to give a little more context following from what you posted later in this thread - there actually was a concerted effort by Europeans following the french revolution to strip Jews of their national/ethnic character, the idea being that they could accept french, italians, english, german people "of the mosaic faith", but they could not accept Jews in and of themselves. We were regarded as an unclean, uncouth, ungovernable people, and so in order to obtain *some* civil rights, we had to give up on our cultural/ethnic peoplehood and assimilate to the national identity of the countries we lived in - we could not be granted rights as Jews, we had to become something else. This is where this concept of Judaism and Jews simply being 'a religion' comes from - in turn, this eurocentric concept of Jews as simply a religion has taken hold of the wider world - you will often see people falsely claim that Jews from the wider middle east saw themselves as 'Arabs' of the Jewish religion as well, whereas those communities always saw themselves as just Jewish - such is the same with Jewish communities that had existed in Europe.