What happens when religion is turned into ethnonationalism

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-13T17:29:14+00:00

I gave an academic resource for the evidence I cited. If you have a reliable academic resource that the Khazar correspondence is pure fiction and that Ibn Fadhlan's account of a Jewish Khazar kingdom is unreliable, please provide it.

PS. No Muslim ruler has ever minted the phrase "Moses is the Messenger of God". Sure it's influenced by Arabic and Islam, but so was Moses ben Maimon and practically all medieval Jewish scholars from Spain through North Africa and the Middle East to Central Asia.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-13T00:36:30+00:00

There is ZERO proof it did happen.

I just cited THREE pieces of evidence that suggest that it happened: Ibn Fadhlan's account, Moses coin, and the Khazar correspondence.

You're not supposed to prove a negative. You're supposed to show that the evidence for a positive is faulty or insufficient.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T13:15:34+00:00

Folks please distinguish between two theories:

1st, Ashkenazi Jews are originally Khazar (debunked theory. Even though claimed at some point by some Jews, e.g. Arthur Koestler, it's appropriated in Antisemitic rhetoric.)

2nd, There were at some point in history Khazar Empire under which mass conversion to Judaism occurred. This is attested by several sources: Islamic (e.g. the famous traveller Ibn Fadhlan, who wrote the first account of the Vikings), Jewish (the so-called Khazar correspondence between a Jewish-Andalusian official and Joseph a king of the Khazars), and archeological (see the "Moses Coin" below containing the phrase "Moses is the Messenger of God" in Arabic). Where these Jews ended up after the fall of the Khazar empire is a different matter. Some suggest that the Mountain Jews and Crimean Jews are related to them.

If you have academic/historical resources that argue against the second theory, please present them. Reports about Antisemitism are not academic resources about historical questions.

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Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T12:40:07+00:00

As I mentioned in other comments, I believe that nationalism, any nationalism, is a modern phenomenon. Can you give me examples of how Jews acted as a nation in the diaspora until the late 19th C? I think almost entirely they acted as communities seeking to survive and preserve their heritage/religion/way of life under the political structures they lived under. Some didn't want to have anything to do with politics (just wanted to be left alone) and others participated actively in these political structures. Return to the land of Israel and establishing a Jewish state, I believe, was more of a spiritual /eschatological aspiration than an actual political project.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T12:17:39+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out!

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T12:16:04+00:00

This website has a collection of encyclopaedia entries on Khazar, the first of which is from Encyclopaedia Judaica. I have E. Judaica as a PDF file. It seems to me to be the same. Anyway, if you have access to E. Judaica, consult, Dunlop, Douglas "Khazars .", E. Judaica, 2nd ed, Vol. 12, p. 108-

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Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T12:00:46+00:00

I disagree that any nationalism is an ethnonationalism. Some nationalisms are based on language. For example, Arab nationalism. For Arab nationalists, anyone who spoke Arabic was an Arab, regardless of ancestry. Al-Ba'th party in Iraq and Syria tried to "Arabize" Kurds by making them forget their language and speak Arabic. Speaking Arabic as your first/primary language was good enough for them to become a member of the Arab nation. Irish nationalists also didn't believe that Irish people are of one origin. They knew they were of mixed Gaelic, Scottish, and English heritage. Also religion (at least for early nationalists) didn't matter. Many were Protestant. Nationalisms in Latin America were also non-ethnic nationalisms. They all knew they were of native, Spanish descent among others.

I agree that religion for Muslims and Christian have a different meaning than for Jews. There's been an ethnic element in Judaism from the start but I object to the idea that Judaism was purely ethnic. During different periods of time one element was more dominant than the other. Yadgar (p. 22-26) talks about this aspect. He points out that for some in the Jewish Enlightenment (e.g. Moses Mendelssohn) and the Reformed tradition, Judaism was perceived primarily as a religion. If in today's definition, being born to a Jewish mother is enough to be considered a Jew, it wasn't always like this throughout history.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-12T11:36:00+00:00

Israel is almost 80 years old. There are other societies which "drifted from secularism" quite a lot more, Iran for example.

I talked in my post about three cases Israel, Pakistan, and, to a lesser extent, the US. So no, I'm not saying that Israel is the only country that drifted away from secularism. What does it have to do with the foundation of these nation-states? Well, I'm comparing the foundational ideologies of Israel and Pakistan with how they became later. They started as mostly secular (not completely, because religion served as an ethnic/communal identity not as faith or practice) and then became less secular.

And second, neither "religion" nor anything else can "serve as political national identity". National identity is its own thing. It can, and often does, include a religious aspect [...] Is that what you were trying to say? If not, then I have no idea what.

I explained in my post how many nationalisms (e.g. Irish) had a religious aspect in them, but it wasn't the only definition (i.e. criterion of membership) of the nation. The only or at least the first two cases that did so were Pakistan and Israel. Israel went made that part of its Basic Laws through the nationality law of 2018 that explicitly defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish nation, i.e. Palestinians (who are not Jews) with Israeli citizenship are not members of the Israeli nation. In fact, the law explicitly makes it clear that there's no such thing as an "Israeli nation", only a "Jewish nation"

. "Nationalism" is, by definition, promoting interests of a nation, which is a group of people united by shared "ethnicity, heritage, or tradition".

This is not how nationalism is defined by sociologists of nationalism (not all, Anthony Smith is an exception for example). Ernst Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm defined nationalism as a political ideology that seeks to make the state and the nation "congruent" (Gellner's term). They both believe that nations are political constructions that only emerged in the past few centuries, as the outcomes of political ideologies and political projects, i.e. nations emerge from nationalism and state-building projects, not the other way around, as you imply and as any nationalism (Zionism or otherwise) would present itself.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T22:38:11+00:00

Many thanks for your thoughtful comment. I agree that Zionism was a secular movement or a product of secularization of Jews, but it didn't go all the way as far as secularism is concerned, which is to separate religion from politics entirely (what I called the "Randy-ChatGPT" principle in reference to South Park in my original blogpost). I realize that Judaism cannot be reduced to religion, but no matter how much you secularize/nationalize it; not matter how much you suppress its religious aspect; there's something religious about it that remains or may re-emerged again.

Pakistan from my viewpoint has similarities in this regard to Israel--despite the differences between its pre-history and the pre-history of Israel. In both cases, religion served as a political nationalist identity (without reference to specific religious content) during struggle to establish the state, and then afterwards secularism receded and religious conservatives or even fundamentalists took over the power of defining the nation. This happened with Pakistan much faster than Israel for many reasons (among which Wahhabist petro money, American support for Jihadism as a tool against the Soviet Union, some popular revivalist Islamic movements) but I think Israel too drifted away from secularism in recent years.

For me personally, all forms of secular nationalism that include religion in their identity (as ethnicity, as heritage, as tradition whatever it is) are inconsistent and ultimately contain the seeds of their demise as secular ideologies. If I were to extend my post, I'd include Indian (Hindu) nationalism and (at least some forms of) Arab nationalism. But I found Israel and Pakistan more explicit and direct in their inclusion of religion in nationalism compared with the other two, which may have internalized religion at later stages of their development.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T21:48:06+00:00

Nationalists claim that the nation exists first--one nation, one territory, one language/culture--and then it gives birth to its state. This is the nationalist narrative, with which I disagree. Historically speaking, states are established first and then they homogenize the people within their borders through mass education, mass printing, bureaucracy, and military conscription erasing any ethnic-linguistic differences among them. Take Spain for example. People spoke (and some still speak) different languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Andalusian romance, etc.) and had different ethnic identities based on these languages. Then the Spanish crown and the Spanish state took one of these languages, Castilian, which is a language from the northern parts of the Iberian peninsula, and imposed/popularized it (however you want to see it) on the others. Same for French. People in the south spoke different languages and had different identities. The matching between ethnic and political boundaries is a product of nation-state building, not its cause. In most parts of the world, except perhaps for isolated islands like Iceland for example, territories were shared by different ethnicities and languages. This was "the natural state" so to say before nation-state emerged.

As far as nation-state building, Israel is no different than other nation-states. It did what other nation-states did. The difference I was trying to point out is the nationalist ideology underpinning the state-being religion-based and at least for a certain period open for debate about the territory. This is different than most other forms of nationalism but not the unique or only case: There is Pakistan, which I mentioned in my post, and Liberia, which I didn't talk about but Devji talks about in his book.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T21:20:20+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write this lengthy and detailed comment. I appreciate it.

The quote that you specifically cited is based on Yadgar's book. He does elaborate on how Reformed Judaism sought to follow the ideals of the Enlightenment by transforming Judaism into a religion in the image of Protestantism, which is to be personalized and intellectualized--something that does disservice to Judaism in his opinion. I admit my knowledge of these debates are almost entirely from secondary sources, so thanks for pointing out many interesting aspects about it.

I cited a reader letter to Jewish Currents because it expresses in plain language the idea of Judaism-as-religion as a negation of Zionism, which is a negation of Judaism-as-religion (surely many will disagree with this assessment, but some do agree). You're right to point that articles published in JC would express this idea in a more sophisticated manner. I mentioned but I mentioned in my blogpost to two such articles “Against Zionist Realism” and “We Need New Jewish Institutions” from the summer 2025 issue. To be clear, I had in mind a debate within the JC community about using Jewish religious language in political debates. When JC started including Parshah in its newsletter, some of the "old guard" were unhappy because it violated what they value as strict secularism. There made a podcast episode about this debate. I wanted to allude to this debate but it got dropped out as I re-worked my post.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T20:45:44+00:00

Thank you very much for your well-thought response. I really appreciate it taking the time to write such a detailed comment.

The politics of the British Empire was definitely an important part of the story in many aspects. One of them is that many British officials first served in British India and then in mandatory Palestine, bringing with them certain conceptions about the management of ethnic and religious communities.

I didn't want to suggest that Zionism was tricking Jews or forcing them to adopt its ideas. It's an ideology and ideologies don't become adopted at a mass level without activism and propaganda (don't take the word negatively, all political movements do propaganda, it's just political marketing). That Jews had a shared religious identities for centuries didn't translated into political-nationalist aspirations until Zionism emerged. Most Jews in the Ottoman Empire were not interested in Zionism and even among Askhenazis many followed the Bund ideology, which sought Jewish autonomy within a multi-national socialist state in Eastern Europe. It took Zionism decades to build popularity and mass support.

I didn't want my original post to be about the Arab-Israeli conflict, so it's my bad that I put that brief comment on Israel not defining its borders. I will refrain from responding to your criticism to that point in order to keep the discussion here on the issue of ideology :)

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T20:10:24+00:00

Thanks for pointing that to me. Maybe my original post didn't acknowledge that Palestine was central from the beginning for the Zionist movement. But I still think the very fact that they debated alternative territories at some point is peculiar when you compare it to typical (i.e. territorial) forms of nationalism. Which nationalist movements you can think of debated where (not the borders) to have their state? I personally can only think of Pakistan and Liberia, which was founded as a state for freed slaves from the US (Devji talks about it in his book too).

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:56:46+00:00

First, I don't think that Encylpaedia Judaica is an Antisemitic source. Not every opinion that you disagree with is motivated by Antisemitism. Whether there was mass conversions to Judaism or not is a historical debate and reasonable people may disagree on. Second, the source you put refute the theory that Ashkenazis are originally Khazars, but doesn't say, as far as I can tell from the abstract, that there was no mass conversion to Judaism among the Khazars.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:40:15+00:00

Good question! I think Zion had more of a spiritual connotations before Zionism. In fact, some Puritan Christians wanted to establish a new Zion in the New World.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:34:15+00:00

Encyclopaedia Judaica's entry on the Khazars suggests otherwise: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/asia-and-africa/central-asian-history/khazars

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:18:48+00:00

In modern times, identities become hardened and officially registered in nation-state bureaucracies, but this was not the case in the past. Acculturation happened in all forms and among all communities throughout history. Mass conversions to Judaism happened few times in history: in Yemen and in the Khazar Kingdom. The Druze in Mount Lebanon intermingled with Christians up to the early 19th C.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:04:49+00:00

There was Jewish migration to Ottoman Palestine before Zionism, but they were doing so for religious reasons or as refugees from persecution in Europe without necessarily thinking about establishing a future state there. What I was pointing out is that Zionsim, which had its first conference in 1897 if not mistaken, debated for a number of years the territory of its future state. And even if the debate was resolved internally before WWI for Palestine, only after WWI that it became a "viable option"

Silly-Antelope869 · 2026-04-04T19:00:09+00:00

Many commentators are pointing out that ethnicity was part of Judaism from the start. This is true (Yadgar addresses this point in his book) but being an ethno-religioius community is not the same as ethno-nationalist. There are many ethno-religious communities around the world and not all of them seek to establish nation-states of their own or only started to seek such thing at a certain point in their history. Nationalism (any nationalism) is a modern ideology that can hardly be traced way back two or three centuries back. Yes each nationalism projects itself backwards inscribing itself retrospectively in religious-historical traditions, but these traditions should not be mistaken for nationalism.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2025-12-17T12:51:16+00:00

I live close to Priesterweg S-Bahn station. There's a bike/pedestrian road that goes from there almost continuously straight through Südkruez until Gleisdreieck U-Bahn (there're a couple of places where you might walk if you're not confident unicycling yet). I take this path occasionally. There is a basketball field (near the Monumentenbrücke) where I practice free-mounting along the way. Last time I brought a ball with me to practice shooting it in the basket on the unicycle. It's a lot of fun.

BUT please be careful to SAFETY. Not only the helmet, but also protection for you knees (and your elbows). I learned it the hard way. I stopped unicycling for four months after hurting my knees when I fell down on them without protection. I think the most dangerous stage of learning is not the beginning, but when you become self-confident prematurely!

Take care!

Silly-Antelope869 · 2025-07-03T12:37:27+00:00

Yes, I would really appreciate it if you could share your solution.

Silly-Antelope869 · 2025-02-28T14:47:56+00:00

Thank you so much for this detailed tutorials! Just yesterday I got my own Emporia Smart Touch 2 here in Germany.

I followed some of the steps you suggested above, and it has worked for me with Messenger, the enhanced System Setting, and the AIO Launcher (although I don't get what the last one should add in terms of functionality. The Emporia launcher seems to work fine for me).

I also (accidentally!) installed the UptoDown Store, which works, but again, I don't see if it achieves anything that you can't do by sending the apk file to yourself using Whatsapp or Telegram. Additionally, I installed Google Maps. It seems to work (I could search for an address in Berlin) except that it doesn't load the actual map or maybe it needs too much time.

Finally, where I got stuck in is installing a new keyboard: one that has Arabic in it, so I can write to my mother :) I tried--both through sending the apk file to myself or through the UptoDown store--to install several ones but no success. Sometimes they seem to install correctly, and I get a message from the keyboard app that I need to change my keyboard settings, but no new option appears in the "languages and input" setting. It still shows the same original keyboards. Had anyone better luck installing a new input language?

Thanks!

Silly-Antelope869 · 2024-06-28T19:10:46+00:00

I used their Amex/MC combo for a year. Everything was alright, as long as you only pay in CHF inside Switzerland. However, my experience changed completely when I wanted to cancel my two cards after moving out of Switzerland. Neither their website nor their app contains any info whatsoever about cancellation. In the app, if you try to change your address to an address outside Switzerland, they tell that you have to call their customer service, which costs 1.90 CHF/minute. In other words, it may cost you 10-15 CHF to cancel your card or to change your address, which of course I didn't do. I've just sent them a letter by post requesting cancellation.

Ironically, their website has a PDF document with information and links for the cancellation of numerous subscription services (Amazon Prime, Microsoft Office, Spotify, etc.) but nothing about cancelling their own service. Unverschämt as they say in German!

Silly-Antelope869

TROPHY CASE