Saturday, December 14, 2013

The broadening of nationalism

Kohn takes the early leg of both Jewish and Greek cultures as the subject of his first chapter. There's no hiding the ambition here, and his tight focus on how these two cultures moved from being exclusionary to more universal certainly helps. But, I'm intrigued by the holes.

I can't really speak to how other religions developed in their early days, so I've nothing to say against Kohn's placing Jewish nationalism as one of the cornerstones of his construction of the concept. There's very little to say against post-Alexander the Great Greek culture being another one of those cornerstones. But Kohn takes no other nation into account.

While it's definitely true that Greek culture became a major export in the late Hellenistic period and remained such (with some variation after passing through a Roman filter) during the Roman era, Kohn says nothing of other regions. The way he describes the spread of the Greek sense of nationalism as a thing based on intellectual achievement and training it seems as though this sense simply spread evenly everywhere. Records or accounts might not exist among the conquered or overcome, but surely some groups resisted this new culture.

Given the way things went, more than likely these pockets of resistance relented, but even then, their reception of the new culture would be different from that of a readily willing group. It would've been appreciated had Kohn mentioned this point, but I'm willing to bet that such a scenario simply wasn't considered.

No comments:

Post a Comment