Celebrating something can’t be bad. Each of us celebrates our birthday; every company celebrates the moment of its foundation; every nation celebrates a significant moment in its history — most often, the moment of its liberation. But everything gets complicated if the celebration includes something else.

When the ancient Israelites returned from Babylonian captivity, something strange and fascinating happened. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell us how the political leaders realized that the purity of the people’s blood suddenly became important, so they took immediate measures: they forbade intermarriage to avoid contamination by non-Israelites, and they expelled Jews who refused to part with their foreign land. wives

This form of racial or ethnic segregation, whatever we want to call it, is in itself surprising, since the children of Israel did not seem to be too bothered by this aspect until the Babylonian exile; the great king David himself, the founder of the united kingdom, was not of pure Jewish blood, for he was the great-grandson of Ruth, a Moabite woman who converted to Judaism, as the book named after her tells. It is true that injunctions against intermarriage also existed in the Law of Moses (Exodus 34:16; Deuteronomy 7:3), but they seemed to have been given in order not to risk altering the purity of worship, rather than to preserve the purity of blood. . In Ezra and Nehemiah, the concept of a “holy nation” (literally “holy seed,” a phrase translated as “holy race” in some English versions) first imposes on the Jews the idea of ​​ethnic/racial purity that must be preserved.

This phenomenon is due to the fact that the collective identity acquires the character that we today call “national” (and which, in the case of the Jews of the post-exilic period, we might call “proto-national”) not so much at the moment when the group becomes aware of its identity and takes on a certain mission (for the Jews this moment began with the acceptance of the Law at the foot of Sinai and had its heyday with the kingdom of David and Solomon), but rather at the moment when the group formed in this way faces the brutality of the reality of subjugating otherness. It was not the glory of a united and powerful kingdom, but the suffering of losing that kingdom in exile that was the catalyst for that initial sense of national consciousness. This is how the German nation was formed under the empire Napoleonic, that is, in the context of the group’s loss of glory and freedom. In other words, the emergence of national feeling and national identity is about emergence subjectivity collective, that is, the moment when the ethnos becomes a community subjects a leader perceived as foreign “by nationality” and illegitimate.

Returning to the ancient Israelites, the question posed in the title can be rephrased: Is glorifying one’s collective identity and establishing a national cult not a form of idolatry from the Torah’s point of view? Of course, the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah do not mention the existence of any national cult. It is true that among ancient and primitive peoples we often deal with the cult of ancestors, and it is also true that some sociologists, such as Emile Durkheim, have equated divinity in primitive communities with collective identity; however, this equivalence was a construct and a theoretical invention of a sociologist, not an objective fact. Such a cult of collective identity did not exist, as far as I know, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages (I am not a historian and I could be wrong), but, most likely, the cult of the nation appears only once, when nationalism in the modern sense of the word, around the time of German Romanticism. By the way, it is possible that the very existence of such a nation cult can be a good criterion for deciding whether a certain ethnic group can be called a nation or not.

The prohibition of idolatry was inherited from Judaism by two other monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, and the question of whether national worship is a form of idolatry is legitimate in all three religions in the context of modern nationalisms, from Iranian nationalism to Zionism. ideology or Romanian nationalism. In fact, this issue is even legitimate for other forms of nationalism in avowedly secular states, such as the case of nationalism in Ceausescu-era Romania or the courting of Han ethnicity, which is said to have the virtue of collapsing the modern Chinese nation, since the secular religion of historical materialism can be considered the fourth the great monotheism of the modern world, which, in turn, was born from the vortex of Christian heresies on Gnostic soil, as Eric Voegelin showed. In modern Romania, a religious person, as a rule, does not engage in this business; the “idolatrous” character of nationalism is usually supported by followers of social constructionism from the social and humanities or from the political sphere of the secular left.

To answer the question, a discussion of two approaches to nationalism is necessary: ​​essentialist and constructionist. There are many discussions, and there are also many authors who have dealt with the problem; the essentialist approach is sometimes called (or at least very close to) perennialism, while the modernist approach corresponds to constructionism.

Essentialism proceeds from the premise that there is a essence of every nation that cannot be taught, bought, or in any way captured by anyone not born and raised in that nation. That something is impossible to capture and describe, therefore it is a kind of secret and intimate treasure of the people.

In the case of relatively small groups based on consanguinity, it is obvious that the “essence” is the blood connection between the members of the group, a connection that is a given that cannot be changed. But as kinship groups grow larger, recognition among tribal members becomes more difficult, so that the essence which the ancients attributed to belonging to a common genealogy also becomes more difficult to control, so that it tends to migrate to symbolic and abstract versions, a state belonging to a common genealogy becomes less and less important and gradually disappears.

What is important about essentialism is that this essence is related to SACRED. Durkheim noticed this, but hastened to say that it is sacred it is nothing else than conceptualizing the group in an abstract sense. Durkheim hastened to remove the sacred from the pedestal placed by traditional and primitive societies and to oversimplify it, reducing it to the social, while the sacred is something much more complex. This connection, which Durkheim noted, exists, but it has a different nature and cannot be approached in a reductionist way. The connection between the essence and the sacred is the connection between the eternal and the sacred. Perennial has to do with temporality, because it refers to something that does not disappear, that is, to something eternal. Therefore, the connection between the essence and the sacred goes beyond the conditions and fluctuations of history and beyond the limits of space. Being transcendent leads to the same idea that the essence is something sacred. And the meaning of the term “sacred,” as we know, is to be “set aside.” To be delayed is to be intangible and is usually the result of a specific action sanctification.

A consecrated object was not sacred before, but it becomes sacred through the act of consecration at the moment it is sacred. put off. Where is the object (or space, time or person). given as for the sacred, we talk about it holiness, because there is a difference between holiness and sacredness. Holiness is something given, not the result of human activity. God is holy, but he is holy not in the sense that he was sanctified, but in the sense that he is holy because of himself. In other words, His holiness is not the result of man-made sanctification.

The immaterial character of the sacred object is also explained by its “worthlessness”, that is, the impossibility of putting a price on it, exchanging it for a commensurate value in money, gold or other precious things. There are several levels of the sacred in traditional societies, and these have survived to some extent in modern society. It is about those interpersonal relationships that are affected by the sacred, that is, those relationships that are immaterial, priceless, essential, eternal, and transcendent. Family relationships, especially between mother and child, are sacred (and this is seen not only in humans, but also in animals) in the sense that a mother will protect her children even at the cost of her life.

Relationships within the family cannot be expressed in material values, therefore they cannot be the subject of exchange or an act of sale. Levels of the sacred appear in traditional societies as concentric spheres of blood ties, kinship, extended family or tribe. Belonging to a Nostratic identity, such as the “holy nation” of the Jews, was seen in traditional societies and in the essentialist conception as something that could not be negotiated, that could not be changed or bought, and therefore something that was not commensurate. in human terms. –

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