The Invention of the Jewish People
English first edition cover
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| Author | Shlomo Sand |
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| Original title | ?מתי ואיך הומצא העם היהודי |
| Translator | Yael Lotan |
| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Subject | Historiography of the Jewish people |
| Publisher | Resling (Hebrew 1st ed.) Verso Books (English 1st ed.) |
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Publication date
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2008 |
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Published in English
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2009 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 358 p. (Hebrew 1st ed.) 332 p. (English 1st ed.) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 317919518 |
| LC Class | DS143.S23 2008 Hebr (Hebrew 1st ed.) |
The Invention of the Jewish People (Hebrew: מתי ואיך הומצא העם היהודי?, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, literally When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?) is a study of the historiography of the Jewish people by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. It has generated a heated controversy. The book was in the best-seller list in Israel for nineteen weeks. It was reprinted three times when published in French (Comment le peuple juif fut inventé, Fayard, Paris, 2008). In France, it received the "Prix Aujourd'hui", a journalists' award given to a non-fiction political or historical work.
An English translation of the book was published by Verso Books in October 2009. The book has also been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Russian, and as of late 2009 further translations were underway.The Invention of the Jewish People has now been translated into more languages than any other Israeli history book. Historian Michael Berkowitz criticized it as "a far cry from a ‘real’ work of scholarship" and "plodding and dull." Geneticist Harry Ostrer presented findings that were generally viewed as disproving Sand's notion that the Jewish people is an ex-post invention.
Sand began his work by looking for research studies about forcible exile of Jews from the area now bordered by modern Israel, and its surrounding regions. He was astonished that he could find no such literature, he says, given that the expulsion of Jews from the region is viewed as a constitutive event in Jewish history. The conclusion he came to from his subsequent investigation is that the expulsion simply did not happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region, and that the Jewish diaspora is essentially a modern invention. He accounts for the appearance of millions of Jews around the Mediterranean and elsewhere as something that came about primarily through the religious conversion of local people, saying that Judaism, contrary to popular opinion, was very much a "converting religion" in former times. He holds that mass conversions were first brought about by the Hasmoneans under the influence of Hellenism, and continued until Christianity rose to dominance in the fourth century CE.
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