1
Ústav
religionistiky
Anthony D. Smith: Chosen peoples: why ethnic groups
survive', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15: 3 (1992), 440 - 449.
FRVŠ
1890/2005
Téma: Náboženství a etnicita
Itis worth recalling first the very different factors and hypotheses from which
a comparative analysis of the patterns of ethnic survival can depart. The ones usually
highlighted are political in nature: the degree of a community's autonomy, its political
will to survive and its leadership qualities. Sometimes analysis will focus on economic
and ecological variables; the possession of specific homelands, their location, extent and
population, and the presence of various material resources, facilities and skills for the
support of a community. Yet another set of hypotheses treats ethnies as networks of
communication, and seeks to ascertain how customs, language and other symbolic codes
bind the members of communities together over generations.
Each of these approaches, and the hypotheses that derive from them, can make
valuable contributions to the study of ethnic survival, and they merit further intensive
comparative investigations. It is worth remembering, however, that ethnic communities
can, and have, survived over long periods without political autonomy, without a
homeland of their own, even without a common language-as the linguistic divisions in
Switzerland remind us though this is rare. In such cases, other social and psychological
factors appear to compensate for these absences.
This suggests that we need to pay more attention to the subjective elements in
ethnic survival, such as ethnic memories, values, symbols, myths and traditions. The
reason is that long-term ethnic survival depends, in the first place, on the active
cultivation by specialists and others of a heightened sense of collective distinctiveness
and mission. The members of an ethnic community must be made to feel, not only that
they form a single 'superfamily', but that their historic community is unique, that they
possess what Max Weber called 'irreplaceable culture values', that their heritage must
be preserved against inner corruption and external control, and that the community has
a sacred duty to extend its culture values to outsiders. Persians, Armenians, Poles,
Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Americans, Irish, English and French, to name
but a few, have all cultivated this sense of uniqueness and mission by nurturing ethnic
values and traditions, through myths of distant origins and symbols and memories of a
golden age of former glory.
We can go further. Myths of common ancestry and memories of a golden age
may unite and inspire the members of an ethnic community over several generations.
Yet what is even more important for ethnic survival is to cultivate a myth of ethnic
election. Those communities that managed to formulate and cultivate such a belief have
succeeded in prolonging the specific collective life of their members over many
generations. The creation and dissemination by specialists of the belief that 'we are a
"chosen people" , has been crucial for ensuring long-term ethnic survival.
A myth of ethnic election should not be equated with plain ethnocentrism.
Ethnic communities have quite commonly regarded themselves as the moral
centre of the universe and as far as possible affected to ignore or despise those around
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them. A myth of ethnic election is more demanding. To be chosen is to be placed under
moral obligations. One is chosen on condition that one observes certain moral, ritual
and legal codes, and only for as long as one continues to do so. The privilege of election is
accorded only to those who are sanctified, whose life-style is an expression of sacred
values. The benefits of election are reserved for those who fulfil the required
observances. The classical expression of such beliefs among the ancient Israelites is to be
found in the book of Exodus (ch. 19):
Now therefore if ye will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant, then shall ye be a
peculiar treasure unto me from all peoples; for all the earth is mine; and ye shall be unto
me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation (Exodus 19:5-0; cf. Deuteronomy 7:6-13 and
10:12-22).
The covenant here refers to a code of morality, law and ritual, set out in detail in
the book of Deuteronomy, which the Israelites must observe if they are to remain chosen
and redeemed by God. Only by keeping these laws and ceremonies can the community
and its members be saved.
Election myth in the Middle East and Europe
Even in antiquity, the Jews were by no means the only people to have believed
that they were 'chosen'. Intimations of such ideas can be found over a millennium
earlier in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the lands of Sumer and Akkad (now
southern Iraq), the scattered city-states, while prizing their independence, acknowledged
their ethnic kinship, particularly in times of crisis. The kings of one or other of the citystates
united the Sumerians periodically, while worship of Enlil, chief god of the
Sumerian pantheon, at his shrine in Nippur, acted as a religious focus for the Sumerian
city-states. During the Sumerian revival under the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third
millennium Be, a greater sense of common ethnicity found expression in nostalgia for an
earlier Sumerian golden age. Yet the sense of ethnic election was muted and indirect. It
was vested in the king, as Enlil's representative on earth, and it was through kingship
that any covenant between the gods and the community was mediated.
Ethnocentrism was more marked in ancient Egypt. The land of Ptah was
compact, united and more homogeneous than the lands of Sumer and Akkad. There was
greater emphasis on divine election of the 'god-king', notably in the political propaganda
of New Kingdom Pharaohs like Tuthmosis III, Hatshepsut and Horemhab.5 There was
correspondingly less stress on the community's election, with or without moral
conditions. At the same time, the characteristic Egyptian sense of cultural superiority to
aliens, those who lived outside 'the land' (of Egypt), was accentuated after the Theban
Pharaohs had driven out the Asiatic Hyksos dynasty in the sixteenth century Be. Once
again, however, the sense of election rose and fell with the monarchy and the state,
though it lingered on into hellenistic and Roman epochs.
We cannot be sure, but a clear-cut theology of communal election in the ancient
world seems to have originated in ancient Israel, though the forms of that relationship
owed much to Near Eastern, especially Hittite, models. The central Israelite belief was
that the sole God, the Lord of the universe, is working out His purpose for all His
creatures, and has chosen a particular people to bring salvation to humanity. God's
favour, however, is conditional on the fulfillment by the chosen of detailed moral and
ritual codes. 'You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will
punish you for all your iniquities'. Amos's prophetic judgement is unequivocal? Later
prophets, responding to the social and geopolitical position of Israel, hemmed in between
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Egypt and Assyria, elaborated on the moral dimensions of divine election. God's
promise to Abraham that 'in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed' is
transformed by the Second Isaiah into the belief that Israel, the suffering servant, is
chastised in order to bring salvation to all peoples. God uses Israel's enemies, the
Assyrians and Babylonians, to redeem a purified Israel and thereby the world; while the
Exodus from Egypt and the Covenant at Sinai are part of God's redemptive plan for
humanity as a whole.
Such a conception imposes a heavy burden on the chosen. They are continually required
to live up to strict moral standards. Backslidings are liable to severe punishment. This
affords great scope for prophets, judges, sages and other moral crusaders to warn their
kinsmen and thereby periodically to reaffirm the distinctive qualities and unique destiny
of the community. Later, this close relationship with God, with its inescapable moral
demands on the community, became the social and psychological mainspring of Jewish
survival in their long diaspora.
Ideas of ethnic election, dynastic and communal, can be found among several
other peoples of the ancient Near East. Here I can only mention a few. Among the
Persians, the belief in ethnic chosenness has surfaced in various guises during their long
history. The great Achaemenid kings, Cyrus and Darius, inherited the idea of the
monarch's divine election from earlier empires and reserved for themselves the
characteristic virtues of the Medes and Persians: truth, order and justice. Cyrus records
how he 'constantly sought after order and equity for the black-headed people [of
Babylon)' whom Marduk made him conquer; while Darius's rock inscriptions at Behistun
emphasize the wisdom of living according to the precepts of the great Persian god,
Ahura-Mazda, and dwell on the special mission of a Persian king to his many subjects.
Such themes were taken up much later by the Sassanid Persian rulers of Iran.
The Zoroastrian temple religion was encouraged, and in the sixth century AD Chosroes
I instigated a revival of old Persian symbols, myths and rituals. To this period, too, we
can trace the origins of the Book ofLord.5, which recorded the exploits of the great
Persian aristocratic families, chosen warriors defending Iran against the land of Tur'an.
Though the Zoroastrian state religion ultimately failed to mould the Persians into a
moral community, it did help to instill a sense of unique identity and destiny, which laid
the basis for the New Persian cultural renaissance.
Much later, under the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century, the adoption of
Islamic Shi'ite beliefs gave a new moral dimension to Persian identity. The present
century has seen a fervent renewal of Shi'ite national-religious community and
missionary destiny-in contrast to the abortive attempts of the Pahlavis to recreate
ancient Aryan imperial traditions.
Further west, a powerful myth of election emerged in the mountain kingdom of
Armenia after its conversion to Orthodox Christianity by St. Gregory in AD 301. The
Romans and Byzantines contended for several centuries with the Persian Sassanid
monarchs for control of Armenia, which finally lost its chance of independence after the
disastrous battle of Avarayr in AD 451, despite a brief revival under the Bagratids in the
ninth century. In this respect, Armenia resembled the Judean kingdoms, from which its
rulers and nobles claimed descent. Both stood at the strategic crossroads of warring
empires, and both peoples were spurred by political adversity to form a moral
community and reinterpret their historical destinies in spiritual terms. The growing
theological rift with Byzantine Orthodoxy, especially after the Council of Divin (AD
554), and Armenian pride in being the 'first Christian nation', cemented their belief in
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ethnic election and divine mission, a belief that the Armenian clergy nurtured
throughout the Armenian diaspora.
Yet another Christian realm whose legitimacy rested on a dynastic myth of
election was the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum and its successors. The Aksumite kings
may have adopted their Monophysite form of Christianity in the fourth century from
Coptic sources, but it retained many Judaic features, brought perhaps from the
southern Arab kingdoms. Successive Ethiopian kingdoms on the Abyssinian plateau
derived their legitimacy from the symbolism of the Lion of Judah and the claim to royal
descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba through Menelik. In the so-called 'Solomonic'
dynasty from the thirteenth century, the ruling Christian Amhara nobles began
to participate in this royal myth of election, which inspired a cultural revival and
mobilized the community for resistance to Muslim invaders and the Falashas.
We need not dwell at length on the powerful myths of election that have surfaced
periodically among the Arabs and their kingdoms, notably during the Islamic conquests
and in the period of the Crusades. The fact that Islam, like Christianity, is a worldreligion,
has not prevented the emergence of narrower ethnic myths within its domain.
In some ways, Islamic allegiance has added a crusading fervor. Particularly among the
Arabs, it has stimulated a pride in their language, culture and achievements and a sense
of election and collective destiny that continue to exert a powerful influence on Middle
Eastern politics to this day.
Myths of election also helped to sustain ethnic communities in Europe.
The ancient Greek encounter with the Persian empire had produced a heightened
ethnocentrism, a sense of moral and cultural superiority to the surrounding
'barbarians', even a pan-Hellenic ideology-though, unlike the foundation myths of the
Romans, it never succeeded in uniting the Greek city-states into a moral or political
community. Only after the adoption of Orthodox Christianity in the Roman East, did
Hellenism gradually acquire a moral dimension. The Byzantirie Christian ideal was
essentially dynastic and universal; yet it slowly became centred on the Greek-speaking
inhabitants of an empire which by the ninth century had lost its western and eastern
provinces, and which came to adopt Greek as its language of state in place of Latin and
foster a classical Greek revival.16 Much later, especially after the Crusader sack of
Constantinople in AD 1204, a defensive Byzantine Hellenic population became even
more convinced of its elective status and imperial mission-as if the destiny of the world
hung on the correct liturgical observance of the only true Christian doctrine in the only
genuine Christian empire.
When that empire was at last extinguished in AD 1453, the same dream found a
home further north and fed the burgeoning imperial ambitions of the Muscovite Russian
state. The realm of the Russian Tsars became the sole bastion of Orthodoxy in an
heretical world, the Third Rome, proclaimed by the Orthodox Russian clergy in the
early sixteenth century. In the words of one of their leaders, Joseph of Volokolamsk
monastery: 'In piety, the Russian land now surpasses all others'. From Ivan the Terrible
on, the Tsar was elevated into a redeemer-figure, a 'father' to his chosen people in holy
'mother Russia'. By the nineteenth century, Slavophiles came to regard the Russian
peasant community as the repository of truth, purity and wisdom-a religious conception
that fed Tolstoyan and populist ideals and one that persists to this day in the writings of
some neo-Russian nationalists.ls
Similar myths can be found further west. They emerged, for example, in the
Frankish kingdom in the eighth century, which the reigning Pope Paul likened to a 'new
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kingdom of David', occupying a place like that of the people of Israel. Similar language
was used much later by Pope Boniface at the end of the thirteenth century, when he
stated that' ... the kingdom of France is a peculiar people chosen by the Lord to carry
out the orders of heaven'-a status and mission that Joan of Arc, and many French
leaders after her, have fought to retain and execute.19
Similar beliefs could be found in contemporary Scodand, in the language of the
Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, in the growing sense of Swiss Confederation from
1291, among the defeated Welsh and Irish, in Hussite Bohemia, in Elizabethan England,
in Calvinist Holland and, across the ocean, in the Arnerican colonies and Catholic
Mexico.
In all these instances, myths of ethnic election have helped to mobilize
communities and ensure their survival over long periods. Because the ethnic myth is a
dramatic tale that links the present with a communal past, and one that is widely
believed, it helps to draw the members into a distinctive community, conferring on them
a special aura, that of 'the elect'. Through its symbolism, it strives to unify different
classes and regions, spreading ethnic culture outwards from the urban centres and the
specialist strata, who guard the traditions, thereby creating a more participant society.
Myths of ethnic election may also strengthen a community's attachment to its
historic territory. By regarding the homeland as God-given, it ties the elect to a
particular terrain. Only the sacred land and the sanctified soil are fit for the elect, and
they can only be redeemed in the land where their fathers and mothers lived, their
heroes fought and their saints prayed. To be worthy of forefathers who laid down their
lives in these holy mountains and by the banks of these sacred rivers, must we not return
to the ancient virtues and foaken ways? The Swiss, who recall the heroism of Sempach
and Morgarten, who extol the shining purity of the Jungfrau, who to this day re-enact
the drama of William Tell, have they not converted an egalitarian myth of chosenness
into the basis of their state and society, the condition of their continued freedom and
prosperity?
Finally, myths of ethnic election can incite a community to expansion and war.
The conviction of possessing the only true faith, and a higher morality and civilization,
has inspired and justified many a missionary movement and imperialist drive to those
who 'live in darkness' -be it medieval A:rmenians seeking converts in the Caucasus,
Arabs engaged in righteous jihad, or Western nations imposing white 'civilization' on
Asians and Africans.2.3
Patterns of ethnic survival
In pre-modem eras, myths of ethnic chosenness spread to most areas of the
world: to the Americas. Southern Asia, the Far East and Africa, as well as to Europe
and the Middle East. Yet the belief in ethnic election has operated in different ways.
Here I shall briefly distinguish four patterns of ethnic persistence and four ways in
which myths of election help to sustain ethnic communities.
I call the first pattern imperial-dynastic. The myth of election is attached to the
ruling house and dynasty, from which the community tends to take its main symbols and
culture, and with which it is always associated. Thus, the Norman myths, within
Normandy, were elaborated by clerics and chroniclers around the exploits of the ruling
dukes from Rollo in AD 913 onwards. The chroniclers assumed that the Norman
community shared in the special status and glory of its ruling house as a regnum, a
kingdom of common customs and descent.
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This conjunction of dynasty, land and people was repeated on a grander scale in
the later Western kingdoms of France, England and Spain. In all three, myths of
election centred on the ruling house, with coronation and anointing ceremonies
underlining the semi-divine status of the monarch. Over the centuries the kingdom and
its people came to share in this elective status, as John of Gaunt's eulogy of England,
'This other Eden, demi-paradise'. reminds us; until the point where the people
themselves become the elect as citizens of a modem nation.2.5 Poland illustrates clearly
this process of transfer. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, the Polish myth of
election was attached to the kingdom and its Catholic rulers. With the decline of the
dynasty and the dissolution of the state in the late-eighteenth century. the people
gradually became the focus of collective redemption. Sections of the nineteenth-century
Polish intelligentsia, notably the great poet Adam Mickiewicz, interpreted Poland's role
as that of a 'suffering Christ' among the nations, soon to rise again-while the Polish
Catholic Church remained sufficiently close to the people to furnish an ethnic resource
into this century. So, Poland avoided the fate of those aristocratic ethnies, where royal
defeat and destruction of the state entailed the demise of the community itself, as
occurred in Burgundy or ancient Assyria; instead, Poland was transformed after 1918
into a citizen-nation.
A second pattern of ethnic survival, the communal-demotic, attaches the myth
directly to the people in their sacred land. In these cases the community has usually been
conquered and is struggling to preserve its former rights and way of life, claiming that
its members are the original inhabitants and their culture is the vernacular. That was
the claim of Celtic communities in Wales and Ireland. The Welsh myth of election
pictured the community as the lost tribes of Israel, a latter-day chosen people, whose
original form of Christianity had been transplanted to ancient Britain by Joseph of
Ariamathea. Together with the Welsh language, folk poetry and the medieval bardic
contests, these beliefs helped to nurture a sense of unique Welsh identity, especially after
the English conquest and the incorporation ofWales.2.7
Ireland exhibited a similar mixture of pagan and Christian motifs in its election
myths. The Irish 'golden age' was variously located in the pagan Celtic era of the High
Kings of Tara, and the heroes of the Ulster cycle of ancient sagas; or in the great epoch
of Irish monastic learning, art and missionary activity after St Patrick's conversion of
Ireland in the fifth century. The latter period, especially, furnished rich materials for
later Irish myths of election, as literary scholars, archaeologists and poets in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries envisaged the national restoration of an original
Irish community in its insula sacra, its sacred island home.
The third pattern is that of the emigrant colonist. Again the myth is attached to
the people; but this time to a people on the move. They have left or fled their old
homelands and are bent on building new communities in . new homelands, often with
little regard for the indigenous inhabitants. The elect are the immigrants and their
descendants. Theirs is a settler community and mission. They carry with them their
values, memories and traditions, regarding themselves as chosen by God for a
providential destiny that will abolish the old order and inaugurate a new society.
The prototype here is the biblical exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt
across the Red Sea. It has served as a model of their destiny for Anglo Saxon tribes
crossing the Channel into Britain, after the Roman legions had been withdrawn, the
land of milk and· honey being replaced by England's green and pleasant land Many
centuries later another crossirig, this time of an ocean by the Pilgrim Fathers fleeing
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religious oppression, became part of the foundation charter of the new American
homeland, with its promise of freedom in a new Jerusalem.
A final pattern, that of diaspora-restoration, also attached the myth of election to
a community on the move; only this time it was to one moving in a reverse direction,
back to the old homeland. The return of the community to its ancestral home from
which it had been exiled became the precondition of collective redemption. Zionism is
the classic instance, with its secular fulfilment of ancient Jewish religious aspirations.
Yet we meet the same pattern among Armenians yearning to return to Mount Ararat,
among eighteenth-century diaspora Greeks longing for a restoration of Hellas, among
Liberians and other Black Americans intent on returning to Africa, and latterly among
some communities deported by Stalin to distant parts of the Soviet Union. In each of
these cases, as the great Greek educator, Adamantios Korais, so clearly realized, the
restoration of a diaspora to its ancestral home involved not merely the physical return of
a people, but also its spiritual regeneration through education and political mobilization.
These four patterns of ethnic persistence and renewal do not pretend to be
exhaustive. However, they reveal the importance of beliefs in chosenness for ethnic
survival. They also show the different ways in which such beliefs operate. Sometimes
they fuel expansion, sometimes popular revolt, at still other times mass migration and
movements of restoration. They also expose the community to different risks: the
ossification of the ethnic community through overdependence on the state, popular
instability and extremism, dissipation of communal energy through schism or
assimilation. These dangers are familiar to ethnic leaders. In each generation priests,
scribes, prophets, bards, mandarins, even nobles, have warned the people of these
dangers and by prescribing remedies for communal ills have actively cultivated the
sense of ethnic identity and destiny.
Each of these patterns also reveals certain key factors in ethnic survival. Warfare
and a warrior ethos are generally prominent in the dynastic-imperial pattern. The elect
consist of righteous warriors under their redeemer-princes and faithful caliphs, and
ethnic chosenness is borne on the spears and shields of missionary knights such as the
Hungarian or Catalan nobility. As with the battles of the ancient Israelites against the
Philistines, memories of victory and defeat became incorporated into the sacred history
of a chosen people and its warrior-deity.
Popular revolt stands at the heart of the communal-demotic pattern. Theirs is no
simple fate of passive endurance, but rather the ideal of a purified people, mobilized in
defence of its heritage. Vernacular mobilization is the leitmotiv of survival among Irish
and Basques, Czechs and Georgians, Kurds and Sikhs, and many more communities
that have drawn on their native languages, traditions, symbols and memories for
comfort and inspiration.
Wandering has become the dominant theme of both emigrant and diaspora
patterns. For the first, it is a migration to the Promised Land, with a providential
destiny that excludes indigenous peoples and slaves. For the diaspora type, long exile
evokes a fervent nostalgia, an ardent desire to recover an original home exclusive to the
chosen community.
.
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