community the right to present itself as a nation, Graetz wonders, and replies that it is not a racial origin, because sometimes different racial types join up to form one people. Nor is language necessarily the common denominator, as shown by Switzerland, for instance. Even a unified territory is not enough for a national formation. Do historical memories unify peoples, asks Graetz, and responds with a sharp and prescient historical observation—that until the modern era the peoples did not take part in political history, but passively viewed the deeds of leaders and rulers. Was it, then, high culture that provided the basis for a nationality? No, because it, too, is new, and has not yet been acquired by the entire people. The existence of nations is a mystery, and there seems to be no single way to account for them.
As Graetz puts it, there have obviously been mortal peoples that vanished in history and others that are immortal. Nothing is left of the Hellenic and Latin races, which have dissolved into other human divisions. By contrast, the Jewish race has succeeded in preserving itself and surviving, and is about to renew its marvelous biblical youth. Its revival after the Babylonian exile and the return to Zion revealed its potential for renewal. us, the people are an organic body with a miraculous capacity for rebirth, which distinguishes them from ordinary biological organisms. The existence of the Jewish race had been unique from the start, which is why its history is a marvel. It is, in fact, a “messianic people” that will eventually save all of mankind. For Graetz, the teleology of the chosen people is more moral than political, retaining some dusty remnants of a crumbling traditional belief.
Like all nation-fostering historians in the nineteenth century, Graetz assumed that the history of his nation was sublime and not to be compared with any other national history. We shall come across echoes of this (admittedly unoriginal) thesis in the final parts of the History of the Jews, written in the second half of the 1860s and early 1870s. The national aspect is especially prominent in the volume devoted to Jewish history in modern times (up to the 1848 revolutions) and even more so, as noted earlier, in the final two volumes of the work, in which the historian sought to reconstruct the biblical genealogy of the Jews. The conceited tone of these volumes provoked the ire of another historian.
A HISTORIANS’ DISPUTE
In the 1870s Heinrich von Treitschke was a well-known historian holding a respected chair at the University of Berlin. His highly praised work The History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century began to appear in 1879, and that year the prestigious magazine Prussian Yearbooks,
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