The invention of the Jewish people

Shlomo Sand, professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv, states in the preface to the English edition of The Invention of the Jewish People that the work arose from an attempt unprejudiced to analyze the great concepts about the historical roots and the identity of the State of Israel. This led him to find pieces of evidence marginalized by the mainstream of thought and that served to "create a narrative radically different from what I had been taught in my youth." A book thus arises that the author does not think is capable of changing the world, but that encourages the hope that he can be one of those that the world seeks when it begins to change.

The text starts with a collection of portraits that allow us to peer into the identity labyrinth built around Judaism and Israel, torn biographies that express amazingly well the power of myth to divide and confront men. All of them are people close to the author and the first is his father, Shulek, a Polish Jew born in 1910 and who in 1939 manages to escape from the Nazis and is welcomed into the USSR; in 1945 he returned to Poland, but the Jews were still rejected and he ended up in a refugee camp in Bavaria, from where he emigrated to Palestine; there he will die conscious of being stripped of his land to another town and yearning for the snows of his native country. Bernardo, the author's father-in-law, was a Catalan anarchist who arrived in Israel in 1948, fleeing Franco and attracted by stories about the kibbutz; atheist and anarchist lived and died, gentle, but with Jewish wife and daughters.

Two Palestinians called Mahmoud follow. The first, born in Jaffa in 1945, is one of the few who are allowed to remain in the city after the Nakba; was in his youth a close friend of the author and ended up leaving the land that had been stolen, welcomed in Sweden and becoming, almost, a Swedish. The other Mahmoud is named Darwish and is a great poet; He was born in 1941 and in 1948 he became a refugee. although he returns, it is only to suffer the pain of uprooting and to express it in the verses that he begins to write at that time; censored and persecuted, he went into exile in 1968; he will never be allowed to live in his country again.

Gisele, a French national and the daughter of a Jewish father and Gentile mother, is a fervent Zionist and is eager to settle in Israel until the bureaucracy of the Hebrew state demands that she "convert to Judaism" in order to do so; she, opposed to the clerics of any tendency, opposes and distances herself from the Zionist discourse thereafter. Larissa, Siberian, with the collapse of the USSR emigrates to Israel, where she must carry the stigma of an identity card that classifies her as "Russian".

The author of the book, born in 1946, was a soldier in the 1967 war; then he feels guilty for spilling innocent blood and leaving Israel; He is a professor in Paris for many years, but he ends up returning to what, in spite of everything, is his country. The invention of the Jewish people emerges as an attempt to question the mythical story around which the state of Israel has been forged, a story that begins when Moses receives the tables of the law from Sinai and then extends through flourishing kingdoms and painful exiles in which the mysterious identity of the "Jewish people" is always preserved. Shlomo Sand continues in this endeavor the work of other researchers such as Boas Evron or Uri Ram, and draws on the lessons of scholars of nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson or Ernest Gellner.

History as a myth

Based mainly on the works of the last two authors cited, the chapter that follows is devoted to terminological precisions and an analysis of the concepts of "people" and "nation". It is proven how the second frequently tries to base torticeramente in the first to become a cultural religion-show with its legion of priests-intellectuals, capable of projecting the heroism of the past in a future of progress at the service of capitalism. With the decline of the power of the Church, the myth retains its mission and grease the social machine to work cohesively and generate dividends. Nationalism is thus outlined as the most successful religion of modernity.

We know later the great milestones of Jewish historiography. Flavius ​​Josephus, Hellenized Jew of the first century, tries to integrate the biblical story with secular sources in the laudatory and missionary discourse of his Antiquities of the Jews. Jacques Besnage, a Huguenot, writes a continuation for this work at the beginning of the XVIII in which he considers them above all a sect persecuted for refusing to accept the divinity of Christ. Isaak Markus Jost, a German Jew, publishes from 1820 his History of the Israelites from the Maccabees to the present day, in which he tries to construct a story that could mean a bridge for the integration of the Jews in the German state. The Jews are thus a solely cultural and religious community, forged during the first exile in Babylon, and whose homeland are the countries in which they live.

We must wait until the 1850s for the works of Heinrich Graetz to bring a radically different perspective to the problem and the historical subject becomes a "Jewish people" presented in a way that brings it closer to the modern concept of nation. At a time when national mythology invades all corners of Europe, the Jews are thus prepared to have their own, which also finds its support in a legendary kingdom of David described in texts considered sacred by Christianity. A friend of Graetz's, Moses Hess, incorporates a racial bias into this process and judges the Jewish one of the "primary races" of the human race, which has preserved its purity over the centuries due to its "indestructible" character. The opposition to these ideas was intense among intellectuals and Gentile historians (Treitschke, Mommsen), who denied another nation on German soil, but also Jews (Lazarus, Bresslau, Cohen), who were betting on assimilation.

Simon Dubnow (1860-1941), a Belarusian Jew, continues in the wake of Graetz, adding data from modern historiography that tries to fit in with biblical sources, and Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989), who held the first chair of Jewish history in the USA, insists on it in A social and religious history of the jews, of 1937. The fact that this book did not advocate the return to the ancient homeland and the attainment of political sovereignty provoked a harsh criticism of Yitzhak Baer , professor of Jewish history in Jerusalem, for whom Jewish identity necessarily called for the establishment of a state in Palestine. A friend of this, Dinur, also a professor of Jewish history, was Minister of Education of Israel from 1951 and responsible for the pedagogical plans that were imposed. Stripped of its theological and thaumaturgical component, the story of the old testament becomes the works of these authors in the historical-national truth. The archaeological investigation has to confirm these unquestionable realities, and essential characters of the new state like David Ben-Gurion or Moshe Dayan see themselves as heirs of the biblical heroes.

However, starting in the late 1960s, the excavations pose serious problems to this dominant story. Thus, the "time of the patriarchs", the departure from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan or the great united kingdom of David and Solomon turn out to be incoherent with the objective data available and interpretable only as a composition elaborated hundreds of years later (probably the VI century to II BC) with the purpose of creating a cohesive religious community, based on monotheism.

The historical unreality of exile

The Romans never deported whole peoples of the eastern countries they conquered. What probably happened in the year 70, with the fall of the kingdom of Judea, was an important destruction, in Jerusalem especially, from which by the end of the century the population had recovered enough. The uprising of Bar Kokhba in 132 led to new devastations, but there is no evidence of deportation either. What then was the origin of the myth of the exile of the Jews after the ruin of the temple? Researchers who have studied this think it is a late elaboration by groups living outside of Palestine and sought to identify with the errant and unredeemed essence of a people who rejected the grace of Messiah Jesus and waited for the "true" , that would take them back to Jerusalem.

The fact is that before the alleged expulsion, there were already abundant Jewish communities in the Middle East and the shores of the Mediterranean, in this latter zone, especially as a result of the commercial expansion during the Hellenistic period. There is also evidence that Judaism, practiced by deeply Hellenized people, was at that time a proselytizing religion that grew with a significant number of conversions of foreign peoples.

The history of the State of Israel shows since its foundation the evolution of an ethnic nationalist project that, unable to be based on other criteria, progressively gets into the hands of the rabbinic caste. Laymen and atheists accept to see their lives dominated by religion, while developing policies of exclusion and apartheid that violate democratic standards. It is evident that the constitution of a state for the use and enjoyment of all the Jews of the world, disregarding the most basic rights of those who inhabited the country for centuries, is a monstrous grievance that can only be defined with rigor as "Jewish ethnocracy", but more eerie is to read the opinions of the intellectual elite of Israel, decorated historians and lawyers, who ardently defend the purely democratic character of all this.

The ethnic project of a Jewish state has become a dead end marked by an insufferable and ominous tension with the Arabs who live marginalized within Israel and also with those who are fiercely colonized in the occupied territories. The situation is a time bomb and it must be taken into account that the support of the West and the Jews from other countries to the project may not be eternal. Shlomo Sand closes the book pointing out that although the Zionist closure makes all reasonable solutions seem utopian, those who were able to invent a past should at least try to dream a future that is not doomed to become a nightmare.

The reworking and mythification is a constant in nationalist narratives, but The invention of the Jewish people, as brave as a scholar, full of documentation and well-grounded arguments, leaves us with the feeling that Zionism has broken a painful record in manipulation of history at the service of a political ideology. The widespread veneration of the biblical story has been used to impose a colonial project that violates human rights on a daily basis and is probably the most serious threat to world peace. We are facing a necessary book because it throws light where lies prevail, and only by extirpating this will be born the hope of dealing with the violence it generates; a work to read, discuss and comment in all possible ways, because the coordinated and firm pressure of the entire civilized world must be able to provide scenarios of sanity to a territory that falls into a fateful spiral.

First version in Spanish, Rebellion on April 8, 2015