Jews reacted to the challenge of modernity in very different ways.While some contributed to the development of capitalism and put their talents at the service of European states,others threw themselves into revolutionary movements.Yet others imagined ways of #re-nationalising # Jews by transforming them into a nation.Thus the Jews were formidable experimenters who participated in causes with contradictory agendas:assimilation (bourgeois or socialist)on the one hand and nationalism on the other.The Invention of a Nation recounts the tortuous ordeal through which the Jews chose the path of nationalism.Indeed the vulnerability which is the lot of any nation without a state was experienced in particularly extreme form by the Jews.With the destitution and persecution of many Jewish communities in the l9th century,especially in Eastern Europe,Jews demanded an end to their uprootedness.This required a state. This book provides a comprehensive account of the ideologies that make up Zionism, ranging from Marxist to National Religious Zionism and the far-right Abba Achimeir. Unlike other studies,it makes explicit the debt the Zionists owed to European thinkers and ideologues,both Eastern and Western.The objective of Zionism # the creation of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine # meant defining a secularised and territorial Jewish identity,via military power,and building a national language.This was especially difficult because the national project was faced with persisting religious communitarianism.But the enterprise was at least partly successful:this process of politicisation makes Israel a paradigmatic example of the invention of a nation state.