Shlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand: The Historian Who Un-Invented a Nation

A high-school dropout who did not finish his own secondary education until he was twenty-five later spent decades teaching history at Tel Aviv University, and then wrote a book arguing that the very idea of a Jewish people descended in an unbroken line from ancient Israel was, in his words, a nineteenth-century invention. The book stayed on Israeli bestseller lists for nineteen weeks. Shlomo Sand had built a career out of refusing to accept the story he was handed.

A Childhood Built on Refusal

Sand was born on September 10, 1946, in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust. The family moved to Jaffa in 1948, where his father worked as a night porter at Communist Party headquarters. His parents' politics were communist and anti-imperialist to the point of refusing German reparations payments for what they had suffered, and Sand's earliest cultural grounding was in Yiddish rather than in the religious or nationalist traditions that would later become his life's subject. He was expelled from high school at sixteen and worked jobs including telephone lineman before finishing his secondary education at twenty-five.

From Soldier to Radical

Sand's political transformation traces to his military service in the 1967 Six-Day War, when his unit captured Abu Tor in East Jerusalem. Further service in Jericho, where he witnessed the treatment of Palestinians, pushed him toward the radical left. He became involved in communist circles, forming a friendship with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish through the Rakah communist party, and in 1968 joined the anti-Zionist organization Matzpen, though he resigned within two years, disillusioned with its internal politics.

An Unlikely Academic Career

Sand earned a BA in History from Tel Aviv University in 1975, then spent a decade in Paris, taking an MA in French History and a PhD centered on Georges Sorel and Marxism, with his doctoral research based at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales between 1978 and 1982. He held a teaching post there from 1983 to 1985 before returning to Tel Aviv University, where he moved through the ranks from tenure-track lecturer in 1988 to associate professor in 1995 and full professor in 2002, becoming professor emeritus in 2014. He also taught periodically at the University of California, Berkeley, and back in Paris.

The Invention of the Jewish People

Sand's defining work, *The Invention of the Jewish People*, was published in Hebrew in 2008 and in English the following year. Its argument was a direct challenge to the foundational narrative of Zionism: that the Jewish nationhood recognized today was substantially constructed by nineteenth-century historians, starting with Heinrich Graetz, who treated biblical narrative as reliable historical record. Sand argued that many ancient peoples had converted to Judaism over the centuries, and that Ashkenazi Jews may in significant part descend from the Khazars, a Turkic people whose ruling elite converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages, rather than from an exiled population of ancient Judea. The book was translated into more languages than any other Israeli history book, including German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and Slovene, and won France's Prix Aujourd'hui journalists' award. He followed it with *The Invention of the Land of Israel* in 2012, extending the same skepticism to territorial claims, and later with *How I Stopped Being a Jew* in 2013, which separated his attachment to Hebrew and secular Israeli life from what he called "tribal Judeocentrism." His other books include *Film as History*, a critique of Claude Lanzmann's documentary *Shoah*, and *The End of the French Intellectual*, examining Michel Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour, and Alain Finkielkraut.

Collision With Genetics, and With Critics

Sand's thesis put him on a collision course with Zionist historians, who accused him of presenting speculative claims as settled fact, and with geneticists working on Jewish ancestry. His remark to *Science* magazine in 2010, suggesting that Hitler would have approved of geneticist Harry Ostrer's DNA ancestry research into Jewish origins, drew a sharp rebuke from Ostrer, who called the comparison "overheated" and a misrepresentation of his work. The geneticist Eran Elhaik later drew heavily on Sand's arguments in proposing that Ashkenazi ancestry reflected a mosaic of Near Eastern, Caucasus, European, and Semitic origins, a theory that itself drew substantial criticism from both historians and geneticists. Sand has never claimed to be a geneticist himself; his arguments are historiographical, about how national narratives get built, not laboratory claims about DNA.

Politics Without Illusions

Sand describes himself as post-Zionist and non-Zionist. He supports Israel's continued existence, but on pragmatic rather than historical grounds — "not because of historical right, but because of the fact that it exists today" — and he opposes the Law of Return. He has called Israeli society "one of the most racist societies in the western world" because of how it is legally defined, and has used the word rape to describe what he says Israel did to Palestinian society. He rejects a one-state solution as unrealistic given that society, and instead supports a two-state solution along 1967 lines with the removal of settlements. In 2014, in an interview with *The Guardian*, he said he wanted to "cease considering myself a Jew," describing himself as having been "assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos" — a position that made him as controversial for his identity claims as for his history.

Why Shlomo Is Called a Genius

Sand's reputation rests on a specific intellectual move: taking a national origin story almost everyone treated as self-evident and showing, through close reading of how nineteenth-century historians actually built it, that it was a construction rather than a transmission. That is genuine historiographical originality — the ability to read a familiar archive and see the scaffolding instead of the building. It is not, however, a genius validated by consensus. Geneticists, demographers, and many historians have argued his central claims about Khazar ancestry and constructed peoplehood do not hold up against the genetic and documentary evidence, and some critics regard the book as polemic dressed as scholarship. The fairest description is that Sand possesses a genuine gift for provocative reframing and a willingness to follow an argument into territory that guarantees him enemies — an intellectual courage, whether or not the specific historical thesis survives scrutiny.

Legacy

Whatever the final verdict on the Khazar hypothesis, Sand forced a debate that Israeli and diaspora Jewish communities had largely avoided having in public, about how national identities are made rather than found, and his books remain reference points — cited approvingly by some, held up as a cautionary tale by others — in any serious argument about the origins of Jewish nationhood.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Invention of the Jewish People
• Notable work: The Invention of the Land of Israel
• Affiliated with Tel Aviv University and School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences
• Educated at Tel Aviv University, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and University of Paris
• Worked as historian, university teacher and activist