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Comment Le Peuple Juif Fut Inventé (2008)

by Shlomo Sand(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

2213637784 (ISBN13: 9782213637785)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Fayard

review 1: Many people think of today's Jews as descendants from ancient Israelites, in fact I probably vaguely believed in this myself for a long time, without thinking about it. This book attacks this idea in detail. If someone had said, "you know, a lot of Jews over history were converts, and Jews tend to resemble other people in whatever area they come from," I would have said, "hmmm, maybe you're right." In fact, I remember reading something like this before I encountered this book, so I know that this book is not totally original, and in fact the author goes to some lengths to unearth his predecessors. This book is tightly reasoned and thoroughly argued. The author wants to unite all the disparate strands of the various books and authors supporting his overall thesis, and h... moree's done a good (if somewhat exhausting) job.What was new to me was the fact that this belief in "Israel as the historical home of modern Jews" is not just a vague belief of some Christians and Jews. It is actually the foundation stone for contemporary attitudes of the Jews towards Israel. Jews are returning to their ancestral home: this is a modern POLITICAL idea. So I can forgive the author's exhaustive approach. It sounds like he has tried to talk to people before about this, and encountered the proverbial brick wall, and so has taken to documenting everything. So I can't fault the author for his thoroughness. But I would have been much more generously inclined towards the author's thesis in the first place; so if the book had been written for me personally, it could have been considerably shorter.
review 2: Few things can cause a bigger shitstorm than to question the foundations of the state of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, by exposing the flawed nature of its ethnoreligious raison d'etre: zionism is built on the quicksand of 19th-century nationalism; and the Jews of today may be largely the descendents of converts, fighting the descendents of the Jews who didn't go into Diaspora... and converted to Islam; all in all a very academic, technical and unputdownable book. less

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