Here I was, sailing along unconcernedly as a seagull, when all of a sudden a Jewish acquaintance woke me up.
She alerted me to the fact that the modern Hebrew spoken in the nation of Israel is a made-up language. I had never thought of that before.
Modern Hebrew, says La Wik, was put together by a guy called Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda starting in about 1881 when he immigrated to Palestine. Ben-Yehuda was born in Russia and went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1877 where he met a Jew from Palestine and managed to communicate using biblical Hebrew. La Wik:
This confirms my theory of nationalism, that it is, along with all political notions, a fake tribalim to create a national myth around the notion of the Jews as a nation. So today in the state of Israel we have all the conditions that help create a viable nation state.
We have a common language. In most nations the national language was imposed on the rest of the nation by the chaps that created the nation. For instance, French is the language of the folks in the Île de France. Italian is the language of the people of Tuscany.
We have a common religion. It goes without saying that the more the people in a nation are united by a common religion, or common church, the better. But the people on the outside looking in, as Muslims in Israel or Catholics in a Protestant country, religion forms a basis for uniting against the nation.
We have a common "race" or ethnicity, or tribe. As I have said, all such identities are "fake." It is really an attempt to recreate the original tribe of the kindred, people related by blood, and imprint it on a larger grouping. Are the Jews of the Diaspora, the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardic Jews, members of a nation? They are if they believe it to be so. And it helps if they share the same religion and the same language.
We have a common history. Well, history is written by the victors, making up a sacred history to justify their political ascendancy. Or, if you like, history is the lie agreed upon. Every tribe needs its sacred myth; every dynasty needs to establish the divine heritage of its kings; every nation needs to show that it was favored by God.
We have a victorious war. Nothing unites humans, especially human men, as the brotherhood of warriors. And the state of Israel had to establish itself in war in 1948 and afterwards.
What is astonishing to me, after my realization of the made-up nature of Modern Hebrew, is the remarkable achievement of the Jews in making up the nation of Israel not in the traditional way of slow accumulation, by slow feudal transitions and petty conquests, accidents of palace politics, and assimilations of neighboring princedoms. We have the invention and the creation of the nation and the state of Israel out of whole cloth in the modern manner, by some guy writing a book and another guy inventing a language, and a modern publicity campaign inviting all Jews to come to Palestine. It is an amazing achievement. La Wik says Zionism was a response to antisemitism and also to the Jewish Enlightenment. But I'll bet that the real driving force was that the emergence of Nations out of the dynastic regimes of Europe inspired the Jews that were rising fast once Jews got to participate directly in the modern economies of Europe to say: Hey, this national idea is really cool. Why can't we Jews have our own nation?
Why not, indeed. And, I'd say that probably nobody but the Jews could have pulled it off.
The point is that it proves the immense power of nationalism as a way of uniting humans into a political community. The ingredients are language, religion, ethnic origin, and a war of liberation. All of these are unifying forces and the more the merrier.
The problem is, of course, that when some new political tendency arises in an existing nation it is going to want to unite people and divide people across different axes than the people of the current nation were originally unified. That is why our current ruling class wants to unify people through identity politics and through their supranational globalism. It's because they can't win, can't create a majority for their governing agenda of rule by the educated class, unless they knock over the current statue of America the Nation with another political idea. President Trump is countering this strategy of the educated ruling class with his Make America Great Again meme, which is a clear effort to unite Americans of all kinds around the American National Idea (whatever it is). He may succeed, or he may not.
Meanwhile, the Jews in Israel have really achieved the impossible, creating a nation out of whole cloth with its own language, own religion, own sacred history, and its own glorious victory.
It doesn't get any better than that.
She alerted me to the fact that the modern Hebrew spoken in the nation of Israel is a made-up language. I had never thought of that before.
Modern Hebrew, says La Wik, was put together by a guy called Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda starting in about 1881 when he immigrated to Palestine. Ben-Yehuda was born in Russia and went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1877 where he met a Jew from Palestine and managed to communicate using biblical Hebrew. La Wik:
It was this use of Hebrew in a spoken form that convinced him that the revival of Hebrew as the language of a nation was feasible.So Ben-Yehuda went to work on Modern Hebrew, "using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries" and inventing other words. My Jewish acquaintance says he also updated the verbs and stuff.
Ben-Yehuda regarded Hebrew and Zionism as symbiotic: "The Hebrew language can live only if we revive the nation and return it to the fatherland," he wrote.And then along came Theodor Herzl, of Pest, Hungary, who created Zionism the movement with his 1896 book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). But Zionism must have been a thing by 1876, when George Eliot published her Daniel Deronda. So, Herzl's Zionism was mashed together with Ben-Yehuda's Modern Hebrew to create the cultural foundation of the national State of Israel, the national home of the Jews.
This confirms my theory of nationalism, that it is, along with all political notions, a fake tribalim to create a national myth around the notion of the Jews as a nation. So today in the state of Israel we have all the conditions that help create a viable nation state.
We have a common language. In most nations the national language was imposed on the rest of the nation by the chaps that created the nation. For instance, French is the language of the folks in the Île de France. Italian is the language of the people of Tuscany.
We have a common religion. It goes without saying that the more the people in a nation are united by a common religion, or common church, the better. But the people on the outside looking in, as Muslims in Israel or Catholics in a Protestant country, religion forms a basis for uniting against the nation.
We have a common "race" or ethnicity, or tribe. As I have said, all such identities are "fake." It is really an attempt to recreate the original tribe of the kindred, people related by blood, and imprint it on a larger grouping. Are the Jews of the Diaspora, the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardic Jews, members of a nation? They are if they believe it to be so. And it helps if they share the same religion and the same language.
We have a common history. Well, history is written by the victors, making up a sacred history to justify their political ascendancy. Or, if you like, history is the lie agreed upon. Every tribe needs its sacred myth; every dynasty needs to establish the divine heritage of its kings; every nation needs to show that it was favored by God.
We have a victorious war. Nothing unites humans, especially human men, as the brotherhood of warriors. And the state of Israel had to establish itself in war in 1948 and afterwards.
What is astonishing to me, after my realization of the made-up nature of Modern Hebrew, is the remarkable achievement of the Jews in making up the nation of Israel not in the traditional way of slow accumulation, by slow feudal transitions and petty conquests, accidents of palace politics, and assimilations of neighboring princedoms. We have the invention and the creation of the nation and the state of Israel out of whole cloth in the modern manner, by some guy writing a book and another guy inventing a language, and a modern publicity campaign inviting all Jews to come to Palestine. It is an amazing achievement. La Wik says Zionism was a response to antisemitism and also to the Jewish Enlightenment. But I'll bet that the real driving force was that the emergence of Nations out of the dynastic regimes of Europe inspired the Jews that were rising fast once Jews got to participate directly in the modern economies of Europe to say: Hey, this national idea is really cool. Why can't we Jews have our own nation?
Why not, indeed. And, I'd say that probably nobody but the Jews could have pulled it off.
The point is that it proves the immense power of nationalism as a way of uniting humans into a political community. The ingredients are language, religion, ethnic origin, and a war of liberation. All of these are unifying forces and the more the merrier.
The problem is, of course, that when some new political tendency arises in an existing nation it is going to want to unite people and divide people across different axes than the people of the current nation were originally unified. That is why our current ruling class wants to unify people through identity politics and through their supranational globalism. It's because they can't win, can't create a majority for their governing agenda of rule by the educated class, unless they knock over the current statue of America the Nation with another political idea. President Trump is countering this strategy of the educated ruling class with his Make America Great Again meme, which is a clear effort to unite Americans of all kinds around the American National Idea (whatever it is). He may succeed, or he may not.
Meanwhile, the Jews in Israel have really achieved the impossible, creating a nation out of whole cloth with its own language, own religion, own sacred history, and its own glorious victory.
It doesn't get any better than that.
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