In the book, Sand disputes the historical veracity of the narrative of forced exile of Jews from Palestine under the Romans, arguing instead that most modern Jews descend from converts to Judaism whose native lands were in locations across the Middle East & Eastern Europe. Sand began his work by looking for research studies about forcible exile of Jews from the region of Palestine & surrounding areas. He was astonished that he could find no such literature, he says, given that the expulsion of Jews from the region is viewed as a constitutive event in Jewish history. The conclusion he came to is that the expulsion simply did not happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region & that the Jewish diaspora is essentially a modern invention. He accounts for the appearance of millions of Jews around the Mediterranean & elsewhere as something that came about primarily through the religious conversion of local people, saying that Judaism, contrary to popular opinion, was very much a “converting religion” in former times.