I think you expressed the opposite sentiment about what nationalism meant some time ago. You claimed it was the view that your fellow-nationalists were automatically compatriots.
I'm not sure what you mean? "Compatriot" just means "co-national", and while I guess the derivation from
patrie might additionally imply some sort of kinship, there's no reason to think that it expresses anything more than a very loose fictive kinship.
I doubt that very much. Jews saw their exile as a collective one, and believed that when the end times came sovereignty would revert to Israel (i.e. the people). Perhaps the above could describe the relationship between assimilationists and Orthodox, but never between Jews of different stock or language. The only such claims are made by nationalists who wanted to claim their Jews as Polish/Arab/German/whatever.
Even when resisting assimilation, Orthodox Jews always frame it as a way of abandoning the Jewish people, and wanting to become "like all other nations."
You're conflating community and collectivity, I think, playing on the fact that pre-1948 Jews didn't always make these distinctions explicit. Pre-modern Jews certainly had a much more developed sense of collective self-identity than most peoples, and that self-identity evidently lent itself well to the development of a national conciousness (particularly when supplied with an attendant state), but it doesn't follow that the identity was a national identity to begin with, or even a national identity-in-waiting. There was nothing inevitable about the ascendency of a Zionist national identification among global Jewry.
I mean, it would be a hell of a thing if the Jews had developed a modern bourgeois national self-conception in the iron age, when it took everybody else until the eighteenth century to produce even a rough sketch? You'd think that somebody would have noticed.
There is no difference between being of Jewish descent and of Hebrew descent. However, preferring Hebrew over 'Jewish' is a way to fight antisemitism; No one can deny the influence of Biblical Israel on Western arts and philosophy (through religion) so by calling Jews Hebrews instead, one can be made accutely aware that being antisemitic is tantamount to attempting to destroy the foundations of Western civilisation.
That's the trick, though, that to call oneself is "Hebrew" is to invoke the ancient Levant rather than any contemporary or recent Jewish experience. To say that you're a Hebrew might literally read as saying that you are a Jew, but by emphasising ancient rather than immediate ancestry, it creates a certain distance from that identity. It's by no means a rejection of one's Jewishness, but it can place a certain qualifying inflection on one's identification with it.
That might not have been true at all times - certainly, I imagine that the early Zionists would have regarded the difference between a Polish Jew and an Egyptian Jew in the same way as German nationalists would have regarded a German living in 'France' and one living in 'Denmark' (quotation marks, of course, because they would have thought of both as living in 'Germany').
Yes, but Zionists were by definition nationalists, so that they saw Jewishness in national terms doesn't mean that they were representative of Jews. Certainly the Bund were very sceptical of any idea of global Jewish nationhood, identifying their Jewish explicitly with the Yiddish-speaking Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe.
Besides, I'm not sure if early Zionists would think like that, because early Zionism was self-consciously a nation-building project as much as or even more than a project of national unification. That's why modern Hebrew became such a touchstone for them, it represented a way of superseding the linguistic diversity of actual Jewish life and creating a new Hebrew-language civic space: literally, creating a Hebrew nation. The early Zionist intellectuals were quite sophisticated people, not just Jews who wanted a Wagnerian mythology of their own, and they understood better than their ideological descendants that nationhood and national being is shot through with complexities that don't always fit easy national narratives.
