Shlomo Sand (pronounced Zand; Hebrew: שלמה זנד; born 10 September 1946) is an Austrian-born Israeli post-Zionist historian and socialist.

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.

[10] The Six-Day War, in which he served – his unit conquered at heavy loss the Abu Tor area in East Jerusalem[6] – pushed him towards the radical left.

Such experiences, particularly one incident in which he reports his fellow soldiers beat and tortured a restrained Palestinian man to death,[6] left him with a sense that he had lost his homeland.

[8][15][16] Declining an offer by the Israeli Maki Communist Party to be sent to do cinema studies in Poland, Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University in 1975.

Determined to "abandon everything" Israeli,[17] he moved to France, where, from 1975 to 1985, after winning a scholarship, he studied and taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis on Georges Sorel and Marxism.

[4] In 1983, according to one source, Sand "took part in a heated exchange over Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite, ni gauche: l'idéologie fasciste en France, and later drew the ire of Claude Lanzmann with his 2002 book in Hebrew, Film as History, in which he not only passed scathing judgement on Lanzmann's Shoah, but also revealed that the film had been secretly funded by the Israeli government.

Would anyone today consider encouraging an Arab demand to settle in the Iberian Peninsula to establish a Muslim state there simply because their ancestors were expelled from the region during the Reconquista?

Why should the descendants of the Puritans who were forced to leave England centuries ago not attempt to return en masse to the land of their forefathers in order to establish the heavenly kingdom?

Would any sane person support Native American demands to assume territorial possession of Manhattan and to expel its white, black, Asian and Latino inhabitants?

And somewhat more recently are we obligated to assist the Serbs in returning to Kosovo and reasserting control over the region because of the sacred heroic battle of 1389 or because Orthodox Christians who spoke a Serbian dialect constituted a decisive majority of the local population a mere two hundred years ago?

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Fischman commented that Sand's argument in The Invention of the Jewish People that Jews arose from multiple conversions among various communities in Europe and elsewhere contradicted work by Harry Ostrer which argued that "geographically and culturally distant Jews still have more genes in common than they do with non-Jews around them," and that such genes were of Levantine origin," including the area where modern Israel is situated.

[23] Elhaik's second paper, in collaboration with others, similarly used Sand's work and concluded that the Ashkenazi descend from 'a heterogeneous Iranian population, which later mixed with Eastern and Western Slavs and possibly some Turks and Greeks in the territory of the Khazar Empire around the 8th century A.D.'[24] Sand’s best-known book in English is The Invention of the Jewish People, originally published in Hebrew (Resling, 2008) as Matai ve’eich humtsa ha‘am hayehudi?

[26] One provocative theory espoused by 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.