You need to read The Invention of the Jewish People. In this book, author Shlomo Sand boldly asserts that the so-called "Jewish people" is a pseudo-concept, a fiction, and that the Jews have not been a people since the time of the Old Testament, as is commonly assumed.

The author makes this claim on the basis of what evidence? This is what we are focusing on in this issue.

When we think of Israel, we think of it as a nation of Jews. When we think of Jews, we think of them as intelligent, shrewd, pious, rich, hard-working, and generally favorable.

The Jewish nation has a long history, going back thousands of years. But we must acknowledge that the Jews have been driven out of the land where their ancestors settled since 70 A.D. They have never had a country of their own since then. They have had to live off the land and among other peoples. They have often been driven around and forced to wander. Despite this, the Jewish nation has thrived. Israel has become a nation. This success is an inspiring story. We must acknowledge that without a homeland for 2,000 years, any other people would have perished. The Jews have survived and thrived, maintaining their identity and demonstrating remarkable patience, perseverance, resilience, and piety.

But I am certain you would be surprised if I 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 fictionalized for some purpose.

I'm going to discuss a book that makes a compelling case that the idea of a Jewish people is a fiction: The Invention of the Jewish People. The book is written by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel. This book, published in 2008, was his first scholarly work after more than thirty years of research and reflection. Upon its release, it received international attention and was translated into more than twenty languages. Sander has been widely praised for his academic courage and insight. As a result, he is considered by many to be an enemy of Israel.

Sander is an Israeli citizen with a stable teaching position and no official conflict of interest with Israel. He wrote such an inviting book for a reason. It all comes back to his family circumstances. Sander's parents were both Polish Jews, but they both abandoned Judaism and practiced communism, which had a direct impact on Sander. As he grew up, Sander developed a hostile stance toward Israel's official ideology, known as Zionism. This ideology is clear: Israel is a Jewish state, and the original inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, must be suppressed and excluded.

Sander is adamant that this attitude is not only unjust and contrary to the course of history, but also a significant source of instability in the Middle East. After teaching at a university, he became even more convinced that Palestinian students who did not have Israeli citizenship deserved support. He wrote this book to refute 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 declared, "I refuse to accept the fictitious national identity imposed on me by Israeli law. I can no longer tolerate the fact that Israel boasts of being a member of God's Chosen People's Club in front of the rest of the world's population. I am renouncing my Jewish identity and cease to think of myself as one." He wrote The Invention of the Jewish People to oppose Zionism and later renounced his Jewish identity, further strengthening his stance to "completely dismantle Jewishness." He envisioned a secular and non-exclusive Israeli identity that transcends Zionism. Let's now examine three aspects of Israel's identity.

I will now explain the core of the book from three perspectives. We will uncover the truth behind Sander's research: who fictionalized the myth of the "Jewish people," why they did it, and what it has achieved.

Part One

Let's start with the first question: We must ask ourselves: what makes us think that the Jews are a people?

It is the Bible, the Jewish Bible to be exact, the book commonly known as the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the foundation of Jewish belief. It begins with God's creation of the world and states that the Jewish people originated from Abraham, the patriarch of mankind. Abraham gave birth to Isaac, Isaac gave birth to Jacob, and Jacob gave birth to Joseph. From these beginnings, the Jewish people gradually multiplied as a nation. Moses later led the Jews out of Egypt and back to Judea on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The Jews had already become "God's chosen people" and had made a covenant with God to keep the laws He had given them.

The Jews established their own state around Jerusalem with two kings, David and Solomon, before splitting up and declining. The ancient Jews were taken captive from their homeland and returned one by one. However, in 70 A.D., the Romans suppressed their revolt and exiled them elsewhere. After that, the Jews never really returned to their ancestral homeland, which was called Judea in the Bible, but later on, it was renamed Palestine.

The Old Testament makes it abundantly clear where the Jews originated from, what they did in their early years, how they flourished, how they declined, and how they were later exiled. This nation's existence is beyond doubt, as there is a clear history to prove it. But who is writing history? Is it being written at the time of the occurrence, or is it being written by descendants after the fact? The answer is clear: history can only be written by descendants. This means that the so-called "history" is more or less a story, and storytelling inevitably involves some fictionalization.

Sander then asks us to use our common sense. The Old Testament tells us that the early Jews were in the process of transitioning from a nomadic tribe to a sedentary agrarian society. What were they like? It is clear that most of this group, whether shepherds or farmers, had very little knowledge and acted at the behest of their leaders, with whom they probably didn't even speak the same language. Their actions are also slow. A peasant who has spent his entire life on a farm, perhaps never having seen a king, will he know that he is a "people"?

In his introduction, Sander confidently states, "A nation is a group of people united by a common misconception of their ancestors, and a common dislike of their neighbors." Sander is clear that the concept of a nation is an afterthought. Its purpose is to create an emotional bond between a group of people. This makes each member feel that they come from the same ancestors as the others. This sense of belonging then makes them willing to stay in the group and work for it.

If the Jews of that era were not a people, how did they come together? Sander is clear that it was because they practiced the same religion, Judaism. Two or three thousand years ago, religion held immense power. It was the Jewish clergy—the most educated, intelligent, and linguistically proficient—who spread and developed a sense of "we" among the people, proclaiming that we were a community. Religion unites everyone in the community under the same God, even if they do not know their own patriarch or king.

Part Two

The Old Testament is clearly characterized by storytelling. It is therefore a fictionalized version of the Jewish people, yet it is seen as the true history of the Jews. We will now address the second central question: Why was it fictionalized?

Sander confidently asserts that for almost two thousand years, few have regarded the Old Testament as a definitive, unadulterated historical account. The Old Testament was a religious text containing a lot of mythology, not real history, even when Jews read it, preached it, and worshipped God according to it. But then, in the second half of the 19th century, some European Jewish intellectual elites were convinced that the Jews had to end their days of being landless and stateless, or they would perish. They launched a movement called "Zionism," with the clear goal of uniting Jews from all corners of the globe to establish a state.

The movement's purpose was to mobilize Jews from all over the world to establish a state. They found this state in the area of Palestine. The Old Testament clearly states that Palestine is the place where the Jewish people emerged, lived, and established their own state more than 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. This is a glorious history. The Bible refers to this land as Judea. If the Old Testament is true, then the Jews can go to this place under the banner of "returning to the land of their ancestors." This is a justified claim that will greatly arouse the enthusiasm of the Jews.

Palestine is not an empty land. It is home to Palestinians who have lived there for generations. It is inevitable that the Jews will want to come over, and it is only a matter of time before conflict with the Palestinians arises. Palestine is the ancestral land of the Jews, and it is their right to claim it.

The Zionists did a great deal 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 A.D. 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, constantly remembering the great Jerusalem that their ancestors had created. They want to return to the great Jerusalem created by their ancestors. The history of 70 A.D. is not just a story. It is documented, primarily in the book The Jewish War, written in the 1st century A.D. by the Jewish historian Josephus.

However, Schlomo Sand definitively states that while there was a Roman war to suppress the Jews in 70 CE, the ancient exile of the Jews from the land of their ancestors is yet another man-made myth. The concept of "exile," like that of the "Jewish people," is a fiction. The Romans never exiled all of their conquered populations.

Sander provides three compelling reasons for this. First, it would have been unprofitable for the rulers to exile all the conquered populations, given the level of productivity and production in those days. Exiling them would have left the land-growing and tax-paying populations much smaller. Second, the Roman rulers had the power to brutally suppress the rebels but lacked the means to banish all the conquered populations because they did not have the trucks, trains, or large warships available to them in the modern world.

Josephus' Jewish War is a historically unreliable source. Josephus lived 2,000 years ago. He was a survivor of Jewish suppression by the Romans and later lived in the Roman Empire. It is therefore implausible that he could have had a clear picture of the overall situation of the Jews at that time. Much of his data is exaggerated. For example, Josephus claims that a million people were killed by the Romans in Jerusalem at that time. Sander rightly points out that this is impossible, citing archaeological sources that show that there were no more than 60,000 to 70,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem at that time. Most importantly, even Josephus, who so passionately describes the grueling suppression of the Jews, makes no mention of the Romans exiling the Jews.

The notion of "exile" is also a fiction. It was designed to prove that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine and to justify their "return."

After exposing these two fictions, Sander confidently answers an important question. If the Jews were not exiled and driven out completely, where did all the Jews who lived in their ancestral lands 2,000 years ago go? The answer is simple: they did not go anywhere.

This brings us back to Judaism. I have already made it clear that the Jewish people did not exist. However, Judaism did, and anyone who practised this religion became a Jew. Sander cites numerous sources to prove that the Jews of that day were not driven elsewhere. They would have converted to other religions in order to survive. 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 converted to Christianity as a result.

Then, later, there was another major change in human history. In the 7th century A.D., Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, and between 638 A.D. and 643 A.D., Islamic armies occupied Palestine. What happened next? Sander asserts that the Jews of Palestine converted to Islam en masse because they were treated more leniently than they had been under Islamic rule in the past.

This conclusion will undoubtedly cause a stir. It is a well-known fact that relations between Jewish Israel and the surrounding Islamic states have always been strained. In the 70 years since Israel's founding, there have been several major wars and countless skirmishes. Sander also states that historically, Jews have converted to Islam, which many people find difficult to accept emotionally.

So who are the descendants of these Jews who converted to Islam? Sander boldly asserts that they are none other than the Palestinians of today. Sander lists a number of scholarly studies that prove the Palestinians have preserved a great deal of Biblical terminology in their spoken language. The names of their mountain villages, mountains, streams, springs, valleys, and hills are all of Biblical origin, which proves they have a strong cultural connection to the ancient Jews. If the Palestinian areas are the "land of the Jewish ancestors," then the Palestinians are the legitimate descendants of those ancestors.

The opposite is true. From the very beginning, the Zionist movement ignored the Palestinians. They emphasized only their right of return. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 came at the expense of the Palestinians. Their land was occupied. Their houses were bulldozed. They were forced to live in areas designated for them by the Jews. They were forced to work for the Jews. It is a simple fact that the vast majority of Palestinians are still second-class citizens. They are still unable to gain 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.

Israel's official ideology blatantly ignores the existence of Palestinians in the country, emphasizing that it is a "Jewish state." The Israeli government has a different take on the situation of the indigenous Palestinians at the time of the state's founding in 1948. They claim that Palestinians are not a people, but rather Arab peasants in the diaspora. In contrast, the government asserts that Jews have always been a people with a historical right to the land.

Let's now briefly summarize the second part. Schlomo Sand confidently asserts that the claim 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 deliberate myths created by the Zionists to justify the Jews' right to their own land. These are two deliberate myths created by Zionists to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and gain international support. Sander asserts that the Jews did not legally return at all; they colonized Palestine. Israel was created on the basis of colonizing the Palestinians.

Part Three

Next, Sander demands an answer to another question: who were those Jewish colonizers who came to Palestine? They were Jews.

Sander's answer is clear: they were Jews, but they were not descended from the so-called "Jewish ancestors." They came from somewhere else.

As I have already made clear, religion is a matter of personal choice. It can be proselytized, renounced, or converted. Jews living in Palestine once renounced Judaism and converted to Islam. People living elsewhere can convert to Judaism and become Jews. Sander confirms that there were large groups of Jews, some forming states, outside of the area that came to be known as Palestine for a long time before 70 CE. This is evidenced by many historical and archaeological sources.

They were Jews who were exiled from Palestine. Sander states: They were not exiled from Palestine. They were formed by the conversion of those places to Judaism.

In today's world, Judaism is not missionary and does not generally welcome foreign converts. However, between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE, Judaism was actively expanding outward. As we know, Judaism was the first monotheistic religion in history. Judaism could not accommodate polytheistic beliefs, so those who believed in it 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 proselytizing had the barbaric overtones of ancient societies. It was coercive, and if the person being proselytized did not obey, he could be in danger of being expelled. The Jews did not exist as a result of exile. They were the result of missionization. Sander provides irrefutable evidence from historical sources that this Jewish missionary trend continued until the early 4th century CE before it ceased.

Sander draws on a variety of research sources from previous generations and also makes use of common sense throughout this paragraph of argumentation. He is adamant that his readers do not overestimate the mobility of ancient people. He makes it clear that people of that time were far less mobile than we are today, having easy access to transportation and being able to move freely to and from many places. It was not easy for people in those days to find a place to put down roots and survive. They would not give up their homes so easily. They would undoubtedly choose to convert or switch to a religion if doing so would provide them with stability.

Sander's use of common sense convinces the reader that the Jews did not wander on a large scale. What is clear is that Judaism would spread and create new Jews in various places. The Jews who "return to their homeland" are the result of this spreading of Judaism.

Sander is clear that the main source of Jews who "returned" to their homeland was Eastern Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe formed a large group and had a unified language, which makes it clear that they were on the verge of becoming a nation. Historical statistics prove that from the 16th and 17th centuries until the 1930s, the population of Eastern European Jews continued to grow and their distribution was concentrated. In Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and elsewhere, Jews were gathering in larger and larger clusters, exerting a regional influence that far outnumbered Jews living elsewhere. In the 18th century, Poland had 750,000 Jews. In contrast, Hamburg, London, and Paris had just over 3,000 Jews combined.

I want to know why this happened. Jews congregated in Eastern Europe for a reason.

As previously stated, Jews were formed through the practice of Judaism. Sander, citing various sources, asserts that in the 8th century CE, there was a Khazar kingdom in Central Asia that accepted Judaism as its official religion, thus creating the Khazar Jews. This 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 Khazar Jews were displaced to nearby Eastern Europe, where they gathered again.

While the Khazar Kingdom left no clear and accurate historical record, Sander is certain that only by recognizing its existence can we explain why there are so many Jews in Eastern Europe.

Sander stated that this Eastern European Jewish community came close to becoming a nation. They had formed classes, had a social division of labor, and the political structure was taking shape. They had a vibrant day-to-day cultural life and, most importantly, they had their own common language, Yiddish. This was the most crucial sign of becoming a nation. A group of people can only make a real community of themselves by communicating without barriers, and linguistic unity was the key to this. However, this process of becoming a nation was abruptly halted by the rise of Hitler's Nazis. Hitler persecuted and exterminated the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe. But even if Hitler never existed and the Jews of Eastern Europe had formed a nation, it would still have been a completely different thing than the group of Jews who had multiplied from their biblical homeland 2,000 years earlier.

Sander has now explained who fictionalized the myth of the "Jewish people," why it was fictionalized, and what the fictionalization accomplished. The Zionist movement has transformed a fictional story into a historical fact and has promoted throughout the world the belief in the "return" of an ancient people, which is a complete fabrication. The Jewish people, as they call it, originated with just a few believers in Judaism who had renounced their faith and converted. People from other places had joined Judaism and become Jews. The Jews are a group whose scope is constantly shifting. The notion of 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 is simply not true. This story may sound sobering, but it is, in fact, just that: a story.

In his book, The Imaginary Jewish People, Sander is effusive in his praise of the Zionist leaders. He asserts that they were brilliant men, thoughtful and decisive, able to skillfully use situations to their advantage. But that does not make fiction real. The Zionist movement used a fictional historical narrative to create an ideology by which it colonized and continues to suppress the Palestinians. This ideology is clear: the Palestinians are to be ignored, they shouldn't be here in the first place, and their right to exist is not something that Jews need to consider.

Sander responds with a particularly facile question: if the Jews have the right to reclaim their ancestral lands after an absence of 2,000 years, should we leave the Palestinians with nothing, since they have lived and breathed here for 1,200 years?

While Sander refutes the lies and exposes the myths, he is not a radical scholar. He does not demand that the Jews withdraw from the land, from Jerusalem, and dissolve the state. Israel must give up its attachment to Jewishness if it wants Palestinians to identify with it.

He then cited historical examples to show that the only way to resolve the grievances and hatreds left in the wake of various occupations and conquests is for the conflicting parties to use reason and wisdom. Take the United States, for example. It illegally dispossessed Native Americans of their land in the course of its founding. Yet no one would argue that the United States should not exist. And when the British were conquered by the Normans from the European continent a thousand years ago, no one demanded that the Normans be driven back to the continent.

Israel, like any other country, has had its share of accomplishments. It has invested its heart and soul in the land and has been productive. Instead of devaluing and nullifying these achievements, it must be urged to open its mind to compatibility with the Palestinians it had previously willfully ignored and feared. Sander is clear that abandoning "Jewishness" and stopping the insistence that "Israel is the Israel of the Jews" is in the best interest of both Palestinians and Jews.

Sander's conclusions continue to attract enormous criticism at home because Israel's religious conservatives are so powerful that they will never tolerate anyone who minimizes the authenticity of the Old Testament, much less accepts the equality of Jews and Palestinians. Conservatives see Sander as just another traitor among the Jews. They dismiss him as a childish, overly sympathetic leftist intellectual and ignore his previous arguments.

Sander makes it clear that he has no intention of challenging the Israeli government or inciting the public to hate their own country and people. He says that his main motivation for writing this book was driven by a sense of injustice. He saw firsthand the struggles of his Palestinian students and felt their pain at the lack of support. This country denied them equal citizenship and made it difficult for them to emigrate with their Palestinian identity. They are unable to hold their heads up in front of their Jewish classmates. They have low self-esteem because of who they are. It is difficult to find a way out of that low self-esteem. Sander asks, "Why is it that Jews are comfortable living in the United States, but Palestinians cannot naturally stay in Israel?"

In conclusion, we have now covered the core of the book. Let's now summarize.

Schlomo Sand makes a bold assertion: the concept of a "Jewish people" is a fiction. He challenges the widely held belief that Jews have been a people since the time of the Old Testament. All "nations" are narratives created by later generations for their own benefit. The Zionist movement created this narrative to mobilize Jews from all over the world to go to Palestine. They called it a "return to the homeland." This is a fabricated myth. There was no such thing as a Jewish exile in the first place, so there was no return. This led to them occupying the land of the Palestinians, who are the true descendants of the Jewish ancestors of the land.