>>24001735
When Herzel re-defined "Jewish" to include religious and non-religious; i.e. based upon birth or ethnicity rather than ideology / belief system.
Can be conpared to:
"American" defined by place of birth rather than to alligience to the American system of values an to the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, Theodor Herzl effectively redefined or reframed Jewish identity in a way that encompassed both religious and non-religious Jews under the same national/ethnic category. This was central to his political Zionism, as outlined in his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and his utopian novel Altneuland (1902).Herzl's View of Jews as a Nation, Not Just a ReligionHerzl, himself a secular and assimilated Jew with little personal attachment to religious practice, argued that the "Jewish question" was not primarily religious or social but national. He wrote: "We are a peopleโone people." Antisemitism persisted even against fully assimilated, non-religious Jews (as seen in the Dreyfus Affair), proving that Jews were treated as a distinct group regardless of faith. Assimilation had failed because Jews were seen as an alien "race" or nationality by others, even when they abandoned religious observance.He explicitly stated: "The Jewish question is no more a social than a religious oneโฆ It is a national question." This shifted Jewish identity from a purely religious community (as many Reform and Orthodox Jews viewed it) to a secular national/ethnic one, uniting observant Jews, cultural Jews, and completely non-religious Jews as part of the same "people" (Volk in German, implying ethnic/national ties).Secular Vision of the Jewish StateIn Altneuland, Herzl depicted a future Jewish state as secular and tolerant: religion was a private matter, with no state interference. He wrote that whether someone sought fulfillment "in the synagogue, in the church, in the mosque, in the art museum, or in a philharmonic concert, did not concern society. That was his [own] private affair." The state respected religion but did not require it; Jewish inhabitants were not envisioned as particularly religious.Herzl's Zionism was purely secular, based on ethnic/national identity rather than faith. He envisioned a modern, European-style liberal society for Jews as an ethnic/national group, where non-religious Jews were fully included alongside any who practiced Judaism.Influence and ContextThis framing was innovative and controversial: it appealed to secular Eastern European Jews facing pogroms and Western assimilated Jews facing antisemitism, but faced opposition from Orthodox Jews (who saw return to Zion as messianic) and assimilationists (who rejected nationalism). Herzl's approach helped lay the foundation for modern secular Jewish identity, where one can be Jewish ethnically/culturally/nationally without religious observance.While Herzl did not coin a single "definition" phrase like a dictionary entry, his writings and Zionist program explicitly categorized religious and non-religious Jews together as one nation deserving self-determination. This is widely recognized in historical accounts of Zionism.
>>24001665
No knowledge of our History, struggles, or Civics needed
EVEN TO BE ELECTED TO CONGRESS