Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

INTRODUCTION 17
or assimilation into, them. The nation scattered widely, its bitter wanderings
taking it to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland, and distant Russia,
but it always managed to maintain close blood relations among the far-flung
communities and to preserve its distinctiveness.
Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, they contend, rare circumstances
combined to wake the ancient people from its long slumber and to
prepare it for rejuvenation and for the return to its ancient homeland. And so
the nation began to return, joyfully, in vast numbers. Many Israelis still believe
that, but for Hitler's horrible massacre, "Eretz Israel" would soon have been
filled with millions of Jews making "aliyah" by their own free will, because they
had dreamed of it for thousands of years.
And while the wandering people needed a territory of its own, the empty,
virgin land longed for a nation to come and make it bloom. Some uninvited
guests had, it is true, settled in this homeland, but since "the people kept faith
with it throughout their Dispersion" for two millennia, the land belonged only
to that people, and not to that handful without history who had merely stumbled
upon it. Therefore the wars waged by the wandering nation in its conquest
of the country were justified; the violent resistance of the local population
was criminal; and it was only the (highly unbiblical) charity of the Jews that
permitted these strangers to remain and dwell among and beside the nation,
which had returned to its biblical language and its wondrous land.
Even in Israel these burdens of memory did not appear spontaneously but
rather were piled layer upon layer by gifted reconstructors of the past, beginning
in the second half of the nineteenth century. They primarily collected
fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memories, out of which they
imaginatively constructed a long, unbroken genealogy for "the Jewish people."
Before then, there had been no organized public "remembering," and remarkably
enough, it has not changed much since then. Despite the academization of
Jewish history studies—with the founding of universities in British-ruled Jerusalem
and later in Israel, and the opening of Jewish studies courses throughout
the West—the idea of the Jewish past has remained generally unchanged,
retaining its unified, ethnonational character to this day.
Different approaches have, of course, been employed in the extensive
historiography of Judaism and Jews. There has been no shortage of polemic
and disagreement in the highly productive field of the "national past." But, so
far, hardly anyone has challenged the fundamental concepts that were formed
and adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither
the important processes that profoundly changed the study of history in the
Western world in the late twentieth century, nor the significant paradigm