Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

58 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
It is not necessary to believe in Gramsci's political Utopia—designed to
justify his work as an intellectual in a workers' party—to appreciate his theoretical
achievement in analyzing the intellectual function that characterizes
the modern state. Unlike the powers that ruled agrarian societies, modernization
and the division of labor required that the political apparatus perform
diverse, ever-multiplying intellectual functions. While the majority of the
populace remained illiterate, this apparatus expanded and cultivated within it
the bulk of the literate population.
Which social classes produced these first "intellectuals" in the growing
state bureaucracy? The answer might help solve the question of the historical
differences in the formation of civil and ethnic nationalisms. In Britain, after
the Puritan revolution, the state apparatus was staffed by members of the new
minor aristocracy and commercial bourgeoisie. In the United States the staff
came mainly from wealthy farming families and prosperous city dwellers. In
France it was mainly educated members of the commercial class and the petty
bourgeoisie who filled the ranks of the "gown nobility," while the upheavals of
the Revolution continued to inject new social elements into the body politic.
In Germany, on the other hand, the Prussian imperial state system
was made up principally of conservative members of the Junker class, their
offspring, and their associates, and things did not immediately change when
Prussia became part of the German Reich after 1871. In Russia, too, the Tsarist
state drew its public servants from the traditional nobility. In Poland, the first
social class that aspired and struggled for a national state were the aristocrats.
Without revolutions to introduce educated, dynamic elements and members
of the new mobile classes, the early stages of state formation did not include
intellectuals who were commoners in the political game or, therefore, in the
dominant protonational ideologies.
The French thinker Raymond Aron wondered whether racism is not,
among other things, the snobbery of the poor. 52 This observation not only
diagnoses a familiar mental state of the modern mass; it can also point to the
historical sources of the concept of "blood ties," which dictated the boundaries
of certain national groups. Before the modern age it was the nobility that
marked blood as the measure of kinship. 53 Only the aristocrats had blue blood
the state structure in the name of the proletariat. I apply here the concept to the entire state
apparatus,
52 Raymond Aron, Les Désillusions du progrès: Essai sur la dialectique de la modernité,
Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969, 90.
53 In the ancient Jewish world, it was mostly the priesthood that demarcated its
identity by blood, and in the late Middle Ages it was, strangely, the Spanish Inquisition.