Ethnoreligions of the World, Unite!

Of Jews and Druze

These colors don’t run. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jews and Druze don’t just rhyme¹ and serve in the IDF together. They are examples of a phenomenon frequently misunderstood in the West: the ethnoreligious group. The West, for well over a thousand years, has been majority Christian. And at the foundation of Christianity is Pauline universalism: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Of course, Christianity never eliminated ethnicity, but it did, at least aspirationally, separate it from religion. In Augustinian terms, Christians owe their ultimate loyalty to the City of God, not the City of Man; spiritual Israel, not carnal Israel or any other worldly people. Islam, too, emphasizes the ummah (community of believers) over ethnic identity. Yet for much of human history, ethnoreligious groups, not universalist religions, have been the norm. Moreover, in practice, even nominally universalist religions are intimately tied to ethnicity. Therefore, while they are the minority in the Western and Islamic worlds, ethnoreligious groups point to a tension (put positively: dialectic) that exists in all religions. Ethnoreligious groups also share common values and interests that make solidarity—of the kind shown by Israel toward Syrian Druze threatened with massacre—natural.

In the ancient world, what we now call religion was simply one component of ethnic identity. For example, in his Histories (430 BCE), Herodotus defines Greekness as, in scholar Paula Fredriksen’s paraphrase: “common blood, common language, common customs, common cult.” Frederiksen notes that “in antiquity, different peoples had different gods, and people within the same genos or kin-group were therefore obligated, by birth and by blood, to worship the gods whose cults they had been born into.” The Jews stood out for worshipping only one ancestral god and refusing to recognize any others. But the Jewish merger of kinship and cultic practice was entirely within the norm. Accordingly, while Greeks and Romans sometimes criticized and persecuted Jews, they also largely respected them for their antiquity and fidelity to tradition. By contrast, Gentile Christians were viewed with scorn for abandoning their own patria nomima (“ancestral customs”) in favor of a novel cult. Notably, when Julian the Apostate sought to revert the Roman Empire to paganism in the 4th century CE, he viewed Jews as allies and even promised to rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.²

Ultimately, of course, Christianity proved victorious over paganism and its ethnoreligious pluralism. Islam, too, spread its universalist, homogenizing creed deep into Asia and Africa. But while Christianity and Islam led many peoples to abandon their ancestral gods, the new faiths could never fully take ethnicity’s place. In Eastern Christianity, national churches fulfill the religious function of an ethnoreligion. Thus the Greek, Russian, and Armenian peoples are intertwined with their respective Orthodoxies. Protestant countries like England, Sweden, and Finland have their own national churches as well. Roman Catholicism is more universalist, but still helps define Italian, Polish, and Irish identity, among others. In Sri Lanka and much of Southeast Asia, nationhood is linked with Theravada Buddhism, while Tibetan Buddhism (as well as the native Bon religion) is integral to Tibet. Islam, of course, was largely spread by the sword of an ethnically Arab empire. Through conversion to an Arab religion and adoption of the Arabic language, once-distinct Levantine and North African peoples have been ethnically Arabized as well. Yet the leadership position in Islam has itself been a source of ethnic rivalry between Arabs, Persians, and Turks. Notably, Iran adopted Shi’ite Islam as a state religion in 1501 CE, so the Islamic world’s Sunni/Shi’ite divide also has a strong ethnic dimension.

Despite their own interweaving of ethnicity and religion, Judaism’s ethnoreligious status often confuses adherents of universalist faiths.³ Politically, anti-Zionists adopt ethnoreligious denialism as a political weapon. If Judaism is only a religion, then Jews are just a bunch of ethnic Poles and Russians who colonized Palestine.⁴ But if Judaism is the religion of an ethnicity rooted in Judea (which was later renamed Palestine), then colonization starts to look more like re-indigenization. And indeed, long before Christianity or Islam ever existed, neighboring peoples recognized Judaism as exactly that. By contrast, the attempt to reduce Jewish identity to religion only dates back to the French Revolution, when Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously said, “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.”⁵ Euphemistically, German Jewish assimilationists called themselves “Germans of the Mosaic faith,” but antisemites didn’t buy their attempt to sever religion from ethnicity. Modern Zionism was born from a recognition of assimilation’s failure by one of its epitomes, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl.

During Israel’s War of Independence, the Jews formed a brit damim (“covenant of blood”) with a fellow ethnoreligious group in the Holy Land: the Druze, whose other population centers are Syria and Lebanon. The Druze are patriotic members of Israeli society and have fought and died in the Jewish state’s wars. Accordingly, when Druze in Syria were attacked by the country’s new Islamist-oriented regime, Israeli Druze asked that Israel intervene. Israel’s subsequent military actions are, then, the extension of Zionism into an ethnoreligious mutual protection pact. Despite the entreaties of some Druze, Israel is unlikely to annex Syrian territory and become a de facto Jewish-Druze binational state.⁶ The vast majority in the Middle East is Arab and Muslim, which means the region’s minorities (including, ultimately, Israeli Jews) must accommodate themselves accordingly. Still, there are natural ties that bind not just Jews and Druze, but all ethnoreligious groups. That includes Middle Eastern Christians like the Maronites, Copts, and Assyrians, who are de facto ethnoreligious groups in a region where non-Muslim proselytizing is long forbidden. Notably, a group of Israeli Christians has been officially recognized as Aramean by nationality and seeks to revive their ancestral Aramaic language—a sort of mini-Zionism within Zionism.

Ethnoreligious groups don’t seek to convert the rest of the world, but they still uphold universalist visions. It’s just that these visions accept human difference as a given. According to the monist tradition in Hinduism, the world’s largest ethnic religion: “Truth is One, though the sages know it variously.”⁷ In Judaism, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come.” For the Druze, “The various paths, means, and lights are one path and light from the sun of the One Truth and of the One Real, the Single and Eternal.” By their very nature, ethnoreligions also share common values, including: religion considered as a way of life, not just a faith proposition; respect for ancestral traditions with a concomitant recognition of individualism’s limits; and a lack of missionary zeal that readily translates to mutual tolerance. These shared values don’t collapse the substantive distinctions between monotheistic Judaism and henotheistic Hinduism, gnostic Mandaeism and animistic Shintoism, or pre-Islamic Yazidism and post-Islamic Druzism. But they create the basis for a common defensive front—and, in certain cases, a covenant of blood.

1. Unfortunately, the alternative spelling “Juze” has not caught on.

2. Julian subscribed to a Neoplatonist, religiously syncretic worldview, writing that “these Jews are in part god-fearing, seeing that they revere a god who is truly most powerful and most good and governs this world of sense, and, as I well know, is worshipped by us also under other names.”

3. “Hebrew” has sometimes served as a separate Jewish ethnonym, though it’s considered archaic in English. (Russian still distinguishes between Yevrey, ethnic Jews, and Iudey, religious Jews, as do some other languages.) A small group of Zionists sought to create a non-Jewish Hebrew, so-called Canaanite, culture in the Holy Land. However, their attempt to completely sever religion from nationality was ahistorical and so doomed to failure.

Of course, the first Christians were ethnically, and, by their own self-understanding, religiously Jewish. Paul called himself “of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews.” The Knanaya of India, an endogamous Christian ethnoreligious group, descend from ethnically Jewish Christians. Today, there is a small Hebrew Catholics movement in Israel, though per the Brother Daniel case, conversion to another religion makes Jews ineligible for aliyah.

4. The largest group of Israeli Jews descend from Middle Eastern refugees. But the logical corollary of ethnoreligious denialism—that Israel is majority Arab—doesn’t exactly fit the settler-colonial narrative.

5. By implication then, Jews were already considered a nation.

6. Although perhaps, per Daniel Clarke-Serret’s suggestion, Israel could extend the right of return to persecuted Druze. There’s also a case to be made for Israel to provide refuge to the persecuted Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, who descend from Jewish sectarians.

7. Like Judaism (from Yehuda, later rendered as Judah and Judea), the term Hinduism derives from a geographic and ethnic designation: the land and people beyond the Indus River. It is a broad descriptor for the indigenous religious traditions of India, though Hinduism is also practiced by the Balinese and Cham in Southeast Asia.