13 Facts About Shlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand is an Austrian-born Israeli post-Zionist historian and socialist.

Shlomo Sand has served as an emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University since 2014.

Shlomo Sand's father, having taken an aversion to rabbis, abandoned his Talmudic studies at a yeshiva and dropped attendance at synagogues, after his mother was denied a front seat after her husband's death, and they could not afford the seat price.

Shlomo Sand spent his first two years in a displaced persons camp near Munich, and moved with the family to Jaffa in 1948, where his father got a job as night porter in the headquarters of the local Communist party.

Shlomo Sand was expelled from high school at the age of sixteen, studied electronics by night and found employment by day in a radio repair business.

Shlomo Sand was friends with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, with whom he was involved in the Rakah communist party, and a conversation between the two inspired Darwish's 1967 poem "A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies," though it was not revealed at the time that the soldier was Sand.

Shlomo Sand resigned from Matzpen in 1970 due to his disillusionment with the organisation.

Since 1982, Shlomo Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris.

Shlomo Sand argues both against the notion of defining a nation based on genetic principles, and against the concrete results and reliability of genetic studies focusing on ethnic markers.

Shlomo Sand was criticized for presenting "dubious theories" regarding Jewish identity as historical facts.

One provocative theory espoused by Shlomo Sand, but challenged by other historians as "a myth with no factual basis," is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who purportedly converted in the early Middle Ages.

In 2013, Shlomo Sand published How I Stopped Being a Jew which examines the question of Jewish identity and the distinction between being a Jew and being Israeli.

Shlomo Sand expresses a desire to break with what he sees as a "tribal Judeocentrism" subject to the "caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe," expressing a deep attachment to the Hebrew language and to a secular ideal of Israel.