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The “invention of . . .” genre is hardly new. Since the publication of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s seminal The Invention of Tradition in 1983, it has become axiomatic that modern national and ethnic identities invariably float on a considerable body of myth, energetically massaged by intellectuals for patriotic use. Shlomo Sand devotes most of his first chapter to a survey of this literature, preparing his readers to see not the originality but the unexceptionality of his book’s central proposition—that the Jewish people, too, has been in this sense “invented.” Unlike broadly similar studies of the historiographical construction of other national identities, however, The Invention of the Jewish People has provoked an exceptionally charged response of fascination and criticism. The core chapters of Sand’s book offer a careful and illuminating analysis of the exaggeration, in mainstream accounts of Jewish history, of the biological continuity of the Jewish people, and the downplaying of various waves of conversion to Judaism. He surveys the awkward negotiation by nineteenth-century and early Zionist scholars of the impact of Jewish proselytism in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, and of the possibility that early medieval Phoenician and North African Berber converts to Judaism might be the ancestors of a substantial proportion of Sephardic Jewry. The eighth-century conversion to Judaism of at least the elite tier of the Khazar Kingdom, between the Caspian and Black Seas, has long been beyond dispute. In the 1950s, Sand notes, no less a figure than Salo Baron, the pioneering doyen of Jewish history in the American academy, identified Khazaria as the key “diaspora mother” of the vast Jewish population of Russia and Eastern Europe (p. 242). Since the wars of 1967 and 1973, however, the study of Khazaria has been almost abandoned by Israeli historians, with those suggesting that many Ashkenazi Jews might be descended from Khazar converts being vilified as anti-Semitic, or, in the case of Jews such as Arthur Koestler, as “self-hating.” Responses to this book by specialists in Jewish history (which Sand is not—he teaches in the “general,” that is, non-Jewish, history department at the University of Tel Aviv) have for the most part been sharply hostile, alleging, sometimes with strained coherence, that Sand’s argument is both obvious and wrong. It would be surprising, though, if this ambitious book, covering two millennia of Jewish history in three hundred pages, were empirically startling to specialists in the early periods through which it gallops; it would also be surprising if those specialists were unable to point to a few factual errors or misleading simplifications. Moreover, this avenue of attack misses Sand’s central thrust, which he spells out very clearly: “Please note: the present work . . . does not deal directly with history . . . its main purpose is to criticize a widespread historiographic discourse” (p. 22). The alternative account of Jewish history that Sand lightly sketches out here does not purport to be anything more than synthetic, speculative, and suggestive. His analysis of the intricate history of approaches to the question of Jewish peoplehood by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish historians, however, is compelling, authoritative, and salutary. His critique of the dominant assumptions of Jewish history demands a more respectful and serious response from practitioners in that field. The underlying provocation of this book is, of course, political rather than historiographical. Sand makes this unequivocally clear, in three personalized vignettes that open the introduction and highlight tragicomic incongruities between individual identities and official Israeli definitions of Jewish status, and in the book’s final chapter, which circles back to a focus on identity politics in contemporary Israel. Given that ethnic hybridity has almost certainly played a much more important role in the Jewish past than dominant Israeli narratives would acknowledge, it should not be so difficult, Sand argues, to envision what he calls the “Israelization” of the Israeli future, in which the Jewish state would become a truly multicultural democratic state, equally open to all its citizens. His vision seems to echo that of some early Zionist settlers and Marxist theoreticians such as Ber Borochov, who emphasized the racial and cultural proximity of Palestinians and diaspora Jews, and whose arguments Sand reconstructs sympathetically. Whatever one might think of the valence of this idea today, Sand’s integration of a rigorous historiographical critique and political urgency is stirring and admirable. “If the nation’s history was mainly a dream,” he concludes, “why not begin to dream its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?” (p. 313).