Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

24 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
The great French historian Marc Bloch said that "to the great despair of
historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their
customs." 2 We might add that one source of anachronism in historiographical
research (though not the only one) is human laziness, which naturally affects
the creation of terminology. Many words that have come down to us from the
past and, in a different guise, continue to serve us in the present are sent back,
charged with a new connotation. In that way, distant history is made to look
similar, and closer, to our present-day world.
A close reading of historical and political works, or even of a modern
European dictionary, reveals a constant migration of meanings within the
boundaries of terms and concepts, especially those devised to interpret
changing social reality 3 We can agree that the word "stone," for instance,
though context-dependent, does correspond more or less to a specific and
agreed object. Like many other abstract terms, however, concepts such as
"people," "race," ethnos, "nation," "nationalism," "country," and "homeland"
have, over the course of history, been given countless meanings—at times
contradictory, at times complementary, always problematic. The term "nation"
was translated into modern Hebrew as le'om or umah, both words derived,
like so many others, from the rich biblical lexicon. 4 But before taking the
discussion to the crucial "national" issue, and trying to define "nation," which
still very reluctantly submits to an unequivocal definition, we should stop to
consider two other problematic concepts that keep tripping up the clumsy feet
of professional scholars.
LEXICON: "PEOPLE" AND ETHNOS
Almost all history books published in Israel use the word am (people) as a
synonym for le'om (nation). Am is also a biblical word, the Hebrew equivalent
of the Russian Narod, the German Volk, the French peuple, and the English
"people." But in modern Israeli Hebrew, the word am does not have a direct
2 Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954,
28. Nietzsche had already written, "Wherever primitive men put down a word, they thought
they made a discovery. How different the case really was! ... Now, with every new piece of
knowledge, we stumble over petrified words and mummified conceptions, and would rather
break a leg than a word in doing so." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, New York:
Russell & Russell, 1964, 53.
3 On connotations of this term and their evolution, see the essays in S. Remi-Giraud
and P. Retat (eds.), Les Mots de la nation, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996.
4 For example, "Two nations [le'umim] are in thy womb, and two manner of people
[goyim] shall be separated from thy bowels," Gen. 25:23; and "Come near, ye nations
[le'umim], to hear; and hearken, ye people," Isa. 34:1.