Is there a Jewish identity? Or there are many? Hebraism is certainly the oldest of the monotheistic religions, but is it a religion or also somethin...

Is there a Jewish identity? Or there are many? Hebraism is certainly the oldest of the monotheistic religions, but is it a religion or also something else? Can we speak of a history of the Jewish people, or just histories of Jewish peoples? And what about the Jews who associate to the Jewish another national identity (American, French, Italian, Australian, etc.). And those who have chosen to live in Israel, and those who call themselves atheists, regardless of country in which they live? How could a Jewish identity be maintained in the diaspora over two millennia? And what role did pogroms, persecutions, the Shoah and all variants of anti-Semitism play in keeping alive the sense of belonging to a community, however defined?

Thousands of books have been written on these questions. An opportunity to restart thinking about the issue is the book by Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, published in Hebrew in 2006, translated into English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Arab and Italian¹. Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He has been active in many formations and groups of the extreme left of the anti-Zionist movement. The fact that he continues to teach at a university in Israel after he wrote and published this book is a positive sign of the strength of the liberal-democratic values in the academic life of that country. This book has in fact the intention to submit to a corrosive critique the narrative that accompanied the birth, the first steps and the troubled history up to the present of the state of Israel. This narrative takes for granted on the historiographical ground the biblical account: the flight from Egypt, the arrival in the “promised land”, the creation of the kingdom of David and Solomon, subsequently divided into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Passing from Biblical times to “historical” times the narrative continues telling of the two destructions of the temple, for the first time in the sixth century before Christ, and a second time in the year 70 AD.

Thereafter began the wanderings and exile that led the Jewish people to spread in a wide area, from Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland, the entire Eastern Europe to Russia. In all these centuries and in all these places, the Jewish people always managed to keep the ties of blood and its religious traditions in defiance of the distances of time and space and the persecutions. On the basis of the “unity” preserved, towards the end of the nineteenth century the Zionist movement was born, and reinforced after the Shoah, the genocide and World War II, and the movement led to the return to Eretz Israel, the fathers’ land and to the founding of the state of Israel.

Shlomo Sand employs five hundred pages to disrupt this narrative. The main points of his argument can be summarized as follows:

- the Bible was written by different hands at different times and can not be taken as a reliable historical narrative;

- the exile after the destruction of the temple could not have covered the entire Jewish population but only a few tens of thousands people;

- the Jewish religion, as the first monotheistic religion in human history, showed a remarkable propensity to expand and convert other populations in North Africa (Berbers) and the Middle East, who partly reconverted later, more or less voluntarily, to Islam (hence the thesis that the Arab population of Palestine is probably of Jewish origin but Islamized);

- Ashkenazi Jews descended from the meeting of the people of the ancient kingdom of the Khazars with communities from Germany, thus giving rise to the formation of Yiddish culture;

- the Jews therefore are not the descendants of the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of David, but the heirs of a religious tradition which, with various and complicated events, survived until today.

How did that narrative emerge which, according to Sand, is the “legend of the wandering people”? The answer is to be found in medieval Christianity who saw the Jewish people as the heirs of those who killed the Christ, an accursed people, driven from their land by God as punishment for their sins. An origin rooted in medieval anti-Semitism, however well-suited to become the core identity of a process of nation-building, to claim the legitimacy of the return to the land of the fathers.

Shlomo Sand has been charged, by the official historiography of his country, to be a specialist of European history and in particular of French history and then to have ventured dangerously in a field that is not his wow. The author of this review does not have the tools to assess the scientific value of Sand’s historiographical interpretation. It is, however, possible to argue that the fact of having studied European history and having had access to the debate on the concept of the “nation” and the processes of nation building could give Sand the opportunity to open new perspectives for research on the objectively complex and controversial issue of Jewish identity. For several decades now scholars have begun in Europe to question the ideological role of historiography in the service of a nationalistic construction in terms of collective identities. Patrick Geary, an American medievalist historian, argues that nationalist historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries placed the birth of nations between the third and the eighth century of the Christian era² and based on that mythical origin the territorial claims of the present. In fact, every nation-state, a typical product of modernity, has the need to justify its existence in a past that dates back to the dawn of time. Think about the effort of fascism in Italy to reposition the nation in continuity with the Roman Empire, or the attempt of German archeology during the Nazi time to reconnect the “deutsche Nation” to the “ancient Germans”, celebrated by Tacitus.

History has always been used “politically” to educate the masses, to build soldiers willing to sacrifice for the homeland and to strengthen internal solidarity. No wonder if this could happen even in the case of Israel. The task in this case was, however, particularly difficult. It implied the need to claim the unity of populations who had lived for centuries between North Africa and the Caucasus, between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, speaking different languages and bearers of different cultures and to convince them to claim a land on which to found a Jewish state. One could not avoid a series of questions: Who is a Jew? Who can legitimately claim the right to become citizens of the new state? And the Jews who converted, by coercion or by will, to other religions? And those who, while recognizing themselves as Jews, have no intention to become citizens of Israel? And the atheists Jews living in Israel? And those who are well integrated into other cultures and have become citizens of other states, while not rejecting their Jewish identity? And those that the rabbinic law recognizes as Jews (children of Jewish mothers), but do not feel Jews or even know that they are Jews? No doubt, it is difficult to define what constitutes the national identity (Italian, French, German, American, Spanish, etc.). It is even more difficult defining Jewish identity. History, biology, anthropology, no science is able to give a clear answer. Sand’s answer is that, basically, the Jewish religion is just a fascinating one. However, at least in the tradition of Western public law, the state should maintain clear boundaries and a clear separation towards religion. In Israel, this separation is problematic.

The Jewish religion, however, has had the misfortune to be at the origin of other monotheistic religions that developped in opposition to it, giving rise to the formation of anti-Semitic tendencies that, in different forms, methods and intensities, have gone through the whole history of the Christian and the Islamic world. If identity is born out of the relationship between Ego and Alter, between We and They, it is impossible to deny that anti-Semitism has become a component of Jewish identity. Jews lived for centuries in the midst of peoples of other religions, and yet, if they were able to cross the barriers of Anti-Semitism, they have taken on the national identity of their fellow citizens. Anti-Semitism, combined with the extreme forms of nationalism, has in a sense led the Jews to become in their turn a nation, with the well-known consequences in a very delicate part of the world. The moment in which Judaism will be just a fascinating religion has not arrived yet. Until the division of humankind into nation-states will not come to an end, Jewish identity will continue to embrace in its many variants the entire spectrum from cosmopolitanism to nationalism.

¹ This article is based on the reading of the Italian translation: L’invenzione del popolo ebraico, Rizzoli, Milano, 2010

² See The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton UP, 2003