Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 89
generations was weakening, it had a thriving secular culture of its own. Such
a modernizing process had never taken place among the Jews of Central and
Western Europe. The rise of nationalism in the surrounding societies—Russian,
Ukrainian, Polish and others—in addition to the systemic discrimination in
the Tsarist realm, worsened the situation of the growing Yiddishist community,
whose more dynamic element was driven to migrate westward. The nationalist
feelings that began to simmer in the remaining communities, especially after
the wave of pogroms in the early 1880s, had no parallel in any contemporary
Jewish community. There arose intellectuals and movements that were both
prenationalist and nationalist—from the numerous supporters of autonomy
to the handful of early Zionists—all searching for an independent collective
expression with which to scale the walls of discrimination, exclusion and
alienation presented by most of their neighbors.
In this situation, it was not surprising that Graetz's book became popular,
indirectly prompting another impressive enterprise: the invention of a collective
national past. It was somewhat unexpected that the author of this literary
project was an "autonomist" though not a supporter of a national state.
Dubnow, like Graetz, devoted his entire life to the presentation of an unbroken
narrative of Jewish existence in history. Like his predecessor, Dubnow may
be defined as a prenationalist historian, yet not a Zionist. He did not believe
it was possible, or appropriate, to transfer a large human mass to Palestine to
build a state of its own there. But he did call for the creation of a fully autonomous
space for the Jewish people, whose situation was "anomalous." Most proponents
of autonomy did not regard themselves as members of a race that was alien
in Europe, and delineated their identity in keeping with the norms and mores
of the lively, popular Yiddishist culture in which they lived. Dubnow was the
exception: his prenationalist sensibility led him to look to the past in order to
carve out a memory that would provide a firmer identity for a collective existence,
which he feared had become too fragile and problematic.
Dubnow's theoretical assumptions were a kind of synthesis between the
Frenchman Renan and the Germans Herder and Fichte. From Renan he took
the subjective elements in the definition of nationalism—will and consciousness
setting the boundaries of the collective—and from Herder and Fichte
he took a large dose of their swollen ethnospiritual romanticism. Race, he
thought, was just the first stage in the formation of a nation, which goes on
to develop slowly and become a single cultural-historical entity. But neither
the race, nor the language, nor the territory determines the final shape of the
nation in history. Nations are characterized as bearers of a long-term spiritual
culture that reproduces itself and passes from generation to generation.