This chapter considers ‘minority’ and other interpretative concepts, in the historical the context created by the break up of the Union in Ireland Partition was ultimately about one question: religious minorities and their oppression – real or imagined, anticipated or remembered. Far from being introverted and parochial, many of these people displayed an exceptional awareness of contemporary global challenges and opportunities: they were intrinsically transnational in terms of background, instincts, and interests. For both Jews and Protestants, religion encoded centuries of conflict but also of practices of everyday compromise. In its political application, religion provided these groups with their main source of self-awareness and underpinned their distinctive understandings of both Unionism and Irish nationalism, and indeed Zionism, which was itself a radical form of minority politics. Empowered but also limited by partly segregated institutional and social environments, the minority mind encompassed both culture and identity.