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On the Nation and the Jewish People Kindle Edition
by Ernest Renan (Author), Shlomo Sand (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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Ernest Renan was one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century in France, the man who first opened up the study of nationalism. In this book, Shlomo Sand, the author of the best-selling The Invention of the Jewish People, demonstrates the complexity of Renan's thought. Sand shows the relationship of Renan's work to that of key twentieth-century thinkers on nationalism, such as Raymond Aron and Ernest Gellner, and argues for the continued importance of studying Renan.
Alongside his essay, Sand presents two classic lectures by Renan: the first, the renowned "What Is a Nation?", argues that nations are not based upon race, religion, and language; in the second he uses historical evidence to show that the Jews cannot be considered a "pure ethnos." On the Nation and the Jewish People is an important contribution to the understanding of nationalism, bringing back into play the work of a profoundly misunderstood thinker.
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114 pages
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About the Author
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, L'Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Georges Sorel en son temps, Le XXe siècle à l'écran and Les Mots et la terre: les intellectuels en Israël.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was a French philosopher and writer.
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Print length : 114 pages
381 in Religious Studies - Sociology
1,544 in Jewish History
Customer Reviews: 4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars (8)
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Shlomo Sand
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, L’Illusion du politique: Georges Sorel et le débat intellectuel 1900, Georges Sorel en son temps, Le XXe siècle à l'écran and Les Mots et la terre: les intellectuels en Israël.
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HeavyScissors
5.0 out of 5 stars The original refutation of Jewish nationalism (before Zionism)
Reviewed in the United States on 18 August 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Racial nationalism, or "ethno-nationalism," is bunk.
This volume contains two short lectures delivered by Ernest Renan in 1882 and 1883. It was exactly around those years that European Jews began to yearn for Zionism, and European non-Jews began to organize a movement of racial hatred and persecution against Jews that they called "Anti-Semitism." Both of these pernicious movements were rooted in the "scientific racism" of the time, and laid the foundation for the horrors of the Third Reich in Europe (1933 to 1945) and the Zionist project in Palestine (1918 until now). They both presuppose the absurd but persistent myth that Jews are a biological race (nation, people) with a historical essence that connects them to their imagined ancestor Abraham and the Bible's "children of Israel." It is ironic that Renan was able to eviscerate these notions so completely in the 1880s, since in his younger years he had been a leading theorist of the now discredited discipline of "ethno-linguistics" in the 1850s, which posited the fateful delusion of an "Aryan race" and a "Semitic race." The young Renan was actually responsible for popularizing the false and racist idea that Jews are "Semites."
But the older Renan corrected himself. He is an elegant writer who gets right to the point, and draws from a rich store of knowledge. These two short essays argue convincingly that modern Jews are not a "nation" wandering the earth down through the ages, scattered over the globe, yearning to return to their imagined primordial homeland. Before the Roman empire became Christian, Judaism was the original universal monotheism of the ancient Mediterranean world. People from all backgrounds converted to Judaism. Their descendants, within two or three generations, learned to imagine (in conformity with Torah) that their ancestors had once dwelt in Egypt and slaughtered Canaanites. Also, "the Jews" were never "exiled" from Palestine in the Christian era, as alleged in modern Israel's "Declaration of Independence" (1948).
History is myth. Nationalism is a deadly absurdity. With all due respect to Jews and their identities, there is no such thing as "the Jewish people"; at least not in the sense intended today by Zionists.
The volume contains a helpful introductory essay by the contemporary Israeli (anti-Zionist) historian Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People (2008). The latter book builds on the foundation laid by Renan, but is far more dense and detailed.
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