The Return of Shlomo Sand

A British friend, curious about my attachment to things Jewish, recently put the question to me most starkly: “Hasn’t that Sand fellow settled the Jewish business once and for all?”

The “Sand fellow” is Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian best known for claiming that there is no such thing as a Jewish people and, in a separate but related move, renouncing his own Judaism. The titles of his books—The Invention of the Jewish People, The Invention of the Land of Israel, How I Stopped Being a Jew—leave little to the imagination. Within the ideologically-freewheeling precincts of Israeli academia, his work is accorded a certain respect (though his influence in Israeli society at large is negligible), but outside of Israel, and particularly in Europe, he and his claims are taken seriously by the serious sorts of people—like my well-meaning British friend.

Sand’s view is easy to summarize. Those whom we today call “the Jews” are a mishmash of peoples of different ethnic origins, few if any of whose ancestors hailed from ancient Judea. Moreover, Judaism itself is only a “social construct,” a set of manufactured rituals and laws designed to enforce artificial homogeneity on a disparate population. Since good social science, history, and genetics have lately permitted “the Jews” to dispense with this fiction of their national origins, they should quickly seize the opportunity to do so, lest continued association with it implicate them further in Israel’s radically unjust domination of the Palestinians. (Nowhere, so far as I know, has Sand undertaken to debunk Palestinian national origins.)