Shlomo Sand Quotes

#1. In no text or archaeological finding do we find the term "Land of Israel" used to refer to a defined geographic region. This

Shlomo Sand

#2. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign "ethnos" of invaders from afar but rather an autochthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.17

Shlomo Sand

#3. One of the secrets of the Muslim army's power was its relatively liberal attitude toward the religions of the defeated people-provided they were monoththeists, of course. Muhammad's commandment to treat Jews and Christians as "People of The book" gave them legal protection.

Shlomo Sand

#4. Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question.

Shlomo Sand

#5. I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, nor in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea.

Shlomo Sand

#6. Behind every act in Israel's identity politics stretches, like a long black shadow, the idea of an eternal power and race.

Shlomo Sand

#7. Peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such.

Shlomo Sand

#8. My main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish "historical right" to the Land of Israel and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory.

Shlomo Sand

#9. I don't think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.

Shlomo Sand

#10. the term "Land of Israel" was a later Christian and rabbinical invention that was theological, and by no means political in nature. Indeed, we can cautiously posit that the name first appeared in the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew.

Shlomo Sand

#11. If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.

Shlomo Sand