THE WANDERING JEW
567
France, Gennany and others. They are all anachronisms. Do you not
see it yet? Do you not see that when atomic energy daily reduces the
globe in size, when man starts out on his inter-planetary journey,
when a sputnik flies over the territory of a great nation-state in a
minute or in seconds, that at such a time technology renders the
nation-state as ridiculous and outlived as medieval little princedoms
were in the age of the steam engine.
Even those young nation-states that have come into being as the
result of a necessary and progressive struggle waged by colonial and
semi-colonial peoples for emancipation-India, Burma, Ghana, and
others-cannot, in my view, preserve their progressive character for
long. They form a necessary stage in the history of some peoples;
but it is a stage that those peoples too will have to overcome in order
to find wider frameworks for their existence. In our epoch any new
nation-state, soon after its constitution, begins to be affected by the
general decline of this form of political organization; and this is
already showing itself in the short experience of India" Ghana and
Israel. The world has compelled the Jew to embrace the nation-state
and to make of it his pride and hope just at a time when there is
little or no hope left in it. You cannot blame the Jews for this; you
must blame the world. But Jews should at least be aware of the
parwox and realize that their intense enthusiasm for "national sov–
ereignty" is historically belated. They did not benefit from the ad–
vantages of the nation-state in those centuries when it was a medium
of mankind's advance and a great revolutionary and unifying factor
in history. They have taken possession of it only .after it has become
a factor of disunity and social disintegration.
I hope, therefore, that, together with other nations, the Jews will
ultimately become aware--or regain the awareness--of the inade–
quacy of the nation-state and that they will find their wa,y back to
the moral and political heritage that the genius of the Jews who
have gone beyond Jewry has left us-the message of a universal
human emancipation.
