How many pre Enlightenment people of any Abrahamic religion were particularly secular? The reason that you didn’t really have non practicing Jews is that you didn’t really have people who didn’t practice a religion. If a Jewish person stopped practicing Judaism, it was almost always to practice something else, not to become secular. About the only proto-secular pre-Haskalah Jewish thinker I can think of is Baruch Spinoza, but that’s on the cusp of the Haskalah movement. He didn’t stop being Jewish, even though his community cut him off.
There are plenty of secular Jews multiple generations down the line who have little or nothing to do with Israel. Some of them are on this very message board. That change in Judaism had nothing to do with the creation of Israel, it has to do with the fact that Judaism underwent a similar process to Christianity’s Enlightenment, called the Haskalah, which made many sects of Judaism more tolerant and less fundamentalist.
Why? That would place German/Eastern European Jews in a weird place over Jews from elsewhere in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
I think we’re talking past each other. The point I’m trying to make there has nothing to do with secularism. I’m saying that since Jews live all over the world, speak a wide variety of languages, and include members of all racial groups, it doesn’t make sense to speak of us as an ethnic group. Like America, we are a nation, but not an ethnicity.
I suppose you could argue that “Israeli” is at least evolving into a unique ethnicity, but that’s a modern phenomenon that doesn’t include all Jews.
You are a member of the nation, or tribe if you prefer. There are many other Jews who live in different parts of the world from you, who you have no language or recipes in common with, with whom you are united only by the fact that at some point in the past your ancestors practiced the same religion. I don’t think it’s a crucial point, but I do think that calling the Jewish people an “ethnicity” is stretching that word well beyond its usual meaning.
The reason that Jews didn’t become secular Jews in the past, and instead if they stopped practicing Judaism they stopped being Jews, is that at that time becoming secular wasn’t really seen as an option, so the only people who stopped being practicing Jews were people who became practicing Christians, or Muslims.
The reason that Jews now can stop practicing without no longer being Jews is that secularism now exists.
Ethnic groups are social constructs. The social construct of “Jewishness” is very dissimilar to the social construct of “Americaness”.
Jews of different races who live in different places and speak different languages belong to different Kehilot (communities) like Ashkenazis, Sephardim, Mizrachim, Beta Israel, and so on; these different communities make up the ethnic group of Jewish people. Yes, it’s a very diverse ethnic group. It’s still an ethnic group.
Israeli is a unique nationality; there are many Kehilot within that nationality, and multiple ethnicities too.
Israel has a unique culture that’s formed out of the blend of different Kehilot and the local Israeli experience, you could call it “Sabra” if you needed to differentiate it from “Israeli”.
Not to get deeply involved in this pit thread hijack, but as a Jew, I never once considered my feelings of Jewishness to be connected to nationality (or even that that was something I should consider). To be fair, ethnicity and nationality can have some overlapping definitions, but the claim that Jewishness is a nationality and NOT an ethnicity seems like a stretch.
This is a little where I run into trouble with what you’re saying. We are definitionally dealing with a modern notion of identity when we’re talking about people alive today. Some folks alive today draw from newer schools of thought about identity composition, and some folks draw from older traditions. Some folks have really clear rubrics for membership in an identity, and others are much looser.
There is no external perspective from which we may regard these competing ways of forming identity and declaring one method more valid than another. Any position we take on the subject is necessarily subjective.
So, when someone declares that a trans woman is bad at being a woman, or declares the same thing about a butch woman, or insists that real men don’t eat quiche, or declares that Catholics aren’t real Christians, or that Jim Bakker wasn’t a true Christian, or declares that Obama or Harris aren’t really Black, or that real science fiction fans hate Star Wars or love Star Wars, or that early Zionists were bad at being Jewish, or that no true Scotman sugars his porridge, I reject the argument.
There’s no way to gatekeep identity that holds water. The closest you can come is to say, “Here’s how I define this specific identity, and by my own rubric, so-and-so doesn’t qualify; but I understand that there are other rubrics out there for the same identity, and obviously they qualify by their own rubric.”
Which is admittedly a lot less satisfying to say; the only advantage it holds over the gatekeeping is that it’s accurate.
Maybe this is the difference… I don’t feel like my sense of identity (or that of my Jewish community) is based on premodern notions. Claiming that the “premodern” notion is what ought to hold water for folks today in this particular instance but not other instances (like, what about premodern notions of freedom, of governance, of family, etc etc) seems like an approach that is going to run into a lot of problems.
Yeah, though I think I might modify that to “a relatively narrow criterion of ethnicity which differs markedly from modern perceptions of ‘multi-ethnic’ identities”.
Kind of like Native American tribal membership qualifications. Most modern NA tribe members, like most Ashkenazi Jews, have significant amounts of other ancestry, but as far as the national/tribal identity is concerned, it doesn’t make you “less” identified in any formal way.
Which is different from how many people nowadays think about “mixed” ethnic heritage—“I’m half French-Canadian and a quarter Mexican and an eighth each Norwegian and German”, that sort of thing—where the mixture is perceived as having a sort of automatic diluting or diversifying effect on the primary identity, whichever that is.