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 comments on the history of the meanings it acquired in the past.
Most of the agrarian societies that preceded the rise of modern society in eighteenth-century Europe developed statewide supercultures that influenced their surroundings and gave rise to various collective identities among the elite. Yet in contrast to the image that a good many history books continue to peddle, these monarchies, principalities and grand empires never sought to involve all the “people” in their administrative superculture. They neither needed such participation nor possessed the necessary technological, institutional or communications systems with which to foster it. The peasants, the absolute majority in the premodern world, were illiterate, and continued to reproduce their local, unlettered cultures without hindrance. Where they resided in or near a ruling city, their dialects more closely resembled the central administrative language. These subjects represented what was then called “the people,” but for those who cultivated the soil in outlying regions, far from the political centre, the connection between their dialects and the language of the central administration was quite weak.6
So long as human societies were dominated by the principle of divine kingship, rather than by the will of the people, rulers did not need their subjects’ love. Their principal concern was to ensure they had enough power to keep people afraid. The sovereign had to secure the loyalty of the state’s administration in order to preserve the continuity and stability of the government, but the peasants were required simply to pass along the surplus agricultural produce and sometimes to provide the monarchy and nobility with soldiers. Taxes were of course collected by force, or at any rate by its constant implicit threat, rather than by persuasion or efforts at consensus. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that the existence of this power also gave the valued producers of food a physical security, an added value granted them by the very presence of authority.
The state apparatuses, occupied in collecting taxes and recruiting troops, subsisted mainly thanks to the integrated interests of the upper strata—the nobility and the politically powerful. The continuity and relative stability of these apparatuses—not only the crowning of a sovereign, but the invention of dynastic monarchies—had already been achieved by means of certain ideological measures. The religious cults that flourished around the centers of government reinforced the loyalty of the upper levels of the hierarchy through unearthly legitimation. This is not to say that the polytheistic or, later, the monotheistic religions came into being as direct functions of government (the circumstances of their rise were more complex), for otherwise they would have been unnecessary, but that they almost always, though not invariably, served to reproduce power.
The consolidation of belief around the ruling power created a slender, though important, social stratum that grew within the administrative apparatus, sometimes merging with it and later competing with it. This stratum, composed of priests, court scribes,
