jurisdiction. A Jewish man in Alexandria could marry a Jewish woman in Antioch, but not his Christian neighbor. The Ottoman Empire continued this tradition, calling the communities millets (from an Arabic word for nation).
But when the modern national movements arose in Europe, and it appeared that the Jews had no place in them, the founders of the Zionist Movement decided that the Jews should constitute themselves as an independent nation and create a national state of their own. The religious-ethnic community was simply redefined as a nation, and thus a nation came into being that was also a religion, and a religion that was also a nation.
That was, of course, a fiction, but a necessary one for Zionism, which claimed Palestine for the Jewish "nation." In order to conduct a national struggle, there must be a nation.
However, two generations later, the fiction became reality. In Palestine a real nation, with a national reality and a national culture developed. Members of this nation considered themselves Jews, but Jews who are different in many respects from the other Jews in the world.
Before the creation of the State of Israel, and without a conscious decision being made, in everyday Hebrew parlance a distinction was made between "Hebrew" and "Jewish." One spoke of the "Hebrew Yishuv" (the new society in Palestine) and "Jewish religion," "Hebrew agriculture" and "Jewish tradition," "Hebrew worker" and "Jewish Diaspora," "Hebrew underground" and "Jewish Holocaust." When I was a boy, we demonstrated for Jewish immigration and a Hebrew state.
When Israel came into being, things became simpler. Every Israeli who is asked abroad about his national identity, answers automatically: "I am an Israeli." It would not enter his head to say "I am a Jew," unless specifically asked about his religion.
There is no contradiction between our being Israelis and Jews. Modern individuals are composed of different layers that do not cancel each other out. A person can be a man by gender, a vegetarian by inchnation, a Jew by religion, and an Israeli by national group. A woman in Brooklyn can be Jewish and American at one and the same timeJewish by origin and religion, belonging to the (US) American nation.
According to modern Western norms, a nation is defined by citizenship; indeed in many languages "nationality" does denote citizenship. All US citizens belong to the (US) American nation, whether they are by origin Scottish, Mexican, African, or Jewish. By religion, an American can be Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, or Evangelical. That has no bearing on belonging to the nation, which is a political collective.