Shlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand
Born	(1946-09-10) 10 September 1946 Linz, Austria
Nationality	Israeli

Shlomo Sand (pronounced Zand; Hebrew: שלמה זנד‎) (born 10 September 1946 in Linz, Austria) is an Israeli professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He is an expert in the history of nationalism, film as history, and French intellectual history.^[1]

Biography

Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. His parents had Communist and anti-imperialist views and refused to accept compensation from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War. Sand spent his first two years in a displaced-persons camp near Munich, and moved with the family to Jaffa in 1948. He was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen.^[2][3] According to one interview, “Sand spent the late 1960s and early 1970s working a series of odd jobs, including several years as a telephone lineman.” He completed his high-school work at age 25 and spent three years in the military.^[4] The Six Day War, in which he served, “pushed him towards the radical left.”^[4] Quitting the Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki), he joined the more radical, and anti-Zionist, Matzpen in 1968. He resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment with the organisation.^[2]

He eventually left the Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki) and joined the more radical, and anti-Zionist, Matzpen in 1968. Sand resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment with the organisation.^[5][6]

Declining an offer by the Israeli Communist Party Rakah to be sent to do cinema studies in Poland, Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University in 1975. Determined to “abandon everything” Israeli,^[7] he moved to France, where, from 1975 to 1985, after winning a scholarship, he studied and taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis on "Georges Sorel and Marxism."^[8] Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.^[1]

In 1983, according to one source, Sand “took part in a heated exchange over Zeev Sternhell’s Ni droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France, and later drew the ire of Claude Lanzmann with his 2002 book in Hebrew, Film as History, in which he not only passed scathing judgement on Lanzmann’s Shoah, but also revealed that the film had been secretly funded by the Israeli government.”^[3]

Views

While acknowledging “the affinity between Jews and the holy land,” Sand has said that “I don’t think the religious affinity to the land gives you historical right.” Still, he supports Israel's existence “not because of historical right, but because of the fact that it exist today and any effort to destroy it will bring new tragedies.” He explained that he doesn't call himself a Zionist, but “a post-Zionist and non-Zionist because the justification of this land is not historical right.”^[9]

Comparing the Palestinians to children of rape, Sand has said that Israel “raped a population. And not only a population – we destroyed this society, in constituting the Israeli state.” He opposes the law of return an the right of return. Still, “Israel has to be the state of Israelis. That is the only way we can continue to live in the middle east.” He argues that before Hitler, Jews were overwhelmingly against Zionism, and the concept of “Eretz Israel” was not about an earthly homeland but about something more spiritual. He also opposes the one-state solution because, while “very very popular in leftist circles,” it is “not serious” because Israelis, being “one of the most racist societies in the western world,” will never accept it. Thus he supports a “two state solution on the borders of ’67, taking out most of the settlers. I don’t think it will be a big problem.”^[9]

Criticism of gene studies

In 2010, when Harry Ostrer, a Jewish professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, announced the results of a DNA study showing “powerful genetic markers of Jewish ancestry,” Sand told Science Magazine that “Hitler would certainly have been very pleased.” Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Fischman noted that Sand's argument in The Invention of the Jews “that Jews arose from converting many local communities in Europe and elsewhere...is contradicted by Ostrer's work, which shows that geographically and culturally distant Jews still have more genes in common than they do with non-Jews around them, and that those genes can be traced back to the Levant, an area including modern-day Israel.” Ostrer was offended by Sand's attack: “Bringing up Hitler was overheated and misconstrues my work,” he said. But Sand reiterated his criticism, writing in an email to Fischman that “It is a shame for somebody who defines himself as a Jew to look for a Jewish gene.”^[10]

Genetic support for Shlomo Sand has come from Johns Hopkins University geneticist Dr. Eran Elhaik who published the genetic study "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses" in December 2012.^[11] Sand was quoted widely in a December 28, 2012 Haaretz newspaper article discussing Dr. Elhaik's work.^[12] And the journal Genome Biology and Evolution also ran a news piece mentioning Sand, in relation to Elhaik's research; "For Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People, Elhaik's paper was a vindication of his long-held ideas."^[13]

The Invention of the Jewish People

Sand’s best-known book in English is The Invention of the Jewish People, originally published in Hebrew (Resling, 2008) as Matai ve’eich humtsa ha‘am hayehudi? (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?) and translated into English the following year (Verso, 2009).It has generated a heated controversy.^{[14][15][16][17][18][19]}

The book was in the best-seller list in Israel for nineteen weeks.^[20] It was reprinted three times when published in French (Comment le peuple juif fut inventé, Fayard, Paris, 2008). In France, it received the "Prix Aujourd'hui", a journalists' award given to a non-fiction political or historical work.^[21] An English translation of the book was published by Verso Books in October 2009.^[22] The book has also been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian, and as of late 2009 further translations were underway.^{[23][24][25][26][27][28]} The Invention of the Jewish People has now been translated into more languages than any other Israeli history book.^[26]

The Invention of the Land of Israel

In April 2012, a sequel, The Invention of the Land of Israel, was published in Hebrew by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir. It was published in English in 2013.^[29][30]

How I Ceased to Be a Jew

In 2013, Sand published a book entitled How I Ceased to Be a Jew. The book examines the question of Jewish identity and the distinction between being a Jew and being Israeli. It also examines the identity of Israel, with a focus on the country's relationship, as a “Jewish state,” to Jews around the world and to its non-Jewish citizens.^[31]

Publications

• L'Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Paris, La Découverte, 1984
• Georges Sorel en son temps, with Jacques Julliard (eds), Paris, Seuil, 1985
• Intellectuals, Truth and Power: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2000 (in Hebrew)
• Le XXe siècle à l' écran, Paris, Seuil, 2004 — also as Film as History – Imagining and Screening the Twentieth Century, Tel Aviv, Am Oved & Open University Press, 2002 (in Hebrew)
• Cinema and Memory – A Dangerous Relationship?, with Haim Bresheeth & Moshe Zimmerman (eds), Jerusalem, The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2004 (in Hebrew)
• Historians, Time and Imagination, From the “Annales” School to the Postzionist Assassin, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2004 (in Hebrew)
• Les Mots et la terre - Les intellectuels en Israël, Paris, Fayard, 2006—Also as The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, trans. Ames Hodge, Cambridge, Semiotext(e)/Active Agents, 2011.
• The Invention of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2008 (in Hebrew) — also as Comment le peuple juif fut inventé - De la Bible au sionisme, Paris, Fayard, 2008, and The Invention of the Jewish People, New York, Verso 2009.
• The Invention of the Land of Israel, Tel Aviv, Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2012 (in Hebrew). Published in English translation by Verso (2012).
• How I Ceased to Be a Jew, Tel Aviv, Kinneret Zamora Pavilion, 2013 (in Hebrew)

See also

• Isaak Markus Jost
• Leopold Zunz

Notes

External links

• The Invention of the Jewish People, English Edition (Verso Books, 2009) Website
• Anita Shapira, Review Essay: The Jewish-people deniers, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 28, No. 1, March 2009, 63-72 (in English)
• "Comment le peuple juif fut inventé" ("How the Jewish People was invented") by Shlomo Sand, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2008
• Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile: Israel deliberately forgets its history by Shlomo Sand, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2008
• Boycott Ariel college by Shlomo Sand, Haaretz
• History in the (almost) making by Yonatan Gur, Ynetnews, November 2007
• Post-Zionism only rings once by Neri Livneh, Haaretz, September 2001
• "Are the Jews an invented people?", Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique - English edition (May 2008).
• Martin Goodman, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 26 February 2010; Shlomo Sand responds, TLS, Letters to the Editor, 10 March 2010; Martin Goodman responds, TLS, Letters to the Editor, 24 March 2010
• Video of discussion between Avi Shlaim and Shlomo Sand. Chaired by Jacqueline Rose at the Frontline Club, London, 12 November 2009
• Shlomo Sand interview: 'There are Israeli, not Jewish people' on Russia Today. Uploaded to YouTube 4 Aug 2009.