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Twilight of History
The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history todayOn its publication in 2009, Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People met with a storm of controversy. His demystifying approach to nationalist and Zionist historiography provoked much criticism from other professional historians, as well as praise. The furore gave him a privileged position to consider his academic discipline, which he reflects on here in Twilight of History. Drawing on four decades in the field, Sand takes a wider view and interrogates the study of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. Over the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role for historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand’s perspective, since the role of history as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a source of historical fact. He asks such questions Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and “scientific” truth? Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and finds reasons for hope in the work of Max Weber and Georges Sorel.
333 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 7, 2015
13 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
About the author
Shlomo Sand
35 books259 followersShlomo 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.
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.
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September 23, 2018
I went to a school in Ukraine during the time of the twilight of the Soviet Union. We still were taught that the history is objective strict science based upon the historic materialism of Feuerbach and dialects of Hegel, of course enriched with the social theory of Marx. There where no questions about it. So I did not question when we were taught that the Soviet Union (in particular, the Slavic Soviet republics including Russia) were descenders from the Kiev Rus; And that Russia was inheritor of the Roman Empire intellectual luggage through Byzantine (Moscow is the third Rome on the seven hills). I did not only question it, I felt proud to belong to such a rich and ancient history! Then first came collapse of the Soviet Union, and I saw how Russia is appropriating its history leaving the former republics scrabble for their historical identities. But i was too young to bother then, I was in Russia doing a successful career, and still I did not feel the relevance of it all to the current time. Later I moved to England and all of this has become even less relevant for me. However, the war of words between Russia and Ukraine were gaining more and more power, until the real war sparkled in 2014. I think the reasons for it were in the present rather than the past. But the past has been used as a powerful weapon to split the people into groups and made them to take sides literally on the battle fields. That was as close as I personally saw and felt the war ever. And it shook me to the core. And also it was this element” how what they told us in school was not true? So i decided to investigate for myself, who is the proper inheritor of the Kiev Rus (naive I know). After reading quite a few books on the subject I understood that I could not find out the answer. Maybe no one could - i do not think there is enough historical evidence there. And the question has become more broad - does anyone need to claim the ownership of the past in such a way? Has the Kiev Rus any inheritors or is it just question logically flawed for a medieval kingdom and the contemporary states? Is it just an example how certain historical facts are used in designing the myths justifying the present. So that is how my personal history or inquiry has lead me to the broad subject of historiography and what is history for.
“There is a significant difference between the ancient myths and the national narratives of the past: the former did not reject other myths, accepting for better or worse an ideological coexistence with all the rest. National historical narratives however have generally challenged or even squarely denied the myths of neighbouring people and nations. They have proclaimed themselves permanent possessors of a sole authentic truth, which explains among other things the stubbornness of their inventors in defining themselves as science.” Writes Shlomo Sand in this book.
That statement is related to the historians writing between 1820 and 1930. But it is amazing how much out of this statement is now more relevant than ever! Maybe there is a difference: the historians (or should I say those who think they write history today) do not consider themselves as scientists, or rather they do not need any more to appeal to the science to cover themselves with the plethora or authenticity. The science is now partially discredited in public view by the denial of global warming, the usefulness inoculations, economic crisis etc - you know what i mean…
I’ve read a few books recently on historiography, that is writing about history and what is history for. And this is by far the best. Maybe, I liked it so much because it confirmed many issues I suspected with history. Additionally, the book puts the history writing and the historians into the context of their time and space. Sand attempts to trace the history writing in various civilisations starting from so-called hydraulic societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China and finishing with the contemporary West (Germany, France, the UK and the US). He is the only one from what i read so far who attempts, at least initially, to widen the scope beyond the West. Though at the end he as well focuses on the four countries plus some comments on Israel. He does not attempt to be comprehensive, but he is certainly concise and convincing in his conclusions. He does not try to be “objective” - he reveals from the beginning that he shows his own view based upon his knowledge and professional experience. He also shares his personal experiences at the end of the each chapter. This “transparency’ becomes the part of his view on the process of history writing.
After reading a few books on the subject including this one, it seems to me that the history is that elephant in the story of a 6 blind men and the elephant. One can investigate a tiny bit thoroughly and make conclusions which would not work either for the whole or even for the other part. But i totally can live with that and I do not think i need objectivity. However, we all now need the skills to be critical to the narratives we are consuming both historical and current. And I’d rather have critical thinking as a separate subject in schools instead of the national histories. Or alternatively, I would try to combine the critical thinking with the views on the world history. But that is ideal and it might equip the future citizens against the current national states. Also i do not think postmodernism (at least in historical studies as presented in this book) is to blame for the amount of fake information consumed as real facts. Rather I would blame our tendency to take for the true fact something which is just our belief; and our laziness or lack of time and skills to check for ourselves.
This review has become the one of the longest i've ever written. And generally I do not like long reviews. It is always better to read the book, if you are interested in the issue. And I really recommend this one. However, below the main points I personally took from the book:
- Europe has come to the writing of history relatively late.
"We can reasonably maintain that the relative delay of history writing in Europe stands out all the more when compared with certain achievements in China and the Muslim Arabic world before 15th century. Ibn Khaldun write his remarkable historical works in the 14th at the time when Christian Europe essentially wrote only chronicles of church history. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese and Hebrew antiquity chronicles were already written, but unfortunately lost. Until Renaissance the Europeans did not act as historians in any systematic way as the pagan scholars of antiquity had done.”
- But since then Europeans have started actively appropriate the history of Antiquity and it was some magic continuity between the Europe in 15-16th century and the Greeks and the Romans. This has been continued more or less since then. Though there is no particular reasons to believe the people of Antiquity found present Europe even geographically central to their mentality.
“The thesis that sees the Graeco-Roman era as prelude to Europe has been, and continue to be, a doubtful appropriation of a time that in fact never belonged to the Europeans, but which over the centuries has become a ‘natural’ element of their identity. The stranglehold of the West on this symbolic capital (to the detriment of all other civilisations) is not devoid of flattery and self glorification. The History of Europe has thus been made much longer and richer than it is, and ‘white’ mythistory in which philosophy, mathematics, science, theatre, democracy, civil society and the state were born- and much else besides.”
- The majority of the historians between the Antiquity and the 19th centuries were representative of the rich, and respectively educated elite. He has got the list of the famous historians from Herodotus to Gibbon with their social and occupational background to support this fact. Therefore, their accounts rarely could be relied on to represent the “silent majority” (especially their thoughts and views). So this past would likely stay silent forever. Already in recent times some historians have tried to write “micro-histories” of the ordinary people through the documents left by the Inquisition or court records. The most famous of them are: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Montailou, The Cheese and the Worms, The return of Martin Guerre. He admires these accounts but underlines their limitations - due to the sources they cannot represent accurately their subjects.
- In the 19th centuries two tendencies coincide (or even they might be logically related) - the formations of the national states and the professionalisation of the history as a profession. The main influence of the period was historiography of Ranke, the German historian who established the pillars of the historical research and famously said that a historian should show “what actually happened”. Sand comments on the limitations of this approach: “Ranke should have written that he wanted to show what happened according to the archives that he had access to and those that he chose to search.”
During the last century the historiography in Europe and the US (I can add in Russia) has become almost solely national. The historians kept themselves occupied investigating and writing the national histories (and presenting them as a result of science). At the same time the historians draw on the techniques of the contemporary realist literary tradition to present their findings.
“Between 1820 to 1930 National historiography perfectly accomplished it’s mission. By creating various ‘historical pasts’, it enabled each individual French, German, Italian or English to know with certainty that the ancestors of their ancestors had always been French, German, Italian or English, and that their own nation-state was indeed the supreme and definitive culmination of these ‘ancient’ identities.”
Sand convincingly claims that it “generally impossible with rare exceptions to create a stable permanent body of the citizens devoted to the state and respectful of its laws without a common language and without a unifying imaginary past (perhaps also without a war…).”. I think we have a lot of confirmations of this in our present. It is a very scary and powerful tool as the past by definition excludes many people who are presently living in the countries of the West. Or, often it does include them, but in the role which would not be glorifying. So those historical myths of the past’s glory help to unify some people against the other and deliver the political victories of a dubious nature.
- In the later part of the book he reviews the historiography of the last half of the 20th century. He goes through the views of such prominent historians and philosophers like Bloch, Carr and Becker. Carl Becker was new for me with the very interesting view to what degree our individual memory resemble a general history “history proceeds in the selection of things which are pertinent to it.” So it is an illusion that fact speak for themselves’. As they are selected by history to tell the story. He also looks at Nietzsche as a harbinger of challenge to objectivity in the history writing which flourish in the last part of the 20th century.
- This brings him to post-modernism. Rightly, imho, he does not talk about the post-modernism per se. He only talks about the post-modernism’s influence on what is the historiography. He narrows it down to the views of two practising historians: Hayden White, the American medievalist scholar who wrote “Metahistory”, and Paul Vayne, the French historian of antiquity, whose views got much less noted, but who wrote his book independently and earlier than White. Those historians underlined the role of the language in the history writing.
According to Sand, both of these historians did not reject the existence of the historical facts or try to falsify them (contrary to what i’ve read in other critiques of post-modernism). However, they said that how those facts are connected is up to a historian. So historical causation is a part of “the plot” of the text prepared by the historian.
Vayne was saying that the history is “a true novel”. “It would be clearly foolish not to admit the existence of facts; that is ‘circumscribed events that happen independently of the investigator - subject. However, these facts possess no meaning in themselves, being no more than empty chronological series. There is no difference in principle between historical facts and physical ones, but radically distinguished by our ability to describe their interrelationships. Reconstruction of the causes of a historical events always forms an integral part of the plot.”
The views of White are summarised by the Sand as follows: “the idea that historical narratives are verbal fictions that have nothing in common with scientific representations. The difference between history and literary is clear: contrary to the novelist, the historian is not entitled to present events and characters that did not appear in the past reality. The historian does not invent new facts he is always obliged to use the evidence he has noted and discoveries he has made. Fiction only appears on the fashioning the arrangement the attribution of meaning.”
I have not read neither White not Vayne and not sure I plan to. But if their views are represented above correctly, i totally agree with them. And I developed a trust in Sand’s interpretation of the history as it coincides with my experience of reading history books and comparing it with the reality as i understand it.
In the book Sands also questions White’s reduction of the narrative structures to just 4 styles and the applicability of the certain styles to certain factual material, especially tragic events. “Questions is set of events which we call extermination of Indians, African Slavs trade, mass murders in Europe devoid of any inherent meaning, so we might indifferently relate it ironically or satire? Does certain evidence not impose itself more than any other right from the phase of collective research?” He is also dealing extensively with two most popular defences of the traditional historians against the post-modernism.
Overall he sees post-modernism as a symptom of the “cracks” in the historical profession, not the solution to its problems. “The question postmodernism leaves in suspense is it possible to seriously write a history that would not claim to be realistic and veridical?”.
- Probably it is evident by now that Sands rejects “scientific objectivity” as a possibility to the history writing. He claims that, before even considering anything else, for the older periods it would be impossible as there is not enough factual material. And for the recent past the problem is opposite as it is too much and grows exponentially. So any historian would end up choosing the facts for his narrative. And it is also predetermined by the task a historian sets to himself at the beginning of the research. While writing this I feel like reducing a complex problem to something much more simple. He devotes the whole book to dealing with this. I’d rather pull one last quote. But the best way to understand his views and learn a lot more on the subject is to read the whole book.
“All historical writing that is not aware that the actions and plots related do not coincide with past reality is potentially the bearer of a mythological dimension. It may well be a serious narrative full of references and quotations, distinguished by its “exactness” and abstaining from any polemic, yet it remains nonetheless that that belief of the author, whether naive or not, associates him or her with many propagators of myth history who continue to swell the tanks of discipline today.
A living myth is not a lie; it is a story about the past or the future whose veracity cannot be established in a rational manner, yet that no-one can imagine rejecting. It remains valid, in the eyes of believers, until heretics succeed in refuting it. Even in this case, however, the belief is not necessary shaken; myths in fact tend to preserve themselves as long as they are needed, or else until other myths come along to replace them. In history all societies need myths to ensure their coherence and preserve their collective identity, in particular, that of elites that revolve around the sovereign power.”
This book respectively poses the questions: is it possible to seriously write the history which does not claim to be objective? Is it possible to write the history which is not bound by the national rational? Which casts doubts and which is transparent about the views of a historian from the beginning? He cautiously thinks - yes, as far as i understood the book. He also think that it is possible that some of the next supra-narrative would appear as a result of the identity politics. We certainly see that in literature. In history, i think, it is not that mainstream yet.
___________________________________________________________
Quotes by Sand if not specified otherwise:
"We study history to free ourselves from it."
"Any partitioning of time and space and any arbitrariness which selects sorts and organised the details of facts thereby giving them each time a different meaning."
"When the science is based on logical abstractions history sticks to concrete representations."
"Until compulsory education was instituted and military service generalised and until a new administrative apparatus was established that deeply penetrated the agricultural world, a large proportion of peasants still did not know that they were French;their identity and their political consciousness scarcely went beyond the limits of the province in which they lived and worked."
"Conceptualising the specificity of Shoah (Holocaust) only acceptable of there is awareness that this means arranging a series of events into a story that, by being partial, does not fully corresponds to the reality of the past."
"National state has got hold on collective memory though education and common language."
"The fine historian must have the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple. Nietzsche on use and abuse of history for life."
"Science of history inspires neutrality in terms of values with the exception of the initial motivation to service the human society, always trying to develop intelligence and knowledge." Marc Bloch
"It often seems to me as if history is like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing big about those which do not suit our purpose." James Froude in 1864.
"The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context … a fact is like a sack - it won’t stand up until you’ve put something in it… The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate." E H Carr 1961
Sand on E H Carr "He takes visible pleasure in adopting an indeterminate position leaving it to his listeners and readers to extend his logic according to their preferences and personal tastes."
“There is a significant difference between the ancient myths and the national narratives of the past: the former did not reject other myths, accepting for better or worse an ideological coexistence with all the rest. National historical narratives however have generally challenged or even squarely denied the myths of neighbouring people and nations. They have proclaimed themselves permanent possessors of a sole authentic truth, which explains among other things the stubbornness of their inventors in defining themselves as science.” Writes Shlomo Sand in this book.
That statement is related to the historians writing between 1820 and 1930. But it is amazing how much out of this statement is now more relevant than ever! Maybe there is a difference: the historians (or should I say those who think they write history today) do not consider themselves as scientists, or rather they do not need any more to appeal to the science to cover themselves with the plethora or authenticity. The science is now partially discredited in public view by the denial of global warming, the usefulness inoculations, economic crisis etc - you know what i mean…
I’ve read a few books recently on historiography, that is writing about history and what is history for. And this is by far the best. Maybe, I liked it so much because it confirmed many issues I suspected with history. Additionally, the book puts the history writing and the historians into the context of their time and space. Sand attempts to trace the history writing in various civilisations starting from so-called hydraulic societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China and finishing with the contemporary West (Germany, France, the UK and the US). He is the only one from what i read so far who attempts, at least initially, to widen the scope beyond the West. Though at the end he as well focuses on the four countries plus some comments on Israel. He does not attempt to be comprehensive, but he is certainly concise and convincing in his conclusions. He does not try to be “objective” - he reveals from the beginning that he shows his own view based upon his knowledge and professional experience. He also shares his personal experiences at the end of the each chapter. This “transparency’ becomes the part of his view on the process of history writing.
After reading a few books on the subject including this one, it seems to me that the history is that elephant in the story of a 6 blind men and the elephant. One can investigate a tiny bit thoroughly and make conclusions which would not work either for the whole or even for the other part. But i totally can live with that and I do not think i need objectivity. However, we all now need the skills to be critical to the narratives we are consuming both historical and current. And I’d rather have critical thinking as a separate subject in schools instead of the national histories. Or alternatively, I would try to combine the critical thinking with the views on the world history. But that is ideal and it might equip the future citizens against the current national states. Also i do not think postmodernism (at least in historical studies as presented in this book) is to blame for the amount of fake information consumed as real facts. Rather I would blame our tendency to take for the true fact something which is just our belief; and our laziness or lack of time and skills to check for ourselves.
This review has become the one of the longest i've ever written. And generally I do not like long reviews. It is always better to read the book, if you are interested in the issue. And I really recommend this one. However, below the main points I personally took from the book:
- Europe has come to the writing of history relatively late.
"We can reasonably maintain that the relative delay of history writing in Europe stands out all the more when compared with certain achievements in China and the Muslim Arabic world before 15th century. Ibn Khaldun write his remarkable historical works in the 14th at the time when Christian Europe essentially wrote only chronicles of church history. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese and Hebrew antiquity chronicles were already written, but unfortunately lost. Until Renaissance the Europeans did not act as historians in any systematic way as the pagan scholars of antiquity had done.”
- But since then Europeans have started actively appropriate the history of Antiquity and it was some magic continuity between the Europe in 15-16th century and the Greeks and the Romans. This has been continued more or less since then. Though there is no particular reasons to believe the people of Antiquity found present Europe even geographically central to their mentality.
“The thesis that sees the Graeco-Roman era as prelude to Europe has been, and continue to be, a doubtful appropriation of a time that in fact never belonged to the Europeans, but which over the centuries has become a ‘natural’ element of their identity. The stranglehold of the West on this symbolic capital (to the detriment of all other civilisations) is not devoid of flattery and self glorification. The History of Europe has thus been made much longer and richer than it is, and ‘white’ mythistory in which philosophy, mathematics, science, theatre, democracy, civil society and the state were born- and much else besides.”
- The majority of the historians between the Antiquity and the 19th centuries were representative of the rich, and respectively educated elite. He has got the list of the famous historians from Herodotus to Gibbon with their social and occupational background to support this fact. Therefore, their accounts rarely could be relied on to represent the “silent majority” (especially their thoughts and views). So this past would likely stay silent forever. Already in recent times some historians have tried to write “micro-histories” of the ordinary people through the documents left by the Inquisition or court records. The most famous of them are: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Montailou, The Cheese and the Worms, The return of Martin Guerre. He admires these accounts but underlines their limitations - due to the sources they cannot represent accurately their subjects.
- In the 19th centuries two tendencies coincide (or even they might be logically related) - the formations of the national states and the professionalisation of the history as a profession. The main influence of the period was historiography of Ranke, the German historian who established the pillars of the historical research and famously said that a historian should show “what actually happened”. Sand comments on the limitations of this approach: “Ranke should have written that he wanted to show what happened according to the archives that he had access to and those that he chose to search.”
During the last century the historiography in Europe and the US (I can add in Russia) has become almost solely national. The historians kept themselves occupied investigating and writing the national histories (and presenting them as a result of science). At the same time the historians draw on the techniques of the contemporary realist literary tradition to present their findings.
“Between 1820 to 1930 National historiography perfectly accomplished it’s mission. By creating various ‘historical pasts’, it enabled each individual French, German, Italian or English to know with certainty that the ancestors of their ancestors had always been French, German, Italian or English, and that their own nation-state was indeed the supreme and definitive culmination of these ‘ancient’ identities.”
Sand convincingly claims that it “generally impossible with rare exceptions to create a stable permanent body of the citizens devoted to the state and respectful of its laws without a common language and without a unifying imaginary past (perhaps also without a war…).”. I think we have a lot of confirmations of this in our present. It is a very scary and powerful tool as the past by definition excludes many people who are presently living in the countries of the West. Or, often it does include them, but in the role which would not be glorifying. So those historical myths of the past’s glory help to unify some people against the other and deliver the political victories of a dubious nature.
- In the later part of the book he reviews the historiography of the last half of the 20th century. He goes through the views of such prominent historians and philosophers like Bloch, Carr and Becker. Carl Becker was new for me with the very interesting view to what degree our individual memory resemble a general history “history proceeds in the selection of things which are pertinent to it.” So it is an illusion that fact speak for themselves’. As they are selected by history to tell the story. He also looks at Nietzsche as a harbinger of challenge to objectivity in the history writing which flourish in the last part of the 20th century.
- This brings him to post-modernism. Rightly, imho, he does not talk about the post-modernism per se. He only talks about the post-modernism’s influence on what is the historiography. He narrows it down to the views of two practising historians: Hayden White, the American medievalist scholar who wrote “Metahistory”, and Paul Vayne, the French historian of antiquity, whose views got much less noted, but who wrote his book independently and earlier than White. Those historians underlined the role of the language in the history writing.
According to Sand, both of these historians did not reject the existence of the historical facts or try to falsify them (contrary to what i’ve read in other critiques of post-modernism). However, they said that how those facts are connected is up to a historian. So historical causation is a part of “the plot” of the text prepared by the historian.
Vayne was saying that the history is “a true novel”. “It would be clearly foolish not to admit the existence of facts; that is ‘circumscribed events that happen independently of the investigator - subject. However, these facts possess no meaning in themselves, being no more than empty chronological series. There is no difference in principle between historical facts and physical ones, but radically distinguished by our ability to describe their interrelationships. Reconstruction of the causes of a historical events always forms an integral part of the plot.”
The views of White are summarised by the Sand as follows: “the idea that historical narratives are verbal fictions that have nothing in common with scientific representations. The difference between history and literary is clear: contrary to the novelist, the historian is not entitled to present events and characters that did not appear in the past reality. The historian does not invent new facts he is always obliged to use the evidence he has noted and discoveries he has made. Fiction only appears on the fashioning the arrangement the attribution of meaning.”
I have not read neither White not Vayne and not sure I plan to. But if their views are represented above correctly, i totally agree with them. And I developed a trust in Sand’s interpretation of the history as it coincides with my experience of reading history books and comparing it with the reality as i understand it.
In the book Sands also questions White’s reduction of the narrative structures to just 4 styles and the applicability of the certain styles to certain factual material, especially tragic events. “Questions is set of events which we call extermination of Indians, African Slavs trade, mass murders in Europe devoid of any inherent meaning, so we might indifferently relate it ironically or satire? Does certain evidence not impose itself more than any other right from the phase of collective research?” He is also dealing extensively with two most popular defences of the traditional historians against the post-modernism.
Overall he sees post-modernism as a symptom of the “cracks” in the historical profession, not the solution to its problems. “The question postmodernism leaves in suspense is it possible to seriously write a history that would not claim to be realistic and veridical?”.
- Probably it is evident by now that Sands rejects “scientific objectivity” as a possibility to the history writing. He claims that, before even considering anything else, for the older periods it would be impossible as there is not enough factual material. And for the recent past the problem is opposite as it is too much and grows exponentially. So any historian would end up choosing the facts for his narrative. And it is also predetermined by the task a historian sets to himself at the beginning of the research. While writing this I feel like reducing a complex problem to something much more simple. He devotes the whole book to dealing with this. I’d rather pull one last quote. But the best way to understand his views and learn a lot more on the subject is to read the whole book.
“All historical writing that is not aware that the actions and plots related do not coincide with past reality is potentially the bearer of a mythological dimension. It may well be a serious narrative full of references and quotations, distinguished by its “exactness” and abstaining from any polemic, yet it remains nonetheless that that belief of the author, whether naive or not, associates him or her with many propagators of myth history who continue to swell the tanks of discipline today.
A living myth is not a lie; it is a story about the past or the future whose veracity cannot be established in a rational manner, yet that no-one can imagine rejecting. It remains valid, in the eyes of believers, until heretics succeed in refuting it. Even in this case, however, the belief is not necessary shaken; myths in fact tend to preserve themselves as long as they are needed, or else until other myths come along to replace them. In history all societies need myths to ensure their coherence and preserve their collective identity, in particular, that of elites that revolve around the sovereign power.”
This book respectively poses the questions: is it possible to seriously write the history which does not claim to be objective? Is it possible to write the history which is not bound by the national rational? Which casts doubts and which is transparent about the views of a historian from the beginning? He cautiously thinks - yes, as far as i understood the book. He also think that it is possible that some of the next supra-narrative would appear as a result of the identity politics. We certainly see that in literature. In history, i think, it is not that mainstream yet.
___________________________________________________________
Quotes by Sand if not specified otherwise:
"We study history to free ourselves from it."
"Any partitioning of time and space and any arbitrariness which selects sorts and organised the details of facts thereby giving them each time a different meaning."
"When the science is based on logical abstractions history sticks to concrete representations."
"Until compulsory education was instituted and military service generalised and until a new administrative apparatus was established that deeply penetrated the agricultural world, a large proportion of peasants still did not know that they were French;their identity and their political consciousness scarcely went beyond the limits of the province in which they lived and worked."
"Conceptualising the specificity of Shoah (Holocaust) only acceptable of there is awareness that this means arranging a series of events into a story that, by being partial, does not fully corresponds to the reality of the past."
"National state has got hold on collective memory though education and common language."
"The fine historian must have the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple. Nietzsche on use and abuse of history for life."
"Science of history inspires neutrality in terms of values with the exception of the initial motivation to service the human society, always trying to develop intelligence and knowledge." Marc Bloch
"It often seems to me as if history is like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing big about those which do not suit our purpose." James Froude in 1864.
"The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context … a fact is like a sack - it won’t stand up until you’ve put something in it… The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate." E H Carr 1961
Sand on E H Carr "He takes visible pleasure in adopting an indeterminate position leaving it to his listeners and readers to extend his logic according to their preferences and personal tastes."
October 30, 2020
One of the more perplexing types of conversation I have with fellow academics turns on a notion (admittedly arcane) of the ontology of a theory, on the character and form of its ‘being’: it is without a doubt a place for those of us with a tendency to philosophical nerd-dom. Yet, in my everyday work – the stuff that has from time to time paid the bills – this very question of how we do what we do and why we do it, or what it means to be a historian, confronts me in very real ways. There is plenty written about this question of historiography, and more so recently, but there is little that manages to achieve what this elegant and impressive exposition on modern European historiography does – that is, to interlink the what, the why, and the ‘to what effect’ question so compellingly.
Woven through and shaping Sand’s exploration is the sense that the role of modern history is to justify and provide core epistemological and ontological justifications for the contemporary nation, and to outline how and why that is problematic. Yet, that is not where he starts out… The first of the four substantive chapters, all of which begin with a discussion of Sands’ placement of himself, his training and career in relation to the subject of the chapter, proposes an alternative vision of ‘world/European history’ the disrupts the linear progression from Greek antiquity to modern statehood. This anticipates much of the rest argument, looking at the way that modern European historiography constructed Greece as European and claimed direct intellectual links from the ancient world to modernity. Sands uses this reflexivity well, to position himself as an Israeli historian training in a specific European context (France) for work in distinctive and distinctively historicised context (Israel). The significance of this critical reflexivity becomes increasingly obvious as the analysis develops – especially when we consider the works for which Sands is best known in English-speaking world, his recent critical assessments of Israeli national historiography.
The three subsequent chapters continue this exploration of European historiography first through the shift from the incontrovertible priority given to political history to the development of cultural histories in the mid-20th century and the rise of memory studies. His discussion here, anticipated in the first chapter, intensifies methodological and political concerns, considering the reasons for history, its impacts on and engagements with wider cultural questions and developments in other disciplinary settings. This is not a narrow textual analysis but an embracing socio-cultural evaluation of the discipline, including in the chapter a rich discussion of place of memory and of analysis in doing history, the democratisation of the subject (as a product of forms of memory that we all have), and the subsequent implications for both professional practice and critical understanding. Crucially woven through all of this, Sands unpicks the question of ‘sources’ and who speaks for whom leading to some uncomfortable conclusions about some of the classic and much loved texts of this era.
As we often see in discussions of historiography, then, Sands is concerned to make sense of the nature of Truth claims, leading to a discussion of an often underplayed or overlooked tendency in historical writing, especially those discussions that prioritise Anglo-phone approaches. This is a discussion of claims to the discipline’s scientific status. Here the discussion launches from history (the discipline’s) institutionalisation, and the long path from Herodotus and Thucydides to Ranke and beyond. In this we see the problem of the fact and the construction of the archive (and therefore the question of whose voice survives). It is also here that the problem of the nation comes to the fore. Sands makes use of his reflexive voice to evaluate the French context of his training and the emergence of ‘professional/academic’ history along its emergence in Germany in the mid to late 19th century just as both were asserting their national territorial claims to Alsace and Lorraine, and other borderland regions. This problem of truth allows him to unpack the tensions between facticity, interpretation and context.
It also opens up the final aspect of his analysis, and the critical engagement with the nationalist scientific truth claiming approach that became with ‘cultural’ turn. This final aspect is perhaps the most nuanced and most subtle part of his evaluation of a now wider Euro-(North) American discourse in which he welcomes significant aspects of the ‘post-modern’ turn while highlighting the limitations and contradictions of key elements of it. He also, and refreshingly, traces a genealogy that debunks some of the great man aspects of its narrative of its theoretical development. The most refreshing aspect of this discussion however is his cautious, subtle and nuanced evaluation of the risk of relativism and the question of the ‘reality’ of the past. He does this through a discussion of the Shoah/Holocaust looking at the origins of those specific terms, the tendency to distinguish its anti-Semitic components from the extermination of other population groups with distinct political implications, the question of denial and the historiography of distinctiveness all of which he ties back to the question of history’s status as a ‘science’, the problem of the general and specific, and the discipline’s articulation to notions of the nation.
All this might sound daunting and intimidating, and Sands is most definitely grappling with big issues here with resonance not just for the academy but also with wider popular political and socio-cultural importance. It may not sound like a book for the ‘general’ reader, but it absolutely should engage what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the intelligent, educated reader’ because there is so much here that engages with the ways the work of historians (my chosen profession) shapes and influences the ways we understand our world, our place in it and the institutions that populate that space. Sands writes engagingly, not presuming we know the texts or the writers he is discussing while not ‘talking down’ to us as readers; it is a delicate balance built on over 40 years work in the discipline allowing a mature scholar to reflect on his field. What a treat it turned out to be….
Woven through and shaping Sand’s exploration is the sense that the role of modern history is to justify and provide core epistemological and ontological justifications for the contemporary nation, and to outline how and why that is problematic. Yet, that is not where he starts out… The first of the four substantive chapters, all of which begin with a discussion of Sands’ placement of himself, his training and career in relation to the subject of the chapter, proposes an alternative vision of ‘world/European history’ the disrupts the linear progression from Greek antiquity to modern statehood. This anticipates much of the rest argument, looking at the way that modern European historiography constructed Greece as European and claimed direct intellectual links from the ancient world to modernity. Sands uses this reflexivity well, to position himself as an Israeli historian training in a specific European context (France) for work in distinctive and distinctively historicised context (Israel). The significance of this critical reflexivity becomes increasingly obvious as the analysis develops – especially when we consider the works for which Sands is best known in English-speaking world, his recent critical assessments of Israeli national historiography.
The three subsequent chapters continue this exploration of European historiography first through the shift from the incontrovertible priority given to political history to the development of cultural histories in the mid-20th century and the rise of memory studies. His discussion here, anticipated in the first chapter, intensifies methodological and political concerns, considering the reasons for history, its impacts on and engagements with wider cultural questions and developments in other disciplinary settings. This is not a narrow textual analysis but an embracing socio-cultural evaluation of the discipline, including in the chapter a rich discussion of place of memory and of analysis in doing history, the democratisation of the subject (as a product of forms of memory that we all have), and the subsequent implications for both professional practice and critical understanding. Crucially woven through all of this, Sands unpicks the question of ‘sources’ and who speaks for whom leading to some uncomfortable conclusions about some of the classic and much loved texts of this era.
As we often see in discussions of historiography, then, Sands is concerned to make sense of the nature of Truth claims, leading to a discussion of an often underplayed or overlooked tendency in historical writing, especially those discussions that prioritise Anglo-phone approaches. This is a discussion of claims to the discipline’s scientific status. Here the discussion launches from history (the discipline’s) institutionalisation, and the long path from Herodotus and Thucydides to Ranke and beyond. In this we see the problem of the fact and the construction of the archive (and therefore the question of whose voice survives). It is also here that the problem of the nation comes to the fore. Sands makes use of his reflexive voice to evaluate the French context of his training and the emergence of ‘professional/academic’ history along its emergence in Germany in the mid to late 19th century just as both were asserting their national territorial claims to Alsace and Lorraine, and other borderland regions. This problem of truth allows him to unpack the tensions between facticity, interpretation and context.
It also opens up the final aspect of his analysis, and the critical engagement with the nationalist scientific truth claiming approach that became with ‘cultural’ turn. This final aspect is perhaps the most nuanced and most subtle part of his evaluation of a now wider Euro-(North) American discourse in which he welcomes significant aspects of the ‘post-modern’ turn while highlighting the limitations and contradictions of key elements of it. He also, and refreshingly, traces a genealogy that debunks some of the great man aspects of its narrative of its theoretical development. The most refreshing aspect of this discussion however is his cautious, subtle and nuanced evaluation of the risk of relativism and the question of the ‘reality’ of the past. He does this through a discussion of the Shoah/Holocaust looking at the origins of those specific terms, the tendency to distinguish its anti-Semitic components from the extermination of other population groups with distinct political implications, the question of denial and the historiography of distinctiveness all of which he ties back to the question of history’s status as a ‘science’, the problem of the general and specific, and the discipline’s articulation to notions of the nation.
All this might sound daunting and intimidating, and Sands is most definitely grappling with big issues here with resonance not just for the academy but also with wider popular political and socio-cultural importance. It may not sound like a book for the ‘general’ reader, but it absolutely should engage what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the intelligent, educated reader’ because there is so much here that engages with the ways the work of historians (my chosen profession) shapes and influences the ways we understand our world, our place in it and the institutions that populate that space. Sands writes engagingly, not presuming we know the texts or the writers he is discussing while not ‘talking down’ to us as readers; it is a delicate balance built on over 40 years work in the discipline allowing a mature scholar to reflect on his field. What a treat it turned out to be….
December 5, 2017
This is the most beautiful book written on historiography that is out there. It's not beautiful in a purely aesthetic sense, but beautiful in how masterfully and seamlessly Sand conveys the reader through hundreds of years of historiography, passing judgement elegantly and clearly, with a critical edge, every time he needs to do so.
This is the sort of book that is rare since it's composed with great care to appear to be a casual conversation. Only someone who has been working for 30 or 40 years in a field can articulate with such precision, care, and lightness deep insights from the complexities of historiography. This book is very particular, focusing only on French and Israeli historiography, with the necessary riffs off of the German, American, and British historians and what they were up to at similar times.
Sand is interested in the question of what history is, and what history does when it is at its best. This is a hard question to answer primarily due to the major moments of deep relationship that the overtly political has had with history - first, there was little distinction between the political players and the historians, then there was the professionalization of the historians under a rubric of "science" or positivistic discourse, then there was the return of politics under the discourse of history as the articulation of the nation, or what is good about our people in the tale of where we came from. Now there is concern in Sand's writing about the removal of history from the attachment to pedagogy, the reconstruction of history as a specific field rather than the art of conveying a narrative from incomplete information to others to tell the story of what people did in the past. He provides little solution except for eager return to those historians who present history as an imperfect art of uncertainty, a narrative in the most unapologetic rhetorical use of the term. This way history is kept out of being a servant of the political in the modes of public memory/public forgetting.
It is a sad thing to read such a brilliant book and see just how irrelevant my own discipline is even when it contends with these same questions. The quality of rhetoricians' work on public memory is as good as the historians discussed by Sand. Nowhere in the book - and this is not Sand's fault by any means - is there gesture or citation to the brilliant work done by rhetoricians in composition and speech communication on the question of public memory. I wonder why this is. Our work is really great; so are the historians that Sand cites and discusses. What must be done for rhetoric to get the attention of those who are doing equally powerful and insightful critical work about narratives of the past, identity, and national meaning?
Of course, that's my own take-away. It's not meant to disparage this book at all, which is a wonderful read. I could hardly put it down. It's so interesting to see how a discourse takes shape, becomes a currency, then disintegrates slowly as the ideologues cling to it as the voice of authority instead of truth. Really brilliantly written and conveys a lot of great insights into French historical scholarship and practice. Certainly a book I'll read again, but more a book that makes you want to chase down the footnotes and read those. This is a one of a kind book and a must read for those interested in historiography or for graduate seminars in history that ask the professional questions - why are we doing this? Who is this for? What does it mean to be a historian? These questions are turned over and over again in Sand's expert writing, answering a lot but also leaving more on the table for us to consider and re-think as we engage the questions of discourse, history, memory, and identity.
This is the sort of book that is rare since it's composed with great care to appear to be a casual conversation. Only someone who has been working for 30 or 40 years in a field can articulate with such precision, care, and lightness deep insights from the complexities of historiography. This book is very particular, focusing only on French and Israeli historiography, with the necessary riffs off of the German, American, and British historians and what they were up to at similar times.
Sand is interested in the question of what history is, and what history does when it is at its best. This is a hard question to answer primarily due to the major moments of deep relationship that the overtly political has had with history - first, there was little distinction between the political players and the historians, then there was the professionalization of the historians under a rubric of "science" or positivistic discourse, then there was the return of politics under the discourse of history as the articulation of the nation, or what is good about our people in the tale of where we came from. Now there is concern in Sand's writing about the removal of history from the attachment to pedagogy, the reconstruction of history as a specific field rather than the art of conveying a narrative from incomplete information to others to tell the story of what people did in the past. He provides little solution except for eager return to those historians who present history as an imperfect art of uncertainty, a narrative in the most unapologetic rhetorical use of the term. This way history is kept out of being a servant of the political in the modes of public memory/public forgetting.
It is a sad thing to read such a brilliant book and see just how irrelevant my own discipline is even when it contends with these same questions. The quality of rhetoricians' work on public memory is as good as the historians discussed by Sand. Nowhere in the book - and this is not Sand's fault by any means - is there gesture or citation to the brilliant work done by rhetoricians in composition and speech communication on the question of public memory. I wonder why this is. Our work is really great; so are the historians that Sand cites and discusses. What must be done for rhetoric to get the attention of those who are doing equally powerful and insightful critical work about narratives of the past, identity, and national meaning?
Of course, that's my own take-away. It's not meant to disparage this book at all, which is a wonderful read. I could hardly put it down. It's so interesting to see how a discourse takes shape, becomes a currency, then disintegrates slowly as the ideologues cling to it as the voice of authority instead of truth. Really brilliantly written and conveys a lot of great insights into French historical scholarship and practice. Certainly a book I'll read again, but more a book that makes you want to chase down the footnotes and read those. This is a one of a kind book and a must read for those interested in historiography or for graduate seminars in history that ask the professional questions - why are we doing this? Who is this for? What does it mean to be a historian? These questions are turned over and over again in Sand's expert writing, answering a lot but also leaving more on the table for us to consider and re-think as we engage the questions of discourse, history, memory, and identity.
August 7, 2017
A superb account on the retroactive establishment of the most pervasive European historical narratives, a treatise on the epistemological advances in the study of history, complete with an exemplary description of Israel's historicity.
August 5, 2018
It took me several months to finish this book but more because I have been busy than because the book was not interesting. On the contrary, I feel Shlomo Sand explains very well how History is built within nation and a good part of it is about french historians. As a french academic, I really appreciated to understand (and also recognized a good part of) the relationship within the state and these professionals of History. Sand tells us a lot, I think, about things we vaguely guess in the way the History is used at school, but the details he provides make sense to all the processes.
The reading though was not that easy. The numerous goings and comings between history, historians and his own life/career make the track uneasy to focus on.
Globally it is a very clever and instructive book.
The reading though was not that easy. The numerous goings and comings between history, historians and his own life/career make the track uneasy to focus on.
Globally it is a very clever and instructive book.
October 5, 2024
Shlomo Sand is a known opponent of ethnonationalism, wherever it slavers and drools. He is as objectionable to CRIF as he is to white nationalists and islamaphobes.
Were Twilight of History merely a survey of the materiel it covers (and it is much more than that) it would already be valuable. The citations and bibliography alone are valuable.
The French Academy would do itself an honor by including this gentleman, which is unlikely , given "The Invention of the Jewish People". But let's not lift that rock or bestir the vermin under it.
At least four cultures cherished origin myths based on fugitives from the Trojan War: The Romans, the Visigoths, the Ottomans and the British. Now what do they have in common? Germans, another imperial people, while they don't trace their descent from Aenaeas, practiced a near mystical identification with Hellas for a couple of centuries.
Just as in his book about Jewishness, Sand is addressing problems here of false identity, abetted by historians. Shlomo cunningly says that he wrote Twilight of History "to secularize myself", referring not the Jewishness he has long since repudiated but rather to the cultic aspects of his historical craft. As he moves through a long genealogy of historical fantasies, the Renaissance "invention of antiquity", the growth of "periodization", the aspects of the Annales School which so endeared it to the establishment and to the Rockefellers , Pierre nora and the "memory industry" , he always has in sight that leviathan of Western false identity--Hellenism!
"The thesis that sees the Graeco-Roman era as a prelude to Europe has been a doubtful appropriation...the stranglehold of the West on this symbolic capital ... is not devoid of flattery and self-glorification."
This is especially pertinent in the wake of an Olympics which saved the French Regime of that Rothschild midget, Macron, he who vapidly expounds on the meaning of Europe at conferences in the Hague while piling crime upon crime.
It was a German Romantic philhellenism which set the stage for a Bavarian Prince to become the symbol of "Greek Freedom", which is precisely when the Olympics were suddenly revived after a little two thousand year hiatus. Shlomo doesn't get into that.
Some of the books Shlomo mentioned here I decided to read: The Tyranny of Greece and Down from Olympus, as well as Delanty's Origins of Europe which is available on line.
Sand's life and thought have been preoccupied, due to whatever combination of circumstance and predilection, by questions of false identity as they they relate to the craft of history. Here are the fruits. He has studied this for many years and if it interests you you should not fail to read this book, which as I said, is also very good just as a survey of the historian's craft, with discussions of Bloch, Braudel, Ladurie, le Coulanges, Christian Meier, Jacques le Goff, Huizinga, Burkhardt, Febvre, Furet and Nora, among others.
Were Twilight of History merely a survey of the materiel it covers (and it is much more than that) it would already be valuable. The citations and bibliography alone are valuable.
The French Academy would do itself an honor by including this gentleman, which is unlikely , given "The Invention of the Jewish People". But let's not lift that rock or bestir the vermin under it.
At least four cultures cherished origin myths based on fugitives from the Trojan War: The Romans, the Visigoths, the Ottomans and the British. Now what do they have in common? Germans, another imperial people, while they don't trace their descent from Aenaeas, practiced a near mystical identification with Hellas for a couple of centuries.
Just as in his book about Jewishness, Sand is addressing problems here of false identity, abetted by historians. Shlomo cunningly says that he wrote Twilight of History "to secularize myself", referring not the Jewishness he has long since repudiated but rather to the cultic aspects of his historical craft. As he moves through a long genealogy of historical fantasies, the Renaissance "invention of antiquity", the growth of "periodization", the aspects of the Annales School which so endeared it to the establishment and to the Rockefellers , Pierre nora and the "memory industry" , he always has in sight that leviathan of Western false identity--Hellenism!
"The thesis that sees the Graeco-Roman era as a prelude to Europe has been a doubtful appropriation...the stranglehold of the West on this symbolic capital ... is not devoid of flattery and self-glorification."
This is especially pertinent in the wake of an Olympics which saved the French Regime of that Rothschild midget, Macron, he who vapidly expounds on the meaning of Europe at conferences in the Hague while piling crime upon crime.
It was a German Romantic philhellenism which set the stage for a Bavarian Prince to become the symbol of "Greek Freedom", which is precisely when the Olympics were suddenly revived after a little two thousand year hiatus. Shlomo doesn't get into that.
Some of the books Shlomo mentioned here I decided to read: The Tyranny of Greece and Down from Olympus, as well as Delanty's Origins of Europe which is available on line.
Sand's life and thought have been preoccupied, due to whatever combination of circumstance and predilection, by questions of false identity as they they relate to the craft of history. Here are the fruits. He has studied this for many years and if it interests you you should not fail to read this book, which as I said, is also very good just as a survey of the historian's craft, with discussions of Bloch, Braudel, Ladurie, le Coulanges, Christian Meier, Jacques le Goff, Huizinga, Burkhardt, Febvre, Furet and Nora, among others.
July 6, 2024
Twilight of History or better re-name it as The History of History. Shlomo Sad approaches History with a critical lens, starting with the work of the first historians, their motives, their environments. From there, he traces the evolution of history itself, from its earliest forms to our current understanding. While it feels monotonous at times, the book offers an insightful perspective on how we perceive the past.
December 27, 2023
gorgeously written but lowkey a complete plagarism of historian+his facts and imagined communities
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