If you're looking for a thought-provoking read, I highly recommend The Invention of the Jewish People. In this book, the wonderful Shlomo Sand makes the fascinating argument that the concept of the so-called "Jewish people" is actually a kind of fiction. He also suggests that the Jews have not actually been a people since the time of the Old Testament, as is commonly assumed.

I'd love to know what inspired the author to make this claim! That's what we're focusing on in this issue.

When we think of Israel, we generally say that it is a nation of Jews. And when we think of Jews, we think of intelligent, shrewd, pious, rich, hard-working people who have a basically favourable impression of this people.

Many of us think of the Jewish nation as having a long history, going back thousands of years. But we often forget that the Jews have been driven out of the land where their ancestors settled since 70 AD. They've never had a country of their own since then, and have had to live among other peoples. Other peoples have often been driven around and forced to wander, so it's really inspiring to see the success of the Jewish nation today and the existence of Israel as a nation today! It's so inspiring to see how the Jewish people have maintained their identity and resilience despite not having their own land for 2,000 years! Their patience, perseverance, resilience and piety are really admirable.

But would you be surprised if someone told you that the Jews are not a nation at all, and that their rise and fall and wanderings over the past 2,000 years are all fictionalised for some purpose?

I'm really excited to tell you all about this amazing book I've been reading, called 'The Invention of the Jewish People'. The book is written by the wonderful historian Shlomo Sand, who is a professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel. This book was published in 2008 and was his first scholarly work after more than thirty years of research and reflection. It received international attention upon its release and has been translated into more than twenty languages! Sander has been praised a lot for his courage and insight as an academic. Unfortunately, some people have also called him an enemy of Israel as a result.

Sander is an Israeli citizen with a secure teaching position and no official conflict of interest with Israel. So, you might be wondering, why did he choose to write such an inviting book? It all goes back to his family circumstances. Sander's parents were both Polish Jews, but they both chose to leave Judaism behind and embrace communism, which had a big impact on Sander. As he grew up, Sander developed a different view of Israel's official ideology, known as Zionism. This ideology is all about making Israel a Jewish state and making sure that the people who originally lived on the land, the Palestinians, don't get a say in what happens there.

Sander believes that this attitude is not only unfair and goes against the natural course of history, but it's also a major source of instability in the Middle East. After teaching at a university, he became even more in tune with the struggles of Palestinian students who didn't have Israeli citizenship. That's why he wrote this book to set the record straight and show the truth behind the lies of the official ideology.

After The Invention of the Jewish People, Sander published a book, Why I Gave Up Being Jewish, in which he bravely declared, "I couldn't bear the fictitious national identity imposed on me by Israeli law. I was even more intolerant of the fact that it boasts of being a member of God's Chosen People's Club in front of the rest of the world's population. I would like to give up being a Jew and cease to think of myself as one." It seems fair to say that he wrote The Invention of the Jewish People in order to oppose Zionism. He later renounced his Jewish identity, which further strengthened his attitude to "completely dismantling Jewishness". He envisioned a secular and non-exclusive Israeli identity that transcends Zionism. So, let's dive in and explore three key aspects of Israel's identity together!

I'd like to take a moment to explain the heart of this book from three different viewpoints. Let's dive into Sander's research together to uncover who created the myth of the "Jewish people," why they did it, and what it's achieved.

Let's dive right in and start with the first question! Have you ever wondered why we think of the Jews as a people?

It's the Bible, the Jewish Bible to be exact, the book we all know and love as the Old Testament. Jews have grown up for generations reading the Old Testament, a book that begins with God's creation of the world and says that the Jewish people originated from Abraham, the patriarch of mankind. Abraham was a very special man! He gave birth to Isaac, who gave birth to Jacob, who gave birth to Joseph, and gradually multiplied as a nation. Later on, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and back to Judea on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. This was a really special moment for the Jews because they had become "God's chosen people" and had made a covenant with God to keep the laws He had given them.

Over time, the Jews set up their own country around Jerusalem. They had two kings, David and Solomon, who ruled before the country split up and started to decline. The poor ancient Jews were taken captive from their homeland and returned one by one. But finally, in 70 AD, the Romans suppressed their revolt and exiled them elsewhere. After that, for nearly two thousand years, the Jews never really returned to their ancestral homeland, which was called Judea in the Bible. It was later renamed Palestine, which we all know and love today!

From this, we can see that the Old Testament gives us a really clear picture of where the Jews came from, what they did in their early years, how they flourished, how they declined, and how they were later exiled. It's all there in black and white! With such a clear history as evidence, there's no doubt about the existence of this wonderful nation! But here's an interesting question: is the person who writes history writing it at the time of its occurrence, or is it written by the descendants after the occurrence of the history? It's so obvious! History can only be written by descendants. So, the so-called "history" is really more like a story, and stories often include some made-up bits.

Sander then invites us to use our common sense to consider that, according to the Old Testament, the early Jews were in the process of transitioning from a nomadic tribe to a sedentary agrarian society. I'd love to know what they were like! It's likely that most of this group, whether they were shepherds or farmers, had very little knowledge. In fact, they probably had very little knowledge at all! They acted at the behest of their leaders, with whom they probably didn't even speak the same language. They also tend to move at a slower pace. Let's imagine a peasant who has spent his whole life farming. Maybe he's never even seen a king! Would he know that he's part of a "people"?

In his introduction, Sander quotes, "A nation is a group of people united by a common misconception of their ancestors, and a common dislike of their neighbours". I know it sounds a bit extreme, but Sander is trying to tell us that the so-called "nation" is just a way of creating an emotional bond between a group of people. It's a way of making each member feel that they come from the same ancestors as the others, and thus feel a sense of belonging. Once they feel that way, they're willing to stay in the group and work for it.

So, if the Jews of that era were far from being a people, how did they come together? Sander says it was because they practised the same religion, Judaism. Two or three thousand years ago, religion was really powerful. It was the Jewish clergy who were the most educated, the smartest, and the most linguistically talented. They spread a sense of "we" among the people and told everyone that we were a community. Religion brings everyone in the community together in the belief of the same God, even if they don't necessarily know their own patriarch or king.

And now for Part Two!

I've often wondered why the Old Testament is seen as the true history of the Jews. Surely it's just a collection of stories? And that's the second big question we'll be looking at: why was it made up?

Sander kindly points out that not many people have actually viewed the Old Testament as a complete, unadulterated history for almost two thousand years. Even when Jews read the Bible, preached the Bible, and worshipped God according to the Bible, the Old Testament was still seen as a religious text containing a lot of mythology, rather than real history. But then, in the second half of the 19th century, there were some European Jewish intellectual elites who believed that the Jews had to end their days of being landless and stateless, or sooner or later they would perish. They started a movement called "Zionism", which was all about getting Jews from all over the world together to find a place to set up a state.

The lovely people behind the movement wanted to bring Jews from all over the world together to find a place to establish a state. And they found it in the area of Palestine! The Old Testament tells us that Palestine is the place where the Jewish people first emerged, lived and established their own state more than 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. It's a place with a glorious history! In the Bible, this land is called Judea. So, if what the Old Testament says is true, then the Jews can go to this place under the banner of "returning to the land of their ancestors". This seems like a great idea! It would be really inspiring for the Jews.

But more importantly, Palestine is not an empty land. It's home to Palestinians who have lived there for generations. So, when Jews want to come over, it's understandable that there might be conflict with the Palestinians. That's why it's so important for Jews to make Palestine the land of their ancestors.

The Zionists did a lot of work, telling those who were influential in international politics at the time that Palestine was indeed the land of their ancestors. They also told them that their ancestors had been completely exiled from the land by the Romans in 70 AD and had not gone back on a large scale since. This meant that they could only yearn for their homeland from one generation to the next. They also told them about the great Jerusalem that their ancestors had created. The wonderful Jerusalem that their ancestors created. And this history of 70 AD is not just a story. It's a real, documented account, based on the book The Jewish War, written in the 1st century AD by the Jewish historian Josephus.

However, Schlomo Sand makes a great point. While there was a Roman war to suppress the Jews in 70 CE, the idea that the Jews were exiled from their land is another myth that's been passed down for too long. The idea of "exile," like that of the "Jewish people," is a bit of a myth. The Romans never actually exiled all of their conquered populations.

Sander helpfully gives us three reasons for this. Firstly, if we think about how productive and productive people were back then, it just wouldn't have been a good idea for the rulers to exile all the conquered populations. It would have been unprofitable for them to do that, because it would have meant leaving the land-growing and tax-paying populations much smaller. Secondly, the Roman rulers were in a position to suppress the rebels quite harshly, but they simply didn't have the resources to banish all the conquered populations. After all, they didn't have the trucks, trains, or large warships that we have today!

And then there's the fact that Josephus' Jewish War, as a historical source, is full of doubts. Josephus lived 2,000 years ago and was a survivor of Jewish suppression by the Romans. He later lived in the Roman Empire, so it's interesting to think about how he got a clear picture of the overall situation of the Jews at that time. It's worth noting that much of his data is exaggerated. For example, Josephus says that a million people were killed by the Romans in Jerusalem at that time. Sander points out that this is impossible, as archaeological sources show that there were no more than 60,000 to 70,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem at that time. It's so interesting to see that even Josephus, who describes the harsh suppression of the Jews in such passionate detail, doesn't say that the Romans exiled the Jews.

So, the idea of "exile" is also a bit of a myth. It's been used to show that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine and to justify their "return".

After exposing these two fictions, Sander goes on to answer an important question. If the Jews weren't exiled and driven out completely, where did all the Jews who lived in their ancestral lands 2,000 years ago go?

And this brings us back to Judaism. I think it's important to remember that the Jewish people didn't exist in the same way as Judaism did. Anyone who practised this religion became a Jew. So, Sander looks at lots of different sources to show that the Jews of that time weren't forced to leave their homes. Instead, they would have converted to other religions to make a living. In the three to four hundred years after A.D., Christianity was on the rise and eventually became the state religion of the Byzantine Empire. Some Jews saw this as an opportunity to convert to Christianity.

And then, later on, there was another big change in human history. In the 7th century AD, something pretty amazing happened. Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula! Between 638 AD and 643 AD, Islamic armies occupied Palestine. So, what happened then? Sander says that because Jews were treated more kindly under Islamic rule than they had been in the past, many Jews in Palestine converted to Islam.

I think this conclusion is going to cause quite a stir! It's no secret that things haven't always been easy between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. Since Israel was founded 70 years ago, there have been several major wars and lots of smaller skirmishes. And now, Sander makes another surprising claim: that historically, Jews have converted to Islam. This is something many people find difficult to accept emotionally.

So, who are the descendants of these Jews who converted to Islam? Sander also makes an intriguing suggestion that these people might be the Palestinians of today. Sander also mentions some fascinating studies that show how the Palestinians have kept a lot of Biblical words in their everyday language. It's amazing to think that the names of their villages, mountains, streams, springs, valleys, and hills all come from the Bible! This shows just how deeply connected they are to the ancient Jews. If the Palestinian areas are the "land of the Jewish ancestors", then it only makes sense that the Palestinians are the legitimate descendants of those ancestors!

But, as it turns out, it's actually the other way around! It's so sad - from the very beginning, the Zionist movement ignored the Palestinians. They focused only on their right of return. And then, when the State of Israel was established in 1948, it came at the expense of the Palestinians. Their land was occupied, their houses were bulldozed, and they were forced to live in areas designated for them by the Jews or to work for the Jews. It's so sad that after the establishment of the State of Israel and until today, the vast majority of Palestinians are still second-class citizens. They still can't get Israeli citizenship and very few can climb up to the upper echelons of society and be equal to the Jews, let alone integrate into the Jewish community.

It's so sad that Israel's official ideology usually ignores the existence of Palestinians in the country. It emphasises that it is a "Jewish state", which is a real shame. And when it comes to the situation of the Palestinians who lived there at the time of the founding of the state in 1948, the Israeli government says that they are not a people. They say that they are just Arab peasants in the diaspora. But we Jews have always been a people, and we have a historical right to the land.

I'd like to take a moment to quickly recap the second part. Schlomo Sand makes a great point. He says that the idea that "the Jews are a people with a long history" and that "the ancient Jews were exiled from Judea by the Romans in 70 CE and never returned to their homeland" are two myths that the Zionists created to give Jews the right to their own land. These are two myths that the Zionists came up with on purpose. They wanted to find a strong basis for setting up a Jewish state in Palestine and to get other countries on their side. In reality, Sander says, the Jews didn't technically return legally, but rather settled in Palestine. Israel was created on the basis of colonising the Palestinians, which was a real shame.

And now, let's dive into Part Three!

Next, we have another interesting question for our friend Schlomo Sand: who were those Jewish colonisers who came to Palestine? So, were they Jews or not?

Sander's answer is that they were Jews, but they weren't descended from the so-called "Jewish ancestors." They came from somewhere else, and that's okay!

As we said before, religion is something you can choose for yourself. You can believe in it, or you can choose not to. You can even change your mind! Jews living in Palestine once made the choice to renounce Judaism and convert to Islam. And people living elsewhere can choose to convert to Judaism and become Jews! Sander confirms that there were lots of Jews, some of whom formed their own states, living outside of the area that we now call Palestine for a very long time before 70 CE. There are lots of historical and archaeological evidence to show this.

So, could they have been Jews who were exiled from Palestine? Sander says: Oh, goodness, no! They were formed by the conversion of those places to Judaism.

In today's world, Judaism is not missionary and it generally does not welcome foreign converts. But did you know that in the four hundred years between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE, Judaism was actively expanding outward? As we all know, Judaism was one of the first monotheistic religions in history. This means that it's a belief system that acknowledges the existence of only one supreme God. It just wasn't possible to accommodate polytheistic beliefs, so those who believed in Judaism went about spreading it. They told others that they could only believe in one God, that all other gods were false or evil, and that they should convert to Judaism. The process of proselytising, on the other hand, is a bit rough around the edges. It's a bit coercive and if the person being proselytised doesn't obey, they might be in danger of being excommunicated. So, it was actually missionisation that led to the Jews existing, not exile. Sander lovingly cites historical sources to prove that this Jewish missionary trend continued until the early 4th century CE, before it ceased.

Sander has done a great job of using lots of different research from previous generations in this paragraph, and he's also made sure to include plenty of common sense. He kindly reminds his readers not to overestimate how much ancient people moved around. After all, people back then didn't have the same access to transportation and couldn't move as freely to and from many places as we can today. It wasn't easy for folks back then to find a place to put down roots and make a living. They were pretty set in their ways and wouldn't give up their homes without a fight. So, if converting or switching to a religion would give them stability, they would definitely want to do so!

Sander uses common sense to show us that the Jews didn't just wander around a lot. He also shows us that Judaism spread and created new Jews in different places. And so, the Jews who "return to their homeland" are the wonderful result of this spreading of Judaism.

Sander tells us that the main source of Jews "returning to their homeland" was Eastern Europe. At the start of the 20th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe were a big, happy bunch! They spoke the same language, so it's no surprise that they were on the brink of becoming a nation. It's so interesting to see how the population of Eastern European Jews grew and grew after the 16th and 17th centuries until the 1930s! And their distribution was concentrated, too. In Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and elsewhere, Jews were gathering in larger and larger clusters, and they were making a big impact in their local communities. In the 18th century, there were 750,000 Jews living in Poland. That's a lot of people! In comparison, there were just over 3,000 Jews living in Hamburg, London and Paris combined.

I'd love to know why this happened! Have you ever wondered why Jews gathered in Eastern Europe?

Or, as we said before, Jews were formed through the practice of Judaism. Sander, drawing on lots of different sources, suggests that in the 8th century CE, there was a Khazar kingdom in Central Asia that embraced Judaism as its official religion, which led to the emergence of Khazar Jews. This lovely kingdom existed between the 8th and 12th centuries CE and was located between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. When the Khazar Kingdom disappeared, the poor Khazar Jews were displaced to nearby Eastern Europe, where they gathered again.

Even though we don't have a lot of information about the Khazar Kingdom, Sander believes that we can understand why there are so many Jews in Eastern Europe if we acknowledge that it existed.

Sander says that this Eastern European Jewish community was really close to becoming a nation! They had formed classes, had a social division of labour, and a political structure that took shape. They had their own day-to-day cultural life, which was really important. But most importantly, they had their own language, Yiddish. This was the most crucial sign of becoming a nation, because only with linguistic unity could a group of people make a real community of themselves by communicating without barriers. But sadly, this process of becoming a nation was interrupted by the rise of Hitler's Nazis. It's so sad - Hitler persecuted the Jews and exterminated the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe. But even if there had been no Hitler and the Jews of Eastern Europe had formed a nation, it would still have been a completely different thing to the group of Jews who had multiplied out of their Biblical homeland 2,000 years earlier.

So far, Sander has explained who came up with the idea of the "Jewish people", why they did it, and what it achieved. The Zionist movement has taken a fictional story and made it into a historical fact. They've encouraged people all over the world to believe in the "return" of an ancient people, even though it's not really true. The Jewish people, as they like to call it, actually started out with just a few believers in Judaism who had renounced their faith and converted. People from other places had also joined Judaism and become Jews. In other words, the Jews are a group that's always changing and adapting. There's no such thing as a fixed Jewish people who wandered doggedly for 2,000 years without changing their beliefs and eventually returned to the land of their forefathers to establish their own state. It's a sad but true story, but it's just that: a story.

In his book, The Imaginary Jewish People, Sander is full of praise for the Zionist leaders. He says they were such brilliant men, so thoughtful and decisive, and so able to skillfully use situations to their advantage. But that doesn't make fiction real, my friend. It's sad to say that the Zionist movement used a fictional historical narrative to create an ideology by which it colonised the Palestinians and continues to suppress them to this day. This ideology is pretty harsh, don't you think? It basically says that Palestinians don't deserve to be heard, that they shouldn't even be there in the first place, and that Jews shouldn't have to consider their right to exist.

Sander then asks a question that seems a little bit too easy to answer. He says that if the Jews have the right to come back to their ancestral lands after 2,000 years, should we not also give the Palestinians the same right, since they have lived and breathed here for 1,200 years?

While Sander is quick to point out the flaws in the arguments and debunks the myths, he is not a radical scholar. He doesn't get angry and say that the Jews should leave the land, from Jerusalem, and dissolve the state. He believes that Israel should embrace a more inclusive identity, one that doesn't solely focus on Jewishness. This could help Palestinians feel a stronger connection to Israel.

He also made a great point about history. He said that after wars and conflicts, it's really important for everyone involved to come together and find a way to live side by side peacefully. Take the US, for example. When it was first founded, the US illegally took land from Native Americans. But nobody thinks that the US shouldn't exist! And when the British were conquered by the Normans from the European continent a thousand years ago, nobody ever demanded that the Normans be driven back to the continent.

Israel is another country that came into being in the midst of war and conquest. It has had its share of accomplishments and has invested its heart and soul in the land, and it has been productive. Instead of dismissing these achievements, it would be wonderful if it could open its mind to compatibility with the Palestinians it had previously ignored and feared. Sander believes that it would be best for both Palestinians and Jews if they stopped identifying as Jewish and stopped insisting that Israel is the country of the Jews.

Sander's conclusions continue to attract a lot of criticism at home. This is understandable, given that Israel's religious conservatives are so powerful that they will never tolerate anyone who minimises the authenticity of the Old Testament, much less accepts the equality of Jews and Palestinians. Sadly, the conservatives just see Sander as another traitor among the Jews, a childish, overly sympathetic leftist intellectual, and they just ignore his previous arguments.

Sander is an Israeli himself, and he says he has no intention of challenging the Israeli government or inciting the public to hate their own country and people. He says his main motivation for writing this book was simply to try to right a wrong. He saw first-hand how tough it was for his Palestinian students and felt their pain at not having the support they needed. It was really tough for them because this country didn't treat them as equals and it was difficult for them to emigrate to other countries with their Palestinian identity. It's so sad - they can't even hold their heads up in front of their Jewish classmates. They have such low self-esteem because of who they are. But it's so hard to find a way out of that low self-esteem. Sander asks a very good question: why is it that Jews are comfortable living in the United States, but Palestinians cannot naturally stay in Israel?

So, that's a quick summary of the main points of the book. And now, let's wrap up with a quick summary!

Schlomo Sand makes a really interesting point in his book. He says that the idea of a "Jewish people" is a bit of a fiction. He also says that the Jews haven't actually been a people since the time of the Old Testament, which is a pretty surprising idea! All "nations" are just stories that people came up with later on to serve a purpose. When the Zionist movement needed to get Jews from all over the world to head to Palestine, they came up with this story and said it was a "return to the homeland." But this is just a made-up myth. There was no real Jewish exile, so there was no real return. So, they only ended up occupying the land of the Palestinians, who, on the other hand, are the true descendants of the Jewish ancestors of the land.