The Fake racial history of Jews

No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list -- and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest taboo.

Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation -- whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel -- is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more -- all equally controversial.

In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel, and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.

The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.

Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.

In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country's leading historians, has called the book "fascinating and challenging."

Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr. Sand's claims. He dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.

Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim (Hebrew: אַשְׁכֲּנָזִים*, pronounced [ˌaʃkəˈnazim], singular: [ˌaʃkəˈnazi]; also יְהוּדֵי אַשְׁכֲּנָז, Yehudei Ashkenaz, "the Jews of Ashkenaz"), are the Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany from Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north. Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for this region and thus for Germany. Thus, Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews are literally "German Jews."....

Many Ashkenazi Jews later migrated, largely eastward, forming communities in non German-speaking areas, including Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere between the 11th and 19th centuries. With them, they took and diversified Yiddish, a basically Germanic language with Hebrew influence (see Jewish language). It had developed in medieval times as the lingua franca among Ashkenazi Jews. The Jewish communities of three cities along the Rhine: Speyer, Worms and Mainz, created the SHUM league (SHUM after the first Hebrew letters of Spira, Warmatia and Magentza). The ShUM-cities are considered the cradle of the distinct Ashkenazi culture and liturgy......

Although in the 11th century, they comprised only 3 percent of the world's Jewish population, at their peak in 1931, Ashkenazi Jews accounted for 92 percent of the world's Jews. Today they make up approximately 80 percent of Jews worldwide.[5] Most Jewish communities with extended histories in Europe are Ashkenazim, with the exception of those associated with the Mediterranean region. The majority of the Jews who migrated from Europe to other continents in the past two centuries are Ashkenazim, Eastern Ashkenazim in particular. This is especially true in the United States, where most of the 5.3 million American Jewish population[6] is Ashkenazi, representing the world's single largest concentration of Ashkenazim.

Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital

Long-lost capital of Khazar kingdom unearthed in southern Russia; finding said to be of immense importance
AFP

Russian archaeologists said Wednesday that they had found the long-lost capital of the Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, a breakthrough for research on the ancient Jewish state.



"This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organizer Dmitry Vasilyev, of the Astrakhan State University, told AFP after returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea.


Findings
Israeli excavation shows Jews, pagans lived in harmony / Associated Press
Roman temple unearthed in Galilee proves pagans, Jews prayed, lived together, scientist says
Full story

"We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that period – how the Khazars actually lived. We know very little about the Khazars – about their traditions, their funerary rites, their culture," he said.



The city was the capital of the Khazars, semi-nomadic Turkic peoples who adopted Judaism as a state religion, from between the eighth and the 10th centuries, when it was captured and sacked by the rulers of ancient Russia.



At its height, the Khazar state and its tributaries controlled much of what is now southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan and large parts of Russia's North Caucasus region.



The capital is referred to as Itil in Arab chronicles, but Vasilyev said the word may actually have been used to refer to the Volga River on which the city was founded or to the surrounding river delta region.

The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.

"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.

"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.

"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.

"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelmingly peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."

Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."

So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?

Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."

Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe....

One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?

"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."

No! It is a best seller INSIDE ISRAEL itself.

And now in France where it is already in it's third printing.

In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel, and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.

from the linked info:
I'm not sure how he could have arrived at this conclusion, being that genetic/DNA studies done a few years ago basically showed extraordinarily similar genetic ties between the Palestinians and the Jews. The primary (and more significant) differences are religious and cultural.

Maybe the book is so popular because he's bringing his arguments at an interesting angle. My first thought was that it's just another anti-semitic screed, but I guess not since it's selling well in Israel.

That's what I was wondering too. Genetic research counters his claim.

Maybe the book is so popular because he's bringing his arguments at an interesting angle. My first thought was that it's just another anti-semitic screed, but I guess not since it's selling well in Israel.

Israel Bartal, dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University, in a commentary published in Haaretz,[9] writes that Sand's basic thesis and statements about Jewish historiography are "baseless". Bartal answers to "Sand's arguments (...) that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically "pure" [and that] Sand applies marginal positions to the entire body of Jewish historiography and, in doing so, denies the existence of the central positions in Jewish historical scholarship." Bartal refers to Sand's overall treatment of Jewish sources as "embarrassing and humiliating." He adds that "The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy." Bartel summarizes his critique of Sand's characterization of Jewish historiography as follows: "as far as I can discern, the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented earlier in their books and articles by what he insists on defining as "authorized historians" suspected of "concealing historical truth,"" and calls the overall work "bizarre and incoherent."[9]

i'd like to see something from a magazine that isn't a 'socialist review' in discussing the book. that said, it does sound like an anti-semitic screed...

mostly one has to wonder about the motivation of people trying to de-jew the jews.

That's what I was wondering too. Genetic research counters his claim.

Maybe the book is so popular because he's bringing his arguments at an interesting angle. My first thought was that it's just another anti-semitic screed, but I guess not since it's selling well in Israel.