Invention Of Jewish People Pa

by Sand,Shlomo

• ISBN13: 9781844676231
• ISBN10: 1844676234
• Edition: 00
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-06-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

Author Biography

Shlomo Sand teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition	p. ix
Introduction: Burdens of Memory	p. 1
Identity in Movement	p. 1
Constructed Memories	p. 14
Making Nations: Sovereignty and Equality	p. 23
Lexicon: "People" and Ethnos	p. 24
The Nation: Boundaries and Definitions	p. 31
From Ideology to Identity	p. 39
From Ethnic Myth to Civil Imaginary	p. 45
The Intellectual as the Nation's "Prince"	p. 54
Mythistory: In the Beginning, God Created the People	p. 64
The Early Shaping of Jewish History	p. 65
The Old Testament as Mythistory	p. 71
Race and Nation	p. 78
A Historians' Dispute	p. 81
A Protonationalist View from the East	p. 87
An Ethnicist Stage in the West	p. 95
The First Steps of Historiography in Zion	p. 100
Politics and Archaeology	p. 107
The Earth Rebels against Mythistory	p. 115
The Bible as Metaphor	p. 123
The Invention of the Exile: Proselytism and Conversion	p. 129
The "People" Exiled in 70 CE	p. 130
Exile without Expulsion-History in the Twilight Zone	p. 136
Against Its Will, the People Emigrate from the Homeland	p. 143
"All Nations Shall Flow Unto It"	p. 150
The Hasmoneans Impose Judaism on Their Neighbors	p. 154
From Hellenistic Sphere to Mesopotamian Territory	p. 161
Judaizing in the Shadow of Rome	p. 166
How Rabbinical Judaism Viewed Proselytizing	p. 173
The Sad Fate of the Judeans	p. 178
Remembering and Forgetting the "People of the Land"	p. 182
Realms of Silence: In Search of Lost (JEWISH) Time	p. 190
Arabia Felix: The Proselytized Kingdom of Himyar	p. 192
Phoenicians and Berbers: The Mysterious Queen Kahina	p. 199
Jewish Kagans? A Strange Empire Rises in the East	p. 210
Khazars and Judaism: A Long Love Affair?	p. 218
Modern Research Explores the Khazar Past	p. 230
The Enigma: The Origin of Eastern Europe's Jews	p. 238
The Distinction: Identity Politics in Israel	p. 250
Zionism and Heredity	p. 256
The Scientific Puppet and the Racist Hunchback	p. 272
Founding an Ethnos State	p. 280
"Jewish and Democratic"-An Oxymoron?	p. 292
Ethnocracy in the Age of Globalization	p. 307
Afterword	p. 314
Acknowledgments	p. 326
Index	p. 327
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