Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: not immune to similar zeitgeist factors

Una significativa stroncatura del libro di Shlomo Sand
http://www.thejc.com/arts/book-reviews/22340/review-the-invention-jewish-people
Review: The Invention of the Jewish People
By Shlomo Sand (Trans: Yael Lotan)
Verso, £18.99
By David Goldberg, November 26, 2009
Because the state of Israel has always seen itself as embattled, and 
because Zionism is such a contentious ideology, it is often impossible 
to have a reasoned debate about other aspects of Jewish culture, 
religion and history without contemporary Middle East geopolitics obtruding.
Professor Sand’s book is a case in point. It is overblown, learned, 
occasionally brilliant and always polemical. A controversial best-seller 
in Israel last year, it is hardly the revolutionary demolition of Jewish 
history that the dust-cover claims it to be. No one today, unless a 
simpleton, believes that all Jews are descended in an unbroken chain 
from Abraham to the present.
 From the clan interminglings in Genesis, through the “mixed multitude” 
who came out of Egypt with Moses, the worshippers of the false gods of 
foreigners, the post-Solomon divide into Israel and Judah and the 586 
BCE exile, to Ezra’s vain attempt to get the returnees to divorce their 
foreign wives, the Bible itself makes clear how proximity, syncretism 
and assimilation broke down the walls a stern God erected between His 
“chosen people” and “lesser” breeds.
Legends about the Patriarchs, the Exodus and King David are what Sand 
calls “mythistories”, a word coined by the Greek writer George Sefiris 
to describe those embellishments with which every people seeks to 
glorify its origins. For the Romans it was Romulus; for the French, 
Charlemagne; for the Prussians, the medieval Teutonic knights.
As Sand demonstrates with élan, Jewish history was more contingent and 
fragmented than the unitary narrative from mass dispersion after 70 CE 
to Zionist redemption in 1948 would have it. Over the centuries, 
millions joined Judaism, and a substantial number also left.
For every kingdom of Adiabene — roughly corresponding to modern 
Kurdistan and Armenia — that, according to Josephus and other sources, 
converted en masse in the first century CE, there were Jews who defected 
en masse to the new religion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Sand makes too much of the Khazars being the original Ashkenazi Jews. 
But no modern historian would take issue with his contention that to 
call Jews a “race” or a “nation” is a misnomer. We are a mongrel and 
widely scattered people. Neither ethnicity nor language, culture nor 
land, link a Jew from the United States with a Jew from Aden. What we do 
share in common is mythistory and a religious heritage; observing the 
same Sabbath and festivals, performing the same rituals.
It was the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce who coined the aphorism 
that “All history is contemporary history”. We view the past through the 
lens of the present. That is why Heinrich Graetz, the greatest Jewish 
historian of the 19th century and writing at a time of raucous European 
nationalism, created an organic nationalist history of the Jews. His 
20th-century successors, Salo Baron and Simon Dubnow, were influenced 
respectively by emergent Zionism and the Soviet experiment with ethnic 
autonomy.
Sand is not immune to similar zeitgeist factors. He rightly excoriates 
Zionist historiography that posits an unbroken continuum between the 
ancient Jewish homeland and its modern inhabitants in order to justify 
ownership of all the biblical territory. His particular beef is with 
geneticists who have “discovered” such ludicrous “facts” as the Jewish 
gene that is shared by Ashkenazim and Sephardim, or make the even more 
preposterous claim that a single chromosome is common to over 50 per 
cent of men surnamed Cohen.
But because Sand’s political ideal would be “the creation of a 
democratic bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the River 
Jordan”, he is too cavalier in dismissing all of our standard historical 
narrative as an “invention”. Shared folk memories, totally accurate or 
not, have been a vital ingredient in Jewish survival.
David Goldberg’s ‘To the Promised Land’ has recently been reissued by 
Faber Finds

 Faber Finds
l'onestà intellettuale di uno che mette la pubblicità al suo libro
alla fine della stroncatura di un libro di argomento affine è degna di
essere linkata solo da nahum