Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MAKING NATIONS 45
specific varieties of radically aggressive nationalism. The modern colonialism
and imperialism of the liberal nation-states were almost always supported at
the center by popular national movements, and nationalist ideology served
them as the principal source of emotional and political credit in financing
every stage of their expansion.
So nationalism is a worldwide concept, born of the sociocultural process
of modernization and serving as a leading answer to the psychological and
political needs of the immense human masses rushing into the labyrinth of a
new world. Nationalism might not have literally invented nations, as Gellner
asserted, but neither was it invented by them, or by the "peoples" who preceded
them. Without nationalism and its political and intellectual instruments,
nations would not have come into being, and nation-states would certainly not
have arisen. Every step in defining the outline of the nation and determining
its cultural profile was taken deliberately, creating and managing the apparatus
for its implementation. The national project was, therefore, a fully conscious
one, and the national consciousness took shape as it progressed. It was a simultaneous
process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation. 31
The forms of imagination and invention varied from place to place, hence
also the boundaries of the new human divisions. Like all ideological and
political phenomena, they depended on their particular histories.
FROM ETHNIC MYTH TO CIVIL IMAGINARY
Hans Kohn, a Zionist of Czech-German background who began to despair of
Jewish nationalism, left Mandatory Palestine for the United States at the end
of the 1920s. There he became, along with Carlton Hayes, one of the fathers
of the academic study of nationalism. His youth in Eastern Europe, where he
had fought in the First World War, along with his experiences and disillusion
in the Zionist colonialist enterprise and his migration to New York, equipped
him with more valuable firsthand data than his colleague Hayes possessed. 32
He, too, was a captive of the essentialist premise that peoples and nations had
always existed, and he, too, assumed that only the national consciousness was a
novel phenomenon that had to be interpreted in the context of modernization.
31 The self-construction of nations is not the same as the self-creation of a modern
working class, but the dismantling of the essentialist approach to the two "things"—nation
and class—has much in common. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class, London: Penguin, [1963] 2002.
32 On his fascinating life and the development of his thought, see Ken Wolf, "Hans
Kohn's Liberal Nationalism: The Historian as Prophet," Journal of the History of the Ideas
37:4 (1976). 651-72.