All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century CE, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole. Here, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times--when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation.--From publisher description.

"The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history today. Drawing on his four decades as a professional historian, Shlomo Sand interrogates the academic discipline of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. In the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role of historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand's perspective, since the role of history as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a history book. He asks such questions as: Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and 'scientific' truth? Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and sees pointers for this in the work of Weber and Sorel."--Publisher's description