A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

After a long stay on Israel’s bestseller list, and winning the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is finally available in English. The central importance of the conflict in the Middle East ensures that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well beyond the historians and politicians that he takes to task. Without an adequate understanding of Israel’s past, capable of superseding today’s opposing views, diplomatic solutions are likely to remain elusive. In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action.  Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not – draw from this.  This concise and magisterial history of the Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.

What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action.  Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not – draw from this.  This concise and magisterial history of the Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.

Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person's camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a "secular Jew." With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the "chosen people" myth and its "holocaust industry." Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what "Jewish" means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.

On its publication in 2009, Shlomo Sand's book The Invention of the Jewish People met with a storm of controversy. His demystifying approach to nationalist and Zionist historiography provoked much criticism from other professional historians, as well as praise. The furore gave him a privileged position to consider his academic discipline, which he reflects on here in Twilight of History. Drawing on four decades in the field, Sand takes a wider view and interrogates the study of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. Over the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role for historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand's perspective, since the role of history as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a source of historical fact. He asks such questions as: Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and "scientific" truth? Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and finds reasons for hope in the work of Max Weber and Georges Sorel.

Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fascination, he turns his attention to the figure of the French intellectual. From his student years in Paris, Sand has repeatedly come up against the "great French thinkers." He has an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual world and its little secrets, on which he draws to overturn certain myths attaching to the figure of the "intellectual" that France prides itself on having invented. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, he revisits a history that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Eric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the elites, he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and mordant.

What is a homeland? When does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. The invention of the modern concept of the "Land of Israel" in the nineteenth century, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel, it is also what is threatening Israel's existence today.

How the work of Israeli writers today reflects the foundation myths of a Jewish state. The idea of the Jewish nation was conceived before the organization of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century and continued long after the creation of the state of Israel. In The Words and the Land, post-Zionist Israeli historian Shlomo Sand examines how both Jewish and Israeli intellectuals contributed to this process. One by one, he identifies and calls into question the foundation myths of the Israeli state, beginning with the myth of a people forcibly uprooted, a people-race that began to wander the world in search of a land of asylum. This was a people that would define itself on a biological and "mythological-religious" basis, embodied in words that today feed Israeli political, literary, and historical writing: "exile," "return," and "ascent" (Alyah) to the land of its origins. Since 1948, most intellectuals in Israel have continued to accept this ethno-national image and embrace an exclusive state identity to which only Jewish people can belong. The first challenges to this dominant idea didn't appear in Israel until the 1980s, in the innovative work of the "post-Zionist" historians, who were bent on dismantling the nationalist historical myth and arguing for a state that would belong equally to all its citizens. Analyzing how Israeli intellectuals positioned themselves during the Gulf War and in the new era of communication technologies, Sand extends his analysis globally, looking at the status of intellectuals in all societies.

Ernest Renan was one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century in France, the man who first opened up the study of nationalism. In this book, Shlomo Sand, the author of the best-selling The Invention of the Jewish People, demonstrates the complexity of Renan's thought. Sand shows the relationship of Renan's work to that of key twentieth-century thinkers on nationalism, such as Raymond Aron and Ernest Gellner, and argues for the continued importance of studying Renan. Alongside his essay, Sand presents two classic lectures by Renan: the first, the renowned "What Is a Nation?", argues that nations are not based upon race, religion, and language; in the second he uses historical evidence to show that the Jews cannot be considered a "pure ethnos." On the Nation and the Jewish People is an important contribution to the understanding of nationalism, bringing back into play the work of a profoundly misunderstood thinker.

Since the inception of the "War on Terror," Israel has become increasingly important to Western imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies towards the Palestinians. A key ideological weapon in this development is the cynical and unjustified accusation of "anti-Semitism" to silence protest and dissent. For historical reasons, this tactic has been deployed most forcefully in France, and in the first of the two essays in this book French writers Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan demolish the "anti-Semitism is everywhere" claim used to bludgeon critics of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the banlieue youth. In "The Philo-Semitic Reaction," Ivan Segre undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant reactionary trend that identifies Jewish interests with the "democratic" West. Segre's aim is to uphold a universalist position and to defend Jewish tradition from Zionist ideological distortion.

Since the beginning of the War on Terror, Israel has become increasingly salient to imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies toward the Palestinians. In this context, a key ideological weapon is the cynical accusation of "anti-Semitism." For historical reasons, this has been deployed most forcefully in France, and Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan caustically demolish the "anti-Semitism is everywhere" allegation, used to bludgeon opponents of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the banlieue youth. Ivan Segre undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant "reactionary philo-Semitism" that identifies Jewish interests with the "democratic West."

Ernest Renan was one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century in France, the man who first opened up the study of nationalism. In this book, Shlomo Sand, the author of the best-selling The Invention of the Jewish People, demonstrates the complexity of Renan's thought. Sand shows the relationship of Renan's work to that of key twentieth-century thinkers on nationalism, such as Raymond Aron and Ernest Gellner, and argues for the continued importance of studying Renan. Alongside his essay, Sand presents two classic lectures by Renan: the first, the renowned "What Is a Nation?", argues that nations are not based upon race, religion, and language; in the second he uses historical evidence to show that the Jews cannot be considered a "pure ethnos." On the Nation and the Jewish People is an important contribution to the understanding of nationalism, bringing back into play the work of a profoundly misunderstood thinker.

German description: Unser moralisches Empfinden ist von den Emotionen Gluck und Angst gepragt. Sie gelten gar als Motor moralischen Handelns. Doch in unserer Gesellschaft herrscht nach wie vor eine strikte Trennung von Eigeninteresse und Moral. Wahrend Freiheit und Autonomie gepriesen werden, sollen wir in erster Linie Gefuhle vertreten, die nicht unsere eigenen sind. Das vergrossert die Kluft zwischen Sein und Schein. Experimentelle Forschung im Grenzbereich von Moralpsychologie, Neurowissenschaften und Verhaltensokonomie wie auch neuere Erkenntnisse aus den interdisziplinaren Geistes- und insbesondere Religionswissenschaften lassen ein neues Bild des Menschen entstehen. Es hat wenig mit dem eines rationalen und an Idealvorstellungen orientierten Entscheidungsfinders zu tun, wie es bisher in Okonomie und Ethik dominiert hat. Demnach gibt es weder den Menschen, der ausschliesslich an kurzfristiger und rein materieller Nutzenmaximierung interessiert ist, noch gibt es den komplett uneigennutzigen Typus, der immer nur an das Wohl der Allgemeinheit denkt. Mit einem Interview mit dem israelischen Historiker Shlomo Sand (Die Erfindung des judischen Volkes).