I agree that compared to atheists, Jews are religious idolaters. Jews do revere their symbols and rituals. But compared to Christians and polytheists, Jews were about as sophisticated as Hindus. They had a mystical perspective on God so that they kept in the back of their mind the difference between God himself and any "graven image." The Jews' God was invisible and transcendent. That's the Jewish brand which enabled Judaism to survive the loss of Jerusalem and its Temple.

Jewish religion was portable because Jews equated God with absolute nothingness (making for epic bathos). Whereas theocracies rose and fell as they identified their deities with some regime or civilization, the Jews' ciivlization was not of this world. It was the Zoroastrian one (the one Jews adopted at the end of the Babylonian captivity), a divine kingdom that will arrive one day with the messiah.