Decolonizing the Jew: An Old Erasure in New Language
The Enlightenment radically changed the way Jewish identity was understood. Previously, Jews often lived as a separate, self-governing people, with their own courts, communal structures, languages, customs, and collective sense of nationhood. But modern European states offered Jews a new bargain: equal citizenship in exchange for giving up their status as a distinct nation within the nation.
In 1789, the French liberal thinker Stanislas Clermont Tonnerre captured this shift when he declared, “To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to Jews as individuals, everything.” Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) helped make this transition possible by presenting Judaism as a private faith rather than a national identity.
The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment (~1770-1881), deepened this transformation by encouraging Jews to learn European languages, dress like their neighbors, study secular subjects, and integrate into broader society. Reform Judaism (and the other new Jewish denominations) emerged from this new world, reshaping prayer, synagogue life, and tradition to fit modern European expectations. This change brought real opportunity, including rights, education, and citizenship. But it also came at a cost. Jewish peoplehood was narrowed into personal belief, and a once collective national identity was recast as a private religious choice.
In America, Jewishness was similarly reframed by Jewish thinkers such as Will Herberg (1901-1977) as religion, comparable to Protestantism or Catholicism, thereby affirming that political loyalty was expected to belong first to the state.
A similar narrowing happens today when “decolonial” language is misapplied to the State of Israel. At its best, decolonial thought challenges the erasure of indigenous peoples by expansionist empires. But when it treats Jewish identity as merely a religion, not only does it ignore Jewish indigeneity and Jewish exile from the ancient Jewish homeland, it repeats the very Enlightenment framework that forced Jews to shrink themselves into private belief in order to survive their minority status in the diaspora. It assumes that Judaism is only one facet of a person’s identity, like a denomination or spiritual preference, rather than a civilizational, ancestral, cultural, linguistic, legal, and historical identity.
That mistake matters. If Jews are only a religious group, then Zionism can be misread as a political opinion that some Jews happen to hold. But if Jews are a people (the very translation of Am Yisrael), then Zionism is something deeper: an expression of Jewish peoplehood, national memory, and collective self-determination. It is not simply a policy preference. It is a modern articulation of an ancient bond between a people and a shared destiny in their land.
This does not mean every Jewish person must hold the same views about Israel’s government, borders, policies, or future. Like every national movement, Zionism contains dissent and moral responsibility. But reducing Zionism to an optional ideology, detached from Jewish identity, misunderstands Jewish identity. It treats Jewish peoplehood as an excess claim, something illegitimate or invented, when in fact it is one of the oldest continuous national identities in the world.
In that sense, contemporary anti-Zionist frameworks do not escape European categories. They inherit them. They accept the Enlightenment demand that Jews may be tolerated as individuals, and perhaps respected as a religion, but not recognized as a community with national rights. The old bargain reappears in new language: to Jews as a religion, perhaps everything; to Jews as a nation, nothing.
A more honest framework would allow Jewish identity to be as whole as other identities are allowed to be. It would recognize Jews not only as practitioners of a faith, but as a people with history, land, memory, exile, return, trauma, culture, and collective agency. Only then can conversations about Israel, Palestine, justice, and peace begin from reality rather than from a diminished version of Jewish existence.
