Who’s Afraid of ‘A Jewish People’?

Abstract

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People has generated both political use and abuse. The question is: does it offer new revelations of unexplored primary material or is its goal to deny the Jewish people the right to a sovereign state? The book’s unprecedented popularity may be due to a ready-made audience that believes that the commonly accepted narrative of Jewish history is indeed an invented construct. Therefore, there is room to delve into the author’s qualifications and historical methods. 

The three basic assumptions of Sand’s “theory of origins” are scrutinized: 1) the Jews are not a “people”, 2) they lack ethnic continuity in their unfolding history; 3) as such they hardly qualify as a “nation”. His thesis is thus reduced to the claim that post-Second Temple Jews were nothing but a mixed multitude of “Judaizers” with no common ethnic denominator, possessing no cultural continuity with First Temple Jewry. 

At its core The Invention of the Jewish People can be said to offer a radical counter-myth to the origins of the Jewish people, based on a selective reading of select chapters in Jewish history and relying solely on secondary material. In this light, it should hardly be considered the last word in either political or scholarly matters.