Shlomo Sand's book "The Invention of the Jews" from a Christian perspective

I have not finished reading Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People. But I have made a good beginning and have some thoughts that could be placed beside the videos of an interview of Sand’s that is on the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

My first impression has to do with the theologian Paul Tillich. His idea of symbols and whether they can be broken were helpful in looking at Nazi and other totalitarian ideologies and their symbols. Tillich felt that what he saw as the great symbol of Christianity, the cross, was important because the cross as a symbol could be so easily broken. Here I believe he ran up against both a reality and an absolute. The cross is more than a symbol and the whole world is changed if it can be broken.

Sand’s ideas about nations and history are also meant to deal with Nazi ideology and totalitarian nations. With empathy I see him attempting to make sense out of his past. That is, as a Jewish man who is the child of those who suffered under Nazi rule he must be looking through the lens of the question which shape all survivors, “why.”

He is also a historian who knows that it was an idea of essentialism which invaded the thought processes of nations and created the climate for Nazism to rise. And he sees the word ethnos operating in the same manner. As Sand puts it:

”The murderous first half of the twentieth century having caused the concept of race to be categorically rejected, various historians and other scholars enlisted the more respectable concept of ethnos in order to preserve the intimate contact with the distant past. Ethnos, meaning ‘people’ in ancient Greek, had served even before the Second World War as a useful alternative to, or a verbal intermediary between ‘race’ and ‘people.’ But its common ‘scientific’ use began only in the 1950s, after which it spread widely. Its main attraction lies in its blending of cultural background and blood ties, of a linguistic past and biological origin in other words, its combining of a historical product with a fact that demands respect as a natural phenomenon.” (28)

So how does a Christian use Sand’s book? Hopefully, to understand that it was essentialism on the whole that helped to create a totalitarian nation; that it is perhaps ethnos that might lead to the same problems anywhere. A people who see themselves as superior to others because of their past, their culture or their particular strengths tend to look down on others. But still there is a problem with Sand’s book. And this is where Tillich enters the picture for me.

Sand like Tillich believes that by eliminating an absolute, the nation as essential, the nation which arises out of an eternal people and their culture; there can be a prevention of totalitarianism. But he has run into an absolute that cannot be broken on his rock.

The Jewish people are God’s people, his beloved. They are a people with roots in antiquity and this is Sand’s particular anti-theme. Sand sees Israel as he sees other nations. There is no Israel but what belongs to myth and modern history. In other words Israel is an invented nation with myth for its history. For Sand there is no Israelite tribes, no Abraham, no Moses, no Kingdom of David, no exiles.

Sand looks at the Jewish historians based in the Zionist outlook and attempts to show that they were intent on providing a mythological foundation for Israel. He quotes Yitzhak Baer, after writing about his criticism of another Jewish historian who failed to write Jewish history from an ‘organic’ beginning. As Sand puts it the historian had “detached Jewish monotheism from its homeland in the first stage of its appearance, and then erroneously depicted an idealized and fairly comfortable exile. There was no description in his work of the longing for a natural existence in the homeland or the aspiration for sovereignty that had accompanied and defined Jews throughout their wanderings in history.” (101)

But one must disregard the Hebrew Bible as well as such Jewish historians in order to follow Sand. And for the Christian there is no faith without the truthfulness of the Hebrew Bible. When Jesus walked the road to Emmaus with two disciples after his resurrection he taught them about himself by reference to the whole Hebrew Bible. “Then beginning with Moses and with all the Prophets, he explained to them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures.” (Luke 24: 27)

Also: “Now he said to them. ‘These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24: 44)

Added to Sand’s rejection of the ancient history of the Jews is his rejection of the Jews of Europe and the Middle East as those who are descended from any ancient Hebrew peoples. While this kind of thought has been used by various anti-Semitics, Sand does not intend it that way. But those Christians who use it will eventually fall into such categories if they pick up and use other exaggerated views about the Jewish people.

With empathy and care for the author, still one must not accept the main idea in Sand’s book about the history of the Jews. To use his book or his ideas and interviews as a means of discounting a Jewish State is from a Christian point of view an unfaithful exercise. The idea that Sand’s ideas are helpful can only mean an endorsement of secularism and in many cases anti-Semitism.

Longing for Jerusalem, waiting for truth, praying for remorse

The false historical views of Shlomo Sand and the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

This is a return to my concern with the history of the Jewish people as it is written by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

The Jewish people’s love of Jerusalem and their desire to return there if only for pilgrimage has been a constant through the ages. Nobel peace prize recipient, Elie Wiesel, in a speech given at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies series, stated:

“Like every Jew in those times and those places [Eastern Europe-in the early twentieth century] we had a dream, the dream of Jerusalem. I knew the name of Jerusalem before I knew the name of my town. The first lullaby that my mother would sing for me was about Jerusalem, first prayers about Jerusalem.

I remember the custom which to this day exists in many places. One is not suppose to leave a knife on the table in the Jewish home when we say grace. One reason is that we believe every table is an altar, and therefore the knife that can be used to kill cannot be part of the altar. …

The other reason is that our Sages were afraid that when we are saying grace when we come to a certain verse that speaks about Jerusalem that the person would be so over come with nostalgia and pain over the destruction of Jerusalem that …we would take a knife and plunge it in the heart. That is to tell you the place Jerusalem occupied in our mind and our soul and our life.”

Marina Benjamin author of Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation, when visiting Baghdad, the past home of her grandmother, experiences the continuing anti-Semitic attitudes and writes, “Jewish people will often remark that only in Israel does their feeling of Jewishness disappear, because only in Israel, where being Jewish is the pervasive norm is it inconsequential. Having visited Israel several times, I can vouch for having experienced this strange unburdening.”

Journalist, arts editor and author, Benjamin explains in her book about the Jews of Baghdad before their exile which is linked to the birth of Israel in 1948.

“…the Jews of Baghdad, a minority group that had ancient roots in the land, dating from Assyrian and Babylonian exiles of the eighth and sixth centuries BC, when much of the Jewish population of Judaea was deported. Jews had been here for more than a thousand years when the Islamic armies conquered Mesopotamia. They had flourished for centuries. From Ottoman times until the middle of the last century, Jews had dominated trade and finance in Baghdad. They enjoyed religious and communal autonomy, hobnobbed with tribal dignitaries and government officials, and in every sphere of life they were conspicuous, prosperous and influential.”

She later adds this interesting bit of information: “In fact, Baghdadi Jews had been busy establishing trading posts outside Mesopotamia since the middle of the nineteenth century. Beyond England and Persia, there were pockets of Baghdadi Jews trading in Bombay and Calcutta; in Rangoon, the former capital of Burma; and in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan. It was from these satellite communities that the famous Sassoon and Kadoorie dynasties sprang the former responsible for a vast textile empire strung across India’s major urban centers, and the latter for founding the largest finance house in Shanghai.”

And yet, the extremely poor view of Jewish history that the booklet Steadfast Hope: The Palestinian Quest for Just Peace offers destroys not only the reason for the Jewish longing for Jerusalem but also the true history of Jerusalem. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network used as their reference Shlomo Sand who recently wrote a popular history of Israel, Zionism and the Jewish People. The book is When and How was the Jewish People Invented?

I have in other articles pointed out that IPMN was using Sand’s book to infer that those Israelis that came both from Europe and the Arab countries to Israel were not the descendents of the ancient Israelites. This anti-Semitic idea was welcomed by the IPMN because they hoped to destroy any “theological claim” to the Land of Israel. Quoting Sands their author writes:

“The founding narrative of the State of Israel links the modern-day Jews’ claim to the land of Israel/Palestine to their direct genealogical descent from the ancient Israelites. Recent anthropological scholarship shows that this widespread belief is very likely a myth, not historical fact. Shlomo Sand, an expert on European history at the university of Tel Aviv, and author of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? posits that the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later. Thus, he argues, many of today’s Israelis who emigrated from Europe after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the ancient land of Israel.”

The book by Sand is now being published in English under the title, The Invention of the Jewish People, and there are new critical reviews of the book. One of the reviews is entitled “Inventing Israel: Historian Shlomo Sand argues that ‘Jewish peoplehood’ is a myth.” It is written by Evan R. Goldstein. He begins the review:

“The key assumptions about Israel and the Jews are indelible. Forced from Jerusalem into exile, the Jews dispersed throughout the world, always remaining attached to their ancient homeland. Psalmists wept when they remembered Zion. A people were sustained by an unflagging determination to return to their native soil. ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ The triumph of Zionism—the founding of Israel—is the fulfillment of that ancient vow. The Israeli Declaration of Independence states it plainly: “Eretz Yisrael was the birthplace of the Jewish people… After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”

Now suppose that none of it is true.”

Goldstein explains that Sand denies all of the above Jewish history. He also shows how Sand connects the European Jew to “Turkic Khazars” and the Arab Jews to “North African Berbers.”

Goldstein also writes:

"There is, perhaps, a precedent for this type of work. In 1976, the anti-Communist writer Arthur Koestler published The Thirteenth Tribe, a tendentious little book to which Sand owes a great intellectual debt. Koestler argued that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic people who dominated the Russian steppes from the mid-7th century to the beginning of the second millennium. Around 740, the ruling elite of Khazaria converted to Judaism. Koestler speculated that after the collapse of Khazaria those converts drifted westward into Poland, forming the nucleus of Eastern European Jewry. Lacerated by critics, Koestler’s book was nonetheless propelled onto the best-seller list for a few weeks. “Today,” Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, told me, “The Thirteenth Tribe is a combination of discredited and forgotten.

But Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement, where Sand’s ideas have already stirred some interest. ‘Sand is not publishing this book at a dignified conference in Bern at which scholars of the Middle East debate the origins of the Jews,’ said Goldberg, also a Tablet Magazine contributing editor. ‘He is dropping manufactured facts into a world that in many cases is ready, willing, and happy to believe the absolute worst conspiracy theories about Jews and to use those conspiracy theories to justify physically hurting Jews.’ Goldberg views The Invention of the Jewish People as part of a growing body of work designed not only to discredit the idea of Jewish nationalism, but also the idea of Jews themselves. ‘It is nothing new,” he added, ‘We survived Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe; we can survive this.’”

In my first posting on Steadfast Hope I also wrote on the connection of Sand's strange historical ideas and their similarity and use by extreme Racists groups. That posting is, Were Holocaust victims linked genealogically to biblical Israel?.

But let me say again that within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) this is a tremendous problem. That we have an official organization, Israel/Palestine Mission Network, which is accountable to no one, that is offering the general public as well as Christians such garbage is outrageous. It is sin. As a Christian and an Elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) I am dismayed that no one in leadership is speaking up against such anti-Semitic diatribe. And I am still waiting, praying and writing. I will not cease

Another Book Review: by Goldstein-"Where Do Jews Come From?"