The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history today
Shlomo Sand studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, in Paris. He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv. His books include The Invention of the Jewish People, On the Nation and the Jewish People, How I Stopped Being a Jew and The Invention of the Land of Israel.
Sand makes aconvincing case against linear history, retrospectively
invented continuities, anachronistic or ahistorical transpositions.
He stresses the necessity of situating one's own point of view,
contextualizing and historicizing events, bringing to light
bifurcations, paths not taken, contradictions and possibilities.
And above all, of never sticking to the views of the dominant and
the victors.
*La Marseillaise*
Shlomo Sand asks ironically and seriously whether Clio's days are
not numbered. In Twilight of History he retraces the broad lines of
humanity's evolution and questions our relationship to antiquity
and Christianity as foundations of Western civilization. Sand
recalls that the discipline owes its institutionalization to the
establishment of nation-states, given the task of retracing their
origins and fuelling their glory, and he asks how far it can
survive these.
*Le magazine littéraire*
After Israel, it is Clio, the muse of history, who is the object of
Sand's rigorous examination, with such painful questions as whether
we have to accept the impossibility of a morally neutral history.
Is history not basically a 'concealed theology', as Nietzsche saw
it, designed to build and maintain the foundation myths of nations?
At the end of an essay illuminated by personal touches, the pillars
of historical self-evidence fall one after the other: Greek
'heritage', Eurocentrism, arbitrary periodization. Venturing
outside the carapace of his specialization, Shlomo Sand sees far,
and brings a fresh breeze to arid certainties.
*Le temps*
The Israeli historian has a magisterial work behind him. No one has
better shown how a national history is fabricated and constructed
on the sands of an ideology. What Shlomo Sand now offers us
generalizes this argument, and we can only salute his erudite
presentation of the establishment of history as a 'science' in the
service of national passions. His chapter titles, 'Undoing the myth
of origins', 'Escape from politics?', 'Probing the truth of the
past' are so many stimulating injunctions.
*Lire*
Sand does not just make the case against a certain historical
narrative, he also rumples the historians, including such
contemporary icons as the founders of the Annales school, Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre, whom he reproaches of indifference in
their studies to the great political affairs of their time, Nazism,
Stalinism and Judeophobia. In this time of reform of history
teaching and rehabilitation of great republican myths, Shlomo
Sand's simple but indispensable message is to beware of
ourselves.
*Politis*
Eminently readable, almost entirely free of theoretical jargon, and
... of clear importance for both politics and education.
*Reviews in History*
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