The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth (Semiotext

by Shlomo Sand, Ames Hodges (Translator)

How the work of Israeli writers today reflects the foundation myths of a Jewish state. The idea of the Jewish nation was conceived before the organization of the Zionist movement in the nineteenth century and continued long after the creation of the state of Israel. In The Words and the Land, post-Zionist Israeli historian Shlomo Sand examines how both Jewish and Israeli intellectuals contributed to this process. One by one, he identifies and calls into question the foundation myths of the Israeli state, beginning with the myth of a people forcibly uprooted, a people-race that began to wander the world in search of a land of asylum. This was a people that would define itself on a biological and "mythological-religious" basis, embodied in words that today feed Israeli political, literary, and historical writing: "exile," "return," and "ascent" (Alyah) to the land of its origins.

Since 1948, most intellectuals in Israel have continued to accept this ethno-national image and embrace an exclusive state identity to which only Jewish people can belong. The first challenges to this dominant idea didn't appear in Israel until the 1980s, in the innovative work of the "post-Zionist" historians, who were bent on dismantling the nationalist historical myth and arguing for a state that would belong equally to all its citizens. Analyzing how Israeli intellectuals positioned themselves during the Gulf War and in the new era of communication technologies, Sand extends his analysis globally, looking at the status of intellectuals in all societies.

Genres: History, Politics, Israel, Middle East, Nonfiction

237 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2006

About the author

Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso Books, 2009). His main areas of teaching are nationalism, film as history and French intellectual history.

Sand was born to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. His parents had Communist and anti-imperialist views and refused to receive compensations from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War. Sand spent his early years in a displaced persons camp, and moved with the family to Jaffa in 1948. He was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen, and only completed his bagrut following his military service. He eventually left the Union of Israeli Communist Youth (Banki) and joined the more radical, and anti-Zionist, Matzpen in 1968. Sand resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment with the organisation.

He declined an offer by the Israeli Communist Party Rakah to be sent to do cinema studies in Poland, and in 1975 Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University. From 1975 to 1985, after winning a scholarship, he studied and later taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis on "George Sorel and Marxism". Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Reviews

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sand is famous for “The Invention of the Jewish People” a book used more as a political talisman—waved to assert that “Jews” lack real identity or history—than as a serious academic study. This collection of disparate chapters and essays was probably brought out, hastily and with many typos, to capitalize on Sand’s new infamy. A potted history of the Israeli intellectuals’ relationship to Zionism and the State’s ruling powers—very sobering—is followed by a meditation on the alleged exclusionary nature of the Hebrew language, an eye-rolling chapter of “gotcha” quotes by intellectuals during the first Gulf War, and a review of the “new historians”. Many big claims are asserted without evidence, since, presumably, the reader shares Sand’s melancholia over Zionism, which has him longing for more “universal” histories, identities and languages. This isn’t a good intro to Israeli intellectual life, and the references require some knowledge of the thinkers, books and events under discussion.

[Cécile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book, which surprised me by the quality of its conclusion. Also gives a lot of sources I'll certainly explore.