Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

INTRODUCTION 15
entrenched at the upper levels of state education; at their core was national historiography.
To promote a homogeneous collective in modern times, it was necessary
to provide, among other things, a long narrative suggesting a connection in
time and space between the fathers and the "forefathers" of all the members
of the present community. Since such a close connection, supposedly pulsing
within the body of the nation, has never actually existed in any society, the
agents of memory worked hard to invent it. With the help of archaeologists,
historians, and anthropologists, a variety of findings were collected. These
were subjected to major cosmetic improvements carried out by essayists, journalists,
and the authors of historical novels. From this surgically improved past
emerged the proud and handsome portrait of the nation. 1
Every history contains myths, but those that lurk within national historiography
are especially brazen. The histories of peoples and nations have been
designed like the statues in city squares—they must be grand, towering, heroic.
Until the final quarter of the twentieth century, reading a national history was
like reading the sports page in the local paper: "Us" and "All the Others" was
the usual, almost the natural, division. For more than a century, the production
of Us was the life's work of the national historians and archaeologists, the
authoritative priesthood of memory.
Prior to the national branching-out in Europe, many people believed they
were descended from the ancient Trojans. This mythology was scientifically
adjusted at the end of the eighteenth century. Influenced by the imaginative
work of professional students of the past—both Greeks and other Europeans—
the inhabitants of modern Greece saw themselves as the biological descendants
of Socrates and Alexander the Great or, alternatively, as the direct heirs of the
Byzantine Empire. Since the end of the nineteenth century, influential textbooks
have transformed the ancient Romans into typical Italians. In the schools of the
French Third Republic, Gallic tribes who rebelled against Rome in the time of
Julius Caesar were described as true Frenchmen (though of a not-quite-Latin
temperament). Other historians chose King Clovis's conversion to Christianity
in the fifth century as the true birth of the almost eternal French nation.
The pioneers of Romanian nationalism drew their modern identity from
the ancient Roman colony of Dacia; given this exalted origin, they called
their new language Romanian. During the nineteenth century, many Britons
began to view Queen Boudicca, leader of the Celtic tribe of Iceni, who fiercely
1 For the invention of a fictional past see E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The
Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.