Posted by David Bernstein:
"When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" Update:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_28-2009_07_04.shtml#1246365502
[1]I blogged a while back about this book by Shlomo Sand, a bestseller
in Israel and winner of a French prize for nonfiction. The book is
coming out in English this Fall, with the title, "How the Jewish
People Was Invented."
My previous post was very critical, based on reports about the content
of the book, which claims that modern Zionists invented the concept of
the Jewish nation, that modern Jews are not descended from ancient
Judeans, and others assertions that run counter to my understanding of
modern linguistic, religious, demographic, and genetic history.
However, I wasn't able to read the French or Hebrew full text.
In any event, I've now come across [2]this extensive review (in
English) by Anita Shapiro of Tel Aviv University. It's devastating, in
exactly the way a scholarly book review should be.
The one thing that Shapiro doesn't mention is that Sand has
longstanding Communist connections, and that his parents were also
Communists. So while she attributes Sand's sloppy and tendentious
historical work to his desire for a post-Zionist Israel, and points
out how similar some of his theories are to those of right-wing
anti-Semitic cranks, she fails to link it to some broader left-wing
intellectual history.
I mention this not to "red-bait," but because Communists going back to
Karl Marx have long been adamant that both Judaism and Jewish
peoplehood are artificial constructs, in a way that other religions
and nationalities are not. I've been meaning for a long time [3]to
link to this paper, which while not comprehensive, seems like a good
place to start to explore this issue.
The author, Ben Cohen, concludes,
To the extent that all group identities are constructed around
narratives of history or religion or culture, they can be
characterized as synthetic or even artificial. Yet for much of the
left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
objectionable nature of Jewish identity, in contrast to the
identities of other groups, stemmed from its artificiality, which
was understood as being economic in origin. Agents of a monetary
economy could not constitute a community, much less a nationality:
hence the equation of Jewish emancipation with Jewish
disappearance, as intimated by Marx.
He also notes that similar themes were taken up by the Soviets with
regard to Israel, and echoes of both ancient Marxism and Soviet
propaganda are still prevalent among the left's anti-Zionists today.
References
1. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_08-2009_03_14.shtml#1236900840
2.
http://www.isracampus.org.il/Extra%20Files/Anita%20Shapira%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand%20book%20review.pdf
3.
http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/IDEOLOGICAL_FOUNDATIONS.PDF
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