Shlomo Sand

Throughout the history of the Western world, Jews have suffered various forms of exclusion, stigmatization, and discrimination that have forced them always to be aware of their very particular situation. The Jews became a community under siege and, as Shlomo Sand argues, Judaism was shaped by the hostile gaze of Christian civilization. While the forms of hostility endured by the Jews have varied over the centuries, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century anti-Judaism, or Jewish identity itself, without taking account of the sediments of mental hatred, fuelled by religious belief, which have survived the passage of time. While anti-semitism is the term commonly used today, Sand prefers 'Judeophobia', which predates the appearance of anti-semitismand is more precise. Looking back over the centuries, he seeks to identify some of the stages in the age-old, incandescent hatred of the Jews, and tries to understand what remains today of this trenchant hostility. He also questions whether Zionism, born as a distressed response to modern Judeophobia, has ended up mirroring it. To what extent has Zionism inherited the ideological foundations that have always been characteristic of the persecutors of the Jew? his concise history of anti-Jewish hatred will be of great interest to anyone concerned with one of the most insidious and persistent features of Western civilization. Now available as an audiobook.

Best-selling analysis of Jewish history by a leading Israeli historian with a new preface A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.