Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 255
In other words, just as Germanity at some stage needed abundant Aryanism
to define itself, so Polishness needed Catholicism and Russianness needed
Orthodox pan-Slavism to swaddle their national identities and imagery.
Unlike the Jewish religious reform movement, or the liberal and socialist
intellectual groups that sought participation in the emergent national cultures,
Zionism borrowed extensively from the dominant nationalist ideologies
flourishing in the lands of its birth and infancy, and integrated them into its
new platform. It included traces of German Volkism, while Polish romantic
nationalist features characterized much of its rhetoric. But these were not mere
imitations—it was not a case of an agonized victim taking on some features of
his smiling executioner.
While the secular, seminationalistic outlook of the Bund, the widespread leftist
Jewish movement, demanded cultural autonomy for the "people of Yiddishland,"
rather than a single independent polity for all the Jews of the world, educated
Zionists emulated the other nationalists in Europe and assumed an ethnoreligious
or ethnobiological identity to conceptualize their self-definition. Seeking to build
a bridge that could connect Jewish believers—mainly former believers, whose
languages and secular customs were polyphonous and diverse—they were unable
to build on the lively popular mores and turn them into a homogeneous, domesticated
modern culture, as the Bund tried to do. To achieve their aim, the Zionists
needed to erase existing ethnographic textures, forget specific histories, and take a
flying leap backward to an ancient, mythological and religious past.
As the previous chapters have shown, while the chosen "history" ostensibly
matched the religious imaginary, it was not really religious, because
Jewish monotheism was not grounded in historical evolutionary time. Nor
was it wholly secular, since it ceaselessly utilized materials from the old
eschatological faith in order to structure the new collective identity. We must
remember that Jewish nationalism had undertaken an almost impossible
mission—to forge a single ethnos from a great variety of cultural-linguistic
groups, each with a distinctive origin. This accounts for the adoption of the
Old Testament as the storehouse of national memory. In their urgent need to
establish a common origin for the "people" the national historians embraced
uncritically the old Christian idea of the Jew as the eternal exile. In the process,
they erased and forgot the mass proselytization carried out by early Judaism,
thanks to which the religion of Moses grew enormously, both demographically
and intellectually.
For the Jewish nationalists, Judaism ceased to be a rich and varied religious
culture, and turned into something hermetic, like the German Volk or the
Polish and Russian Narod, though with the unique characteristic that it