TALK BY PROFESSOR SHLOMO SAND,
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF TEL AVIV, ON HIS NEWLY
TRANSLATED BOOK, THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
(This may be the most important and most surprising book on Zionism,
Israel and Judaism written in the last fifty years. Nothing in the
Middle East looks the same after reading it. To whet your desire to
attend the talk, I’ve appended a brief sketch of some of the major
themes in the book at the end of this announcement. I’ve also booked a
large hall for Sand’s talk (SEE BELOW), so please pass this
announcement on to friends, students and colleagues who are (or should
be) interested in these subjects……… Bertell Ollman)
BRECHT FORUM –
451 WEST STREET (BETWEEN BANK AND BETHUNE STREETS, THAT IS ON
THE CORNER OF WHAT WOULD BE ABOUT 12TH STREET AND THE WEST SIDE HIGHWAY)
DATE / TIME - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15 - 7:30 – 10:00 PM
(In Discussion with Professor Joel Kovel, Bard College, author of
OVERCOMING ZIONISM)
-
MARXIST THEORY COLLOQUIUM AT NYU
DATE / TIME - FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 - 4:15 – 6:15 PM
(Please note new date and later starting time)
PLACE - MEYER HALL, N.Y.U., 4 WASHINGTON PLACE (between West 4th
Street and Waverly Place, just west of Broadway), Room 121.
(Please note new place)
SPEAKER - PROFESSOR SHLOMO SAND
Sand is a much published professor in the Dept. of History at Tel Aviv
University specializing in the history of ideas. His most recent book
is THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. It is an extremely scholarly,
very original, and often shocking work – the title is meant literally
– with profound implications for Zionism and the ongoing conflict
between Israel and its neighbors. I can’t recall when last I – Bertell
– learned so much about both nationalism and Zionism from any book. It
was a best seller and caused a huge scandal when it appeared a couple
of years ago in Israel and another scandal when the French edition
appeared last year. Sand will be in the U.S. for a week promoting the
English edition of the book. For more, see reviews and interviews in
English at <http//inventionofthejewishpeople.com/>.
TOPIC – “THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE”
DON’T MISS THIS ONE!
*********MEDIA - Professor Sand has a few time slots available for
interviews with the media during his stay in New York (Oct. 15 – 18).
Those of you in the media (or who have contacts in the media) who are
interested in interviewing him, should write to Julie McCarroll, his
editor at Verso Books at jul...@versobooks.com.
******************* NYU REQUIRES A PHOTO I.D. TO GET INTO ALL OF
ITS BUILDINGS
BRIEF SKETCH OF SAND’S BOOK
THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE is divided into two parts. The
first is a long section on the theory of nationalism, whose main
characteristic, according to Sand, is the tendency to invent a past
that suits the current needs and goals of the people in question. This
is not a new idea (Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner have presented
versions of it), but this is the best account of it that I have read.
Second, there follows a much longer section on Zionism, Judaism and
Israel in light of the earlier discussion of nationalism. Most of this
long book is devoted to showing with a great deal of evidence and
arguments from several different disciplines that most of Jewish
history has been invented.
The turning point is the supposed expulsion of the Jews from
Palestine by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in
70 A.D. (apparently, there is no evidence for this; the Roman's never
engaged in such mass expulsions; and most of the Jews in Palestine at
the time were peasants living in the countryside, who would not be
directly affected by the destruction of Jerusalem).
This raises two key questions: 1) Where did the large Jewish
populations that turn up later throughout the rest of the Middle East
and Europe come from, if they were not descended from people who were
expelled from Palestine by the Romans? Sand's answer is that most of
them came from mass conversions of peoples to Judaism that occurred in
at least three different places and times between the destruction of
the Second Temple and the early modern period. (He also shows that
some mass conversions of people to Judaism took place in Palestine
even before the destruction of the Second Temple. So the practice of
converting people, even large groups of people, to Judaism is not as
unknown to the history of Judaism as is commonly believed.)
Probably the biggest mass conversion took place in Khazaria, a
Turkamen empire between the Caspian and the Black Sea between the 8th
and 11th century A.D., which was destroyed in the 11th century by
attacks from Russians, with most of its Jewish population migrating
west into eastern Europe. Together with a somewhat later, smaller,
more prosperous and more cultured Jewish migration from Western Europe
through Germany, they became the future Jews of Poland, Russia,
Hungary, etc.
A second mass conversion in the period after the destruction of
the Second Temple took place among several Berber tribes in North
Africa in the 6th century A.D., though many conversions to Judaism
occurred in and around what had been Carthage and other coastal towns
in North Africa before that. When the Arabs brought Islam to these
lands a century later, they showed their typical respect for the
“people of the book” by not forcing them to adopt their religion.
Then, when North African Muslims (not Arabs from Arabia) invaded Spain
in 711 A.D., Jewish Berbers made up a good part of their army, and
included at least one general. Many of them settled in Spain, and
became the core of what we call the Spanish Jews. The third big
conversion(s) occurred in Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian
peninsula, which had a large number of Jews from very early on,
including at least one Jewish king in the 6th century A.D., who tried
to convert his subjects to Judaism.
Granted that some Jews already lived throughout the Middle East
and Southern Europe before the destruction of the Second Temple - but
if we add up all the mass conversions to Judaism that occurred after
this event, it appears that the bulk of world Jewry from the early
middle ages on were descended from people who never set foot in
Palestine. Which raises, of course, the next key question - what
happened to the Jews who were still in Palestine after the destruction
of the Second Temple? Where did they go? Sand's answer is that they
didn't go anywhere. They are today's Palestinians, most of whom
converted to Islam in the early years of Islam's expansion into the
rest of the Middle-East. These are not unsupported conjectures, for
the great strength of Sand's book lies in the enormous wealth of
evidence and careful, scholarly argumentation he offers for each of
his claims.
Where does all this leave the central idea that underlies the
whole Zionist project - that Jews everywhere have not only a duty but
a right to return to "their original homeland", Palestine? I can't
think of a more fundamental critique of Zionism and therefore of
Israel too than the one found in Sand's book. No serious reader who is
interested in Zionism or Israel – whatever their personal views – can
avoid being shaken up “big-time” by Sand’s impressive redrawing of the
major religious and “racial” boundaries that are usually taken for
granted in most discussion of these subjects.
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