ethnic cleansing and supremacy. Milosevic, he said, postulated something that "had never existed" in order to justify Serbian crimes against Muslims– a "Serbian state stretching from Belgrade to Knin [in Croatia]" and going back 600 years. And listen to his passion against nationalism:
The unscrambling of centuries of miscegenation in Europe in the name of relatively new ideas–that of the "nation-state" and its perversion, the "nation-as-tribe"–reached a paroxysm during the twentieth century. Hitler and Stalin moved or annihilated millions in the name of racist ideology or social engineering. More than one million Greeks were "resettled" from Turkey during the 1920s; six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazi’s; more than three million ethnic Germans from Central Europe and the Soviet Union were "resettled"in the aftermath of World War II. Violence, the very heart of fascist ideologies in which differences of class and background were subsumed, grew in proportion to the often tenuous reality of the national idea. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger has observed, "The Aryan was never anything more than a risible construct," a form of "compensation" for the mixed blood of the German and Austrian peoples. Similarly, in the Balkans, the post-communist "construct" of the Serbian, Croatian, and finally Bosnian Muslim nations had to be imbued with a compensatory fervor that masked the reality of mingling expressed in the idea of Yugoslavia. This fervor of the resurgent nation–built as much around legend as historical fact–in turn produced bloodshed not seen in Europe since 1945.
Wonderful, huh?
We are facing great bloodshed in the Middle East unless Jews begin to examine the legends and historical constructs that have justified the landgrab project that Israel licensed in the name of the Jews who were in Jerusalem 3000 years ago, per Netanyahu, and inventing hummus. Shlomo Sand has repeatedly been knocked in the Times, but he is offering a door to Jews and Israelis to examine our presence in the world in non-nationalistic terms, but as a religious civilization. Cohen should be engaged in this struggle. Because he shares Sand’s universalistic beliefs and knows the danger of social ideologies that mask the "reality of mingling."
(Oh and by the way: yes, Yugoslavia underwent partition– and there was also a robust right of return for refugees, guaranteed.)
