J. Theoder Herzl uses Hobsbawm's proto-nationalistic characteristics in his book The Jews' State and in his essay "Dr. Gudemann's National-Judentum" to propose a prospective Jewish nation; however, he concludes that race is not an important element in his envisioned Jewish nation. For Herzl, a nation is a "historical group of people who recognizably belong together and are held together by a common foe" (67). Unfortunately, all European Jews did have a common foe which was fascist governments seeking a group to scapegoat and unilaterally blame for their nation's economic problems. The foe of the Jew is and has always been leaders who want to placate unhappy masses by focusing them on the Jews as their enemy. Jews do make enemies but are made them by governments who other them for their own purposes. In France, there were other groups who were similarly othered by the ethnic majority in order to propagate their attempts at political power, namely the Creoles. Creoles and Jews were both oppressed and alienated in their communities, being disallowed to participate as full citizens in the country even if they were born there. At every potential opportunity for social advancement, the two groups were refused and forced to remain on the outskirts of society, unable to ascend the social hierarchy. They always are obstructed by barriers when it came to ascending in the society, indeed they were even given a chance to ascend at all. Similarly, Benedict Anderson highlights this problem of oppression in his book Imagined Communities. He mentions the trouble created against the Creoles in the Americas because they were simply born elsewhere. The Creole nationalistic movement, he argues "predated the appearance of American...

Cramped visceral pilgrimages had no decisive consequences until their territorial stretch could be imagined as nations" (Anderson 63). One can conclude that the Creoles and the Jews accounted similar alienation and oppression problems even though they lived on two different continents. Sadly, the Creoles and the Jews were not accepted because they were considered different, thus they were excluded from their societies, so in time resentment built up and they were forced to either demand equality or to relocate.
While the philosophers discussed disagreed about the identification of Jews as an ethnic group, what cannot be ignored are that they were dismissed and deprived as a group because of their religion. In a very real way, it was this oppression and ostracism that further strengthened the unity among Jewish people and developed a sense of statehood amongst them. If they could not be accepted by others, then they reasonably had only one another to depend on. Therefore, it was logical that they would interact socially, emotionally, and politically with one another. They might have been separated by location and shared European ancestry with other groups, the defining characteristic for these people was their Jewishness.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso, 2006. Print.

Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. London: Cambridge Press, 1992.Print.

Pinsker, Lev Semenovich. "Auto-Emancipation: an Appeal to His People." Road to Freedom.

New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 1975. 74-106. Print.