Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

Introduction: Burdens of Memory
A Nation ... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry
and a common dislike of their neighbors.
—Karl Deutsch, Nationality and Its Alternatives, 1969
I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write,
were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs.
—Ernest Gellner, "Reply to Critics," 1996
This book is a work of history. Nonetheless, it will open with a number of
personal stories that, like all biographical writing, required a liberal amount
of imagination to give them life. To begin like this is less strange than readers
may at first imagine. It is no secret that scholarly research is often motivated by
personal experiences. These experiences tend to be hidden beneath layers of
theory; here some are proffered at the outset. They will serve the author as the
launch pad in his passage toward historical truth, an ideal destination that, he
is aware, no one ever truly reaches.
Personal memory is untrustworthy—we do not know the color of the ink with
which it was written—and thus one should view the depiction of the following
encounters as inexact and partly fictitious, though no more so than any other
type of biographical writing. As for their possibly troublesome connection with
the central thesis of this book, readers will discover it as they proceed. True, their
tone is sometimes ironic, even melancholic. But irony and melancholy have their
uses, and might jointly be suitable attire for a critical work that seeks to isolate the
historical roots and changing nature of identity politics in Israel
IDENTITY IN MOVEMENT
The First Story—Two Immigrant Grandfathers
His name was Shulek. Later, in Israel, he was called Shaul. He was born in
Lodz, Poland, in 1910. At the end of the First World War his father died of the
Spanish flu, and his mother went to work as a laborer in a textile plant near
the city. Two of her three children were put up for adoption with the help of
the local Jewish community; only Shulek, the youngest, remained at home.
He attended a heder for a few years, but his mother's straitened circumstances
forced him out into the streets at an early age, and he began to do various jobs