Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 257
flourished in all of Europe's laboratories of learning during the imperialist era
of the late nineteenth century percolated through ethnocentric nationalism
into the central public arenas and became part of the ideological texture of the
new political parties. Among them was the young Zionist movement.
The concept of the nation as an ethnic entity was upheld, with varying
intensity, by all the different Zionist camps, which was why the new biological
science captivated so many. The idea of heredity helped justify the claim
to Palestine—that ancient Judea that the Zionists ceased to view as a sacred
center from which deliverance would come, and by a bold paradigmatic shift
revamped as the destined national homeland of all the Jews in the world. The
historical myth required the appropriate "scientific" ideology—for if the Jews
of modern times were not the direct descendants of the first exiles, how would
they legitimize their settlement in the Holy Land, which was the "exclusive
homeland of Israel"? The divine promise would not have sufficed for nationalism's
secular subjects, who had revolted against the passive tradition that left
the conduct of history to the Almighty. If justice was not to be found in religious
metaphysics, it had to be found, if only partially, in biology.
Nathan Birnbaum, perhaps the first Zionist intellectual—it was he who
coined the term "Zionism" in 1890—picked up the argument where Hess left off:
You cannot explain a people's particular mental and emotional distinction except
by means of the natural studies. "Race is all," said our great fellow national Lord
Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]. The distinction of the people sterns from the
distinction of the race. The variety of races accounts for the great diversity of
nations. It is because of the differences between the races that the German or the
Slav thinks differently from the Jew. It is this difference which explained why the
German created the Song of the Nibelungen and the Jew, the Bible. 3
As Birnbaum saw it, neither language nor culture, but only biology, could
account for the rise of nations. Otherwise it was not possible to explain the
existence of the Jewish nation, whose progeny were immersed in various
national cultures and spoke different languages. Tribes and nations existed
"because nature has produced, and keeps on producing, diverse races of men,
just as it creates different seasons and climates" 4 When Houston Stewart
Chamberlain published his famous racialist book The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century in 1899, Birnbaum viewed it with understanding, rejecting
3 From "Nationalism and Language," an article written in 1886, quoted by Joachim
Doron in his The Zionist Thinking of Nathan Birnbaum, Jerusalem: The Zionist Library, 1988
(in Hebrew), 177.
4 Ibid, 63.