In The Invention of the Jewish People, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand dismantles one of the most deeply entrenched narratives in modern history: that the Jews are an ancient, ethnically cohesive people who were forcibly exiled from their homeland in 70 CE and wandered the earth for two millennia before returning to reclaim it. Drawing on decades of suppressed and overlooked scholarship, Sand argues that this founding story is largely a myth constructed by nineteenth-century historians and adopted wholesale by the Zionist movement to provide moral and political legitimacy for the creation of an ethno-national state. The exile, he shows, never happened as described—the Romans did not expel entire populations from Judea—and the millions of Jews who appeared across the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Eastern Europe were overwhelmingly the product of mass conversions to Judaism, not biological descent from the ancient Israelites.

Sand traces these forgotten conversion histories through the Judaized kingdom of Himyar in Arabia, the Berber tribes of North Africa and their warrior queen Kahina, and most dramatically, the Khazar empire of the Eurasian steppe, whose ruling class and much of its population adopted Judaism between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. These communities, Sand argues, are the actual demographic ancestors of most modern Jews—a thesis that Zionist historiography has systematically buried because it undermines the ethnic and territorial claims on which the State of Israel was founded. The book is ultimately a challenge to the politics of identity itself: if the "Jewish people" as a unified ethnic nation was deliberately fashioned from diverse religious communities by nationalist intellectuals wielding selective history, then the concept of an ethnically exclusive state built on that myth demands fundamental re-examination.

Due to length, download is only available as a PDF at this time.

Disclaimer: The information shared in this eBook is for informational purposes only. The author and Shadowbanned Library assume no liability for the use or misuse of the information presented. Each author is responsible for their own research and content. Shadowbanned Library does not review or fact-check books.