--- product_id: 2241858 title: "The Invention of the Jewish People" price: "1911031₫" currency: VND in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.vn/products/2241858-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people store_origin: VN region: Vietnam --- # The Invention of the Jewish People **Price:** 1911031₫ **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Invention of the Jewish People - **How much does it cost?** 1911031₫ with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.vn](https://www.desertcart.vn/products/2241858-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future. Review: Who Could Have Known? - As a man with limited formal education I first off admit to being no critic of books of history nor books of books of history. My interest in The Invention of the Jewish People is a logical progression from reading the King James Old Testament in its entirety (I'm on the second go), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy - by John Mearesheimer and Stephen Walt, The Middle East in World Affairs by George Lenczowski, A History of the Modern Middle East by William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, Theologico and Political Treatise, and Political Treatise both by Benedict de Spinoza, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. Through this limited collection of sources it became apparent to me there was much more to zionism than I would be able to read about in one book. That is until I read The Invention of the Jewish People. Whatever your takeaway from this book, I as a heritage Christian highly recommend The Invention of the Jewish People to those church-goers who subscribe to the fantastical notion put forth by many evangelical congregations. The book is tough sledding in some spots, particularly the first chapter which sets out to define nationalism, the purpose of which is to ground the investigations and conclusions put forth by Professor Sand. But man doesn't progress by reading down but only by reading up. It is important to realize students in Israel are not even permitted to read some of the sources Prof. Sand cites in this thorough and enlightening book so that I urge anyone interested in having a deeper perspective of our current bloody posture in the Middle East to read Professor Sand's book. I appreciate Professor Sand's book so much and look forward to The Invention of the Land of Israel. It is becoming more and more apparent to me that the Zionist movement is not so much about religion and promises the Hebrew God made to a long past tribe, as it is money and the effete lust for power. P.S. And with the newly initiated war Israel and the U.S. vehemently deny is happening, this book is even more pertinent to understanding our irrational and immoral attachment to the political machine of zionism, camouflaged as a religion. Review: The invention of bourgeois nationalism, Zionist style.... - Schlomo Sand is employed as a professor of contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. The Invention of the Jewish People was originally published in Hebrew in Israel. Translations of his work are now being published throughout the world in many languages, including English. Sand is the son of a World War II era veteran of the Polish Communist Party. He is also the son-in-law of a Spanish anarchist who fought Franco nationalists in the streets of Barcelona during the Civil War/Revolution. Professor Sand would probably describe himself as an apple, fallen somewhat distant from those trees, perhaps as a cosmopolitan liberal. His view of Israel is that it would better off giving up being an `ethnocracy'--Sand's term for the ethno-biologically defined Jewish political State. Professor Sand's preference is for Israel to become a garden variety, secular capitalist democracy like France or the United States of America. Dr. Sand gives his readers many insights into the general intellectual foundations of the modern era's nationalist ideological project and of Zionist nationalist project in particular. In this reviewer's opinion, The Invention of the Jewish People is worth reading for these critical observations alone, as nationalism has been and continues to be a strong ideological force in our time. Sand makes the case that class societies up until the 18th century were made up mostly of sedentary peasants and nomadic herdsmen. Sand effectively argues that there was no official ideology of nationalism embedded in the consciousness of the people who lived within these pre-industrial societies. Historically speaking, these agrarian formations were dominated by classes of aristocrats, landlords and slave owners. The nomadic and peasant majorities of this ancient world had no notion of being part of a nation. Comprehending this insight is fundamental to grasping Sand's arguments about how nationalism, and in particular Jewish nationalism, was an ideological invention. As opposed to modern day nationalist conscious, based on self-regulated `patriotism' , schooled with `pledges of allegiance', ubiquitous posters of `our fearless leader' and `hats off at the sports match in honour of the national anthem', ancient rulers relied on keeping the mostly peasant producers of wealth in a constant state of fear of the absolute power of the sovereign. There was no sense of being a part of a national political State amongst the general populace. At best, the sovereign only had to, "secure the loyalty of the state's administration in order to preserve the continuity and stability of the government, but the peasants were required simply to pass along the surplus agricultural produce and sometimes to provide the monarchy and nobility with soldiers. Taxes were of course collected by force, or at any rate by its constant implicit threat, rather than by persuasion or efforts at consensus." (p.26) Capitalist rule erupted out of political revolutions against these ancient expressions of absolutism. The revolutions of modernity (from Cromwell's Puritans in the mid 17th century to Colonial America's yeoman farmers and private property owners, to the overthrow of monarchism in France by its citizens and in country after country well into the 19th and 20th centuries) all resulted in the establishment of national political States. All nationalisms were political expressions of the rapidly changing social relations of the producers of wealth. From peasant subjects, to wage-labouring citizens, the producing classes were united, after nationalist revolt, as citizens with the ruling capitalist and landlord classes in one big political State. These conditions were accompanied by new political notions, primary amongst them, the rule of law and the classless identity politics which proclaimed that sovereignty was no long the king's; but for the `people' of the nation. From these material circumstances sprang a need by the ruling class for the legitimation of their system of political dominance thus, the impetus for public intellectuals to invent and spread the gospel of the various and sundry nationalist brands. One of the first tasks these amplified intellectual voices had to confront was to define who `the people' were. Sand contends that modern public intellectuals invented all nationalist ideologies thus, all `peoples'. Most of these intellectuals mixed history with cultural myths in order to fashion their nationalist ideologies. Sand calls these nationalist ideologies passing for history, `mythistory'. More than a few of these nationalist mythistories were combined with the pseudo-scientific invention of `race', an ideology originating in the 18th century. "In the nineteenth century, national cultures often tied the soft term, `people', to the rigid and problematic `race,' and many regarded the two words as intersecting, supporting, or complimentary. The homogeneous collective origin of `the people'--always, of course, superior and unique, if not actually pure--became a kind of insurance against the risks represented by fragmentary, though persistent, sub identities that continued to swarm beneath the unifying modernity. The imagined origin also served as an efficient filter against undesirable mixing with hostile neighbouring nations." (p.27) However, by 1945, the horror of the Nazi holocaust, most especially its connection with `Ayrian' racist mythhistory, prompted world leaders and public intellectuals to officially renounce `race' as having any scientifically based, genetic substance. UNESCO statements on race in the early 1950s explained `race' as a social myth and the 1998 American Anthropological Association statement on `race' proclaimed it to be a pseudo-scientific concept. Still, the `commonsense' notion that there are `races' has persisted and is present to this day in public discourse even though, as Sand observes, pre-WWII notions of `race' have more and more morphed into the bourgeois intellectually acceptable concept of `ethnicity'. To be sure, the oppressive force of racism persists. Not only that but, it is often legitmised, Sand would argue, by continuing to legitimate an ethno-biological linkage with nationalist ideological concepts defining, `the people'. That the Nazi extermination of `inferior races' during WWII, threw a spanner in the ideological works of those attempting to link `race' with `nation', is true. However, as Sand points out, it was particularly problematic for Zionist ideologists. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, its legitimacy was based on the notion of a genetic connection between ancient and modern peoples of the Jewish faith and culture. According to this mythistory, modern day Jews were genetically linked to those people who inhabited that portion of the Middle East known as Israel, Judea and Palestine in the early 1st century CE. A fusing of Biblical stories with actual history had long become part of the Zionist ideological project. As the nationalist ideological story goes (Sand writes a much more detailed account in a chapter he titles, `Mythistory'), the Jewish people were deported from their homeland after much of Jerusalem, along with the Second Temple, was destroyed in 70CE by the Roman soldiers under the command of Titus. As the story went, this came as punishment for an unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Empire by the Jewish people. According to this mythical tale, the whole of this Jewish people then wandered the Earth in exile from their homeland. The Zionist nationalist project was designed to bring the Jewish people home to "Eretz Israel" from their long exile. What Sand demonstrates, in his meticulously researched book, is that great mass of the people who lived in what was then the Roman province of Palestine in 70CE were not exiled. As he conclusively shows, conquerors of that era, including the Babylonian conquerors related in the Biblical story of the destruction of the First Temple and the Romans who destroyed the Second Temple, never exiled whole peoples because those peoples were the peasant producers of wealth and obtaining that wealth, along with the power that goes with it, is what being a ruling class is all about. Peasants are generally tied to their land and most people living in Roman Palestine were peasants. Peasants don't move around. They're sedentary. Ancient ruling classes always liked it that way. As Sand points out, conquering rulers of ancient times would routinely enslave defeated elites from the ruling class whom they had conquered but, they would leave the great mass of the people (mostly peasant farmers) on the land, to continue to produce wealth, as these peasants had done for various other ruling classes for centuries before. The implications of this revelation for the current relation between peoples identifying themselves as Palestinians and those identifying themselves as Jews both inside and outside the immediate borders of Israel are pretty obvious in this reviewer's opinion. The classless nationalist identity politics, which keep rank and file Palestinian and Israeli workers at each other's throats, is based on a series of invented fictions. Of course, this is true for all the world's nationalisms, for all are ideological inventions which assume that the working class and the employing class have interests in common. So, where do most of the people of the Jewish faith in the world come from, if not from an ethno-biologically connected people who were exiled from their homeland by the Romans in 70 CE? Sand's answer is that most come from "proselytising". Sand demonstrates that the first great monotheistic religion, Judaism, was spread to eager pagan converts throughout the Mediterranean basin a long time before the competing monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam arose. The question which came to this reviewer's mind was, "Why would polytheists find this monotheistic religion, with its invisible deity so attractive?" Shorter work time is one of Sand's fascinating insights. The weekly day of rest, the Sabbath, turned the practice of Judaism into a way of legitimising free time, much to the consternation of the slave owning ruling classes of the ancient, polytheistic world. As Sand relates, a great victory for the proselytisers of the Jewish faith came with the conversion of the Punics. Punic Carthage was not a Hebrew speaking city state. It was located in what is today the political State of Tunisia. After the defeat of Carthage by the Roman Republic in 146 BCE, the Jewish religion continued to be practiced amongst the peasant people of this region. The faith also spread to nearby nomadic Berbers, who were later to accompany the Arabic Muslim conquerors of Spain as soldiers in 711 CE. The implications here are enormous, especially considering what happened to Jews who refused to convert to Christianity during Ferdinand and Isabella's reign in Spain, circa 1492CE. Sand presents historically documented evidence of the many other conversions to Judaism within the confines of the heavily used trading routes of Mediterranean, in the late BCE and the early CE of the Roman Empire. He shows that this proselytising tendency was more or less suppressed with the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE and of Islam after the 8th century CE. "Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms, Christianity or Islam, to the land of paganism, with immigrants who convinced the pagans that their faith was preferable. The great mass proselytizing campaign that began in the second century BCE, with the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom, reached its climax in Khazaria in the eighth century CE." (p. 220) As Sand shows, the conversion of the Kagan of Khazaria, a kingdom located above the Black Sea, helped create a great mass of people of the Jewish faith. Many of these Jewish religionists spread out into what is now Eastern Europe after Khazaria was overrun by the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the early 13th century CE. Sand writes, "The Khazars were a coalition of strong Turkic or Hunnic-Bulgar clans who, as they began to settle down, mingled with the Scythians who had inhabited these mountains and steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which was known for a long time as the Khazar Sea. At its peak, the kingdom encompassed an assortment of tribes and linguistic groups, Alans and Bulgars, Magyars and Slavs. The Khazars collected taxes from them all and ruled over a vast landmass, stretching from Kiev in the northwest to the Crimean Peninsula in the south, and from the upper Volga to present-day Georgia." (p.214) As Sand demonstrates time and again, actual history profoundly conflicts with the `mythistory' of the BIBLE which forms the very foundation on which Israeli nationalist ideology and ultimately, the Israeli political State rests. For example, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948: "After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom." (p.129) The Invention of the Jewish People is a work which will be useful to any reader interested in making sense of the social relations of power and current political conflicts arising from them in the modern day Middle East. Doctor Sand's work should be helpful to those eager to grasp the conceptual intricacies of nationalist ideology and how it has come to distort political judgements amongst and between workers of the world today. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #862,662 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #2 in History of Judaism #20 in Israel & Palestine History (Books) #47 in Jewish History (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,369 Reviews | ## Images ![The Invention of the Jewish People - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ohFH0l+2L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Who Could Have Known? *by P***. on March 3, 2026* As a man with limited formal education I first off admit to being no critic of books of history nor books of books of history. My interest in The Invention of the Jewish People is a logical progression from reading the King James Old Testament in its entirety (I'm on the second go), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy - by John Mearesheimer and Stephen Walt, The Middle East in World Affairs by George Lenczowski, A History of the Modern Middle East by William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, Theologico and Political Treatise, and Political Treatise both by Benedict de Spinoza, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. Through this limited collection of sources it became apparent to me there was much more to zionism than I would be able to read about in one book. That is until I read The Invention of the Jewish People. Whatever your takeaway from this book, I as a heritage Christian highly recommend The Invention of the Jewish People to those church-goers who subscribe to the fantastical notion put forth by many evangelical congregations. The book is tough sledding in some spots, particularly the first chapter which sets out to define nationalism, the purpose of which is to ground the investigations and conclusions put forth by Professor Sand. But man doesn't progress by reading down but only by reading up. It is important to realize students in Israel are not even permitted to read some of the sources Prof. Sand cites in this thorough and enlightening book so that I urge anyone interested in having a deeper perspective of our current bloody posture in the Middle East to read Professor Sand's book. I appreciate Professor Sand's book so much and look forward to The Invention of the Land of Israel. It is becoming more and more apparent to me that the Zionist movement is not so much about religion and promises the Hebrew God made to a long past tribe, as it is money and the effete lust for power. P.S. And with the newly initiated war Israel and the U.S. vehemently deny is happening, this book is even more pertinent to understanding our irrational and immoral attachment to the political machine of zionism, camouflaged as a religion. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The invention of bourgeois nationalism, Zionist style.... *by M***D on November 25, 2010* Schlomo Sand is employed as a professor of contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. The Invention of the Jewish People was originally published in Hebrew in Israel. Translations of his work are now being published throughout the world in many languages, including English. Sand is the son of a World War II era veteran of the Polish Communist Party. He is also the son-in-law of a Spanish anarchist who fought Franco nationalists in the streets of Barcelona during the Civil War/Revolution. Professor Sand would probably describe himself as an apple, fallen somewhat distant from those trees, perhaps as a cosmopolitan liberal. His view of Israel is that it would better off giving up being an `ethnocracy'--Sand's term for the ethno-biologically defined Jewish political State. Professor Sand's preference is for Israel to become a garden variety, secular capitalist democracy like France or the United States of America. Dr. Sand gives his readers many insights into the general intellectual foundations of the modern era's nationalist ideological project and of Zionist nationalist project in particular. In this reviewer's opinion, The Invention of the Jewish People is worth reading for these critical observations alone, as nationalism has been and continues to be a strong ideological force in our time. Sand makes the case that class societies up until the 18th century were made up mostly of sedentary peasants and nomadic herdsmen. Sand effectively argues that there was no official ideology of nationalism embedded in the consciousness of the people who lived within these pre-industrial societies. Historically speaking, these agrarian formations were dominated by classes of aristocrats, landlords and slave owners. The nomadic and peasant majorities of this ancient world had no notion of being part of a nation. Comprehending this insight is fundamental to grasping Sand's arguments about how nationalism, and in particular Jewish nationalism, was an ideological invention. As opposed to modern day nationalist conscious, based on self-regulated `patriotism' , schooled with `pledges of allegiance', ubiquitous posters of `our fearless leader' and `hats off at the sports match in honour of the national anthem', ancient rulers relied on keeping the mostly peasant producers of wealth in a constant state of fear of the absolute power of the sovereign. There was no sense of being a part of a national political State amongst the general populace. At best, the sovereign only had to, "secure the loyalty of the state's administration in order to preserve the continuity and stability of the government, but the peasants were required simply to pass along the surplus agricultural produce and sometimes to provide the monarchy and nobility with soldiers. Taxes were of course collected by force, or at any rate by its constant implicit threat, rather than by persuasion or efforts at consensus." (p.26) Capitalist rule erupted out of political revolutions against these ancient expressions of absolutism. The revolutions of modernity (from Cromwell's Puritans in the mid 17th century to Colonial America's yeoman farmers and private property owners, to the overthrow of monarchism in France by its citizens and in country after country well into the 19th and 20th centuries) all resulted in the establishment of national political States. All nationalisms were political expressions of the rapidly changing social relations of the producers of wealth. From peasant subjects, to wage-labouring citizens, the producing classes were united, after nationalist revolt, as citizens with the ruling capitalist and landlord classes in one big political State. These conditions were accompanied by new political notions, primary amongst them, the rule of law and the classless identity politics which proclaimed that sovereignty was no long the king's; but for the `people' of the nation. From these material circumstances sprang a need by the ruling class for the legitimation of their system of political dominance thus, the impetus for public intellectuals to invent and spread the gospel of the various and sundry nationalist brands. One of the first tasks these amplified intellectual voices had to confront was to define who `the people' were. Sand contends that modern public intellectuals invented all nationalist ideologies thus, all `peoples'. Most of these intellectuals mixed history with cultural myths in order to fashion their nationalist ideologies. Sand calls these nationalist ideologies passing for history, `mythistory'. More than a few of these nationalist mythistories were combined with the pseudo-scientific invention of `race', an ideology originating in the 18th century. "In the nineteenth century, national cultures often tied the soft term, `people', to the rigid and problematic `race,' and many regarded the two words as intersecting, supporting, or complimentary. The homogeneous collective origin of `the people'--always, of course, superior and unique, if not actually pure--became a kind of insurance against the risks represented by fragmentary, though persistent, sub identities that continued to swarm beneath the unifying modernity. The imagined origin also served as an efficient filter against undesirable mixing with hostile neighbouring nations." (p.27) However, by 1945, the horror of the Nazi holocaust, most especially its connection with `Ayrian' racist mythhistory, prompted world leaders and public intellectuals to officially renounce `race' as having any scientifically based, genetic substance. UNESCO statements on race in the early 1950s explained `race' as a social myth and the 1998 American Anthropological Association statement on `race' proclaimed it to be a pseudo-scientific concept. Still, the `commonsense' notion that there are `races' has persisted and is present to this day in public discourse even though, as Sand observes, pre-WWII notions of `race' have more and more morphed into the bourgeois intellectually acceptable concept of `ethnicity'. To be sure, the oppressive force of racism persists. Not only that but, it is often legitmised, Sand would argue, by continuing to legitimate an ethno-biological linkage with nationalist ideological concepts defining, `the people'. That the Nazi extermination of `inferior races' during WWII, threw a spanner in the ideological works of those attempting to link `race' with `nation', is true. However, as Sand points out, it was particularly problematic for Zionist ideologists. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, its legitimacy was based on the notion of a genetic connection between ancient and modern peoples of the Jewish faith and culture. According to this mythistory, modern day Jews were genetically linked to those people who inhabited that portion of the Middle East known as Israel, Judea and Palestine in the early 1st century CE. A fusing of Biblical stories with actual history had long become part of the Zionist ideological project. As the nationalist ideological story goes (Sand writes a much more detailed account in a chapter he titles, `Mythistory'), the Jewish people were deported from their homeland after much of Jerusalem, along with the Second Temple, was destroyed in 70CE by the Roman soldiers under the command of Titus. As the story went, this came as punishment for an unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Empire by the Jewish people. According to this mythical tale, the whole of this Jewish people then wandered the Earth in exile from their homeland. The Zionist nationalist project was designed to bring the Jewish people home to "Eretz Israel" from their long exile. What Sand demonstrates, in his meticulously researched book, is that great mass of the people who lived in what was then the Roman province of Palestine in 70CE were not exiled. As he conclusively shows, conquerors of that era, including the Babylonian conquerors related in the Biblical story of the destruction of the First Temple and the Romans who destroyed the Second Temple, never exiled whole peoples because those peoples were the peasant producers of wealth and obtaining that wealth, along with the power that goes with it, is what being a ruling class is all about. Peasants are generally tied to their land and most people living in Roman Palestine were peasants. Peasants don't move around. They're sedentary. Ancient ruling classes always liked it that way. As Sand points out, conquering rulers of ancient times would routinely enslave defeated elites from the ruling class whom they had conquered but, they would leave the great mass of the people (mostly peasant farmers) on the land, to continue to produce wealth, as these peasants had done for various other ruling classes for centuries before. The implications of this revelation for the current relation between peoples identifying themselves as Palestinians and those identifying themselves as Jews both inside and outside the immediate borders of Israel are pretty obvious in this reviewer's opinion. The classless nationalist identity politics, which keep rank and file Palestinian and Israeli workers at each other's throats, is based on a series of invented fictions. Of course, this is true for all the world's nationalisms, for all are ideological inventions which assume that the working class and the employing class have interests in common. So, where do most of the people of the Jewish faith in the world come from, if not from an ethno-biologically connected people who were exiled from their homeland by the Romans in 70 CE? Sand's answer is that most come from "proselytising". Sand demonstrates that the first great monotheistic religion, Judaism, was spread to eager pagan converts throughout the Mediterranean basin a long time before the competing monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam arose. The question which came to this reviewer's mind was, "Why would polytheists find this monotheistic religion, with its invisible deity so attractive?" Shorter work time is one of Sand's fascinating insights. The weekly day of rest, the Sabbath, turned the practice of Judaism into a way of legitimising free time, much to the consternation of the slave owning ruling classes of the ancient, polytheistic world. As Sand relates, a great victory for the proselytisers of the Jewish faith came with the conversion of the Punics. Punic Carthage was not a Hebrew speaking city state. It was located in what is today the political State of Tunisia. After the defeat of Carthage by the Roman Republic in 146 BCE, the Jewish religion continued to be practiced amongst the peasant people of this region. The faith also spread to nearby nomadic Berbers, who were later to accompany the Arabic Muslim conquerors of Spain as soldiers in 711 CE. The implications here are enormous, especially considering what happened to Jews who refused to convert to Christianity during Ferdinand and Isabella's reign in Spain, circa 1492CE. Sand presents historically documented evidence of the many other conversions to Judaism within the confines of the heavily used trading routes of Mediterranean, in the late BCE and the early CE of the Roman Empire. He shows that this proselytising tendency was more or less suppressed with the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE and of Islam after the 8th century CE. "Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms, Christianity or Islam, to the land of paganism, with immigrants who convinced the pagans that their faith was preferable. The great mass proselytizing campaign that began in the second century BCE, with the rise of the Hasmonean kingdom, reached its climax in Khazaria in the eighth century CE." (p. 220) As Sand shows, the conversion of the Kagan of Khazaria, a kingdom located above the Black Sea, helped create a great mass of people of the Jewish faith. Many of these Jewish religionists spread out into what is now Eastern Europe after Khazaria was overrun by the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the early 13th century CE. Sand writes, "The Khazars were a coalition of strong Turkic or Hunnic-Bulgar clans who, as they began to settle down, mingled with the Scythians who had inhabited these mountains and steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which was known for a long time as the Khazar Sea. At its peak, the kingdom encompassed an assortment of tribes and linguistic groups, Alans and Bulgars, Magyars and Slavs. The Khazars collected taxes from them all and ruled over a vast landmass, stretching from Kiev in the northwest to the Crimean Peninsula in the south, and from the upper Volga to present-day Georgia." (p.214) As Sand demonstrates time and again, actual history profoundly conflicts with the `mythistory' of the BIBLE which forms the very foundation on which Israeli nationalist ideology and ultimately, the Israeli political State rests. For example, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948: "After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom." (p.129) The Invention of the Jewish People is a work which will be useful to any reader interested in making sense of the social relations of power and current political conflicts arising from them in the modern day Middle East. Doctor Sand's work should be helpful to those eager to grasp the conceptual intricacies of nationalist ideology and how it has come to distort political judgements amongst and between workers of the world today. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Useful Confirmation of Under Reported Information *by J***N on December 13, 2009* ADDENDUM NO. 2: June 2011 On re-reading Sand's book, I see that like so many other readers I was caught up in the history that was new to me. The book, however, is not a history -- it's historiography, a book about the evolution of historical writing: who the authors were, the historians' backgrounds, historical environments, and purposes, their relations with one another and how they based their works on previous histories. Sand's historiographic study concludes that Jewish history, like history of many other subjects, comes in two flavors: a canon that serves nationalism and adjusts to political exigencies, and scientific history that evolves along with the availability of documentary and physical evidence, as well as with changes in professional techniques. Sand gives several examples of politically motivated changes in the canonical history of the Jews. Most of the changes originated from the rise of "ethnic" nationalism in the late 1800s in Eastern Europe (as contrasted with the earlier "citizenship" nationalism of the early 1800s in Western Europe -- see pages 46-54). This political movement in the region where most Jews lived led Jewish nationalist historians to re-define Jewish identity as ethnic, rather than religious. For example: -- The existence of other ethnic communities that had converted to Judaism was progressively ignored as ethnic identity was emphasized. -- Racialist theories about Jews were promoted in the late 1800s when such analysis was fashionable but dropped after the Nazi episode put it in a bad odor, only to be revived after the 1967 conquest of the West Bank once again put a premium on distinguishing Jews from their neighbors inside the same borders. -- While historians, including David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, knew and wrote that Palestinian fellahin were by-and-large descended from Judean Jews, the anti-colonial Palestinian revolt of 1929 led Jewish history to cease mentioning it. The most important lesson of Sand's book is that modern nation-states reward an historical canon that serves nationalism, and they combat scientific history where it contradicts the canonical history. This is an important lesson because political pressure can affect other sciences as well. The public in the main only knows canon history thanks to government schools and political festivals. Sand recounts some scientific history not only because it appeals to him but because he wants the public to be more aware of the existence of scientific history. ORIGINAL REVIEW: Shlomo Sand argues that the Jewish religion was a huge success in gaining converts -- so much so that the number of Jews in ancient times (around 4 million) was vastly more than the imaginable number of exiles from the Judean population. This made the Jewish people cosmopolitan, not simply a Judean group. The "invention" in Sand's title is the subsequent claim that Jews were "essentially" all Judean exiles. Sand points out that exiling whole countries was physically impossible. In Judea's case, he says there is no evidence that more than a few thousand elite would have been forced to leave. The Jewish society, farmers and shepherds in its majority, continued. Alexander the Great and then the Romans conquered many nations, and Sand says that the scope for international interchange within the Hellenistic and Roman Empires tempted many people from nations like Judea to re-locate, especially to attractive metropoles like Alexandria and Rome. This would have been interesting mainly to elites and intellectuals, and it was these elite Judeans who were so successful in attracting pagans to convert to Judaism. One response to these findings that one hears is that they're true but that they don't change the "essential truth" that Jews were "exiled" from Judea, propelled by a change in the Jews' sense of themselves. Sand's book frequently refers to "essentialist" arguments like this, and evidently he does not agree. It's very useful to have these points made in a prominent way. Sand's book also contains some intricate and interesting discussions of nationhood in the abstract. He can over-talk a subject, however, and the last chapter about democracy in modern Israel seems like almost a change in subject. ADDENDUM NO. 1: I characterized Sand's book as a "useful confirmation of under-reported information." Prof. Tony Judt is in a better position to judge, so I was gratified to read this section from his review in The Financial Times: "His [Sand's] contribution, critics assert, is at best redundant. For the last century, specialists have been perfectly familiar with the sources he cites and the arguments he makes. From a purely scholarly perspective, I have no quarrel with this. Even I, dependent for the most part on second-hand information about the earlier millennia of Jewish history, can see that Prof Sand - for example in his emphasis upon the conversions and ethnic mixing that characterise the Jews in earlier times - is telling us nothing we do not already know. "The question is, who are "we"? Certainly in the US, the overwhelming majority of Jews (and perhaps non-Jews) have absolutely no acquaintance with the story Prof Sand tells. They will never have heard of most of his protagonists, but they are all too approvingly familiar with the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit. If Prof Sand's popularising work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile." Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009 ## Frequently Bought Together - The Invention of the Jewish People - The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland - The Thirteenth Tribe --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.vn/products/2241858-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people](https://www.desertcart.vn/products/2241858-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people) --- *Product available on Desertcart Vietnam* *Store origin: VN* *Last updated: 2026-06-05*