Israel: An Invented Nation?

The soon-to-be release of the English language edition of The Invention of the Jewish People by Professor Shlomo Sands is tremendously exciting, questioning as it does the very connection between the Jewish community and Israel:

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical backfill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

Nationalism, innovative theoretical perspectives… notch it up on my winter reading list.