Marx’s thought on nationhood emerged from the cosmopolitan legacy of the “radical Enlightenment.” It took shape in the crucible of European nationalisms, the persistence of dynastic multinational empires, and the appearance of socialism as a new political actor.1 In 1848, the national question was deeply intermingled with the question of class. As a minority current of socialism, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism promoted a new form of political internationalism of which the most significant expression was the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. A constitutive tension quickly appeared between this cosmopolitan aspiration – well synthesized by The Communist Manifesto’s sentence: “the workers have no country”2 – and the growing tendency of the nascent socialist movements to inscribe themselves into national patterns made of inherited cultures, languages, traditions, and social practices.

This chapter examines the relationship between nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from the perspective of Eastern Galicia, a multiethnic and multireligious region populated for 400 years by Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews, which was transformed by the advent of nationalism from a society of never-harmonious but rarely violent interethnic coexistence into one of extreme violence. Special attention is given to the town and district of Buczacz as representative of what is now known as western Ukraine. In writing this chapter, I have drawn on the research conducted for my recent study, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz.1 But while the book provides a heavily documented narrative of events in this locality, it largely refrains from explicitly discussing the theoretical and methodological concepts that undergird it.

This chapter explores the relationship between secularism, nationalism, and religion in relation to Zionism. It maintains the centrality of the political-theological aspect in defining and forming the Israeli state, insisting that it is the theological with its apocalyptic dimension that stands at the heart of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. It argues that to discuss Jews and Zionism in the context of religion and nationalism means to integrate two different perspectives: first, the historical analysis of the Jewish existence as a “problem” for modern secularism. The second perspective is the one provided by Zionism as a project of Westernization of the Jews. Accordingly, it argues that the Zionist theological perspective is unique in its direct relation to Jewish-Christian messianic images and biblical images of Palestine. Thus, the Israeli case stands out due to the relationship between messianism (and its political interpretations) and nationalism. Consequently, the analysis of Zionist discourse reveals the colonial dimension inherent to the process of secularization in the West in general, and nationalization of the Jews in particular. It also tries to point out to options of decolonization to be found in religious terminology.