Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

42 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
in the forms of solidarity and identity of the small human communities in the
villages and towns—caused by occupational mobility and urbanization, and
by the abandonment of extended-family homes and of familiar objects and
spaces—produced cognitive lacerations that only a total identity politics, such
as nationalism, could heal, through powerful abstractions given shape by the
dynamic new means of communication.
We find the early buds of national ideology, though still hidden in
religious foliage, beginning to flower in the political spring of the Puritan revolution
in seventeenth-century England. (Perhaps they had been pollinated by
the new Church of England, in its break with the Roman papacy.) 27 Following
that upheaval, these buds proceeded to open and then spread east and west,
along with the process of modernization. The revolutionary period of the late
eighteenth century saw their fullest flowering. A national consciousness was
beginning to flourish among North American and French revolutionaries,
hand in hand with the idea of "the people's sovereignty," the mighty war cry of
the new era.
The famous phrase "No taxation without representation!" taken up against
Britain by the bold settlers of America, already presented this advancing
entity's Janus face of nationalism and democracy. When the Abbé Sieyes wrote
his famous essay in 1789, "What is the third estate?," the still virginally shy
national-democratic ideology could be glimpsed between the lines. Three years
later, it was borne aloft through the turbulent streets of France. The cult of the
national state, with its rituals, festivals and anthems, began to seem natural and
obvious in the eyes of the Jacobin revolutionaries and their successors.
Napoleon's conquests undermined the traditional monarchist structures
and accelerated the spread of what might be described as the central ideological
virus of political modernity. The national-democratic bug entered the
hearts of France's soldiers when they came to believe that each one of them
might be carrying a marshal's baton in his knapsack. Even the circles that
sought to oppose the Napoleonic conquests, even the democratic movements
that began to challenge the traditional kingdoms, soon became nationalistic.
The historical logic of this spreading phenomenon was plain to see: "government
by the people" could only be realized in the national state.
There was more. Old, enfeebled dynastic empires—the Prussian and the
Austro-Hungarian and, later, the Tsarist Russian—were also obliged to adopt,
cautiously and incrementally, the national innovation, in hopes of extending
27 For a further discussion on the later nationalism in England, see Krisham Kumar,
The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.