There is a recurring debate regarding whether Jews constitute a “race” or are “merely” the adherents of a religion.

However, Jewishness (I give preference to this term over “Judaism,” which evacuates the ethnic component) is more accurately described as an ethnoreligious tradition: religious covenant and historical peoplehood are interwoven in ways that make their complete separation extremely difficult.

The more interesting question, therefore, is not if Jews are a race or a religion, but what happens when the religious and ethnonational dimensions of Jewish identity tug in different directions? Which principle ultimately possesses the stronger power of mobilisation – theological orthodoxy or solidarity with the Jewish people as a historical collective? Metaphysical commitment or ethnic solidarity?

For example, Islam certainly recognises lineage, tribe, and nation as realities of human society, but it explicitly refuses to make descent the ultimate measure of religious worth:

O humankind! Indeed, We ave created [all of] you from a [single] male and female. Moreover, We have made you peoples and tribes, so that you may [come to] know one another. And, indeed, the noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the most God-fearing of you. Indeed, Allah is all-knowing, all-aware. (Qur’an, 49:13)

The Islamic ummah is therefore, at least normatively, constituted by confession and submission to God rather than common descent. A Senegalese Muslim, an Indonesian Muslim, a South Asian Muslim, and an Arab Muslim need not possess any genealogical relationship whatsoever in order to belong completely to the same religious community.

A People Back to Peoplehood

Classical Jewish identity operates differently. Jewishness can survive loss of belief and even the adoption of explicit atheism because membership in the Jewish people is not reducible to private theological conviction. In other words, Jewishness historically binds covenant to a particular people, so that categories that modernity tends to separate (religion, ancestry, law, collective history, and nation) remain structurally entangled. Much of this will sound mind-boggling to many Muslims – especially the idea that someone can reject the very existence of God and still be considered a Jew.

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible itself does not normally address Israel as an accidental collection of autonomous believers. Instead, it repeatedly addresses a corporate people: Exodus 19:5–6 combines covenantal obedience with collective election, as Israel is to become God’s “treasured possession among all the peoples” and “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Deuteronomy 7:6 similarly describes Israel as “a people consecrated to the LORD your God” and God’s “treasured people.”

Thus, the object of election is not simply an abstract doctrine. It is a people. Rabbinic literature develops the corporate dimension further. The famous principle of arvut (mutual responsibility, derived in Shevuot 39a, states that “all Israel are responsible for one another.” Later formulations describe Israel as “all a single body.”

Of course, none of these passages should simply be translated into nineteenth-century racial nationalism. That would be anachronistic. But they don’t fit comfortably into the modern liberal conception of religion as an essentially “voluntary association of individuals united only by personal belief.”

This helps explain why 1967 was so consequential. The Six-Day War wasn’t just another episode of Israeli military history. For large numbers of diaspora Jews, it compressed ancient religious memory, modern national identity, Holocaust memory, fear of collective catastrophe, and spectacular military victory into a single political event.

The Israeli capture of East Jerusalem and the Old City, including access to the Western Wall and Israeli control of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, possessed an obvious symbolic significance that the capture of an ordinary strategic position could never have possessed.

Even a secular Jew could understand what “Jerusalem” meant within the Jewish historical memory. A contemporary retrospective by Natan Sharansky, an Israeli politician who grew up assimilated in the Soviet Union with no knowledge of Jewish history or traditions, illustrates the point vividly. He recalled:

The Zionist idea gave me – and millions of others – a meaningful identity. In June 1967, when I was nineteen, the call from Jerusalem – ‘The Temple Mount is in Our Hands – penetrated the Iron Curtain. Democratic Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War… , inspired many of us all over the world to become active participants in Jewish history…Forging a mystical link with our people, we discovered identity, or as we call it “peoplehood.”

In public discourse, Zionism is often presented as fundamentally secular, while religious Judaism is associated with suspicion of Zionism or, sometimes, even opposition to it.

Historically, there is some basis for this depiction. Political Zionism emerged largely from secular European Jewish nationalism, while significant Orthodox currents rejected the attempt to restore Jewish sovereignty through human political action rather than messianic redemption. Yet 1967 profoundly complicated and, in some respects, inverted this relationship.

RELATED: The Conflict Between Traditional Judaism and Modern Zionism

The intellectual foundations had already been laid by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who interpreted even the secular Zionist project as an unwitting instrument of divine redemption. After the Six-Day War, however, his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook transformed this theology into a far more territorial and politically activist doctrine.

The conquest of East Jerusalem, the Old City, and the West Bank (understood by religious Zionists through the biblical geography of Jerusalem, “Judea and Samaria”) appeared to Kook’s disciples as empirical confirmation that the secular Israeli state and even its largely secular army could function as instruments of Providence.

This interpretation subsequently inspired the creation of Gush Emunim, founded by figures associated with the Merkaz HaRav milieu, for whom Jewish settlement of the territories conquered in 1967 became participation in an unfolding redemptive process.

The importance of the “Kookian revolution” is therefore not confined to an eccentric theological episode of the 1970s. Its political descendants remain significant within contemporary Israel. The infamous Bezalel Smotrich, a leading figure of the Religious Zionist Party, emerged from the religious-settler milieu and has been explicitly associated with the ideological legacy of Zvi Yehuda Kook. His party continues to advocate expanded Jewish settlement and a conception of the West Bank as part of the greater Land of Israel.

The (even more) infamous Itamar Ben-Gvir belongs to a somewhat different genealogy and should not be described simply as a Kookian. His most direct ideological lineage runs through Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Kahanist movement, though scholars have also situated figures such as Ben-Gvir within the broader national-religious educational environment historically shaped by Rav Kook.

RELATED: Rabbi Kahane: A Look into Unapologetic Jewish Supremacism and Terror

Secular Jews in the West Want to Become Hebrew

All of this is an illuminating framework for understanding a number of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual trajectories, as an important current of American Jewish intellectual life moved from left-wing ideologies, such as socialism, Trotskyism, or even Cold War liberalism, toward what became neoconservatism.

Irving Kristol is the paradigmatic case. He began politically as a Trotskyist and eventually became so closely associated with neoconservatism that he was routinely referred to as its “godfather.” Norman Podhoretz underwent a related transformation at Commentary, becoming increasingly hostile to the New Left and strongly supportive of Israel and an assertive American foreign policy. His own retrospective writing treated 1967 as a major dividing point, particularly because sections of the radical Left increasingly interpreted Israel through the vocabulary of imperialism and racism.

In a 2017 interview titled “Why American Jews Embraced Israel After the June 1967 War,” Norman Finkelstein, speaking to Aaron Maté, expands on the shift introduced by 1967 and mentions Podhoretz:

I, for example, at one point, went through the main Jewish periodicals during the period from Israel’s founding until 1967. There’s barely anything on Israel if you take the main socialist Jewish periodical that was really Jewish but socialist with Jewish editors, Dissent Magazine. People like Irving Howe who are very prominent American-Jewish intellectuals later became phonetically pro-Israel. Dissent was founded in ’54. Between ’54 and ’67, there are only three articles on Israel and Dissent. Of those three, one of them condemned Israel for the 1956 invasion of Egypt, the Sinai attack (…) Podhoretz comes to the helm of Commentary. Podhoretz also became a phonetical pro-Israel supporter after ’67. Now, he’s editor in chief of Commentary in 1960. It’s very interesting. I read through all the issues from ’60 to ’67. There’s barely any mention of Israel. Once in a while, you would have an article like “My son had a bar mitzvah in Israel”. It’s human interest stories, but very little having to do with the politics of Israel.

David Horowitz represents a later and more dramatic version of the “political apostasy.” He came from the New Left before eventually becoming an aggressive critic of the Left and a conservative activist. He then built a conservative network that would include the likes of Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Tommy Robinson (you may refer to the following Muslim Skeptic article for more details: “David Horowitz: Understanding Zionist Networking Through Ben Shapiro’s Mentor“).

You also have similar profiles in France, where questions of Jewish identity, republican universalism, immigration, Islam, and Israel became intertwined within a specifically French intellectual crisis.

The most famous example is probably that of Alain Finkielkraut, who emerged from the post-1968 intellectual left-liberal world but gradually became one of the most prominent critics of multiculturalism, mass immigration, contemporary progressive culture, and what he regards as sections of the Left’s indulgence toward antisemitism.

What, then, should we make of these apparent political “U-turns”? It does seem to demonstrate that Jewish ethnicity invariably triumphs over Jewish religion. A Jew could stop believing in God while continuing to view himself as historically Jewish; he could reject halakhic observance while remaining emotionally attached to Israel; and he could adopt universalist Marxism while retaining forms of collective memory that became politically salient when Israel appeared endangered or when the Left itself turned against Zionism.

In other words, secularisation could remove theology without necessarily dissolving the corporate identity historically produced by theology.

The secular Zionist may reject the commandments while preserving the biblical categories of people, land, exile, and return in nationalised form. The religious Zionist may then re-theologise precisely the same categories. The secular and religious Zionists can therefore disagree profoundly regarding God while nevertheless inhabiting overlapping narratives of Jewish history.

The Talmudic maxim that “all Israel are responsible for one another” likewise imagines obligations extending across the corporate body of Israel. Thus, the categories that modern Western discourse calls “religious” and “ethnic” are already intertwined at the textual level.

The paradox of Zionism is therefore that secularisation did not necessarily destroy the biblical political imagination. In some respects, it translated it. The power of 1967 lay precisely in this convergence, in the sense that a secular Israeli soldier, a diaspora Jew moved by ancestral memory, and a religious Jew interpreting events providentially could all look toward Jerusalem and give the same event radically different metaphysical meanings.

These Zionist intellectual profiles thus show us the difficulty in operating with dual propositions that we implicitly inherit from a secularized worldview.

RECALLED: Jews Leaving Israel for the Diaspora: Yerida and the Cannibalization of Zionism