By Shlomo Sand

A old journey de strength that demolishes the myths and taboos that experience surrounded Jewish and Israeli background, The Invention of the Jewish People deals a brand new account of either that calls for to be learn and reckoned with. used to be there quite a compelled exile within the first century, by the hands of the Romans? should still we regard the Jewish humans, all through millennia, as either a special ethnic workforce and a putative nation—returned eventually to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that the majority Jews truly descend from converts, whose local lands have been scattered a ways around the heart East and japanese Europe. The formation of a Jewish humans after which a Jewish kingdom out of those disparate teams may well basically ensue below the sway of a brand new historiography, constructing in accordance with the increase of nationalism all through Europe. underneath the biblical again fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who changed rabbis because the architects of Jewish identification, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a brand new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a daring research of nationalism that money owed for the outdated myths.

After a protracted remain on Israel’s bestseller record, and successful the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is eventually to be had in English. The significant value of the clash within the heart East guarantees that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well past the historians and politicians that he is taking to job. with no an sufficient realizing of Israel’s prior, able to superseding today’s opposing perspectives, diplomatic strategies tend to stay elusive. during this iconoclastic paintings of background, Shlomo Sand presents the highbrow foundations for a brand new imaginative and prescient of Israel’s destiny.