Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
The 'Jewish Bismarck'
By Amos Elon
The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959
by Anthony David
Metropolitan Books, 451 pp., $30.00
Some years ago, in a series of lectures on nationalism, delivered, appropriately enough, in Belfast, Eric Hobsbawm imagined an evocative 'intergalactic historian,' an extraterrestrial visitor who arrives on planet Earth after a thermonuclear war has destroyed all life. Since the technology of advanced weaponry had enabled the belligerents to destroy people rather than property, our visitor is able to consult libraries and archives for the cause of the catastrophe. We can imagine him reading and sightseeing in Herder's library in Weimar or in Garibaldi's on the island of Caprea, off Corsica, where the Italian national hero spent the last years of his life in a little house facing France and not Italy, because, as a guide once told me, he could not bear what his compatriots had done with Italy after his retirement. At the end of his tour, Hobsbawm writes, the intergalactic visitor must conclude that 'nationalism' had been the gravedigger of our planet.[1]
Review, 4807 words
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