On the Nation and the Jewish People

by Shlomo Sand, Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan was one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century in France, the man who first opened up the study of nationalism. In this book, Shlomo Sand, the author of the best-selling The Invention of the Jewish People , demonstrates the complexity of Renan’s thought. Sand shows the relationship of Renan’s work to that of key twentieth-century thinkers on nationalism, such as Raymond Aron and Ernest Gellner, and argues for the continued importance of studying Renan.

Alongside his essay, Sand presents two classic lectures by the first, the renowned “What Is a Nation?”, argues that nations are not based upon race, religion, and language; in the second he uses historical evidence to show that the Jews cannot be considered a “pure ethnos.” On the Nation and the Jewish People is an important contribution to the understanding of nationalism, bringing back into play the work of a profoundly misunderstood thinker.

Genres: Israel, History

128 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2010

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

[Malcolm]

This is a fabulous little book collecting together two of Renan’s lectures – one from 1882 and one from 1883 – that explore what it means to be in or of a nation. Renan was a complex and contradictory French intellectual whose outlook shifted markedly across the 19th century – at times liberal, at times conservative (with a little reaction thrown in from time to time). Edward Said condemns him as one of the prime movers in the Orientalism he explored while he is also often condemned as an anti-Semite. All the while, he widely cited in nationalism studies for his poetic observation (in one of these lectures) that the nation is a daily plebiscite – something we opt to join. He is also less often noted as saying that national identity requires both memory and forgetting. I’d have to add at this point that Renan’s modern relevance causes me to worry either that he was extremely prescient, or that we’ve not come far.

Renan is also important in Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, and his opening essay situates Renan in 19th century French debates challenges both the irredeemable Orientalist and anti-Semite charges by situating his work in a tradition that includes figures as important (even when I disagree) as Ernest Gellner, Raymond Aron & Marc Bloch in nationalism studies and as commentators Jewish history and sociology. The book, originally published in Israel in Hebrew, is designed for Israeli readers as a way into the background to the Invention. On this count, it works well and Sand’s is one of the better discussions I have read of Renan-the-scholar.

Equally valuable are the two lectures. ‘What Is a Nation?’, the 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, was considered by Renan to be one of his most important pieces, if not the most important. He does not go quite as far as Gellner is arguing that nationalism caused nations (Gellner made that case about 100 years after Renan) but he does embark on a rigorous and sustained critique of the biological and essentialist basis of the nation. The lecture – about 30 pages long here (about an hour to deliver, I’d suspect, ½ and hour to read) systematically debunks the notion that the nation has its basis in ‘race’, language, religion, community of interest or geography, although all of these may be factors. The nation, for Renan, is a “soul, a spiritual principle” base din shared memory and a collective desire to live together; simple really.

More controversial, but also more explicitly relevant to Sand’s case, is the 1883 lecture to the Cercle Saint-Simon, ‘Judaism as Race and Religion’. Renan’s major work was a history of the Jewish people, and this lecture he distinguishes between being Jewish as a descendent of the occupants of Judea (‘race’) and being Jewish as practitioners of the faith (‘religion’) to argue forcefully that only some co-religionists are of Judea. He points to converts in the Greek and Roman worlds, the mass conversion of the Khazars (southern Russia), and widespread populations of converts in the Arabian peninsula and north Africa and the Horn of Africa. The former lecture has great contemporary relevance (which why those us in nationalism studies still cite it); this is more historically interesting but of less contemporary significance, partly because of Sand’s work.

Verso is to be celebrated for republishing these important pieces.

[George]

Fantastic little number, very accessible.

Shlomo Sand is lovely to contextualise Renan in the frame of Said villanising him as a key founder of race theory. He is generous is explaining that Said was not wrong, but only that Renan's views changed over time. In this way, Sand brings another progressive Palestinian voice into his hopeful dialectic.

Of course the only people who push the ridiculous and dangerous notion that Jews are a race are Nazis and UltraZionists. Here, with direct citation in original languages of antiquity is Renan demonstrating quite clearly this is not true. And together with Said and Sand we span almost 3000 years of history up to the present - an argument that can only bring hope for the kind of alliances and new formations that will be necessary to defeat racism and ensure mutual communal flourishing for all in Palestine in the years ahead.

Shlomo Sand is an inspiration.

[Haaagrid]

Casse pas 3 pattes à 1 canard

[Mu Thomart Nimal]

très éclairant de découvrir les textes de Renan en 2026...

[Luke]

Who has the most to gain from preserving the idea of the “State”? That would have to be America and Israel. The end of the disguised nation state is tied to the end of a particular form of imperial hegemony. The same reign that established the last epoch of totalitarianism.

Power will bifurcate, as long as possible, those who would be outspoken for a new nation state (like Palestine), with those who would be for dissolving the optics of nation states generally. Quite the convoluting apparatus they have now, it would appear. And so we must know our history.