If the “old” Jewish Question had asked how a Jew could be a citizen, the “new” one posed by Daniel Boyarin’s remarkable and courageous article asks how nationality can exist without a state. Striking about this formulation is the distance it marks from the European debates about emancipation and assimilation that had defined its predecessor. Boyarin’s context is not continental but imperial, taking into account Jews in colonized lands as much as the historical relationship between Europe and empire. As Hannah Arendt was the first to argue in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this relationship possessed an outward trajectory that went through anti-Semitism and an inward return by way of genocide.1

如果“旧的”犹太人问题是问犹太人如何成为公民，那么丹尼尔博亚林的非凡而勇敢的文章提出的“新”问题是问没有国家的民族如何存在。这一提法的突出之处在于它与欧洲关于解放和同化的辩论（定义了其前身）之间的距离。博亚林的背景不是大陆而是帝国，考虑到殖民土地上的犹太人以及欧洲与帝国之间的历史关系。正如汉娜·阿伦特在《极权主义的起源》中提出的第一个观点，这种关系的外向轨迹是反犹太主义，内向是种族灭绝。1