Jews were not the creators of modernity, Slezkine reminds us. To the contrary, they came to modernity late and unwillingly. They barely participated in the foundational events of modernity, such as the scientific and the industrial revolutions. They adapted to it extremely well but as latecomers and not as founders.
Jews embraced the nation-state, Slezkine says, because it made Christianity less relevant. Christianity in a nation-state is not THE thing. It’s A thing, one of many. It’s easier for a Jewto accept Shakespeare or Goethe as an expression of the most important values than it is to accept Jesus Christ. You can feel belonging over your admiration of Shakespeare where you can’t come together with others over the worship of Jesus.
In an aside, I want to mention that the destruction of the nation-state is accompanied by the devaluing of its canon of the Greats. The perjorative expression “dead white men” appears exactly at the time when Benedict Anderson publishes Imagined Communities, a book that became the Bible of anti-nationalist intellectuals everywhere.
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