Читать книгу The Invention of the Jewish People - Shlomo Sand - Страница 8

A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.

—Karl Deutsch, Nationality and Its Alternatives, 1969

I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs.

—Ernest Gellner, “Reply to Critics,” 1996

This book is a work of history. Nonetheless, it will open with a number of personal stories that, like all biographical writing, required a liberal amount of imagination to give them life. To begin like this is less strange than readers may at first imagine. It is no secret that scholarly research is often motivated by personal experiences. These experiences tend to be hidden beneath layers of theory; here some are proffered at the outset. They will serve the author as the launch pad in his passage toward historical truth, an ideal destination that, he is aware, no one ever truly reaches.

Personal memory is untrustworthy—we do not know the color of the ink with which it was written—and thus one should view the depiction of the following encounters as inexact and partly fictitious, though no more so than any other type of biographical writing. As for their possibly troublesome connection with the central thesis of this book, readers will discover it as they proceed. True, their tone is sometimes ironic, even melancholic. But irony and melancholy have their uses, and might jointly be suitable attire for a critical work that seeks to isolate the historical roots and changing nature of identity politics in Israel.