Jewish religious symbols were harnessed because no modern common Jewish culture existed
Evidence
Originally, Zionist ideology was an endeavor to reinvent Jewish nationhood as a new secular identity. However, as Shafir and Peled (2002) argue, for Zionism, “the need to rely on primordial factors for legitimation and mobilization was particularly acute, since there was no modern culture common to all Jews.” Among other things, this dictated “the use of a whole array of Jewish religious symbols and other cultural constructs” (Shafir and Peled 2002, 149). Israel, moreover, adopted a Jewish nationality as a way to secure the boundaries and membership of the nation while precluding the formation of an Israeli nation that might have included the Arab minority – those Palestinians who stayed in what became Israel following the 1948 War. In this Zionist nation-building context, religion served as the ideological equivalent to ethnicity (Ram 2008, 61). — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 850
Categorization
- XREF: Strongly connects to the reader’s core research: this grounds the manufactured-enemy argument — sacred identity is invoked instrumentally to bind a nation lacking a common modern culture, exactly the constructed-external-cohesion dynamic under study. — connects to: Zionism countered the earlier invention of Judaism as a religion — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 748; Romantic-era cults of authenticity branded assimilated Jews as inherently inauthentic — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1659; Jewishness was transposed from a nation’s religion into a national religion — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 836
- SEED: The point that a nationalist project reaches for primordial/sacred identity BECAUSE no common modern culture exists is a generalizable mechanism worth an essay on nationalism as manufactured primordialism.
Broader Connections
- Zionism countered the earlier invention of Judaism as a religion
#expands(0.75) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 748 - Romantic-era cults of authenticity branded assimilated Jews as inherently inauthentic
#complicates(0.75) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1659