True Left

More evidence Jews are part of Western Civilization:

The Haskalah, often termed Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew: השכלה; literally, "wisdom", "erudition" or "education"), was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with certain influence on those in Western Europe and the Muslim world. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.

The Haskalah pursued two complementary aims. It sought to preserve the Jews as a separate, unique collective, and it pursued a set of projects of cultural and moral renewal, perhaps most notably a revival of Hebrew for use in secular life, which resulted in an increase in Hebrew found in print. Concurrently, it strove for an optimal integration in surrounding societies. Practitioners promoted the study of exogenous culture, style, and vernacular, and the adoption of modern values. At the same time, economic productivization was pursued. The Haskalah promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought, and enquiry, and is largely perceived as the Jewish variant of the general Age of Enlightenment.
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The Maskilim sought to replace the framework of values held by the Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern Europe with their own philosophy, which embraced the liberal, rationalistic notions of the 18th and 19th centuries and cast them in their own particular mold. This intellectual upheaval was accompanied by the desire to practically change Jewish society.
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The Jewish Enlighteners pursued two parallel agendas: they exhorted the Jews to acculturate and harmonize with the modern state, and demanded that the Jews remain a distinct group with its own culture and identity.
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It opposed the reclusive community of the past but sought a maintenance of a strong Jewish framework (with themselves as leaders and intercessors with the state authorities); the Enlightened were not even fully agreeable to civic emancipation, and many of them viewed it with reserve, sometimes anxiety. In their writings, they drew a sharp line between themselves and whom they termed "pseudo-maskilim" – those who embraced the Enlightenment values and secular knowledge but did not seek to balance these with their Jewishness, but rather strove for full assimilation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah

According to the article, the "assimilationist" faction was very transient and was quickly overpowered by the identitarian faction (who had now upgraded traditional Jewish identitarianism with the modern strategic and intellectual foundations of the "Enlightenment").

The Jewish national movements of Eastern Europe, founded by disillusioned maskilim, derisively regarded it – in a manner similar to other romantic-nationalist movements' understanding of the general Enlightenment – as a naive, liberal and assimilationist ideology which induced foreign cultural influences, gnawed at the Jewish national consciousness and promised false hopes of equality in exchange for spiritual enslavement. This hostile view was promulgated by nationalist thinkers and historians, from Peretz Smolenskin, Ahad Ha'am, Simon Dubnow and onwards. It was once common in Israeli historiography.[12]
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The term Haskalah became synonymous, among friends and foes alike and in much of early Jewish historiography, with the sweeping changes that engulfed Jewish society (mostly in Europe) from the late 18th Century to the late 19th Century. It was depicted by its partisans, adversaries and historians like Heinrich Graetz as a major factor in those; Feiner noted that "every modern Jew was identified as a maskil and every change in traditional religious patterns was dubbed Haskalah".

While Zionism (i.e. Jewish tribalism) pre-dates Herzl and is as old as Jews themselves, it was this "Enlightenment" which allowed those like him to upgrade Jewish identitarianism to a level which was previously unseen. During this time period, Jews had become politically "emancipated" by Western governments, and Jews had correspondingly "emancipated" Jewishness so that it was now possible for Jewish tribal/racial identity to exist completely seperately from Jewish religion.

The haskalah also resulted in the creation of a secular Jewish culture, with an emphasis on Jewish history and Jewish identity, rather than on religion. This, in turn, resulted in the political engagement of Jews in a variety of competing ways within the countries where they lived on issues that included[citation needed]

    the struggle for Jewish emancipation
    involvement in new Jewish political movements, and
    later (in the face of continued persecutions in late nineteenth-century Europe), the development of Zionism.

One commentator describes these effects thusly "The emancipation of the Jews brought forth two opposed movements: the cultural assimilation, begun by Moses Mendelssohn, and Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896." [16]