Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

INTRODUCTION 21
become a reliable history book chronicling the birth of a nation? To what extent
was the Judean Hasmonean kingdom—whose diverse subjects did not all speak
one language, and who were for the most part illiterate—a nation-state? Was the
population of Judea exiled after the fall of the Second Temple, or is that a
Christian myth that not accidentally ended up as part of Jewish tradition? And
if not exiled, what happened to the local people, and who are the millions of Jews
who appeared on history's stage in such unexpected, far-flung regions?
If world Jews were indeed a nation, what were the common elements in
the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech, other than
religious belief and certain practices of that belief? Perhaps, despite everything
we have been told, Judaism was simply an appealing religion that spread widely
until the triumphant rise of its rivals, Christianity and Islam, and then, despite
humiliation and persecution, succeeded in surviving into the modern age.
Does the argument that Judaism has always been an important belief-culture,
rather than a uniform nation-culture, detract from its dignity, as the proponents
of Jewish nationalism have been proclaiming for the past 130 years?
If there was no common cultural denominator among the communities of
the Jewish religion, how could they be connected and set apart by ties of blood?
Are the Jews an alien "nation-race," as the anti-Semites have imagined and sought
to persuade us since the nineteenth century? What are the prospects of defeating
this doctrine, which assumes and proclaims that Jews have distinctive biological
features (in the past it was Jewish blood; today it is a Jewish gene), when so many
Israeli citizens are fully persuaded of their racial homogeneity?
Another historical irony: there were times in Europe when anyone
who argued that all Jews belong to a nation of alien origin would have been
classified at once as an anti-Semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest
that the people known in the world as Jews (as distinct from today's Jewish
Israelis) have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately
denounced as a Jew-hater.
Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel
still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that
serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and
the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The
state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it
has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused
to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural
democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state
that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on
seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though