Imagining the nation was an important stage in the development of historiography, as indeed in the evolution of modernity. It engaged many historians from the nineteenth century onward. But toward the end of the twentieth century the dreams of national identity began to disintegrate. More and more scholars began to dissect and examine the great national stories, especially myths of common origin, that had hitherto clouded the writing of history. It goes without saying that the secularization of history took place under the hammer blows of cultural globalization, which continually takes unexpected forms throughout the Western world.
Yesterday’s nightmares of identity are not tomorrow’s identity dreams. Just as every personality is composed of fluid and diverse identities, so is history, among other things, an identity in motion. This book seeks to illuminate this dimension, both human and social, that is inherent in the passage of time. Though this lengthy plunge into the history of the Jews differs from the usual narratives, it may not be free of subjectivity, nor does the author claim to be free of ideological bias. He intends to present some outlines for a future counterhistory that may promote a different kind of culturally constructed memory—a memory that is aware of the relative truth it contains, and that aspires to help forge emerging local identities and a critical, universal consciousness of the past.
1 For the invention of a fictional past see E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
2 Quoted in Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 7. This brilliant work exposes the fallacy of “ethnic” labeling as applied in most modern, national histories dealing with the Middle Ages.
3 To understand this controversy, see Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture, New York: Routledge, 1999, and also my book Les mots et la terre: Les intellectuels en Israël, Paris: Fayard, 2006, 247–87.
4 Two works mainly: Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
5 See Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; and Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur,” History and Memory 7:1 (1995), 91–124. The intellectuals of the “Canaanite” movement were the first Israelis to challenge the classical paradigms of Zionist historiography, but they did so with the aid of highly tenuous mythologies.
6 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991; and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
7 Marcel Detienne, Comment être autochtone, Paris: Seuil, 2003, 15. It is worth mentioning here that my conversations with the French historian Marc Ferro provided material and inspiration for this book. See his article “Les Juifs: tous des sémites?” in Les Tabous de l’Histoire, Paris: Nil éditions, 2002, 115–35.
CHAPTER ONE
Making Nations: Sovereignty and Equality
No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them, are ethnicized—that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community.
—Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology”
Nationalism was the form in which democracy appeared in the world, contained in the idea of the nation as a butterfly in a cocoon.
—Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
Thinkers and scholars have struggled for more than a hundred years with the issue of nationalism but have not come up with an unambiguous and universally accepted definition. A widely accepted description will probably be achieved only after the age of the nation has ended, when Minerva’s owl takes flight and we see past this overarching collective identity that so powerfully shapes modern culture.1
But it is only proper that a historical work, particularly one likely to cause controversy, should begin its explorations with a look, however brief, at the basic concepts that it will employ. In any event, this is sure to be a challenging, even exhausting, voyage, but a lexicon that consists of explanations of the conceptual apparatus employed in this book may prevent superfluous wandering and frequent stumbling.
European languages use the term “nation,” which derives from the late Latin natio. Until the twentieth century, this term denoted mainly human groups of various sizes and with internal connections. For example, in ancient Rome it commonly referred to aliens (as well as to species of animals). In the Middle Ages it could denote groups of students who came from afar. In England at the start of the modern era it denoted the aristocratic strata. Now and then it was used in reference to populations of a common origin, sometimes a group speaking a particular language. The term was used in diverse ways throughout the nineteenth century, and its precise significance remains a subject of controversy to this day.
The great French historian Marc Bloch said that “to the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs.”2 We might add that one source of anachronism in historiographical research (though not the only one) is human laziness, which naturally affects the creation of terminology. Many words that have come down to us from the past and, in a different guise, continue to serve us in the present are sent back, charged with a new connotation. In that way, distant history is made to look similar, and closer, to our present-day world.
A close reading of historical and political works, or even of a modern European dictionary, reveals a constant migration of meanings within the boundaries of terms and concepts, especially those devised to interpret changing social reality.3 We can agree that the word “stone,” for instance, though context-dependent, does correspond more or less to a specific and agreed object. Like many other abstract terms, however, concepts such as “people,” “race,” ethnos, “nation,” “nationalism,” “country,” and “homeland” have, over the course of history, been given countless meanings—at times contradictory, at times complementary, always problematic. The term “nation” was translated into modern Hebrew as le’om or umah, both words derived, like so many others, from the rich biblical lexicon.4 But before taking the discussion to the crucial “national” issue, and trying to define “nation,” which still very reluctantly submits to an unequivocal definition, we should stop to consider two other problematic concepts that keep tripping up the clumsy feet of professional scholars.
LEXICON: “PEOPLE” AND ETHNOS
Almost all history books published in Israel use the word am (people) as a synonym for le’om (nation). Am is also a biblical word, the Hebrew equivalent of the Russian Narod, the German Volk, the French peuple, and the English “people.” But in modern Israeli Hebrew, the word am does not have a direct association with the word “people” in a pluralistic sense, such as we find in various European languages; rather it implies an indivisible unity. In any case, the am in ancient Hebrew, as well as in other languages, is a very fluid term, and its ideological use, which has unfortunately remained very sloppy, makes it difficult to include it in any meaningful discourse.5
The best way to define a concept is to follow its history, but as it is not possible to expand on the evolution of the term am in such a short chapter, the present discussion will confine itself to a number of