Older still than Mt Sinai? Secular Jews stole the identity of a religious group. The Secular Jew Concept is 19th century.
From the late 19th century and up until World War I, prominent figures such as Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am and David Ben-Gurion—Israel’s first prime minister—all saw the future Jewish territorial unit in Palestine as a province of sorts within the multinational Ottoman. No Jews prior to modern times ever anticipated an ingathering of exiles that would occur without the appearance of a messiah and would result in the establishment of a state in which halakha was not the law of the land. The pious Jews of Palestine—the only kind before Zionist settlement—enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy granted by the sultan. They had never contemplated national status, a concept as foreign to the Palestinian Jews as it was to the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul.