Zionism has become an important if unexpected object of interest among the new nationalists, among whom the Catalan independence movement draws the most explicit inspiration from its example. Jordi Pujol, the president of Catalonia’s Generalitat from 1980 to 2003 and the father of modern Catalan separatism, told Israel’s Knesset in October 2007 that at the age of 17 he read Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, as well as the writings of Chaim Weizmann and numerous works on the history of Zionism. “My interest in Zionism,” he told Israel’s parliamentarians, “is explained by my Catalan nationalism, as a citizen of a country that during the past three or four hundred years has been subjected to a harsh policy of linguistic and cultural persecution and general denationalisation.” As it happens, the first printed translation of the Bible to appear on the Iberian peninsula was the Catalan version of 1478, made by the monk Bonafacio Ferrer in Valencia with the assistance of local rabbis. “All available copies were destroyed by the Inquisition before 1500, but a single leaf survives in the Hispanic Society of America’s library,” reports the Cambridge History of the Bible.

Although a great gulf is fixed between the sense of the sacred in Great Britain and America, they remain siblings who in different ways draw upon Israel’s idea of the sacred as conveyed by the Bible. What is sacred in both countries, moreover, pervades the popular culture, and is understood as easily by the least-   educated citizens as by the mandarins of their high culture. Herr Gauland could not be more wrong to claim that Americans have no culture. German culture is a far more elusive entity, which helps to explains why German nationalism remains a problematic movement.

A brief aside on the question of what identity is and how it is formed is in order. Identity is above all being and time; we do not need to consult Heidegger on this point, for St Augustine explained it a millennium and a half before him in Confessions XI. The durability of biblical identity stems in part from the fact that it anchors memory in time. “Revelation is the first thing to set its mark firmly into the middle of time; only after Revelation do we have an immovable Before and Afterward,” wrote Franz Rosenzweig. “Then there is a reckoning of time independent of the reckoner and the place of reckoning, valid for all the places of the world.” The peoples of the world look back in time, though innumerable conquests, migrations, and forced assimilations that stretch beyond all records and encounter not time, but “once upon a time,” in myth. America’s identity, like Israel’s, begins with an event. The peoples who imagine themselves to be the autochthonous sons of the soil find that memory dissipates into the mists of time.

That is a conundrum for the Christian world, which sees its spiritual origin at Golgotha but its ethnic origin in the impenetrable mists of the distant past. To be a whole person, the Christian must find a way to reconcile these two demarcations of memory. One solution is to embrace myth. C.S. Lewis argued that Christianity “is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i. e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call real things.”