Zionuts

[Loki]

Which means that any trace of "divine right of kings" in your attitude or make-up excludes the possibility of nationalism entirely. Which really isn't all that reasonable applied to the real world rather than theory models for academia. More importantly, you're talking about nationalism strictly as overt political ideology, but the topic was rather broader. You don't need to apply full rigorous modern nationalism to fit the topic that was raised. As Steely points out, your own claim in rebuttal to that topic was "the concept of national identity" didn't exist. It clearly did and is, in fact, a necessary precursor for nationalism to ever develop. It's not a chicken and egg problem, one clearly comes before the other in this case.

Yes, divine right of kings is inconsistent with nationalism. Sovereignty either comes from the people or it does not. Are we going to equate nationalism with "people who have a vague sense of being similar in some way"? That's identity in general. Are we going to consider tribes to be nations now? Or all states for that matter?

National identity does predate nationalism, but by decades, not millennia. That identity presupposed interaction between different parts of the nation, which didn't take place until the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution. It requires people to know national myths, which could only happen on a mass level after the printing press and a certain level of literacy. It requires people to identity as members of a certain nation (which is why ancient Greece wasn't a nation; people might have had some general sense of being Greek, but they identified with their city-state), which did not happen until the 19th century. Someone could literally be English one day and French the next (based on conquest) without even understanding what happened. The peasants frequently didn't even speak the language of their lords.

Meanwhile, nobles identified with their House. They might have had some residual loyalty to their king. But that's a loyalty based on dynastic ties, not nationalism.

I suspect this is definitional, but I'm not sure I follow all of your assertions here (e.g. that a printing press or literacy is required for national identity, or that tradition or religion can't also be part of a national identity). Since this is Zionuts, do you really think that the Bar Kochba rebellion wasn't in the interests of re-establishing a Judean nation with self-determination? How is that not a national identity? And that was back in the 2nd century.

What made that revolt different to the ones carried out by various tribes of barbarians subjugated by the Romans? No one likes being oppressed.