ABSTRACT
This last section of the book concludes that unlike many of the theories that introduced nationalism as the secular substitute of declining religiosity, there was a solid symbiosis between the two concepts. As demonstrated in Part I of the book, Pietism, and later-on neo-Pietism, consolidated the close relationships between religious devotion and a community of kinship and then between ecumenical Christianity, religious devotion, and the German nation. “Religious nationalism” was therefore a result of a decades-long evolution of a certain religiosity and a particular culture developed among the Germans. This trajectory, as shown in Part II, has been applied by Pietists and neo-Pietists alike to Jews and Judaism. While the earlier Pietists depicted the particular religion and culture of the Jews and argued for their immanent nature that could not be revoked even after conversion, the nineteenth-century neo-Pietists turned such peculiarity into an explicit feature of Jewish nationalism. Therefore, the nationalization of Judaism by Awakened conservatives could not be interpreted by mere anti-Semitic impetus but also as part of a growing accommodation of nationalism. Concepts of this kind were evident also among Jewish pre-Zionists, who anticipated the Zionist nationalism of late nineteenth-century.
