The Invention of the Jewish People

"This is a book which has enjoyed great success. It not only denies that Israel is the state of the Jewish people but it denies the fact that there is a Jewish people. This is typical of a modern trend among post-Zionist Israeli academics. Professor Sand’s claim is that the Jews in Europe are not descendents of Jews of the second temple or the first temple in Palestine, that they were mixed with non-Jewish communities in Russia and elsewhere and they have no claim to be descendents of the Jewish people. I find this claim preposterous and quite surprising that it should come from an academic. First of all, he doesn’t prove his case, he relies on folklore and anecdote and he doesn’t establish his facts. But the facts are anyway irrelevant. Most nations are not racially pure. Evelyn Waugh came to Palestine in the 1930s and when he got off the boat in Haifa he saw different ethnic races and he said: ‘Are all these people Jewish?’ He wrote to Nancy Mitford that ‘apparently they are all Jewish because they all think they are Jewish’. And I think it is very indicative that Jewish people come from all different ethnic origins and they don’t claim that they are one race. The same is true for this country, Britain. Certainly not everyone is descended from the ancient Anglo-Saxons. There is Norman blood and immigrants and the same is true for Israeli Jews. So, the allegation that Jews are not a people is not substantiated and even it were substantiated it’s irrelevant. Irrelevant! Totally irrelevant! I find this book significant because it shows how radical anti-Zionist literature in Israel written by academics has reached non-academic levels. I find more wisdom in what Herzl wrote 100 years ago than in these contemporary fashionable writings which are aimed at the commercial market. The point he is trying to prove is that the Jews of Israel have no claim to Biblical ancestry and so they don’t have any claim to represent the Jewish people because the Jews are not a people. My position is that Jews are all multi-ethnic and multi-everything and there’s no uniform Jew and no uniform Jewry, so some are conservative, some are liberal, some are secular, some are assimilationist, and some come from Africa and Asia and recently we’ve had this immigration of black Jews from Ethiopia. We all belong to the same family, tribe or community and have an affinity with each other. And with the land of Israel. The concept of the Jewish people is, in fact, a multi-cultural concept, who are united not only by religion. Herzl, for example, knew very little about Judaism, didn’t know how to pray in Hebrew, didn’t know a word of Yiddish, hadn’t circumcised his son, but he says: ‘I’m Jewish. And I’m a Jew who belongs to the same tribe as those who are at the top of Berlin society and the Jews of North Africa.’ It is a multi-cultural concept so that all the Jews, no matter what your colour is, no matter what your education or social status, belong to the same tribe, community or call it whatever you want – call it people. That’s why Israel is such a success – Jews from Yemen and Iraq as well as Jews coming from the highest echelons of the Weimar Republic , see themselves as the same people and must get along with each other. It’s easy to mock Herzl, but he’s more contemporary and more relevant than all this new anti-Zionist fashionable nonsense. The new historians are on the whole a pitiful lot."

"It’s been a bestseller in Israel , and that’s very interesting because it undermines the blood and soil aspects of Zionism and also the Christian Zionism that is so rife in the United States. It’s a right-wing protestant thing that is actually quite anti-Semitic because it says that Israel is a land promised to the Jews and they must kick out all the Arabs and we will support them in that. The movement goes to apocalyptic extremes, saying the key sign of the ‘end times’ will be that the Jews return to Palestine and then Christ will come again and smite them all. Well, not anti-Christian because the right kind of Christians will all be orgasmed away to paradise. But obviously it’s against the Palestinian Christians. But the important thing about The Invention of the Jewish People is that it undermines all that by using science to show that the Jews are not, in fact, a race – that is a 19th-century idea that comes out of the same environment as fascism . Sand shows that there was never a mass exodus of Jews from Palestine – there was the decapitation of the political class but no exodus. The direct descendents of the Jews of Judea are, in fact, the Palestinians. Ashkenazi Jews are converts from the Khazar Kingdom in Russia (Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this) and the Sephardis are converted North African Berbers and the Yemeni Jews are, obviously, Yemeni. Sand again comes to the conclusion that Israel should be a democratic secular state and not a Jewish state. The ethnic underpinning of Zionism is false – the Jews are not a race. I mean, nobody is a race, of course. I think it was Benedict Anderson [the American Professor of International Affairs and specialist in nationalism] who said that we are all imagined communities. Of course, there are other arguments for Zionism that are much more sensible – I don’t happen to agree with them but they are more sensible than saying that today’s Jews are God’s chosen people who must return to the land God promised them. Those people are the Palestinians if they’re anyone and not this Jewish State made up of Russians, Moroccans and Yemenis. Yes, he is, and, despite the ideological blindness that afflicts so many Israelis, the book has been a bestseller in Israel."