Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: e Shlomo Sand si prende un'altra dose di pece e piume

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/indecent-proposal
Indecent Proposal
The Invention of the Jewish People.
By the books an age reads and respects ye shall know it. What, then, 
shall we say of an age in which a book so intellectually shoddy that 
once, not very long ago, it would have been flunked as an undergraduate 
thesis by any self-respecting professor of history becomes a best-seller 
upon first appearing in Hebrew in Israel in 2008; goes on to win the 
prestigious Aujourd’hui Award of the association of French journalists; 
and now, in English translation, is taken seriously by reviewers and 
reporters, and nets its author an honored place on talk shows and in 
“advanced” opinion? Perhaps one might charitably say that such an age is 
forgetful and poorly educated and credulous. And to be fair, The 
Invention of the Jewish People does make one valid point. But let’s 
begin with the shoddiness.
Sand’s book is about Jewish nationhood, Jewish nationalism, and 
Zionism--each of which, in the best postmodern fashion and with due 
acknowledgment to such well-known theorists of national identity 
formation as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, Sand seeks to 
“deconstruct” by viewing it as an artificially cobbled modern notion 
rather than as a historically rooted phenomenon. This he does by means 
of two shopworn arguments, one completely absurd and one partly so.
The first argument is that because the world’s dispersed Jews were 
united, until modern times, only by their religious beliefs and 
practices, there was never any such thing as a “Jewish people,” just as 
there was never any such thing as a Catholic people or a Protestant 
people. Jews, Sand writes, developed a “national consciousness” only in 
the nineteenth century, its first formulators being religiously lapsed 
European Jewish intellectuals:
     Mostly products of rabbinical schools, educated Jews who were 
feeling the effects of the secular age and whose metaphysical faith was 
beginning to show a few cracks longed for another source to reinforce 
their uncertain, crumbling identity. The religion of history struck them 
as an appropriate substitute for religious faith, but for those who, 
sensibly, could not embrace the national mythologies [of various 
European peoples] rising before their eyes ... the only option was to 
invent and adhere to a parallel national mythology, [one that] turned 
into a determined march [toward Jewish nationhood] in the imagining of a 
Jewish people.
Feeling excluded by the intensifying nineteenth-century nationalisms of 
the peoples among whom they lived, the Jews conjured themselves into a 
people, too. Sand even knows who the urconjuror was. He was Heinrich 
Graetz, the German-Jewish historian, whose multi-volume History of the 
Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present began to appear in the 1850s. 
“This was the first work,” according to Sand, “that strove, with 
consistency and feeling, to invent the Jewish people.... Henceforth, for 
many people, Judaism would no longer be a rich and diverse religious 
civilization that managed to survive despite all difficulties and 
temptations in the shadows of giants, and became an ancient people or 
race that was uprooted from its homeland in Canaan and arrived ... at 
the gates of Berlin.”
Graetz was the first, but not the last. He and his followers, Sand 
informs us, prepared the intellectual ground for Zionism, which, as the 
nineteenth century drew to a close, claimed Palestine for its newly 
imagined “people or race.” And if Zionism is thus the invention of an 
invention, the state of Israel, built on the myth of a “Jewish ethnos,” 
is the invention of an invention of an invention. The clear implication 
is that a country existing at a third remove from reality is hardly 
legitimate.
Long a staple of Arab and anti-Zionist propaganda, this argument is the 
exact opposite of the truth. What was invented at the outset of 
modernity was not Jewish peoplehood, which--as all the evidence that has 
come down to us amply bears out--had been taken for granted throughout 
history by Jews and gentiles alike. It was Jewish non-peoplehood, whose 
first important formulator was the eighteenth-century French count 
Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre. A leader of the fight for Jewish 
emancipation at the time of the French Revolution, it was 
Clermont-Tonnerre who famously declared that French Jews should be 
“granted everything as individuals and denied everything as a nation.” 
His Jewish countrymen, he declared, should be treated as Frenchmen of 
the Jewish faith, on the analogy of Frenchmen of the Catholic or 
Protestant faiths--and also, on that of the Germans, Poles, and 
Englishmen of the Jewish faith with whom they shared a religious 
confession. Although this was not an analysis that immediately convinced 
many Christians, who were slow to emancipate Jews outside of France, it 
soon became the motto of the rapidly growing ranks of assimilationist 
and Reform Jews all over Europe.
And yet while Clermont-Tonnerre believed that the Jews should cease to 
be a separate people, he would not have disagreed with the opponents of 
emancipation that they still were one. How could he have, when Judaism, 
which in his age nearly all of them still observed, had always insisted 
that it was God’s covenant not merely, like Christianity, with the 
individuals who accepted it, but with all the descendants, whether they 
accepted it or not, of the Israelites who stood at Mount Sinai? “Until 
Your people crossed over, O Lord, till the people [am] You made Yours 
[kanita] crossed over,” says the Song of the Sea in the Book of Exodus, 
by all accounts one of the oldest biblical passages--and while the 
Hebrew verb kanita can also be rendered as “You acquired,” am, a word 
used hundreds of times in the Bible to describe both the Israelites and 
their neighbors, can only mean “people.” There is simply no other way to 
translate it.
Judaism, whether it is nearly four thousand years old, as biblical 
chronology would have it, or only 2,500 years old, as the revisionist 
Bible critics favored by Sand maintain, is inseparable from a Jewish 
“national consciousness.” Believing Jews throughout the ages have never 
doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra’el, a people of 
Israel--nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish 
identities. It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far 
from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern 
re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior 
existence.
It is of course true, as Sand delights in observing, that the claims 
made for Jewish peoplehood have been different from those made for other 
national groups. A religiously traditional Jew in nineteenth-century 
Poland did not share with a traditional Jew in Morocco all that a 
Frenchman in Paris shared with a Frenchman in Toulouse. The two Jews 
inhabited different continents, were ruled by different governments, 
spoke different languages, lived in different material cultures, and had 
different social mores.
But it is not quite so simple. After all, the differences between 
nineteenthcentury Frenchmen were not necessarily slight, either: one 
might be a Catholic and one a Protestant, one a speaker of standard 
French and one of dialect, one urban and one rural, one royalist and one 
republican, one northern and one Mediterranean. And conversely, the 
differences between our two Jews were not necessarily that great. Both 
were acutely conscious of being unlike their gentile neighbors; both 
spoke their own language or dialect, much of its distinctiveness due to 
the many Hebrew words in it; if sufficiently educated, they were able to 
communicate in Hebrew itself; and they had a jointly acknowledged though 
unvisited national homeland in the Land of Israel.
Above all, each would have immediately recognized the other as a 
kinsman. And since their religion permeated the entirety of their daily 
lives, these lives had a great deal in common, too. Besides attending 
practically identical synagogue services on Saturday morning (and even 
all week long) and then making the same blessings and singing more or 
less the same hymns around the Sabbath table, a nineteenth-century 
Polish and Moroccan Jew also ate a very similar long-simmering 
stew--called cholent in Poland and dafina in Morocco--whose method of 
preparation was dictated by the same ritual laws. And though few 
Frenchmen were so attached to being French that they would have 
forbidden a son or daughter to marry an otherwise eligible and 
attractive foreigner, Jews everywhere broke off all relations with 
children who married non-Jews.
To say that Jewish national identity was rooted in religion is not to 
say that it was merely religious. And in any case, for someone 
convinced, after Anderson and Gellner, that all national identities are 
“imagined” ones imposed on populations at some point in their history by 
ruling or intellectual elites, what does any of this matter? If 
nationhood or peoplehood is ultimately determined by subjective 
perceptions, Sand is barking up the wrong tree by laboring to prove that 
Jews lacked the objective qualifications for it. By his own standards, 
all that should count is what Jews felt and thought about 
themselves--and in all the enormous corpus of pre-nineteenth-century 
Jewish literature (from which, for understandable reasons, Sand does not 
quote), Jewish peoplehood is never treated as anything but an 
unchallenged and unchallengeable fact.
Were Jews always as scrupulous about preserving the purity of their 
bloodlines as was the nineteenth-century Polish or Moroccan Jew who said 
the mourner’s kaddish for the child who married out? Not at all, 
contends Sand in his second argument against the historical reality of a 
Jewish people. The notion that Jews share a lineage going back to 
biblical times is, he claims, a false one. Not only was much of ancient 
Jewry never exiled from Palestine, in which it remained and converted to 
Christianity and Islam in antiquity or the early Middle Ages, but large 
numbers of non-Jews in the Diaspora entered the Jewish fold in the same 
period--in at least some cases, it would seem, without undergoing the 
formal conversion process required by rabbinic Judaism.
Sand dwells at length on the better known of these episodes, all 
partially or wholly ignored by rabbinic literature: the Edomites of 
southern Palestine, forced to convert by the Hasmonean King John 
Hyrcanus in 125 B.C.E.; the numerous “God-fearers” of the Roman Empire, 
gentiles attracted to Judaism who often slipped unobtrusively into its 
ranks; the inhabitants of Yemen who became Jews under the Judaizing 
Himyarite kings of the fourth and fifth centuries; the Jewish Berber 
tribes of North Africa before its seventh-century Muslim conquest; the 
Khazars, a Turkic people living between the Caspian and Black seas, 
whose royal house embraced Judaism in the eighth century; and so on. Far 
from having common biblical ancestors, he argues, most contemporary Jews 
would discover, if they could go far back enough in time, that they have 
diverse non-Jewish ones.
But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA 
studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most 
disgraceful pages in Sand’s book are those in which he displays an 
ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by 
serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how 
historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its 
most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of Tel 
Aviv University, Karl Skorecki of the Haifa Technion, and Doron Behar of 
the Rappaport Institute, for “internalizing the Zionist myth” and 
“seeking at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity” in order to 
create a “new discipline” designed to confirm “the Zionist idea of the 
Jewish nation-race.” Having myself worked for many years on a research 
project with Skorecki and Behar, I can testify that this impugning of 
their scientific integrity is libelous.
The irony is that the genetic studies that Sand dismisses lend him a 
measure of support. Overall, they show that while there is a high 
Y-chromosome correlation with an eastern Mediterranean profile among 
Jewish men from most parts of the world, indicating that many of them do 
have common Palestinian ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA correlation of 
Jewish women is much lower. Or, in less technical terms: while male 
gentiles have on the average entered Diaspora Jewish communities in only 
small percentages per generation over time, female gentiles --presumably 
because they were local inhabitants taken for wives by Jewish men in 
places like Yemen or North Africa--have done so more significantly.
But again: so what? There is nothing explosive about this. Judaism has 
always made it clear that the Jewish people is not biologically 
exclusive and can be joined by outsiders. And taking Sand on his own 
terms, what does any of this have to do with Jewish peoplehood, or with 
Zionism? If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars 
who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted 
seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this 
have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their 
attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors 
did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there? 
Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has 
written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that 
Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their 
progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman 
invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar 
proposition seriously.
While he does not trouble to interrogate (as he might say) his own 
beliefs, Sand does reveal something about their origins. He is, he tells 
us in his introduction, the admiring Israeli-born grandson of an 
anti-Zionist Polish Jewish communist, and as a young man growing up in 
the 1960s in mixed Arab-Jewish Jaffa he dreamed of leaving Israel 
forever. Two of his closest friends were a Jaffa Arab and a young Arab 
writer from Haifa named Mahmoud Darwish. After his army service, in the 
course of which, in the Six Day War, he “had to shoot at the enemy and 
intimidate terrified inhabitants,” he went off to Paris to study modern 
European history, determined to “abandon everything” Israeli. Yet in the 
end, he writes, speaking of himself in the third person,
     despite the alienation [that he felt from Israel], he was overcome 
by longing for the city in which he had grown up, and so he returned to 
the painful place where his identity was forged. His homeland, claiming 
to be the “State of the Jewish people,” received him willingly. As for 
the rebellious poet who had been born on its soil, and the old friend 
[from Jaffa]--the state was too narrow to include them [and they 
emigrated].
By then, however, Israel had changed. The country to which Sand 
returned, and in which he married the daughter of a non-Jewish Spanish 
anarchist who was married to an Israeli woman, now teemed with post- and 
anti-Zionist intellectuals. Like him, they objected to what they 
considered Israel’s Jewish ethnocentricity; like him, too, they thought 
that the “state of the Jewish people” should become a “state of all its 
citizens.” By the early 1990s, the attitudes that had made Sand feel 
like an outsider in the Israel of the 1960s were chic, in the academy 
and beyond. Many had their justification in fashionable theories of 
nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the rejection of Otherness that 
originated in the France he had studied in. Mahmoud Darwish was now a 
renowned Palestinian poet. The zeitgeist and the Sand-geist were the 
same. Why The Invention of the Jewish People was not already written 
then, I don’t know. Perhaps Sand--who, while denying the existence of a 
Jewish people, never doubts that of a Palestinian one, even though no 
serious historian disputes that Palestinian national consciousness is a 
product of late modern times--was waiting to see if the winds of fashion 
would shift again. Since then, however, they have only blown harder.
As I said, Sand makes one valid point. Many of the early and 
mid-twentieth-century Jewish scholars who first explored previously 
shadowy episodes of mass adhesion to the Jewish people--men such as 
Nahum Slouschz, who wrote about the Berbers, and Abraham Polak, who 
studied the Khazars, and Yitzhak Ben-Tsvi, who dealt with the Jews of 
the Arabian Peninsula--were Zionists whose research had more than a 
merely scholarly motivation. In demonstrating, as they thought, that the 
Jewish people had once been less defensive, more adventuresome, more 
outgoing and open to the world, more confident of its ability to 
interact with others and to absorb them, they felt they were making a 
statement for their own age.
These scholars and thinkers wanted Zionism to expand the conventional 
notions of what a Jew was and could be. They desired Jews to understand 
that, in a land of their own, assimilation would be a force working for 
them rather than against them, since they now stood to be the 
assimilators and not the assimilated. (Some, such as Ben-Tsvi, later to 
become Israel’s second president, even dreamed, before being disabused 
of the notion by Palestinian Arab nationalism, that a Palestinian Jewish 
society could re-absorb the country’s Arabs, who were, he believed, the 
descendants of ancient Jews.) Yet, as Sand correctly observes, the 
pioneering work of these figures was never followed up by subsequent 
Israeli historians, who by and large lost interest in it.
The little-known chapters in Jewish history upon which figures such as 
Slouschz, Polak, and Ben-Tsvi sought to cast light receded again into 
the shadows, and were pushed back to the fringes of Israeli historical 
consciousness. Even most secular Israelis continue to think of 
themselves as belonging to a people descended from biblical times with 
little or no adulteration, which has stubbornly fought to preserve its 
constantly threatened identity by admitting only those newcomers willing 
to conform to its rigid religious standards. As non- or anti-religious 
as secular Israel may otherwise be, it has always lacked the will and 
the means to define Jewishness in any but traditional religious terms.
Sand, like other critics of Zionism, is wrong in believing that Israel 
cannot be both formally Jewish and functionally democratic, and that it 
must choose between the two. He is right, though, in regarding Israeli 
society’s refusal to assume full responsibility for the assimilation of 
the over one and a half million non-Jews in its midst--immigrants from 
the exSoviet Union, foreign workers and their Israeli-born children, 
Israeli Arabs--as one of its great failures. If Israel is going to be 
Jewish and fully democratic, it will have to find other ways for 
non-Jews to become Jews, or to identify with Jews, than the forbidding 
Orthodox conversion that is currently their sole societal option. A 
revival of historical interest in how, in certain times and places in 
the past, non-Jews have been successfully integrated into the Jewish 
people in large numbers, and without too many questions asked, might be 
a contribution to such a process. Shlomo Sand’s call for it is 
commendable. This is the best that can be said for an otherwise 
deplorable book.

 Indecent Proposal
quali sono i titoli accademici di Hillel Halkin, che nemmeno citi?
E questi sono i regular contributor di quella schifezza che citi:
    * Fred Barnes
    * Jeane Kirkpatrick[4]
    * Joshua Muravchik[4]
    * Eric Breindel[4]
    * Jacob Heilbrunn[4]
    * Irving Kristol[4]
    * Edward Luttwak[4]
    * Michael Ledeen[4]
    * Ronald Radosh[4]
    * Robert Kagan[4]
    * Charles Krauthammer[4]
la creme della feccia neocon. Chi è che va in giro coperto di pece e
piume, Sand o chi cita le stroncature su spazzatura del genere?

 The Invention of the Jewish People.
Molto bello. Grazie.
Credo che dal punto di vista della critica sia tutto.
Molto altro ci sarebbe invece da dire dal punto di vista politico, cioè 
della allucinante concezione di popolo, stato e diritto alla loro 
esistenza che Sand mostra di avere con questo libro. Una concezione 
piuttosto fascista, se Sand pensa che il diritto all'esistenza di uno 
stato (ad esempio quella di Israele) debba essere fondata sulla purezza 
ancestrale di un popolo-razza.
Ci sarebbe anche molto altro da dire sul fatto che una ciofeca del 
genere sia stata pluripremiata in Europa. Dice cose tristi di alcune 
brutte cose di cui molti, da queste parti, sono ancora intrisi.
Tb (bieco illuminista)
-- 
"A vote is like a rifle, it's usefulness depends upon the character of
the user."
~ Theodore Roosevelt

 esistenza che Sand mostra di avere con questo libro.
e che ha il plauso di Cr"cetta.

 genere sia stata pluripremiata in Europa.
informiamo il gentile pubblico che l'unico paese in cui la "ciofeca" è
stata in cima ai bestseller per 3 mesi non si trova in Europa, ma in
MO.

 e che ha il plauso di Cr"cetta.
Ah sì? Rotfl.
