THEM AND US

The Book of Genesis says that after the Flood the descendants of Noah spread out over the earth, ‘every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations’ (Gen. 10: 5). The Judaeo-Christian-Muslim tradition is far from being the only one that makes such a strong link between ‘tongue’ and ‘nation’, or that gives a particular language a special, quasi-divine status as the repository of meaning and of cultural memory. But the Bible is the most direct source of the modern (post-Renaissance) conception of the nation as a people linked by birth, language and culture and belonging to a particular place.

This had not been the European way of thinking prior to the Renaissance, when religious belonging provided a first division among peoples, and dynastic rule a second. Feudal organisation was tighter and more all-encompassing than any of the systems of social relationships that have replaced it. Individuals were personally responsible to their feudal superiors, and for their inferiors. With such a high level of social investment, the loci of symbolic belonging mattered less than they would in later times, as this order gradually loosened its grip. ‘Language’ meant Latin, pan-European and largely insulated from the vernacular dialects spoken by most people going about their daily lives. These vernaculars were not thought of as ‘language’, or as having any importance beyond the practical needs of communication, whereas Latin was the sacred vehicle of divine rites and divine knowledge.