And speaking of inventions…
The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen takes down a new book which claims the modern-day Jews are not descended from the Judeans of the First and Second Temple period, but are descendants of various converts who reverse engineered their links to the Holy Land.
Cohen clearly singles to the reader that Shlomo Sand, the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso Books), is pushing an agenda, and that his book is a polemic, not a careful or serious piece of scholarship.
Cohen calls out Sand on his use of “dubious theories” (as opposed to “theories some have called dubious,” which invites the benefit of the doubt) and she remains similarly skeptical throughout. She highlights Sand’s agenda: “Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory,” which guides the reader to take his theorizing with a grain of salt. She shows no sign in waffling or wiggling in quoting someone who says “experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory.”
This paragraph is especially damning of Sand and his methodology:
Professor Sand accuses Zionist historians from the 19th century onward — the very same scholars on whose work he bases his case — of hiding the truth and creating a myth of shared roots to strengthen their nationalist agenda. He explains that he has uncovered no new information, but has “organized the knowledge differently.” In other words, he is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of — shaping the material to fit a narrative.
The debate – and the Jews – are well served by Cohen’s piece, which eschews “objective” news reporting for analysis. If done as a straight-forward news story, the reporter would have been obligated to offer “equal time” to the other side of the argument – X says this, but Y says this. The Times did this in covering the “intelligent design” debate – in trying to appear objective, they put ID “experts” on an equal footing with genuine biologists and “balanced” the overwhelming evidence of the scientific method with folklore.
I think we should thank Cohen for not bowing to the false god of objectivity.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 
November 25th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
In the letter “Shlomo Sand responds to Simon Schama’s review in the Financial Times”, dated November 21, Sand claims “no serious work concerning the origins of the demographic weight of Yiddish-speaking Jews has been carried out” in recent decades. That isn’t true because I wrote a study of this very nature titled “The Origins of East European Jews” and it was published in the scholarly journal Russian History/Histoire Russe volume 30 numbers 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2003) on pages 1-22.
Sand is familiar with the first edition of my book “The Jews of Khazaria” and cites it in “The Invention of the Jewish People” on page 238. But it is the second edition of my book that carries the full extent of the research on Jewish demographics and origins, with its Chapter 10 (formerly numbered 11) sourcing the new genetic studies as well as the demographic and linguistic research of scholars like Alexander Beider.
My evidence disproves Sand’s book’s ideas about the origins of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, showing that the real story is that Ashkenazim and Sephardim have preserved a large amount of ancestry from ancient Israel up to the present time.
My book is available from bookstores all across the United States. Do you or another member of your staff want to review it for New Jersey Jewish News? Contact my publisher for a review copy.
November 25th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
The Times has nothing to worry about when it comes to the advocates of “intelligent design” because they don’t read the paper anyway, but Jews in big numbers do and the last thing that the Times needs at this point in time is for CAMERA to start another boycott.
Forget about the possibility that Sands may be on to something. The book has been a best seller in Israel, but it seems that Israeli Jews are more prepared to read something that may provoke them–witness the differences between what appears in the Israeli and the sanitized American Jewish press–than are American Jews who are only too happy with not having to read or hear the bad news.
November 25th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
[...] A piece assailing Shlomo Sand’s book on the Invention of the Jewish People in the New York Times the other day drew this applause from Andrew Silow-Carroll of the New Jersey Jewish News: [...]