Growing up in 1980s China, I vividly remember the smokes, bodies, and ruins on the TV screen, accompanied by unfamiliar phrases like “Gaza Strip” (加沙地带）and “West Bank” (约旦河西岸), uttered in Chinese by the hosts of CCTV’s famously boring evening news program. After I came to the U.S., the similar scenes from Palestine continued to drive news cycles. However, this superficial familiarity did not mean I knew much about the conflict. Why would I care? The dreadful stories from that land seemed to be getting old, and the people involved appeared hopelessly trapped in the past, while the world moved on. October 7th and its aftermath changed me. Like many others, I struggled to make sense of the horror of that day, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the widening chasm that suddenly threatened to engulf America. I have never seen so many protests on college campuses, including the one where I teach. More strikingly, the vast majority of protesters seemed to support the side that, from my understanding, had started the war in the worst way imaginable.
Perhaps they knew something I did not. Maybe my lack of historical knowledge clouded my judgment. In any case, I am determined to understand better. I decided to start with the history of the Jews, the chosen people who have claimed Palestine in the name of God.
“The Invention of the Jewish People,” written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian from the University of Tel Aviv, was the first book I stumbled on. As usual, the book caught my attention because of its controversies. After finishing the book, however, I realized that the title might be unnecessarily provocative. “The Invention of the Modern Israeli State” would be more accurate, although inventing “the Jewish people” sounds much more exciting.
The book addresses a fundamental question: are Jews a people or a religion? To me, this was the most confusing aspect about the Jewish identity. I had always assumed Jews were simply believers of Judaism. Precisely because of their faith, Jews have been cursed, persecuted, and slaughtered for thousands of years by pagan Romans, Arabic Muslims, European Christians, and Nazis. This ancient hatred was so intense and enduring that an entire vocabulary of words was created to describe it: antisemitism, pogrom, Holocaust, ghettos, and genocide.
However, the mainstream view among Israelis today, according to Sand, is that Jews is also an ethnic group whose ancestry goes back to the apocryphal accounts in the Bible. To understand this claim, let me briefly recount Jewish history in its first millennium.
The legend has it that Abraham is the biological progenitor of all Jews. God revealed the Truth to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising that his descendants will become a great nation and be given the land of Canaan, which is today’s Palestine. Abraham’s descendants were briefly enslaved by Egyptians but led by Moses back to the Hold Land, which they eventually conquered. By 1000 BCE, the Kingdom of Irael emerged, ruled sequentially by three legendary kings, Saul (the grandfather), David (the father) and Soloman (the son). The kingdom reached its peak under Soloman, who built the First Temple, as well as grand palaces where he famously housed an enormous harem. The death of Soloman in 930 BCE plunged Israel into a chaos from which it would not fully recover until perhaps modern times. The nation was divided into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Israel fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 720 BCE, and Judah subsequently fell to Babylon in 586 BCE.
The conquest of Judah by Babylon was the first traumatic event—it destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, sending the first wave of Jews into exile in Babylon and Egypt. Many Jews would later return to the Holy Land and build the Second Temple with the help of the First Persian Empire, which by then had dominated the land between the Mediterranean and India. However, the Jewish nation would continue to exist as a vassal state—controlled first by the Persians and then by the Greeks—until 165 BCE, when the Hasmonean Kingdom gained independence following a revolt against the Greeks.
Then it was the Romans’ turn to ravage Palestine. The Hasmonean Kingdom fell to Pompey’s legions in 63 BCE. The following two hundred years were marked by tremendous upheaval in Palestine, including the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The conflict culminated in Bar Kokhab revolt (132 – 136 CE), during which Romans effectively decimated Judea and wiped out most of its Jewish population. Jews began to leave Palestine in droves and would not return in great numbers until the 20th century. Over the next two thousand years, the Jewish diaspora would spread out across the world, sometimes on their terms, but more often driven by relentless persecutions.
Crucially, the claim that Jews are an ethnic group implies that, no matter where they live now and how they have migrated through the ages, Jews have managed to maintain the purity of their ethnicity. The Jewish diaspora is seen as a nation in exile, unfairly deprived of its land promised by God, and thus has the right to return to it. As Sand put it,
“National mythology determined that the Jews—banished, deported or fugitive emigrants—were driven into a long and dolorous exile, causing them to wander over lands and seas to the far corners of the earth until the advent of Zionism prompted them to turn around and return en masse to their orphaned homeland. This homeland had never belonged to the Arab conquerors, hence the claim of the people without a land to the land without a people.”
This image of a Jewish nation in exile, however, was a modern invention that only began to take shape in the second half of the 19th century. According to Sand, up to that point, Jews still primarily identified themselves through their shared religion rather than a common ethnic lineage. Yet, Bible would soon be “transferred from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section”, becoming an ethnic marker that indicates “a common origin for individuals of very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion”. Armed with the Holy Book, now interpreted as a historical document, Jewish intellectuals in Germany, such as Heinrich Graetz and Heinrich von Treitschke, began to frame 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 theory is built upon three pillars.
First, Sand maintains that there was never a mass forced deportation of Jews from their homeland after the fall of the kingdom. Instead, their emigration took place gradually over several centuries, due largely to the expropriation of Jewish land, first by Emperor Hadrian (one of the “Five Good Emperors” of Rome) following the Bar Kokhab revolt, and then by the new conquerors under the banner of Muhammad in the seventh century. Moreover, Judaism teaches that the exile from the Holy Land serves as a form of redemption, and the return must await the End of Days, when the Messiah will arrive to resurrect the dead and offer salvation. Therefore, there was no “voluntary return” either, for that would be considered an attempt to “hasten the end and rebel against God’s spirit”. As a result, Jews began migrating to Palestine in significant numbers, as Sand notes, “only when the American borders closed in the 1920s, and again after the horrendous Nazi massacres”.
Second, Sand argues that Judaism has not always been an exclusive religion of a chosen people. On the contrary, ancient Judaism was “as keen to propagate itself as Christianity and Islam would be in the future.” In fact, without significant proselytizing efforts that lasted more than 300 years, starting from the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom, the Jewish population could not have reached its current scale. The later exclusivity was more or less forced upon Judaism by Christianity’s more successful marketing strategy, as well as the edicts of Christianized Roman emperors, which forbade, among other things, the circumcision of males who were not born Jews, including slaves. Of course, this early period of mass conversion to Judaism –– whose memory has been deliberately eradicated by Zionists, according to Sand –– directly contradicts the notion of a pure ethnic lineage tracing back to Abraham and his sons.
The third and perhaps most controversial pillar is the so-called Khazar Hypothesis. According to this theory, a large part of Ashkenazi Jews—who lived mostly in Central and Eastern Europe before World War II, with a great many perishing in the death camps constructed by Hitler—were not migrants from Western Europe, especially Germany, but rather descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic people who established a powerful empire in the region between the Caspian and Black Seas during the 7th to 10th centuries. The existence of a Khazar Kingdom that converted to Judaism sometime between the 8th and 9th centuries has been accepted by many. For example, another book I read recently, “A Short History of the Jewish People,” corroborates this. However, there seems to be no consensus on what happened to the Jews living in that kingdom after it was conquered by the Mongols. Here is what Sand writes:
“The Mongols did not understand the needs of land cultivation in the vast territories they captured, and did not sufficiently care for the farming needs of the subjugated populations. During the conquest, the irrigation systems that branched from the wide rivers—systems that had sustained the cultivation of rice and vineyards—were demolished, causing the flight of masses of people and depopulating the prairies for hundreds of years. Among the emigrants were many Jewish Khazars who, together with their neighbors, advanced into the western Ukraine and hence to Polish and Lithuanian territories”.
To be sure, Sand lacks any substantial archaeological evidence to support his conjecture about a mass westward migration of Jewish Khazars. In fact, many scholars even doubt that a mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism ever took place. However, he is right to ask why an interesting and plausible historical theory has been vilified in Israel as heretical, scandalous, disgraceful, and anti-Semitic since 1970s.
Whether or not Sand has all the facts correct—his book has faced pushback from fellow historians—his debunking of the modern concept of the “Jewish People” appears well-reasoned and persuasive, at least to a layman like me. The question is, why did Sand take it upon himself to debunk his own people? As a historian, he fully understood that the reconstruction of Jewish identity was part of the European nationalist movements of the time.
Nationalists have always looked to a glorified past to validate their distinct historical existence.
The Nazis imagined a mythical Germanic past where Aryans were portrayed as a superior, pure race destined to lead the world.
The Meiji Restoration in Japan revived Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu—who was purportedly a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu—to affirm the existence of a divine and unbroken imperial line.
As a kid, I was taught that all Chinese are 炎黄子孙, i.e., the direct descendants of the Yan Emperor (炎帝) and the Yellow Emperor (黄帝), who are said to have ruled China around 2700-2600 BCE. While I always understood these legends were to be taken with a grain of salt, I never doubted for a moment—until after living in the U.S. for some years—that the Chinese are an ethnic group with lineage tracing back to a glorious ancient people led by those legendary figures. Nor did I question the notion that the Chinese have a “sacred and inviolable right” to every inch of the “Chinese land”, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Taiwan, even though these provinces were relatively recent conquests by the Manchurian, a nomadic people disparaged as foreign invaders as recently as in the early 1900s.
Jewish nationalists were no different: they found their narrative in Moses’ commandments and Solomon’s mighty kingdom, despite the lack of evidence to prove they ever existed.
As Karl Deutsch quipped,
“A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.”
If deceptive self-aggrandizement is a standard practice among nation-states, why only calling BS on Jews?
Sand explains his rationale toward the end of the book. He argues that the Jewish identity, invented to justify and bolster the young state of Israel, is at odds with democracy, which requires that all people residing in a country be its sovereign. Since Israel is legally defined as a Jewish state, non-Jews living in the country are treated as undesirable aliens and are, to various degrees, segregated, excluded, and discriminated against. As a result, Israel remains an incomplete democracy or a low-grade democracy. In Sand’s view, this status quo is not only less than ideal but ultimately unsustainable, since
the myth of the Jewish ethnos as a self-isolating historical body that always barred, and must therefore go on barring, outsiders from joining it is harmful to the State of Israel, and may cause it to disintegrate from within.
Therefore, Sand calls for the “creation of a democratic binational state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River” as the ideal solution to the century-long Israel-Palestine conflict. Be Ideal as it may, Sand’s one-state solution is a non-starter for either side of the conflict nowadays. Indeed, even he concedes that such a solution, which would likely condemn Jewish Israelis to a permanent minority status in their own state, might be asking too much. Given their historical experiences over the past two thousand years, it is understandable that Jews are wary of being a minority, especially in a country where the majority adheres to a different faith and may consider itself permanently at war with non-believers and apostates. That leaves us with the two-state solution, which remains viable but barely so.
In all likelihood, the endless cycles of violence and truce will continue, as Israelis and Palestinians remain locked in a perpetual life-and-death struggle over a piece of real estate that they could have shared in peace and prosperity. Sand mentioned that many Palestinians may, in fact, be descendants of Jews who voluntarily converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. If that is true, I cannot think of a more poignant example of the perverse power of religion, which has turned the same people against each other in such a tragic and horrific manner.
Marco Nie, Wilmette, IL