Posted by David Bernstein:
"When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?"
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_08-2009_03_14.shtml#1236900840
[1]Ha'aretz reports that a book of this title, written by Professor
Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University history professor, has won a French
journalism prize for the best non-fiction book of the year.
[2]Ha'aretz previously reported the books's thesis:
The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews
and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the
Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become
Jews.
The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of
Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became
Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the
origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from
Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of
the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as
merchants.
This is nonsense.
Two data points: (1) Linguists have found exactly no evidence that any
words in Yiddish originated from the Caucasian languages , which
obviously contradicts the notion that the Khazars contributed
substantially to the Eastern European Jewish population, much less
that Yiddish language and culture originated with the Khazars; and (2)
When I lived in Ann Arbor, I had a conversation with one of the
leading medical geneticists in the world, a non-Jewish physician. We
discussed the "Ashkenazic" genetic mutations that carry particular
diseases, and I pointed out that to the extent they require both
parents to carry the gene, my children are safe, because my wife is an
Iraqi Jew. The physician responded that many of the "Ashkenazic"
mutations are also found in "Sephardim" (by which I believe he meant
Eastern Jews in general), though they are less significantly
prevalent. He added that genetic research shows that Ashkenazim and
Sephardim have common genes going back 2,600 years. That was enough to
cause me to ignore all claims about the Khazar origins of the
Ashkenazim and whatnot that are based on anything beyond new genetic
evidence.
Not surprisingly, Sand's work has a political agenda, according to
Ha'aretz: "to promote the idea that Israel should be a 'state of all
its citizens' - Jews, Arabs and others - in contrast to its declared
identity as a 'Jewish and democratic' state."
I don't think that Zionism, etc., depends on whether Jews really have
common genetic origins or not, anymore than Palestinian identity is
any more or less real depending on whether, as some claim, a large
percentage of "Palestinian Arabs" had immigrated rather recently from
other countries in the Middle East. But I do think that manipulating
history for ideological purposes is bad, and the French might
reconsider whether this book is eligible for a nonfiction award.
References
1. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070628.html
2. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959229.html
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