Table of Contents
Preface to the English-Language Edition ix
Preface to the 2020 Edition: Ten Years Later xiii
Introduction: Burdens of Memory 1
Identity in Movement 1
Constructed Memories 14
1 Making Nations: Sovereignty and Equality 23
Lexicon: "People" and Ethnos 24
The Nation: Boundaries and Definitions 31
From Ideology to Identity 40
From Ethnic Myth to Civil Imaginary 45
The Intellectual as the Nation's "Prince" 54
2 Mythistory: In the Beginning, God Created the People 64
The Early Shaping of Jewish History 65
The Old Testament as Mythistory 71
Race and Nation 78
A Historians' Dispute 81
A Protonationalist View from the East 87
An Ethnicist Stage in the West 95
The First Steps of Historiography in Zion 100
Politics and Archaeology 107
The Earth Rebels against Mythistory 115
The Bible as Metaphor 123
3 The Invention of the Exile: Proselytism and Conversion 129
The "People" Exiled in 70 ce 130
Exile without Expulsion-History in the Twilight Zone 136
Against Its Will, the "People" Emigrate from the Homeland 143
"All Nations Shall Flow unto It" 150
The Hasmoneans Impose Judaism on Their Neighbors 154
From Hellenistic Sphere to Mesopotamian Territory 161
Judaizing in the Shadow of Rome 166
How Rabbinical Judaism Viewed Proselytizing 173
The Sad Fate of the Judeans 178
Remembering and Forgetting the "People of the Land" 182
4 Realms of Silence: In Search of Lost (Jewish) Time 190
Arabia Felix: The Proselytized Kingdom of Himyar 192
Phoenicians and Berbers: The Mysterious Queen Kahina 199
Jewish Kagans? A Strange Empire Rises in the East 210
Khazars and Judaism: A Long Love Affair? 218
Modern Research Explores the Khazar Past 230
The Enigma: The Origin of Eastern Europe's Jews 238
5 The Distinction: Identity Politics in Israel 250
Zionism and Heredity 256
The Scientific Puppet and the Racist Hunchback 272
Founding an Ethnos State 280
"Jewish and Democratic"-An Oxymoron? 292
Ethnocracy in the Age of Globalization 397
Afterword: A People without a Land, A Land Without a People? Some Replies to My Critics 314
"The Jews Have Always Existed as a People" 314
Exile and Historical Memory 317
Are the Palestinians the Descendants of the Ancient Jews 318
The Last Resort: A Jewish DNA 318
Acknowledgments 326
Index 327