Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

62 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
the political map of the world would have been more monochromatic. 59
These intellectuals had to utilize popular or even tribal dialects, and
sometimes forgotten sacred tongues, and to transform them quickly into new,
modern languages. They produced the first dictionaries and wrote the novels
and poems that depicted the imagined nation and sketched the boundaries
of its homeland. They painted melancholy landscapes that symbolized the
nation's soil 60 and invented moving folktales and gigantic historical heroes,
and weaved ancient folklore into a homogeneous whole. 61 Taking events
related to diverse and unconnected political entities, they welded them into
a consecutive, coherent narrative that unified time and space, thus producing
a long national history stretching back to primeval times. Naturally, specific
elements of the various historical materials played a (passive) part in shaping
the modern culture, but it was principally the intellectual sculptors who cast
the image of the nation according to their vision, whose character was formed
mainly by the intricate demands of the present.
Most of them did not see themselves as the midwives of the new nation
but as the offspring of a dormant nation that they were arousing from a long
slumber. None wanted to see themselves as a baby left on a church doorstep
without an identifying note. Nor did the image of the nation as a sort of
Frankenstein's monster, composed of organs from different sources, especially
disturb its devotees. Every nation had to learn who its "ancestors" were, and in
some cases its members searched anxiously for the qualities of the biological
seed that they propagated.
Genealogy gave added value to the new identity, and the longer the
perceived past, the more the future was envisioned as unending. No wonder,
then, that of all the intellectual disciplines, the most nationalistic is that of the
historian.
The rupture caused by modernization detached humanity from its recent past.
The mobility created by industrialization and urbanization shattered not only
the rigid social ladder but also the traditional, cyclic continuity between past,
59 On the stages in the development of national minority movements in Eastern and
Central Europe, see the important empirical work by the Czech scholar Miroslav Hroch,
Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, New York: Columbia University Press,
2000. The author himself attributed the book's awkward title and its obsolete terminology to
the fact that its first version appeared back in the early 1970s.
60 On the visual depiction of nations, see Anne-Marie Thiesse's excellent, La Création
des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: Seuil, 1999, 185-224,
61 On why and how national heroes are created, see P. Centlivres, et al. (eds.), La
Fabrique des héros, Paris: Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1998.