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The Invention of the Jewish People The Invention of the Jewish People Shlomo Sand Translated by Yael Lotan VERSO London • New York English edition published by Verso 2009 © Verso 2009 Translation © Yael Lotan First published as Matai ve'ekh humtza ha'am hayehudi? [When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?] © Resling 2008 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-422-0 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Vail To the memory of the refugees who reached this soil and those who were forced to leave it. Contents PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION ÎX INTRODUCTION: BURDENS OF MEMORY 1 Identity in Movement 1 Constructed Memories 14 1. MAKING NATIONS: SOVEREIGNTY AND EQUALITY 23 Lexicon: "People" and Ethnos 24 The Nation: Boundaries and Definitions 31 From Ideology to Identity 39 From Ethnic Myth to Civil Imaginary 45 The Intellectual as the Nations "Prince" 54 2. MYTHISTORY: IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE PEOPLE 64 The Early Shaping of Jewish History 65 The Old Testament as Mythistory 71 Race and Nation 78 A Historians' Dispute 81 A Protonationalist View from the East 87 An Ethnicist Stage in the West 95 The First Steps of Historiography in Zion 100 Politics and Archaeology 107 The Earth Rebels against Mythistory 115 The Bible as Metaphor 123 3. THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE: PROSELYTISM AND CONVERSION 129 The "People" Exiled in 70 CE 130 Exile without Expulsion—History in the Twilight Zone 136 Against Its Will, the People Emigrate from the Homeland 143 "All Nations Shall Flow Unto It" 150 The Hasmoneans Impose Judaism on Their Neighbors 154 viii From The Hellenistic Sphere to Mesopotamian Territory 161 Judaizing in the Shadow of Rome 166 How Rabbinical Judaism Viewed Proselytizing 173 The Sad Fate of the Judeans 178 Remembering and Forgetting the "People of the Land" 182 4. REALMS OF SILENCE: IN SEARCH OF LOST (JEWISH) TIME 190 Arabia Felix: The Proselytized Kingdom of Himyar 192 Phoenicians and Berbers: The Mysterious Queen Kahina 199 Jewish Kagans? A Strange Empire Rises in the East 210 Khazars and Judaism: A Long Love Affair? 218 Modern Research Explores the Khazar Past 230 The Enigma: The Origin of Eastern Europe's Jews 238 5. THE DISTINCTION: IDENTITY POLITICS IN ISRAEL 250 Zionism and Heredity 256 The Scientific Puppet and the Racist Hunchback 272 Founding an Ethnos State 280 "Jewish and Democratic"—An Oxymoron? 292 Ethnocracy in the Age of Globalization 307 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 314 INDEX 315 Preface to the English-Language Edition This book was originally written in Hebrew. My mother tongue is actually Yiddish, but Hebrew has remained the language of my imagination, probably of my dreams and certainly of my writing. I chose to publish the book in Israel because initially my intended readers were Israelis, both those who see them selves as Jews and those who are defined as Arabs. My reason was simple enough: I live in Tel Aviv, where I teach history. When the book first appeared in early 2008, its reception was somewhat odd. The electronic media were intensely curious, and I was invited to take part in many television and radio programs. Journalists, too, turned their attention to my study, mostly in a favorable way. By contrast, representatives of the "authorized" body of historians fell on the book with academic fury, and excitable bloggers depicted me as an enemy of the people. Perhaps it was this contrast that prompted the readers to indulge me—the book stayed on the bestseller list for nineteen weeks. To understand this development, you have to take a clear-eyed look at Israel and forgo any bias for or against. I live in a rather strange society. As the closing chapter of the book shows—to the annoyance of many book reviewers—Israel cannot be described as a democratic state while it sees itself as the state of the "Jewish people," rather than as a body representing all the citizens within its recognized boundaries (not including the occupied territories). The spirit of Israel's laws indicates that, at the start of the twenty- first century, the state's objective is to serve Jews rather than Israelis, and to provide the best conditions for the supposed descendants of this ethnos rather than for all the citizens who live in it and speak its language. In fact, anyone born to a Jewish mother may have the best of both worlds—being free to live in London or in New York, confident that the State of Israel is theirs, even if they do not wish to live under its sovereignty. Yet anyone who did not emerge from Jewish loins and who lives in Jaffa or in Nazareth will feel that the state in which they were born will never be theirs. Yet there is a rare kind of liberal pluralism in Israel, which weakens in times of war but functions quite well in peacetime. So far it has been possible in Israel to express a range of political opinions at literary events, to have Arab parties take part in parliamentary elections (provided they do not question X PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION the Jewish nature of the state), and to criticize the elected authorities. Certain liberal freedoms—such as freedom of the press, of expression and of associa tion—have been protected, and the public arena is both variegated and secure. That is why it was possible to publish this book, and why its reception in 2008 was lively and aroused genuine debate. Furthermore, the tight grip of the national myths has long been loosened. A younger generation of journalists and critics no longer echoes its parents' collectivist ethos, and searches for the social models cultivated in London and New York. Globalization has sunk its aggressive talons into the cultural arenas even of Israel and has, in the process, undermined the legends that nurtured the "builders' generation." An intellectual current known as post- Zionism is now found, though marginally, in various academic institutions, and has produced unfamiliar pictures of the past. Sociologists, archaeologists, geographers, political scientists, philologists, and even filmmakers have been challenging the fundamental terms of the dominant nationalism. But this stream of information and insights has not reached the plateau on which resides a certain discipline, called "The History of the Israelite People" in Hebrew academies. These institutions have no depart ments of history as such, but rather departments of general history—such as the one I belong to—and separate departments of Jewish (Israelite) history. It goes without saying that my harshest critics come from the latter. Aside from rioting minor errors, they chiefly complained that I had no business discussing Jewish historiography because my area of expertise is Western Europe. Such criticism was not leveled against other general historians who tackled Jewish history, provided they did not deviate from the dominant thinking. "The Jewish people," "the ancestral land," "exile," "diaspora," "aliyah," "Eretz Israel," "land of redemption" and so forth are key terms in all reconstructions within Israel of the national past, and the refusal to employ them is seen as heretical. I was aware of all this before I began writing this book. I expected my attackers to claim that I lacked a proper knowledge of Jewish history, did not understand the historical uniqueness of the Jewish people, was blind to its biblical origin, and denied its eternal unity. But it seemed to me that to spend my life at Tel Aviv University amid its vast collection of volumes and documents about Jewish history without taking time to read and tackle them would have been a betrayal of my profession. Certainly it is pleasant, as a well-established professor, to travel to France and the United States to gather material about Western culture, enjoying the power and tranquility of academe. But as a histo rian taking part in shaping the collective memory of the society I live in, I felt it was my duty to contribute directly to the most sensitive aspects of this task. PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION xi Admittedly, the disparity between what my research suggested about the history of the Jewish people and the way that history is commonly under stood—not only within Israel but in the larger world—shocked me as much as it shocked my readers. Generally speaking, educational systems teach you to begin writing after you have finished your thinking—meaning that you should know your conclusion before you start writing (that was how I obtained my doctoral degree). But now I found myself being shaken repeatedly as I worked on the composition. The moment I began to apply the methods of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and others, who instigated a conceptual revolution in the field of national history, the materials I encountered in my research were illuminated by insights that led me in unexpected directions. I should emphasize that I encountered scarcely any new findings—almost all such material had previously been uncovered by Zionist and Israeli histori ographers. The difference is that some elements had not been given sufficient attention, others were immediately swept under the historiographers' rug, and still others were "forgotten" because they did not fit the ideological needs of the evolving national identity. What is so amazing is that much of the infor mation cited in this book has always been known inside the limited circles of professional research, but invariably got lost en route to the arena of public and educational memory. My task was to organize the historical information in a new way, to dust off the old documents and continually reexamine them. The conclusions to which they led me created a radically different narrative from the one I had been taught in my youth. Unfortunately, few of my colleagues—the teachers of history in Israel— feel it their duty to undertake the dangerous pedagogical mission of exposing conventional lies about the past. I could not have gone on living in Israel without writing this book. I don't think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books. I may be naive, but it is my hope that the present work will be one of them. Tel Aviv, 2009