In the kingdoms that preceded the consolidation of nations, notably those in Western Europe, the agents of culture constituted an efficient corps that worked in tandem with administrative officialdom, the judiciary, and the military, and collaborated with them in the nation-building project. Among minority groups—cultural-linguistic or religious, and generally defined as ethnic—that had suffered discrimination under the supranational kingdoms and imperial powers, the intelligentsia were almost the only midwives of the new, rapidly rising nations.
Within the broad boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist Russian and Ottoman empires, and later the British, French, Belgian and Dutch colonies, there arose small circles of vigorous intelligentsia characterized by an acute sensitivity to cultural discrimination, linguistic repression, or exclusion on religious grounds. These groups arose only when the nationalist ferment was already seething in the metropolitan center—still weak and fictive in the crumbling kingdoms, but authentic and hegemonic in the new empires. These circles were familiar with the high culture that was taking shape and spreading in the centers of power, but still felt inferior to it, because they had come in from the margins and were constantly reminded of that fact. Since their working tools were cultural and linguistic, they were the first to be affected and thus formed the vanguard of the nationalist revolt.
These dynamic groups started a long campaign to lay the foundations for the emerging national movements that would claim sovereignty over the nations they represented while, at the same time, bringing them into being. Some of these intellectuals retrained to become the political leaders of the new mass movements. Others clung to their intellectual occupations and passionately continued to delineate the contours and contents of the new national culture. Without these early literati, nations would not have proliferated, and the political map of the world would have been more monochromatic.59
These intellectuals had to utilize popular or even tribal dialects, and sometimes forgotten sacred tongues, and to transform them quickly into new, modern languages. They produced the first dictionaries and wrote the novels and poems that depicted the imagined nation and sketched the boundaries of its homeland. They painted melancholy landscapes that symbolized the nation’s soil60 and invented moving folktales and gigantic historical heroes, and weaved ancient folklore into a homogeneous whole.61 Taking events related to diverse and unconnected political entities, they welded them into a consecutive, coherent narrative that unified time and space, thus producing a long national history stretching back to primeval times. Naturally, specific elements of the various historical materials played a (passive) part in shaping the modern culture, but it was principally the intellectual sculptors who cast the image of the nation according to their vision, whose character was formed mainly by the intricate demands of the present.
Most of them did not see themselves as the midwives of the new nation but as the offspring of a dormant nation that they were arousing from a long slumber. None wanted to see themselves as a baby left on a church doorstep without an identifying note. Nor did the image of the nation as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, composed of organs from different sources, especially disturb its devotees. Every nation had to learn who its “ancestors” were, and in some cases its members searched anxiously for the qualities of the biological seed that they propagated.
Genealogy gave added value to the new identity, and the longer the perceived past, the more the future was envisioned as unending. No wonder, then, that of all the intellectual disciplines, the most nationalistic is that of the historian.
The rupture caused by modernization detached humanity from its recent past. The mobility created by industrialization and urbanization shattered not only the rigid social ladder but also the traditional, cyclic continuity between past, present and future. Previously, agrarian producers had no need for the chronicles of kingdoms, empires and principalities. They had no use for the history of large-scale collectives, because they had no interest in an abstract time unconnected to their concrete existence. Lacking such a concept of development, they were content with the religious imagination that comprised a mosaic memory devoid of a tangible dimension of progressive movement. The end became a beginning, and eternity bridged life and death.
The secular, upsetting modern world, however, turned time into the main artery through which symbolic and emotional imagery entered social consciousness. Historical time became inseparable from personal identity, and the collective narrative gave meaning to the national existence, whose consolidation required heavy sacrifices. The suffering of the past justified the price demanded of citizens in the present. The heroism of the receding world prophesied a brilliant future, perhaps not for the individual but certainly for the nation. With the help of historians, nationalism became an essentially optimistic ideology. This, more than anything else, was the secret of its success.
1 Please note that the term “nationalism” when used this book should not immediately be equated with an extremist ideology.
2 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954, 28. Nietzsche had already written, “Wherever primitive men put down a word, they thought they made a discovery. How different the case really was! … Now, with every new piece of knowledge, we stumble over petrified words and mummified conceptions, and would rather break a leg than a word in doing so.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, New York: Russell & Russell, 1964, 53.
3 On connotations of this term and their evolution, see the essays in S. Remi-Giraud and P. Retat (eds.), Les Mots de la nation, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996.
4 For example, “Two nations [le’umim] are in thy womb, and two manner of people [goyim] shall be separated from thy bowels,” Gen. 25:23; and “Come near, ye nations [le’umim], to hear; and hearken, ye people,” Isa. 34:1.
5 The word am, which is translated as “people,” appears frequently in the Old Testament with a variety of meanings. It can mean a clan, or a throng gathered in the city center, or even a fighting force. See for example, “So Joshua arose, and all the people [am] of war, to go up against Ai,” Josh. 8:3; “And the people of the land [am ha’aretz] made Josiah his son king in his stead,” 2 Chron. 33:25. It can also indicate the “holy community,” namely, the People of Israel, chosen by God. For example, “For thou art an holy people [am] unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people [am] unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth,” Deut. 7:6.
6 Exceptions to this model include certain Greek polis cities, as well as some aspects of the early Roman republic. In both, the formation of small groups of citizens bears a slight resemblance to modern “peoples” and nations. But the Greek concepts of “demos,” “ethnos” and “laos,” and the Roman “populus,” which arose in the early stages of the Mediterranean slave-owning societies, did not have the mobile and inclusive dimension of modern times. They did not include the entire population—e.g., women, slaves and foreigners—and equal civil rights were granted only to locally born, slave-owning men, meaning they were strictly limited social groups.
7 See the comments on the loose usage of this term in an important work by Dominique Schnapper, La Communauté des citoyens: Sur l’idée moderne de nation, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, 18.
8 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 66; and see also by Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. See also a very similar definition in John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism, London: Fontana Press, 1994, 7.
9 No wonder that Smith has been a godsend to Zionist historians seeking to define the Jewish nation. See, for example, Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1995, 5–11.
10 Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class, Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, London: Verso, 1991, 96.
11 Paradoxically, even the extreme case of the Islamic Republic in Iran does not entirely contradict this position. The Islamic revolution sought to bring the message of Islam to