Finally I got my paws on a copy of Shlomo Sand’s much-ballyhooed work “The Invention of the Jewish People.” There is so much of dubious value and even utter irrelevance that, even after just a few pages, I cannot accept any claims linking him even if only tangentially to the so-called “New Israeli Historians” (Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe et al., widely noticed for their focus on various aspects of the Palestinian side of what happened in Palestine since the early 20th century).
On the contrary, Shlomo Sand must be viewed as representing a category all his own. Rather than simply recycling various versions of either Old Testament or Pentateuch biblical renderings of the “history of the Jews,” he does refer to various facts of how various versions of some kind of historical rendering of what happened with Jewish communities came to be. So, he is acquitted at least in this court of any charges of creating mystery. But he ends up seriously mis-speaking the meaning of events by ignoring the impacts of other developments outside the cloisters in which “history” gets written down. The result is an “historical”-seeming narrative no less deceptive than the standard-issue triumphalist Zionist version. I therefore dub Shlomo Sand the “First of the New Israel Mistorians.”
Watch this space for an ongoing updated review / study of this not unimportant but utimately failed piece of “post-modernism.”
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