8 Quotes by Shlomo Sand

The fine and varied literature that I read was almost all in translation: from classic works by Jack London, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, to detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, not to mention fascinating pornographic books. I also appreciated the biblical stories that contained all three genres.

As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair.

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

I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.

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

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

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.

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.