“Relieving or at least coming to terms with the civil inequality of the Jews was central to the new meaning of statehood in modernity…”

Relieving or at least coming to terms with the civil inequality of the Jews was central to the new meaning of statehood in modernity — quite literally a stumbling block to the Jews, and, often enough, a foolishness to the Gentiles. In the new, modernizing nation-states, the limited but genuine forms of Jewish collective life, as lived in the pre-modern self-governing Jewish community known as the Kehilla, no longer made sense. Beyond the technical sticking points of Jews’ collective perdurance as pockets within the nation state and the persistence of the Jews’ distinctive integration of primordial identity and transcendence in a universal key, was an unresolved structural conundrum in the emergence of that new statehood itself.

Yehudah Mirsky, “What Is A Nation State For?”, Marginalia (11 March 2015) [http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/nation-state-yehudah-mirsky/]