Shlomo Sand - 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). Reviewing the book for Haaretz, Ofri Ilani wrote that Sand's work is an attempt "to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’ with a common origin," but instead is a mix of groups who have adopted the Jewish religion, primarily descending from the medieval Eurasian state of Khazaria.

Sand argues that the original Jews living in Israel were not exiled following the Bar Kokhba revolt, and suggests that the ancestors of much or most of the present day world Jewish population were individuals and groups who converted to Judaism at later periods. The story of the exile, he states, in fact was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God." Sand states that most Jews were not exiled by the Romans and were permitted to remain in the country. He puts the number of those exiled at tens of thousands at most. He adds that many of the Jews converted to Islam following the Arab conquest, and were assimilated among the conquerors. He concludes that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews.

Ilani summarizes Sand's explanation of the birth of the myth of a Jewish people as a group with a common ethnic origin as follows: "t a certain stage in the 19th century intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace."

Sand's area of professional expertise is the history of modern France and Europe, and not of antiquity, and in response to Israeli criticism that he wrote about Jewish, rather than European history, he replied, "a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."