By, Simon Rocker
2 min read
BySimon Rocker, Simon Rocker
By Shlomo Sand
Verso, £9.99
The radical Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, has returned with his wrecking ball in an attempt to shatter more Zionist shibboleths. In previous books, he has argued that there was no mass exile of Jews from Judea in Roman times, that the idea of a single historic Jewish people is a myth and that Jews were never as attached to the Land of Israel as imagined by the forefathers of Zionism.
Here, in this short polemic, he goes one further by declaring that he has decided to "resign" as a Jew. To identify as Jewish in Israel, he contends, is to be part of a dominant group that discriminates against Arabs and other non-Jews - to affiliate "to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices". For Sand, the essential characteristic of Israel should be Israeliness, a culture open equally to Jews and Arabs. In the 21st century, labels such as "Jewish state" are a "questionable and dangerous anachronism". A state that defines itself by the religious or ethnic make-up of its majority cannot be considered democratic in his view.
In one sense, he recalls an earlier, iconoclastic strain of Zionism, which sought to divorce itself from the Jewish past and establish a new Hebraic civilisation. A confirmed atheist since his youth, Sand maintains that no "living, non-religious Jewish culture" exists and that what passes for secular Jewish culture is the thin, nostalgic echo of a religious tradition.
He also goes on to criticise what he regards as the ethnocentric narrowness of that tradition. But his credentials as a commentator on Judaism are open to question. He claims, wrongly, that the Mishnah is written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. He also argues that the much-quoted maxim - "He who saves a single life preserves a whole world" - is not an example of Jewish universalism because the Talmud limits it to "a single life in Israel".
While it is true that editions of the Babylonian Talmud often print this version, Sand ignores alternative, and possibly earlier, rabbinic readings which do not add the qualifying phrase "in Israel". It is a significant omission because it suggests a tendency to skate over complexity for the sake of polemical neatness.
At another point, he criticises Jewish groups for trying to monopolise Nazi genocide, marginalising other victims; but he overlooks Jews who, for instance, who have tried to raise awareness of the suffering of the Roma.
Sand regards his Jewishness as a matter of history and, other than an external political imposition, not part of his present and certainly not part of the future. If he and other individuals wish to define their nationality simply as Israeli, they should be allowed to and not be compelled to register as Jews.
But Jews have long held that it is better to wrestle with than abandon their tradition and I doubt that this book will persuade many to emulate him.
Simon Rocker is the JC's Judaism editor