Shlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand (pronounced Zand; ; born 10 September 1946) is an Israeli post-Zionist historian and socialist. He has served as an emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University since 2014. He is known for his book The Invention of the Jewish People, originally published in Hebrew as Matai ve'eich humtsa ha'am hayehudi? ( When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?) in 2008.

Biography Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. Both his parents had communist and anti-imperialist views and refused to accept compensation from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War. studied electronics by night and found employment by day in a radio repair business. Drafted in 1965, he served at the communist kibbutz of Yad Hanna. The Six-Day War, in which he served – his unit conquered at heavy loss the Abu Tor area in East Jerusalem left him with a sense that he had lost his homeland. and a conversation between the two inspired Darwish's 1967 poem "A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies," though it was not revealed at the time that the soldier was Sand.

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

Declining an offer by the Israeli Maki Communist Party 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, 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. 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. Expounding on this argument, in 2012, Sand wrote:

Nevertheless, Sand supports Israel's existence "not because of historical right, but because of the fact that it exists today and any effort to destroy it will bring new tragedies." He explained that he does not call himself a Zionist, but "a post-Zionist and non-Zionist because the justification of this land is not historical right."

Geneticist Dr. Eran Elhaik has published two research papers which cite Sand's work extensively. The first, "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses", came out in December 2012 argued that genetic evidence points to a "mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries" within the founding population of modern European Jews. The theory proved highly controversial, and was contested by a number of historians and several geneticists. Elhaik's second paper, in collaboration with others, similarly used Sand's work and concluded that the Ashkenazi descend from 'a heterogeneous Iranian population, which later mixed with Eastern and Western Slavs and possibly some Turks and Greeks in the territory of the Khazar Empire around the 8th century A.D.'

Published works 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.

Sand reconstructs how the myths of Jewish nationalism were forged by certain 19th-century historians, starting with Heinrich Graetz, who took the Hebrew Bible as a reliable historical source. Sand was criticized, mainly by Zionist historians, for presenting allegedly "dubious theories" regarding Jewish identity as historical facts. He argues that several ancient peoples were forcibly converted to Judaism, starting with the Idumeans, while numerous individuals voluntarily embraced Judaism throughout the Roman Empire and neighboring polities. Sand also espouses the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the early Middle Ages, which is vehemently denied by other Israeli scholars. Like early Zionists such as Israel Belkind, Sand dismisses the misconception of a massive exile of Judeans in the first century CE and argues that Palestinians are mostly descended from the Judean population of that time. All these arguments challenge the ideological foundations of the State of Israel. 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. An English translation of the book was published by Verso Books in October 2009. The book has also been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and Slovene and further translations were underway. As of 2009, The Invention of the Jewish People has been translated into more languages than any other Israeli history book.

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.

How I Stopped Being a Jew In 2013, Sand published How I Stopped Being a Jew which 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. He expresses a desire to break with what he sees as a "tribal Judeocentrism" subject to the "caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe," expressing a deep attachment to the Hebrew language and to a secular ideal of Israel.

Other publications L'Illusion du politique, Paris, La Découverte, 1984 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 in Hebrew and Spanish). Historians, Time and Imagination, Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 2004 (in Hebrew ). The Words and the Land, Los Angeles, Semiotext, 2011 (also in French). Twilight of History, London, Verso, 2017 (also in Hebrew and French). J. Julliard & S. Sand (eds.), Georges Sorel en son temps, Paris, Seuil, 1985 H. Bresheeth, M. Zimmerman & S. Sand (eds.), Cinema and Memory, Jerusalem, Zalman Shazar, 2004 (in Hebrew). S. Sand (ed.), Ernest Renan – On the Nation and the Jewish People. London, Verso, 2010 (also in French and Hebrew).