https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/dp/1788736613/ref=d_pd_sbs_sccl_2_3/141-0837787-0949309?pd_rd_w=9osp8&content-id=amzn1.sym.adc4f85a-b4
Michael T. Ballard
5.0 out of 5 stars
The invention of bourgeois nationalism, Zionist style....
Reviewed in the United States πΊπΈ on November 25, 2010
Verified Purchase
Schlomo Sand is employed as a professor of contemporary history at the
University of Tel Aviv. The Invention of the Jewish People was
originally published in Hebrew in Israel. Translations of his work are
now being published throughout the world in many languages, including
English.
Sand is the son of a World War II era veteran of the Polish Communist
Party. He is also the son-in-law of a Spanish anarchist who fought
Franco nationalists in the streets of Barcelona during the Civil
War/Revolution. Professor Sand would probably describe himself as an
apple, fallen somewhat distant from those trees, perhaps as a
cosmopolitan liberal. His view of Israel is that it would better off
giving up being an `ethnocracy'--Sand's term for the ethno-biologically
defined Jewish political State. Professor Sand's preference is for
Israel to become a garden variety, secular capitalist democracy like
France or the United States of America.
Dr. Sand gives his readers many insights into the general intellectual
foundations of the modern era's nationalist ideological project and of
Zionist nationalist project in particular. In this reviewer's opinion,
The Invention of the Jewish People is worth reading for these critical
observations alone, as nationalism has been and continues to be a strong
ideological force in our time.
Sand makes the case that class societies up until the 18th century were
made up mostly of sedentary peasants and nomadic herdsmen. Sand
effectively argues that there was no official ideology of nationalism
embedded in the consciousness of the people who lived within these
pre-industrial societies. Historically speaking, these agrarian
formations were dominated by classes of aristocrats, landlords and slave
owners. The nomadic and peasant majorities of this ancient world had no
notion of being part of a nation. Comprehending this insight is
fundamental to grasping Sand's arguments about how nationalism, and in
particular Jewish nationalism, was an ideological invention. As opposed
to modern day nationalist conscious, based on self-regulated
`patriotism' , schooled with `pledges of allegiance', ubiquitous posters
of `our fearless leader' and `hats off at the sports match in honour of
the national anthem', ancient rulers relied on keeping the mostly
peasant producers of wealth in a constant state of fear of the absolute
power of the sovereign. There was no sense of being a part of a national
political State amongst the general populace. At best, the sovereign
only had to, "secure the loyalty of the state's administration in order
to preserve the continuity and stability of the government, but the
peasants were required simply to pass along the surplus agricultural
produce and sometimes to provide the monarchy and nobility with
soldiers. Taxes were of course collected by force, or at any rate by its
constant implicit threat, rather than by persuasion or efforts at
consensus." (p.26)
Capitalist rule erupted out of political revolutions against these
ancient expressions of absolutism. The revolutions of modernity (from
Cromwell's Puritans in the mid 17th century to Colonial America's yeoman
farmers and private property owners, to the overthrow of monarchism in
France by its citizens and in country after country well into the 19th
and 20th centuries) all resulted in the establishment of national
political States. All nationalisms were political expressions of the
rapidly changing social relations of the producers of wealth. From
peasant subjects, to wage-labouring citizens, the producing classes were
united, after nationalist revolt, as citizens with the ruling capitalist
and landlord classes in one big political State. These conditions were
accompanied by new political notions, primary amongst them, the rule of
law and the classless identity politics which proclaimed that
sovereignty was no long the king's; but for the `people' of the nation.
From these material circumstances sprang a need by the ruling class for
the legitimation of their system of political dominance thus, the
impetus for public intellectuals to invent and spread the gospel of the
various and sundry nationalist brands. One of the first tasks these
amplified intellectual voices had to confront was to define who `the
people' were.
Sand contends that modern public intellectuals invented all nationalist
ideologies thus, all `peoples'. Most of these intellectuals mixed
history with cultural myths in order to fashion their nationalist
ideologies. Sand calls these nationalist ideologies passing for history,
`mythistory'. More than a few of these nationalist mythistories were
combined with the pseudo-scientific invention of `race', an ideology
originating in the 18th century. "In the nineteenth century, national
cultures often tied the soft term, `people', to the rigid and
problematic `race,' and many regarded the two words as intersecting,
supporting, or complimentary. The homogeneous collective origin of `the
people'--always, of course, superior and unique, if not actually
pure--became a kind of insurance against the risks represented by
fragmentary, though persistent, sub identities that continued to swarm
beneath the unifying modernity. The imagined origin also served as an
efficient filter against undesirable mixing with hostile neighbouring
nations." (p.27)
However, by 1945, the horror of the Nazi holocaust, most especially its
connection with `Ayrian' racist mythhistory, prompted world leaders and
public intellectuals to officially renounce `race' as having any
scientifically based, genetic substance. UNESCO statements on race in
the early 1950s explained `race' as a social myth and the 1998 American
Anthropological Association statement on `race' proclaimed it to be a
pseudo-scientific concept. Still, the `commonsense' notion that there
are `races' has persisted and is present to this day in public discourse
even though, as Sand observes, pre-WWII notions of `race' have more and
more morphed into the bourgeois intellectually acceptable concept of
`ethnicity'. To be sure, the oppressive force of racism persists. Not
only that but, it is often legitmised, Sand would argue, by continuing
to legitimate an ethno-biological linkage with nationalist ideological
concepts defining, `the people'.
That the Nazi extermination of `inferior races' during WWII, threw a
spanner in the ideological works of those attempting to link `race' with
`nation', is true. However, as Sand points out, it was particularly
problematic for Zionist ideologists. Since its inception in the mid-19th
century, its legitimacy was based on the notion of a genetic connection
between ancient and modern peoples of the Jewish faith and culture.
According to this mythistory, modern day Jews were genetically linked to
those people who inhabited that portion of the Middle East known as
Israel, Judea and Palestine in the early 1st century CE. A fusing of
Biblical stories with actual history had long become part of the Zionist
ideological project. As the nationalist ideological story goes (Sand
writes a much more detailed account in a chapter he titles,
`Mythistory'), the Jewish people were deported from their homeland after
much of Jerusalem, along with the Second Temple, was destroyed in 70CE
by the Roman soldiers under the command of Titus. As the story went,
this came as punishment for an unsuccessful revolt against the Roman
Empire by the Jewish people. According to this mythical tale, the whole
of this Jewish people then wandered the Earth in exile from their
homeland. The Zionist nationalist project was designed to bring the
Jewish people home to "Eretz Israel" from their long exile.
What Sand demonstrates, in his meticulously researched book, is that
great mass of the people who lived in what was then the Roman province
of Palestine in 70CE were not exiled. As he conclusively shows,
conquerors of that era, including the Babylonian conquerors related in
the Biblical story of the destruction of the First Temple and the Romans
who destroyed the Second Temple, never exiled whole peoples because
those peoples were the peasant producers of wealth and obtaining that
wealth, along with the power that goes with it, is what being a ruling
class is all about. Peasants are generally tied to their land and most
people living in Roman Palestine were peasants. Peasants don't move
around. They're sedentary. Ancient ruling classes always liked it that
way. As Sand points out, conquering rulers of ancient times would
routinely enslave defeated elites from the ruling class whom they had
conquered but, they would leave the great mass of the people (mostly
peasant farmers) on the land, to continue to produce wealth, as these
peasants had done for various other ruling classes for centuries before.
The implications of this revelation for the current relation between
peoples identifying themselves as Palestinians and those identifying
themselves as Jews both inside and outside the immediate borders of
Israel are pretty obvious in this reviewer's opinion. The classless
nationalist identity politics, which keep rank and file Palestinian and
Israeli workers at each other's throats, is based on a series of
invented fictions. Of course, this is true for all the world's
nationalisms, for all are ideological inventions which assume that the
working class and the employing class have interests in common.
So, where do most of the people of the Jewish faith in the world come
from, if not from an ethno-biologically connected people who were exiled
from their homeland by the Romans in 70 CE?
Sand's answer is that most come from "proselytising". Sand demonstrates
that the first great monotheistic religion, Judaism, was spread to eager
pagan converts throughout the Mediterranean basin a long time before the
competing monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam arose.
The question which came to this reviewer's mind was, "Why would
polytheists find this monotheistic religion, with its invisible deity so
attractive?" Shorter work time is one of Sand's fascinating insights.
The weekly day of rest, the Sabbath, turned the practice of Judaism into
a way of legitimising free time, much to the consternation of the slave
owning ruling classes of the ancient, polytheistic world.
As Sand relates, a great victory for the proselytisers of the Jewish
faith came with the conversion of the Punics. Punic Carthage was not a
Hebrew speaking city state. It was located in what is today the
political State of Tunisia. After the defeat of Carthage by the Roman
Republic in 146 BCE, the Jewish religion continued to be practiced
amongst the peasant people of this region. The faith also spread to
nearby nomadic Berbers, who were later to accompany the Arabic Muslim
conquerors of Spain as soldiers in 711 CE. The implications here are
enormous, especially considering what happened to Jews who refused to
convert to Christianity during Ferdinand and Isabella's reign in Spain,
circa 1492CE.
Sand presents historically documented evidence of the many other
conversions to Judaism within the confines of the heavily used trading
routes of Mediterranean, in the late BCE and the early CE of the Roman
Empire. He shows that this proselytising tendency was more or less
suppressed with the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the
Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE and of Islam after the 8th century
CE.
"Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms,
Christianity or Islam, to the land of paganism, with immigrants who
convinced the pagans that their faith was preferable. The great mass
proselytizing campaign that began in the second century BCE, with the
rise of the Hasmonean kingdom, reached its climax in Khazaria in the
eighth century CE." (p. 220)
As Sand shows, the conversion of the Kagan of Khazaria, a kingdom
located above the Black Sea, helped create a great mass of people of the
Jewish faith. Many of these Jewish religionists spread out into what is
now Eastern Europe after Khazaria was overrun by the Mongols under
Genghis Khan in the early 13th century CE. Sand writes, "The Khazars
were a coalition of strong Turkic or Hunnic-Bulgar clans who, as they
began to settle down, mingled with the Scythians who had inhabited these
mountains and steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which
was known for a long time as the Khazar Sea. At its peak, the kingdom
encompassed an assortment of tribes and linguistic groups, Alans and
Bulgars, Magyars and Slavs. The Khazars collected taxes from them all
and ruled over a vast landmass, stretching from Kiev in the northwest to
the Crimean Peninsula in the south, and from the upper Volga to
present-day Georgia." (p.214)
As Sand demonstrates time and again, actual history profoundly conflicts
with the `mythistory' of the BIBLE which forms the very foundation on
which Israeli nationalist ideology and ultimately, the Israeli political
State rests. For example, the Declaration of the Establishment of the
State of Israel, 1948: "After being forcibly exiled from their land, the
people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased
to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of
their political freedom." (p.129)
The Invention of the Jewish People is a work which will be useful to any
reader interested in making sense of the social relations of power and
current political conflicts arising from them in the modern day Middle
East. Doctor Sand's work should be helpful to those eager to grasp the
conceptual intricacies of nationalist ideology and how it has come to
distort political judgements amongst and between workers of the world
today.
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