Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 269
Renan's rhetoric was still replete with such terms as "race" and even
"blood," but his historical erudition resisted the dominant verbal conventions.
By dint of a short, sharp empirical analysis, he joined the outlook of
the German historian Theodor Mommsen and attacked the popular views
ascribing to the Jews qualities of an ancient, closed race of uniform origin.
Christianity, Renan stated, was not the first religion that called on all
humanity to believe in a single deity; it was Judaism that began the great
campaign of religious conversion. To demonstrate his thesis, he began by
surveying the wave of Judaization during the Hellenistic and Roman period,
until Cassius Dio's famous assertion in the third century CE that the term "Jew"
no longer applied to people of Judean descent (see Chapter 3, above). The Jews
used to convert their slaves, and their synagogues were effective venues that
attracted their neighbors to join them. The masses of Jewish believers in Italy,
Gaul and elsewhere were mostly local people who had converted to Judaism. 28
Renan went on to talk about the Adiabene kingdom, the Falashas, and the vast
conversion under the Khazars.
In conclusion, Renan repeated, there is no Jewish race, nor one typical Jewish
appearance. At most, self-isolation, endogenous marriage and the long periods
in the ghettoes had produced certain Jewish types. The Jews' secluded social life
had affected their behavior and even their physiognomy. Heredity and blood had
nothing to do with it. This social existence and even the typical occupations had
not been freely chosen by the Jews, but imposed on them in the Middle Ages. In
many ways the Jews of France did not differ from the Protestants. The Jews, mainly
Gauls who had been Judaized in antiquity and become an oppressed religious
minority, were liberated by the French Revolution, which ended the ghettoes.
Thereafter, the Jews were part and parcel of the national culture of France, and
the question of race had no significance whatsoever.
This contribution by the leading French intellectual of his day, the
Jean-Paul Sartre of the period, undoubtedly lent significant support to the
liberal-democratic camp, which would ultimately roll back the ethnocentric
and anti-Semitic nationalist wave of the Dreyfus Affair. A similar role, in
another political, national and cultural arena, was played by Karl Kautsky.
This "pope" of the Marxism of the Second International, a methodical
thinker of Czech origin, succeeded Marx and Engels at the head of Europe's
socialist camp at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
sought to define the nation on a voluntarist basis (see the Chapter 1). The lecture on Judaism
was translated into English and published by the American Jewish Committee as a response
to German racism in Contemporary Jewish Record 6: 4 (1943), 436-48.
28 Ibid, 444.