What is the Torah's view on Nationalism?

Last updated 07 Jun 2026 • 14 min read

The Torah Does Not Oppose a Jew's Love for His People — It Opposes the Replacement of Covenant With Nationhood. Klal Yisrael Is Not a Nation Like the Nations, Bound by Land, Language, and Shared History; It Is a Nation Constituted at Sinai by Torah. Secular Zionism's Foundational Move Was to Reverse This — to Make the Jews "a Nation Like All the Nations." That Reversal, Not the Love of One's People, Is What the Torah Rejects

To understand the Torah's view of nationalism, we must first define the term precisely — because the word is used loosely, and the looseness obscures what is actually at stake.

Nationalism, as the term developed in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, is the doctrine that a people's identity, value, and destiny are rooted primarily in their nationhood — in shared language, shared land, shared culture, shared history — and that national self-determination, expressed through the sovereign nation-state, is the highest political goal of a people. The doctrine had liberating effects for some oppressed peoples; it also produced, in the same two centuries, imperialism, the World Wars, and the totalitarian nation-states whose nationalism became a substitute religion.

Secular Zionism adopted this European framework and applied it to the Jews. Its foundational move was to redefine Jewish identity in national rather than covenantal terms — to transform the Jews from a holy nation defined by Torah into a normal nation defined by land, language, and political sovereignty like every other nation. This was not incidental to secular Zionism; it was its explicit, stated program. The early secular Zionist thinkers were clear that they sought to normalize the Jewish people — to make the Jews a nation like all the nations, with a state like all the states.

And that reversal is the crux of the Torah's objection. The Torah does not oppose a Jew's love for his people — that love is assumed and even commanded. What the Torah rejects is the replacement of the covenantal definition of Jewish peoplehood with the national one. We work through the framework below — without repeating the related material we have developed in our articles on the mitzvah of living in Eretz Yisrael and on the Source-vs-Vessel distinction, both of which address adjacent questions. This article addresses the specific question of nationalism as an ideology and its relationship to Torah.

I. The Torah's Definition of a Nation

The Torah constitutes Klal Yisrael as a nation — but it does so on a foundation that no other nation shares. At Har Sinai, before the giving of the Torah, Hashem defines what kind of nation Israel is to be (Shemos 19:5–6):

"V'atem tihyu li segulah mikol ha'amim ki li kol ha'aretz. V'atem tihyu li mamleches kohanim v'goy kadosh."

"You shall be to Me a treasured possession from among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

The defining terms are mamleches kohanim (a kingdom of priests) and goy kadosh (a holy nation). Israel's nationhood is constituted not by soil, sovereignty, or shared ethnicity, but by its relationship to Hashem and its acceptance of the Torah. The very next chapters are the Aseres HaDibros and the body of the Torah's law — because the nationhood that Sinai constitutes is a nationhood of Torah.

This is not a homiletical flourish. It is a structural claim about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, and it was articulated with precision over a thousand years ago by one of the foundational figures of the entire Rabbinic mesorah.

Rav Saadia Gaon (882–942), the head of the academy of Sura and the first systematic philosopher of Rabbinic Judaism, wrote in his Emunos v'Deos (the Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Maamar 3) a sentence that has been quoted across the Torah world for eleven centuries:

"Ein umaseinu umah ela b'Toroseha."

"Our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torah."

This is the foundational statement of the Torah position on Jewish nationhood, and it is the precise inverse of the secular nationalist claim. Rav Saadia Gaon was not making a sentimental observation. He was making a structural claim: strip away the Torah, and the thing that remains is not a Jewish nation in some reduced form — it is not a Jewish nation at all. The Torah is not one feature of Jewish peoplehood among others; it is the constituting principle without which the peoplehood does not exist.

A Jewish people that becomes "a nation like the nations" — defined by land, language, and sovereignty rather than by Torah — has not become a secular version of the Jewish nation. By Rav Saadia Gaon's structural definition, it has ceased to be the Jewish nation in the defining sense, retaining only the outer shell of shared ancestry and geography. This is what the Torah objects to in secular nationalism: not the love of one's people, but the hollowing-out of what the people fundamentally is.

II. We Were a Nation Before We Had a Land

The most powerful historical demonstration of the Torah's definition is the simple fact of Jewish history: Klal Yisrael became a nation before it possessed a land, and remained the same nation after it was exiled from the land.

The Jewish people were constituted as a nation at Har Sinai (year 2448), in the wilderness, with no land, no sovereignty, no army, and no state. The nationhood was complete at the moment of kabbalas haTorah — the acceptance of the Torah — and was not increased by the subsequent conquest of the Land under Yehoshua, nor by the establishment of the monarchy under Shaul and David, nor decreased by the destruction of the two Batei Mikdash and the two exiles.

For most of its history, the Jewish nation has existed without political sovereignty over its land — through the Babylonian exile, through the long galus after the Churban, through nearly two thousand years in which the Jewish people maintained its complete national identity across dozens of host countries, in dozens of languages, under every form of foreign rule, with no state and no sovereignty whatsoever. And it remained, throughout, fully and completely the Jewish nation — because its nationhood was never grounded in land or sovereignty in the first place. It was grounded in Torah, which the Jews carried with them everywhere.

This is the empirical refutation of the nationalist framework as applied to Jews. The nationalist claim is that a people's identity is grounded in land, language, and sovereignty. The Jewish historical record demonstrates the opposite: the Jews maintained complete national identity for two millennia without land, without a single shared vernacular (Jews spoke Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and dozens of other languages), and without sovereignty. What they maintained throughout was Torah. The Torah was, in the Maharal's framing and Rav Saadia Gaon's structural claim, the actual homeland of the Jewish people — the territory within which the nation lived, regardless of which physical country housed their bodies.

III. Nationalism as a Substitute for Malchus Shamayim

The deeper danger that the Torah identifies in nationalism is its tendency to become a substitute religion — to elevate the nation and the state to the place properly occupied by Hashem.

This is not a uniquely Jewish concern; it is visible across the history of modern nationalism, where the nation-state became an object of quasi-religious devotion, with its flags, anthems, founding myths, and martyrs functioning as a secular liturgy. When applied to the Jewish people, this substitution is not merely a political error — it is a displacement of malchus Shamayim, the sovereignty of Heaven, by the sovereignty of the nation.

Rav Elchonon Wasserman Hy"d (1874–1941), the foremost talmid of the Chofetz Chaim, analyzed secular Zionism in precisely these terms in his Kovetz Maamarim and Ikvesa D'Meshicha. His framework: secular Zionism represented a form of rebellion against the malchus (sovereignty) of Hashem — the desire of the Jewish people to throw off the "yoke" of being Hashem's servants and instead to be "free men" who determine for themselves what is moral and what is not, what is permitted and what is forbidden, on the model of the surrounding nations. The essence of the rebellion, in Rav Elchonon's analysis, was the substitution of national self-determination for submission to Hashem's Torah. The Jew, in the secular nationalist framework, is no longer Hashem's servant bound by His commandments; he is an autonomous national citizen who decides his own values.

The Satmar Rav, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum zt"l (1887–1979), developed the most systematic Charedi critique of secular Zionism in Vayoel Moshe and in his later Al HaGeulah V'Al HaTemurah. His framework: secular nationalism seeks to replace the Jewish people's complete dependence on Hashem with pride in human power and political sovereignty. The desire to be "a nation like all the nations" — which the secular Zionists openly proclaimed — is, in the Satmar Rav's analysis, itself a profound rejection of the Jewish people's defining role, which is precisely to not be a nation like all the nations, but to be Hashem's am segulah, His treasured and distinct people. To aspire to normalcy, to ordinariness among the nations, is to aspire to the negation of the very thing that makes Israel Israel.

These critiques are not marginal. They represent the mainstream Charedi analysis of secular nationalism across both the Lithuanian and Chassidic worlds — that nationalism, as an identity-defining ideology detached from Torah, displaces the sovereignty of Heaven and substitutes the worship of the nation for the service of Hashem.

IV. When the Nation Becomes the Ikkar

The sharpest formulation of the Torah objection comes from the Brisker tradition.

Rav Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk (1853–1918) is widely quoted in the Brisker tradition as having framed the dispute with Religious Zionism in terms of ikkar and tofel — the primary and the secondary. The Religious Zionist position, in this framing, treats the Land and the national project as the ikkar (the primary thing) and Torah as the tofel (the secondary thing that supports it); the Brisker-Charedi position holds the reverse — Torah is the ikkar, and everything else, including the Land, is tofel relative to it. This is the precise structural inversion that the entire Charedi critique of nationalism turns on: the question of what occupies the center.

This is the same point Rav Saadia Gaon made eleven centuries earlier, applied to the modern dispute. If the nation is the ikkar and Torah is the tofel, then one has adopted the nationalist framework: the people is primary, and Torah is a cultural feature of the people. If Torah is the ikkar and the nation is the expression of it, then one has retained the Torah framework: Torah is primary, and Jewish nationhood is its embodiment. The whole dispute over nationalism reduces to this question of what is the center and what is the periphery.

Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach zt"l developed this consistently in his Michtavim u'Maamarim: Jewish national feeling is legitimate and even holy when it is in the full service of Torah — when the nation understands itself as the bearer of Torah and exists for the sake of Torah. But the moment nationalism becomes an independent value — the nation as an end in itself, detached from its Torah purpose — it becomes, in Rav Shach's framing, merely a Jewish-flavored clone of secular European nationalism, and more dangerous than the original precisely because it borrows the language of kedushah to clothe a secular idea. The danger of a nationalism that calls itself holy while emptying itself of Torah is greater than the danger of an openly secular nationalism, because it confuses the very Jews it claims to serve about what their Judaism actually is.

V. Avodah Zarah and the Worship of the Nation

This brings us to the most serious dimension of the Torah's objection, which must be stated with care.

When the nation becomes the ultimate object of devotion — when the highest loyalty, the deepest identity, the source of meaning and value, is the nation and the state rather than Hashem and His Torah — then the framework has crossed from politics into something approaching avodah zarah in its structural form. Avodah zarah, at its root, is the elevation of something created — whether a physical idol, a force of nature, or an abstraction — to the place that belongs to the Creator alone. A nationalism that makes the nation the ultimate value has placed the nation in the position that belongs to Hashem.

This must be stated with precision, because it is easily misunderstood. The point is not that every secular Zionist is an idol-worshipper in the conventional sense — the overwhelming majority are tinokos shenishbu, Jews raised without Torah who never chose the framework they inherited, as we have developed elsewhere in this series. The point is structural: the ideology of nationalism-as-ultimate-value occupies, in the architecture of a person's loyalties, the place that Torah Judaism reserves for Hashem alone. When a Jew's deepest identity is "I am an Israeli" or "I am a member of the Jewish nation" rather than "I am a servant of Hashem bound by His Torah," the ordering of ultimate loyalties has been inverted. The nation has become the ikkar; Hashem has become, at best, the tofel. That inversion is the spiritual danger that the Torah's objection to nationalism is fundamentally about.

VI. A Nation Without Torah Cannot Be Or LaGoyim

The early secular Zionists frequently claimed that the Jewish state would serve as a moral beacon — an or lagoyim, a light to the nations, exemplifying justice and ethics for the world. But the Torah's framework holds that there is no Jewish moral light independent of Torah.

The navi Yeshayahu defines the content of the light precisely (Yeshayahu 2:3):

"Ki mi'Tziyon teitzei Torah u'dvar Hashem mi'Yerushalayim."

"For from Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of Hashem from Yerushalayim."

The light that goes forth from Zion is Torah and the word of Hashem — not culture, not democracy, not technological achievement, not military prowess, not a particular political or ethical system derived from European liberalism. These may be admirable in various ways, but they are not the or lagoyim that the Jewish people exists to provide. Morality detached from Torah is not the Jewish light to the nations; it is the adoption of the nations' own frameworks, repackaged with Jewish branding. The Jewish people can only be a light to the nations by being what it actually is — the bearer of Torah — and offering the world the one thing the world cannot generate on its own: the revealed will of the Creator.

A Jewish nation that has emptied itself of Torah and filled itself with secular nationalism has nothing distinctive to offer the nations. It has become a small nation-state among many nation-states, with the same secular values as the others, distinguished only by its ethnicity and its geography. That is not a light to the nations. It is the precise negation of the role that or lagoyim describes.

VII. Loving One's People Is Not Nationalism

It is essential to be clear about what the Torah does not object to, because the critique of nationalism is frequently misheard as a critique of Jewish national feeling altogether. It is not.

The Torah assumes and commands love for one's fellow Jews. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh ba'zeh — all of Israel are responsible for one another. V'ahavta l'rei'acha kamocha — love your fellow as yourself. The mitzvah of ahavas Yisrael, the obligations of communal responsibility, the deep bonds of Jewish peoplehood — all of these are Torah values, not contradictions of Torah. A Jew is supposed to love Klal Yisrael, to feel bound to every other Jew, to rejoice in Jewish flourishing and grieve at Jewish suffering.

The Charedi world embodies this love intensely — in the vast networks of Jewish mutual aid, in the bonds of communal responsibility, in the love of every Jew as a brother that we have developed across this series. Charedim love Klal Yisrael. Charedim love Eretz Yisrael, daven for it three times daily, and build Torah communities throughout it. None of this is in question.

What the Torah rejects is the specific ideological move of nationalism — the elevation of nationhood to the status of an identity-defining, value-generating ultimate, detached from and substituting for Torah. The distinction is between loving one's people (a Torah value) and making the nation one's god (the nationalist error). One can love Klal Yisrael with one's whole heart while refusing to make the nation the ikkar. Indeed, the deepest love for Klal Yisrael is precisely the love that wants the nation to be what it truly is — Hashem's holy people — rather than a hollowed-out secular imitation of itself.

We do not hang flags in place of tefillin. We do not sing anthems in place of Tehillim. We do not locate our ultimate identity in citizenship rather than covenant. But this is not because we love our people less. It is because we understand what our people actually is — and we love it enough to refuse the substitution that would empty it of its soul.

VIII. The Closing Position

The Torah's view of nationalism is precise, and the precision matters.

The Torah does not oppose love for one's people. That love is a Torah value, commanded and embodied. The Torah opposes nationalism as an ideology — the doctrine that grounds Jewish identity, value, and destiny in nationhood (land, language, sovereignty) rather than in Torah, and that elevates the nation to the status of an ultimate value in the place properly occupied by Hashem.

Rav Saadia Gaon stated the principle eleven centuries ago: ein umaseinu umah ela b'Toroseha — our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torah. We were constituted as a nation at Sinai by accepting the Torah, before we had a land; we remained a nation for two thousand years of exile without land or sovereignty; and we will be redeemed as a nation not by political-national achievement but by return to the Torah that constitutes us. The Torah is the ikkar. The nation is its embodiment. Reverse that order — make the nation the ikkar and the Torah the tofel — and you have adopted secular nationalism, whatever language of kedushah you clothe it in.

Secular Zionism's foundational program was precisely this reversal — to make the Jews "a nation like all the nations." The Charedi world's refusal of that program is not a refusal to love the Jewish people or the Jewish land. It is the insistence that the Jewish people remain what Sinai made it: not a nation like the nations, but mamleches kohanim v'goy kadosh — a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, constituted by Torah, existing for Torah, and finding its destiny in Torah.

We stood together at Har Sinai and said "na'aseh v'nishma" — "we will do and we will hear" (Shemos 24:7). That is the moment our nationhood was born. Not a passport, not a flag, not a border, not an anthem — but the acceptance of the Torah from the hand of Hashem. That is what makes us a nation. And that is what we will return to, fully, when the geulah comes and all of Klal Yisrael recognizes that our only true nationhood was always the nationhood of Torah.

Sources

The Torah's definition of Jewish nationhood

Shemos 19:5–6 — "mamleches kohanim v'goy kadosh" — Israel constituted as a holy nation at Sinai
Shemos 24:7 — "na'aseh v'nishma" — the moment of national constitution through acceptance of Torah
Devarim 14:2 — "am kadosh atah la'Hashem… v'cha bachar Hashem lihyos lo l'am segulah"
Devarim 26:18–19 — the reciprocal designation of Israel as Hashem's treasured people

The foundational statement of nationhood-through-Torah

Rav Saadia Gaon, Emunos v'Deos (Book of Beliefs and Opinions), Maamar 3 (3:7) — "Ein umaseinu umah ela b'Toroseha" — "Our nation is only a nation by virtue of its Torah." (Rav Saadia Gaon, 882–942, head of the academy of Sura; the first systematic work of Rabbinic Jewish philosophy, completed 933)
The Maharal of Prague — the development of the concept of Israel's metaphysical distinctness from the nations (Netzach Yisrael, Gevuros Hashem)

The historical demonstration

The constitution of the nation at Sinai (year 2448) prior to entry into the Land
The maintenance of complete national identity across two millennia of exile without land, common vernacular, or sovereignty
Talmud Bavli, Shabbos 88a — the acceptance of Torah as the constituting national act

Nationalism as rebellion against malchus Shamayim

Rav Elchonon Wasserman Hy"d, Kovetz Maamarim and Ikvesa D'Meshicha — secular Zionism as the desire to throw off the yoke of Hashem's sovereignty and be "free men" who determine their own morality
The Chofetz Chaim's framework, as transmitted by Rav Elchonon

The Satmar critique

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (the Satmar Rav), Vayoel Moshe (Maamar Shalosh Shevuos; Maamar Yishuv Eretz Yisrael; Maamar Lashon HaKodesh) — the systematic Charedi-Chassidic critique
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, Al HaGeulah V'Al HaTemurah — the later work on geulah and the secular state; the analysis of "a nation like all the nations" as the negation of Israel's defining role
Note: the geulah material is in Al HaGeulah V'Al HaTemurah; Vayoel Moshe's three maamarim are Shalosh Shevuos, Yishuv Eretz Yisrael, and Lashon HaKodesh

The Brisker framework of ikkar and tofel

Rav Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk (1853–1918) — the widely-transmitted Brisker framing of the dispute with Religious Zionism in terms of ikkar (Torah) vs. tofel (the Land/national project)
The Brisker tradition's consistent anti-Zionist position through Rav Velvel (the Brisker Rav) and his sons

Rav Shach's framework

Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach zt"l, Michtavim u'Maamarim — Jewish nationalism as holy only in the full service of Torah; the greater danger of a secular nationalism clothed in the language of kedushah

The or lagoyim framework

Yeshayahu 2:3 — "Ki mi'Tziyon teitzei Torah u'dvar Hashem mi'Yerushalayim" — the content of the light is Torah
Yeshayahu 42:6 and 49:6 — "or goyim" — the navi's framing of Israel's role, understood in the Torah framework as the bearing of Torah and the knowledge of Hashem

Loving one's people as a Torah value (not nationalism)

Vayikra 19:18 — "V'ahavta l'rei'acha kamocha"
Talmud Bavli, Shevuos 39a — "kol Yisrael areivim zeh ba'zeh" — mutual responsibility
Sanhedrin 44a — "Yisrael af al pi shechata Yisrael hu" — the indissoluble bond of Jewish peoplehood
The framework of ahavas Yisrael as developed across the mussar and chassidic traditions

The structural relationship to other articles in this series

"Is It a Mitzvah to Live in Eretz Yisrael?" — the love of the Land within the Torah framework
"Yes, We See the Miracles, No the State Is Not the Geulah" — the Source vs. Vessel distinction
"How Does the Charedi World View Secular Jewish Leaders?" — the tinok shenishba framework for secular Jews
"Why Don't Charedim Support State Recognition of Reform or Conservative Judaism?" — the framework of Torah-defined Jewish identity