Jews, the first modern people
To continue some thoughts on the politics of printed word technology… Evgenia and I went to a bar mitzvah for the twin sons of my old friend, a Soviet immigrant from Odessa. It was in a synagogue in Foster City. Sitting there in the pews watching the service — the rabbi and the rest of the congregation rocking back and forth as they read their prayers, the Torah paraded around the room in adoration, with people kissing it as it passed them by — we got a nice glimpse at one reason why the Jews, always a marginal religious group, have been so successful in the modern world: We the Jews have long been people of the book — obsessed with text. And the modern world is all about worshipping the written word. So “we” were ahead of the game.
The printed word today is maybe what the natural world was to pagans and animists — something bigger than us, something to read into and revere, something full of secret knowledge. Just look at the people on the street, glued to their devices. Or better yet look at my own journalistic work — obsessed as it is with digging up forgotten (textual) histories. The Jews were into text, studying it, venerating it long before it was cool.
Yeah, I know, it’s not a very original insight. There’s a great book (again that reverence for a text) by Yuri Slezkine called the The Jewish Century that expands on this in big and detailed way. It’s really is a sharp book, and I’ve referenced it before when writing about Jews in Ukraine — here and here. Its main thesis is that European Jews were basically the first modern people. He lays it out in his introduction.
The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.
Some peasants and princes have done better than others, but no one is better at being Jewish than the Jews themselves. In the age of capital, they are the most creative entrepreneurs; in the age of alienation, they are the most experienced exiles; and in the age of expertise, they are the most proficient professionals. Some of the oldest Jewish specialties—commerce, law, medicine, textual interpretation, and cultural mediation—have become the most fundamental (and the most Jewish) of all modern pursuits. It is by being exemplary ancients that the Jews have become model moderns. The principal religion of the Modern Age is nationalism, a faith that represents the new society as the old community and allows newly urbanized princes and peasants to feel at home abroad. Every state must be a tribe; every tribe must have a state. Every land is promised, every language Adamic, every capital Jerusalem, and every people chosen (and ancient). The Age of Nationalism, in other words, is about every nation becoming Jewish.
—Yasha
I've seen arguments like this before.
The problem with it is that wood block printing was invented in China many, many centuries before it existed in Europe, either as wood or metal type.
So I'd say that it was more likely Buddhist monks (some of the earliest printing was for that) and then Chinese and Chinese speaking literati that were the first modern nations in that sense.
They even had newspapers, more or less.
https://www.medievalists.net/2021/05/how-newspapers-existed-china-900-years-ago/
As a young person, growing up in an area that had a lot of working class Jews in it, in the 50' and 60', I was deeply influenced by a number of people of humble background. The biggest take away for me was "Never Again!". In my naivite of in the time of childhood, I lacked the historical knowledge and lacked the analytical capacity to place the sector of the Jewish population I was in interacting with, in their proper social and historical context. These were the Jews, who were open to the community around them, who thought of themselves as one other group of people, among many groups of people. They could welcome an atheistic, non-Jewish younster to their dinner tables with great warmth. Their message to me was, "Never Again!", and by "Never Again!", they meant not anywhere and not to anyone else. Perhaps, you can imagine my dis-illusionment when I started interacting with Jews, for whom "Never Again!", meant Now Is Our Turn!
I am not sure what you mean in total, when you refer to Nationalism. I am of the section of the Left that takes the view that Nationalism has no progressive aspects. Tribalism is as inherent in our species as the capacity for language. I firmly beleive, if we can not learn to see humanity as one big tribe, with many branches, stories and histories, we will orchestrate our own doom as a species.
We live in a time in which the principal organization of humanity is into Nation States. Nation States being the vessels for a flavor of tribalism. We also live in a time of near instant communication and only slightly longer times to annihilation.
Given my early experience, looking at the Zionist dog, wagging the US tail, I have a deep loathing for people like Victoria Nuland/Numacher, her rabid dog husband, Blinken and a long list of other despicable people. While the Zionist Neo-Lib/Conservative cabal is a minority, where ever one looks, one can see them running around pouring gasoline on those fires of dominance and imperialism that seems intent on acheiving armegedon.