Ghettoization had created a Jewish nation within every nation east of the Elbe, a situation that Ottomans could manage but Europeans could not. The rising ethnic definition of nationhood could not abide such duality and sooner or later would turn bloodthirsty, he feared. Yet the traditional practice of requiring religious conversion for legal equality Jews properly rejected, and the loss of real religion that such a step promoted was the type of modernization he feared the most.
