What Is a Jew?

In 1946, writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre surveyed the state of Jewish-Gentile relationships. His book was entitled Anti-Semite and Jew. It was an attack on antisemitism, and not surprisingly, given Sartre’s existentialist commitments, it was a powerful plea for “authenticity.” The antisemite is inauthentic in projecting his fears and discontents onto the Jew. Gentile authenticity would end anti-semitism. But what of Jewish authenticity? This is, says Sartre, for the Jew “to live to the full his condition as a Jew.” Inauthenticity is “to deny it or to attempt to escape from it.” The essay is, in short, an encouragement of Jewish self-affirmation. What then follows is perhaps the bleakest analysis of the Jewish situation since Spinoza.

Jews, argues Sartre, “have neither community of interests nor community of beliefs. They do not have the same fatherland; they have no history.” What then do Jews have in common that constitutes their Jewishness and by which they are bound, in authenticity, to live? “The sole tie that binds them is the hostility and disdain of the societies that surround them. Thus the authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown toward him.”

To be Jewish, for Sartre, is to be the object of antisemitism and to face this fact unflinchingly. This analysis, provided by one of the great philosophers of the age, is remarkable. It is not merely barren; it contradicts itself on two counts. Firstly, to be authentic in Sartre’s terms is to “let existence precede essence.” It is to make oneself, to be one’s own “author.” Uniquely, though, Jews do not make themselves. They are made by others. They exist as such only because they are singled out for hatred. As one commentator concluded on Sartre’s analysis, “The Jew is the inauthentic being par excellence, essentially defined by the glance of the other.” Secondly, since Jews exist only by virtue of antisemitism and since antisemitism would not exist in a society of authentic individuals, the Jewish destiny is ideally self-liquidating.

Sartre himself drew the second conclusion. “Thus the authentic Jew who thinks of himself as a Jew because the antisemite has put him in the situation of a Jew is not opposed to assimilation any more than the class-conscious worker is opposed to the liquidation of classes…. The authentic Jew simply renounces for himself an assimilation that is today impossible; he awaits the radical liquidation of antisemitism for his sons.” In an ideal world there will be no more Jews. It is difficult, at this distance, not to see the deep inner connection between Sartre’s philosemitism and the Nazi ideology it opposes.

For this was an argument shared by friends and enemies alike since the eighteenth century. It had been Spinoza who first argued that antisemitism had been the most potent factor in securing Jewish survival. “As to their continuance so long after dispersion and the loss of empire,” he had written, “there is nothing marvelous in it, for they so separated themselves from every other nation as to draw down upon themselves universal hate…. That they have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred, experience demonstrates.” If only ­antisemitism keeps Jews Jewish, then an era of true tolerance would lead to total Jewish assimilation.

Sartre was not an antisemite. His warmth toward Jews and Judaism grew over time, as interviews given shortly before his death make clear. He was simply, as Steven Schwarzschild and others have argued, describing a reality. The French Jews he knew at the time were assimilated to the point that exposure and resistance to antisemitism was the sole content of their identity. They knew that they were Jews because society so regarded them. But beyond this their Jewishness had no substance. It had neither historical consciousness nor religious faith. It was translated into neither a distinctive way of life nor a concrete vision of a Jewish future. They were Jews without knowing why or how.

Something of that analysis remains true today. If Jewish survival is problematic it is because Jewish identity itself is problematic. ­Nineteenth-century Jewish thought was directed toward two specific goals: social integration in the diaspora and the creation of a Jewish home in Israel. Those goals have been realized. What remains as the motivating dynamic of Jewish survival in the late twentieth century? How do contemporary thinkers answer the question: What is it to be a Jew?

Defying Hitler

Emil Fackenheim is one of the outstanding Jewish philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. His work is a continuing dialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and secular thought in the wake of the Holocaust. It is a deep and sophisticated attempt to explore the possibility of “mending the rupture” of a shattered world. But as we recall from an earlier chapter, he has offered a striking definition of Jewish existence after Auschwitz. He argues that the “authentic Jew who faces up to his singled-out Jewish condition” is now bound by a 614th command. He is “forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” Fackenheim continues:

If the 614th commandment is binding upon the authentic Jew then we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, second, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with Him or with belief in Him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler’s victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.

Fackenheim’s thought as a totality is subtle and complex. But what is of interest is the fact that this particular formulation captured a widespread feeling. It articulated, as one reviewer wrote, “the sentiments…of Jewish shoe salesmen, accountants, policemen, cabdrivers, secretaries.” What, on this reading, becomes of Jewish identity?

It is turned into a defiance of Hitler. This is only a hairbreadth away from Sartre’s definition of Jewish authenticity. Fackenheim has in one sense gone further, for even were there no antisemitism, it would be a Jewish duty to remember it. God Himself only lives in Jewish minds in order to frustrate the Nazi attempt to murder His people. In his more recent work, Fackenheim’s thought stays within these lines. In answer to the question “What is a Jew?” he answers that “we, the Jews of today, would either have been murdered or never born…. We are an accidental remnant.” But a Jew who is murdered simply because he is a Jew has, according to some authorities, fulfilled the command of kiddush ha-Shem, “sanctification of God’s name.” He has become, in his death, holy. Since any Jew might have been a victim of the Final Solution, every Jew is holy, and in this sense “our holiness is ineluctable and brooks no honest escape or refusal.” Here Jewish holiness has been equated with being singled out as a potential victim.

Jewish identity cannot be built on such a foundation. Jews in the past did indeed preserve a memory of their sufferings at the hands of Pharaoh, Amalek, and Haman. They remembered, in kinot and selichot, the victims of the Crusades, massacres, inquisitions, and pogroms. They even, in one dazzling insight into rabbinic consciousness, saw suffering as part of the essence of Jewish peoplehood. A Gentile who comes to convert to Judaism is asked, according to the Talmud, “What reason do you have for wishing to convert? Do you not know that Israel at the present time is persecuted and oppressed, despised, harassed and overcome with afflictions?” The Talmud adds, “If he replies, ‘I know and yet am unworthy,’ he is accepted immediately.”

Despite this, no Jewish thinker prior to modernity saw suffering as a source of Jewish identity. Even Judah Halevi, who was able to rescue a vestige of pride from persecution, nonetheless saw suffering as a trial of faith, not as a substitute for it: Jews, he said, suffered more than others because they were more sensitive. “Israel among the nations is like the heart among the organs of the body.” Michael Wyschogrod, in a penetrating critique of Fackenheim’s work, has insisted that “there is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it.” Judaism survives despite Auschwitz, not because of it.

The Holocaust and Jewish Identity

Fackenheim’s definition of Jewish purpose is more than mere theory. It articulates a major orientation of contemporary Jewish life. Consciousness of antisemitism, past, present, or anticipated, remains a dominant strand of present Jewish identities. Worse: while Jewry in the wake of emancipation tended to see hatred of the Jew as a temporary phenomenon, to be overcome by individual or collective “normalization,” post-Holocaust ideology sees it as an enduring feature of the Jewish condition. “Jews,” writes George Steiner, “are a people whom totalitarian barbarism must choose for its hatred.” To be a Jew is to place on one’s children “a burden of ancient loathing.” “That fear,” he adds, “lies near the heart of the way in which I think of myself as a Jew.”

John Murray Cuddihy has argued that this creates “a kind of Manichean view of the world in which a small, weak, good group (the Jews) is dispersed among a large, strong, bad group (the nations, the goyim). This small, good group is self-defined as a victim of the large, strong, bad Christian group that victimizes it.” A harsh analysis, but not an inaccurate one.

In America the Holocaust has become a new and primary symbol of Jewishness, a source of survivalism and political and philanthropic endeavor. Holocaust memorial centers have proliferated. Holocaust programs dominate Jewish studies on campus. The Shoah has become one of the primary themes of Jewish literature – one writer recently estimated that one in four new books on a Jewish subject are about it. It is a key element in teenagers’ Jewish education. It is recalled in Yom ha-Shoah services. Its functional value is clear. It unites an otherwise denominationally divided community. It links American Jewry to Israel without negating the diaspora. It provides a logic for secular Jewish survival.

But, as a number of commentators have recently pointed out, the Holocaust points everywhere and nowhere. It has been used by ­secular Zionists to “refute” the diaspora. It has been used by religious anti-­Zionists to indict Zionism: the nations, they argue, would never have turned against Jews had Jews not sought prematurely to leave. It has been cited by Americans to justify democracy. It has been cited by Jewish activists, driven by the call of “Never again,” to denounce democracy. The Holocaust has been taken as proof of Jewish uniqueness. It has been taken, too, as proof that a sense of uniqueness, of the “chosen people,” is a vicious concept and leads in the end to the idea of the “master race.” As an instrument of Jewish survival its value is deeply ambiguous. One of the great scholars of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz, has spoken of her distress at the “almost obsessive, ceaseless attention” given to it by American Jews. “If we’re a people that gets murdered, the young will flee from us. We have something more than that.”

The Holocaust and Israel

The Shoah figures prominently too in Israel’s view of the diaspora. A.B. Yehoshua voiced a widespread sentiment when he wrote that “the Holocaust proved to us the danger of our abnormal existence among the nations. It is,” he writes, “the final, decisive proof of the failure of diaspora existence.” To one of the characters in Amos Oz’s In the Land of Israel, written in the aftermath of the Lebanon War, the hostility to Israel displayed by Western media was part of the “cunning of history.” It would increase antisemitism and thus force Western Jews finally to leave and make aliyah. This too is a significant shift in consciousness. Most of the early Zionists believed that the existence of Israel would end antisemitism. Instead it has transmuted it into anti-Zionism. But this, rather than being analyzed, tends to be seen in fated, apocalyptic terms. It is part of seifa de-galuta, the process of the end of exile. Israel fulfills a quasi-providential role when it increases the discomfort of Jews in and with the diaspora. It hastens the ingathering.

Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiyah have charted the rise in Holocaust imagery in Israelis’ description of their own situation since 1967, and especially since 1973. Here again we face a revolution of thought. In the early years of the state, the Holocaust and Israel tended to figure as opposite archetypes. The Shoah symbolized diaspora suffering and passivity; Israel represented a new identity, powerful, proud, and ­assertive. But more recently the Holocaust has come to “reflect the eternal condition of the Jewish people – isolated and beleaguered.”

Liebman and Don-Yehiyah are disturbed by the possible consequences of this image. They warn that “Israel’s sense of isolation and distrust of its allies is profoundly influenced by the Holocaust symbol, resulting in behavior that could antagonize allies and become, in the end, a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That analysis has been echoed by the secularist Amnon Rubinstein.

Since modern times, Jews have had a deeply ambivalent attitude toward antisemitism. On the one hand it is something to be detested, opposed, and fought. But on the other hand, though few have been as explicit in this respect as Sartre and Fackenheim, it provides substance for an otherwise perplexing identity. Leonard Fein has written that “deep down – and sometimes not so very deep – we still believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to keep us a people, that we have not the fiber to withstand the lures of a genuinely open society. It is seduction, not rape, that we fear the most.” It is as if, in resisting hostility, the Jew discovered himself.

Yet as the basis of an identity, it has fearful consequences. Internalized, it can become self-hatred. Externalized it can be used to justify stances of unwarranted suspicion and aggression. Though Jews in the Middle Ages explained their suffering in terms of an enduring tension between themselves and the world – in R. Shimon bar Yochai’s phrase, “Is it not well known that Esau hates Jacob?” – this was counterbalanced by the conviction that, in Malachi’s phrase, “Nonetheless, God loved Jacob.” Indeed, the very notion that the hostility of “the world” had its roots in the distant past helped to deprive non-Jewish perceptions of their sting, and make them marginal to the Jewish self-image.

What is harmful about taking antisemitism as the basis of identity is that it is an imposed identity. It takes as definitive, not the Jew’s encounter with his historical past, his religious present, or his messianic future, nor even his chosen kinship with other Jews, but instead his encounter with non-Jewish society. As an identity it is, to use David Riesman’s terminology, neither tradition-directed nor inner-directed, but other-directed. It turns destiny into fate. It sees Jewishness as something thrust upon the Jew. It is the product of a complex and interlocking set of alienations, of the Jew from the traditional content of Jewishness on the one hand, and of Jews from social and political neutrality on the other.

Having sought “normalization” either in the diaspora or Israel, Jews find themselves still and unpredictably bearing a high public profile. If Charles Liebman is right in seeing American Jews as “torn between two sets of values – those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival,” we need look no further in understanding the role of antisemitism in identity. For in fighting it, the Jew simultaneously asserts his right to acceptance in the wider society and establishes his differentness as the object of prejudice. The ambivalence is momentarily resolved. But at the cost of a love-hate relationship with both Jewishness and the non-Jewish reference group. A long history of ambivalence can be traced from Spinoza to Sartre and onward to Fackenheim. That surely is one price of the secularization of Jewish identity. The hatred of the world is no substitute for the love of God in explaining the Jewish “singled-out condition.”

Diaspora or Exile?

If antisemitism is one component of contemporary Jewish identity, ­identification with Israel is another. Charles Liebman suggests that “concern for Israel, efforts in its behalf, and the symbols of Israel increasingly represent the content of American Judaism.” Leonard Fein concurs. Since the Six-Day War, he writes, “Zionism has been the collective religion of the Jews, and the needs of Israel rather than the demands of the halakhah have provided the norms for communal behavior.”

But here too lies a deep ambivalence. The consensus on the centrality of Israel is unaccompanied by either a sense that Jews ought to leave America in favor of aliyah, or by a perception of America as galut, exile. To the contrary. The category of “exile” seems radically inapplicable to the American situation. “American Jews,” writes Charles Silberman, “now live in a freer, more open society than that of any diaspora community in which Jews have ever lived before.” As Jacob Neusner puts it, “American Jews politically, socially, and economically stand within the corporate limits of society; they do not see themselves as temporary residents, people who really belong somewhere else. Their homeland is America; its turmoil is theirs; so too is its tragedy and triumph. To allege that in the eschaton they will be magically lifted up and transported on eagles’ wings to some other place is to present American Jews with a useless fantasy.” America is home.

What are the consequences of a secularly Israel-oriented diaspora? The most serious is that it creates a form of vicarious identity. Authentic Jewish life takes place elsewhere. Charles Liebman has penetratingly defined the role of Israel for American Jews as the new heim, the substitute for the “old home” of Eastern Europe, now vanished in the Holocaust. The heim is a place one visits occasionally, feels nostalgia for, and about which one wants to feel that life goes on there as it always has. But the “characteristic of the heim…is that one doesn’t live there.” Jewish continuity is guaranteed by someone else, somewhere else. It is delegated away to a surviving elite. For the rest, to be Jewish is to enable other Jews to be Jews.

The most critical voice within American Jewry of this vicarious identity has been Jacob Neusner. “The rebirth of the Jewish people takes place through the achievement of the Zionist movement, and that is true. But it is true for someone else. It is not true for ourselves. We are not there.” The categories through which diaspora Jewry explains itself to itself relate to events that take place elsewhere and to other Jews. “Ours is a mythic situation in which we talk about what other people go through, but then we find ourselves unable to explain the world in which we live, the things through which we pass, the life we choose for ourselves and our children. We are spectators at someone else’s drama.”

Beyond this, vicarious identity masks a deep disparity between the way American Jews see themselves and the way they are seen through Israeli eyes. For Americans, Israel is a source of diaspora renewal. It strengthens the sense of collective Jewish peoplehood. It provides a focus of identity and activity. For the majority of Israeli thinkers, however, this is dangerous self-delusion.

Natan Rotenstreich, A.B. Yehoshua, and Eliezer Schweid among others have continued to argue the classic Zionist case that there can be no true Jewish creativity in the diaspora, nor ultimately can there be secure Jewish survival. Schweid argues against Achad ha-Am’s thesis – central to diaspora Zionism – that Israel represents “a spiritual center” for Jews throughout the world. This ignores, says Schweid, the way ­culture is transmitted. “Participation in a culture means direct involvement in the process of creativity.” Jews outside Israel cannot absorb its inner vitality at one remove. “The superficiality of Jewish culture among the vast majority of the Jews of Europe and America is irrefutable proof of the validity of this assertion.” Gershom Scholem applied to American Jewry the chasidic maxim that the greatest exile is not to know one is in exile. Arnold Eisen concludes, from his survey of recent thought of the themes of exile and homecoming, that “negation of the diaspora, including America, stands at the very center of contemporary Zionist reflection.”

Paradoxes of Interdependence

This conflict of perceptions has led to a series of ironies and paradoxes since 1967 that have shaken the axioms of secular Zionism. First, Israel was to be the “sole secure refuge” for Jews in flight from persecution. In the light, though, of Israel’s recent wars and inner turbulence, Yeshayahu Leibowitz has argued that Jews who seek safety could find it more effectively in Australia and Canada. Eliezer Schweid calls Israel an “embattled fortress.”

The sharp dichotomy between the security of a homeland and the insecurity of the diaspora has been ironically inverted. For to the extent that Israel is a safe refuge, it makes the diaspora safer too. Mordecai Kaplan, one of the architects of American Zionism, defined the sense in which Israel was home using words taken from the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Home thus understood is not where one lives. But it is what makes exile endurable.

Second, Israel was to be the sole context of a distinctive Jewish identity. The choice, as Arthur Koestler put it, was either “emigration to Israel or gradual assimilation to their host nations.” What was not foreseen was the extent to which the existence of Israel, far from negating the diaspora, in fact revitalized it. Throughout the Jewish world as we have noted, there was a sudden flowering of Jewish self-expression in the wake of the Six-Day War. Much of it was focused on Israel, but not all. There was religious self-discovery also, and a renewed contact with the texts and practices of tradition. Israel, far from hastening diaspora assimilation, has counteracted it.

These conflicts and ambivalences become exposed when phenomena arise that are impossible to explain or respond to on extant assumptions. What, for example, should be the diaspora reaction to the many Soviet Jewish emigres who have chosen to live in America rather than Israel? What should be its response to the yordim who have chosen to leave the promised land for the “land of promise”? Should it be supportive or critical? Both groups confound established archetypes. Israel, not America, is the natural refuge for Jews fleeing oppression; and Israel is not a home one leaves. To that extent, Russian and Israeli arrivals in America are often regarded as disturbing anomalies. Yet both groups have chosen what American Jews themselves have chosen: to live outside Israel. To that extent they regard local reaction as hypocritical.

Is Israel supported or compromised by a strong and self-sufficient Jewish life in the golah? Is the diaspora to be educated toward its own survival, or to the view that only in Israel is there complete Jewish fulfillment? The conventional wisdom, at least in the diaspora, is that in practice there is no conflict between these objectives. As one American lay leader put it, “We must recognize that the future of the generations that follow us is inextricably linked to Israel as a source of deepening commitment to our own sense of Jewishness and spiritual identification.” But, he continued, “It is not and cannot be a substitute for our own increased commitment to creative Jewish continuity at all levels in our own communities.” But between these two sentences is a latent conflict that is not always avoidable.

Identification with Israel does not ease the burden of diaspora Jewish self-definition. On the contrary, it heightens it. It has meant, in recent years, taking a political stance sharply at odds with the image of Israel projected by the media. It has meant, for Jewish students at universities, running the gauntlet of anti-Zionist propaganda. It has disturbed rather than supported the harmony between diaspora Jewry and its environment. Here again we are confronted by the failure of “normalization,” the project by which Israel would make Jews “like other nations.” Israel, no less than the Holocaust, testifies to the Jewish “singled-out condition.” But it does not of itself explain it. On secular Zionist orthodoxy, Israel and the diaspora should have gone their separate and divergent ways, the one toward integration in the family of nations, the other to disappearance through assimilation. Yet they have remained obstinately linked to one another in a state of mutual tension.

The stark alternatives of secular Zionism, between a disintegrating diaspora and a secure and normal homeland, have given way to a complex and fraught interdependence. Israel has made all Jews, both its own and those of the diaspora, feel more at home in the world. At the same time, under the impact of Israel’s political isolation, it has served to emphasize the “not-at-homeness” of the Jew. Israel and the diaspora have grown markedly closer in the last two decades while at the same time holding strikingly different perceptions of one another. Out of these paradoxes it is difficult to draw a coherent picture of a diaspora identity focused on a place in which one chooses not to live.

Jewishness and Judaism

The author has suggested that a Jewish identity built around the Holocaust and Israel, the two defining symbols of diaspora Jewishness since 1967, is not in itself sufficient to give meaning and content to Jewish life. They are, to be sure, the most momentous events in Jewish history since the destruction of the Second Temple. No contemporary Jewish thought can avoid confronting and being shaped by them. But they do not in themselves yield meaning. They presuppose a prior set of meanings, a framework of interpretation. In themselves, and especially in the diaspora, they mask and to some extent embody ambivalence about being a Jew.

But there have been some American sociologists who have argued that this kind of analysis is misconceived. There is, they suggest, no such thing as a specifiable Jewish identity. As we noted in an earlier chapter, Charles Silberman, Calvin Goldscheider, and Steven M. Cohen have argued, in effect, that Jewishness is what Jews do. They grant that in America, Jewish observance continues to decline. So too does affiliation with synagogues and other Jewish organizations. They speak of “ineffective, inadequate, and unsuccessful Jewish education…pervasive ignorance…decline in temple and synagogue participation, empty synagogue schools, and unused community facilities…emphasis on and acceptance of minimum Jewish commitments.” They concede that “mobilization of energies for fund-raising devoid of Jewish content as a goal in itself” has become a substitute for “creative Jewish commitments.”

But this, they argue, does not of itself entail a decline in the vitality of Jewishness. It represents a transformation in the nature of Jewishness. And this is only to be expected. For there is no essence of Jewish identity. As Jews change, so does the character of what counts as “Jewish.” At one time it might have been adherence to halakhah, at another, membership of a synagogue, at yet others, supporting Israel or Jewish welfare causes, or perhaps simply having Jewish friends. Jewishness persists so long as Jews see themselves as Jews and so long as they are measurably similar to one another and different from everyone else.

We recall Calvin Goldscheider’s definition of Jewishness in terms of group cohesion: “The strength of the Jewish community reflects the number and intensity of ingroup interactions. The more the bases of interaction and the greater its intensity, the more cohesive is the community.” The implications of this statement are striking. For example, as Goldscheider himself points out, Jewish education is usually evaluated in terms of success or failure in communicating Jewish knowledge or commitment. But it has another dimension. “Parents bring their children to school, have contact with other Jewish parents and with Jewish teachers and other Jewish children. The ramifications are extensive. It is clearly what community is all about.” Schools are places where Jews meet. They are a setting for “ingroup interaction.” The street outside the school, where parents meet, may be as important as the classroom, where children meet. As long as Jews meet, mix, and have attitudes and lifestyles in common, we need not ask about the content of Jewish life. Instead we must concede the fact of Jewish life, which changes in form from generation to generation.

These sociologists are responding to a fact best analyzed over thirty years ago by Nathan Glazer. What has happened to American Jewry, he suggested at the time, was less significant than one thing that had not happened. “This negative something is the strongest and potentially most significant religious reality among American Jews: it is that Jews have not stopped being Jews…. It is not that most Jews in this country submit themselves to the Jewish law; they do not. Nor can they tell you what the Jewish heritage is.” Their sense of Jewishness might consist in anything from Zionism to a love of Yiddish or Jewish food or Jewish jokes. But it persisted. There was, he found, “a stubborn insistence on remaining a Jew, enhanced by no particularly ennobling idea of what that means.”

There is, though, one profound difference between Glazer and the contemporary “transformationists.” Glazer distinguished between Jewishness and Judaism. Judaism represents a religious faith and a holy way of life. It is not what Jews actually do, but what they ought to do, what they are religiously called on to do and what, traditionally, they did. The significance of Jewishness, for Glazer, is that it keeps Jews at least potentially in touch with Judaism. So long as Jews remain identifiably Jewish, “they are capable of being moved and reached and of transcending the pedestrian life that so many of them live in company with other Americans.” So long as Jewish ethnicity is actual, Jewish religiosity is possible, for were there no Jews there could be no Judaism. The persistence of Jewishness “means that the Jewish religious tradition is not just a subject for scholars but is capable now and then of finding expression in life. And even if it finds no expression in one generation or another, the commitment to remain related to it still exists.”

Goldscheider, by contrast, is more interested in Jewishness than Judaism. “Religiosity,” he argues, “is only one of the ways in which Jews express their Jewishness.” And it is this move that is open to argument on two different grounds. The first concerns the future. Can Jewish ethnicity, rooted in no more than the fact that Jews tend to have similar education, careers, lifestyles, and political attitudes, survive? The second concerns definition. Is this Jewish survival? Is there not some point at which Jewishness must be measured against Judaism? Is there not some point, indeed, at which Jewishness ceases to have any connection with Judaism? Arthur Hertzberg brings the two arguments together when he writes that “Judaism is neither authentic, nor can it survive, if it amounts to no more than a triumph of adjustment to suburban life.”

Behind every sociology there is a theology. And behind the transformationists lies a view of Jewish life which owes much to Mordecai Kaplan, who defined Judaism as the evolving civilization of the Jewish people. Kaplan’s Reconstructionism recognized that while Judaism as traditionally understood had “practically become inoperative,” there was nonetheless a secondary cohesive force that bound Jews, namely “the will to maintain and perpetuate Jewish life as something desirable in and for itself.” On this view there is no “essence” of Judaism. The primary function of Judaism is to express and sustain group cohesion, and there is no way of specifying in advance the forms it will take. To the extent that Silberman, Goldscheider, and Cohen evaluate rather than simply describe; to the extent that they see in the changing patterns of American Jewry not decline but a new kind of vitality, they tacitly endorse something like a Reconstructionist interpretation of Jewish life. Indeed, almost two decades ago, Charles Liebman had already described the beliefs that underlay Reconstructionism as the “folk religion of American Jews.”

Who Is a Jew?

Is there anything that stands in the way of this minimalist conception of Jewish identity, which sees it in terms of Jewishness rather than Judaism and which attaches no normative content to Jewishness? Jews, after all, do survive as Jews in the diaspora, against all expectation. They have widely different conceptions of what Jewishness means, or perhaps no clear conception at all. Yet they identify, with surprising passion and sometimes self-sacrifice, as Jews. Why should this not be sufficient? A Jew is one who identifies as a Jew. Beyond that, no clarification is possible or necessary. We can measure the shifting patterns of group solidarity. What we cannot do is describe some as more “authentic” than others.

Without at this stage invoking theology or halakhah, there are nonetheless two formidable problems, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical issue is this: The word “Jew” has a reference that is extended over space and time. Part of what it means to be a Jew is to be a member of a people that spans millennia and continents. Existentially that sense of peoplehood lies close to the heart of modern Jewish identities. To feel Jewish, as many recent observers have noted, is less to feel bound by Jewish law and belief than to feel a sense of kinship with the Jews of Israel and the Soviet Union, the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, the Jews who enacted their unique drama through the echoing centuries of exiles and wanderings, hopes, and persecutions. Presupposed in the use of a single word to describe a people divided by time and space, land and language, custom and culture, is some common content designated by the word “Jew.”

That content is not given by the analyses of contemporary diaspora Jewish ethnicity. Upward mobility, advanced education, residential or occupational clustering, a taste for certain kinds of food or humor or political positions – these tell us what is American about American Jews, or English about Anglo-Jews, not what is Jewish. Jewish ethnicity has long had this character. Even in their most segregated, ghetto-bound periods, Jews borrowed manners and motifs from their surrounding culture. In large measure this is what marked the difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between the Jews of Rome and Rizhin, Manchester and Mezeritch.

What was improbable, striking, and decisive is that despite these differences, Jews constituted a single people. They saw themselves and were seen by others as having a direct horizontal continuity with one another and a vertical continuity with the people of the Bible and the rabbinic age. What they held in common was definitive; what they held distinctively in their various localities was not. What they held in common was, as Saadia Gaon noted, Torah. That bound them to a shared life, a shared history, and a shared destiny. That was the “essence” detectable beneath the variegated cultural forms in which it was clothed.

Jewish peoplehood cannot survive the dissolution of that “essence.” This theoretical concern comes to the fore in one burning and practical question. Who is a Jew? The answer given by tradition is unambiguous. A Jew is one born to a Jewish mother or one who has undergone a halakhically valid process of conversion. Several things have happened, especially since the 1960s, to make that answer seem out of step with the social reality of Jewish life in the diaspora.

First is the rapidly accelerating rate of intermarriage. American Jewry, as we have seen, has now reached the state of Western and Central European Jewries between the two world wars: an outmarriage rate of approximately one in three. Precise quantifications are not available for Anglo-Jewry, but it seems likely that the rate here will also rise to, if it has not yet reached, that level. Second is what we have called the new Jewish ethnic affirmation. Intermarriage was hitherto seen as both a real and symbolic exit from the Jewish community. Today a significant proportion of those with non-Jewish spouses wish to remain identified as Jews and wish their children so to be identified. Third is the rapidly growing acceptance of intermarriage as a fact of Jewish life, even among those who do not endorse it or wish it for themselves. The 1975 Boston survey, for example, showed that while 43 percent of the over-60s held strongly negative views about it, only 5 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 did so. Fourth, the lifestyles and attitudes of the intermarried and non-intermarried are growing more alike. The former are more likely to have Jewish friends and values and live in a Jewish neighborhood. The latter are less likely to have a high profile of Jewish observance and synagogue attendance. Sociologically, the two groups are becoming harder to distinguish.

This has led to the most controversial claim of the “transformationists” – that intermarriage does not significantly weaken, and may in some ways strengthen, the Jewish community. The argument mounted by Silberman, Goldscheider, and Cohen is complex and points in more than one direction. In part it is defensive. Outmarriage rates, they argue, are lower than have been estimated. The rate of increase is slowing. Only the more marginal section of the community is affected. But in part it is evaluative. If the couple stay within the community, outmarriage represents a demographic gain. If the non-Jewish partner converts, the couple is likely to be more Jewishly active than average. Acceptance of the outmarried by the Jewish community will tilt the balance from loss to gain.

But it is here that sociology and halakhah part company. Gold-scheider is explicit. “The definition of the Jewishness of the family in terms of biology (or halakhah) is becoming less important for most American Jews than it was in the past and less relevant to Jewish communal continuity than how people define themselves behaviorally, communally, and culturally, and how the community defines them.” Those who see themselves and are seen by others as Jews, are Jews. But historically it was in just such circumstances that schisms arose within the Jewish world. Hellenists, Sadducees, the early Christians, and the Karaites saw themselves as Jews. They did not, however, stay within the Jewish mainstream. Though the question of what is a Jew may, at certain times, be indeterminate and open-ended, it tends to converge on the highly specific question, who is a Jew? That is not a question that tolerates a multiplicity of answers, a measure of vagueness or diplomatic disattention. To the contrary, it is a question that precipitates crisis.

Religious Legitimation and Social Process

That crisis, in the context of American Jewry specifically, diaspora Jewry generally, has an additional dimension. It can be expressed thus. Already in the mid-1950s Will Herberg and Nathan Glazer were commenting on an unusual feature of Jewish life. Jews were deeply secularized, far more so than either Protestants or Catholics. Yet there were signs of what was ostensibly a religious revival. There was a stunning increase, in the postwar years, in the number of synagogues, schools, and community centers. Books and periodicals appeared on religious themes. Yet Jews did not participate in great numbers in synagogue services. They did not see Judaism as having a significant bearing on the conduct of their lives. They did not turn to rabbis for personal direction. The rabbi, indeed, was seen at this time primarily as a religious functionary and a representative figure to the non-Jewish world.

What had happened, argued Herberg and Glazer, was that Judaism as a religion had itself become secularized. For Herberg it had become a “culture-religion” celebrating not the Mosaic faith but “Americanism.” For Glazer the change had taken place when Jews moved from urban to suburban settings. There, experiencing for the first time a predominantly non-Jewish neighborhood, Jews felt the pressures of conformity and “respectability.” Church-going and Sunday school were the norm, and Jewish equivalents had to be created. They were to be “Jewish, but not too Jewish.” Both writers pointed to the fact that in the emergent American Judaism, what dominated the agenda were human needs, not Divine commands; American integration, not Jewish “chosenness.” Religion, when it spoke to the individual, was expected to provide “peace of mind” and enhance the power of positive thinking. When it spoke to the community it was expected to serve the cause of group solidarity and ethnic survival. No longer did Jews exist to serve Judaism. Judaism existed to serve the needs of Jews.

It was this phenomenon that led, a decade later, to one of the most powerful religious statements to have emerged from American Jewry, R. Joseph Soloveitchik’s long essay, The Lonely Man of Faith. Judaism, he argued, did not bring peace of mind. To the contrary, it brought deep inner conflict between the secular and religious sides of the human personality, what he termed, respectively, “majestic” and “covenantal” man. Now, however, secularism had invaded the sanctuary. Modern man “comes to a place of religious worship. He attends lectures on religion and appreciates the ceremonial, yet he is searching not for a faith in all its singularity and otherness, but for religious culture.” He wants an aesthetic, not a religious experience. He seeks community, not command. “Western man diabolically insists on being successful. Alas, he wants to be successful even in his adventure with God. If he gives of himself to God, he expects reciprocity.” He thinks in terms not of covenant but of commercial transaction. He insists that “faith adapt itself to the mood and temper of modern times.” The grandeur of faith – “aboriginal, exploding with elemental force” – could not, argued Soloveitchik, be reduced to a suburban sedative and a leisure pursuit.

But it was happening, and R. Soloveitchik could offer no more positive prospect than that the man of faith should withdraw from society and experience “ontological loneliness” and “social isolation.” Religion was being pressed into the service of a secular culture. And here was the paradox. In America, Jews preferred Jewishness to Judaism but insisted on giving it a religious expression. The institutions of ethnicity were the synagogue and the rabbinate. Theology had become the handmaid of sociology. Judaism had become the legitimator of Jewishness.

Mordecai Kaplan had given the process its intellectual basis. But it affected not only his Reconstructionism, but American Reform and Conservative Judaism as well. This meant that, in varying degrees, all the non-Orthodox denominations had to accommodate themselves to the ethos of contemporary American Jewry, an ethos only tangentially related to classic Jewish values and beliefs. It meant, among other things, mixed seating in synagogues, an abandonment of the prohibition against a kohen marrying a divorcee, and the ordination of women as rabbis and cantors. These have been endorsed even by the most traditional of the denominations, Conservative Judaism.

In addition, the Reform movement has accepted the creation of synagogues for homosexuals. One Reform writer, Norman Mirsky, recently noted that “the Reform rabbi has to be both gyroscope and weathervane, for while throughout the Jewish world the weather is always changing, never before has there been a Jewish clergy whose pledge to its laity has been so overt in integrating rapid social change into a recognizable Jewish liturgical and institutional framework.” Reform, in short, has fulfilled the function of giving religious legitimation to the changing boundaries of Jewishness.

Issues of Status

So the tension between Jewishness and Judaism exists not only as a personal issue for individual Jews, nor as an intellectual argument among sociologists, but as a religious argument between Orthodoxy and others, Reform in particular. Inevitably the most intractable issues turn on the question of personal status. One relates to divorce. Since the 1840s, radical Reformers in Germany, Samuel Holdheim in particular, had argued that a civil divorce was sufficient to terminate a Jewish marriage, under a radical reinterpretation of the idea that “the law of the land is law.” This view had been adopted, at least de facto, by the American Reform rabbinate.

By Jewish law, however, termination of a marriage requires a halakhically valid divorce, get, and without this the partners remain bound to one another. Should the woman remarry on the basis of a civil divorce only, the relationship is halakhically adjudged to be adulterous and any children born from it are mamzerim, illegitimate, and unable to marry legitimate Jews. The issue was acute enough to lead R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes, in 1849, to propose a formal excommunication of Reform Jews and a ban against marriages with them. But the issue remained on the sidelines until recent rising rates of divorce and remarriage and the continued prominence of Reform in American Jewry made it a numerically significant phenomenon.

Sociologically, though, the central issue has been intermarriage. It is here that the religious legitimation of secular survivalism is most potentially explosive. The tacit acceptance of mixed marriage, or at least the desire on the part of Jewish parents “to keep their children Jewish, no matter how,” has led to some 40 percent of American Reform rabbis officiating at marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Half of those who refuse will refer the couple to a colleague who will perform the ­ceremony. Norman Mirsky adds that “there is enormous pressure placed on Reform rabbis to officiate at mixed marriages. It is rumored that some congregations will not hire rabbis who refuse. Personal correspondence seems to bear this out.”

The question then arises as to the religion of the spouse. In some cases the non-Jewish partner converts to Judaism. The figures are elusive, but Steven Cohen estimates that some 23 percent of non-Jewish wives do so, and some 11 percent of non-Jewish husbands. One reliable estimate places at 10,000 a year the number of converts to Judaism in America. Most of these are performed under Reform auspices. Halakhically, conversion to Judaism requires immersion in a mikveh, circumcision in the case of males, and kabbalat ha-mitzvot, “acceptance of the commandments.” In the case of Reform conversions, one or other of these criteria, possibly all, will standardly not have been fulfilled. Orthodoxy, too, sees the Conservative movement’s relationship to halakhah as ambivalent, and thus questions the validity of its conversions.

But if almost a quarter of non-Jewish wives are willing to convert, more than three quarters are not. In the new climate of affirmative ethnicity, though, often the husband wishes and the wife is willing to raise the children of the marriage as Jews. This led to the notorious decision of the Central Conference of American Rabbis – the Reform rabbinic convention – in 1983, which declared “that the child of one Jewish parent is under the presumption of Jewish descent. This presumption of Jewish status of the offspring of any mixed marriage is to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.”

The decision signaled a willingness to defy the millennial criteria of Jewish status. Henceforth, a child might be deemed Jewish without a Jewish mother or an act of conversion, on the basis of “patrilineal descent” and personal identification. Indeed, as a number of perceptive observers, among them Shaye J.D. Cohen and Manfred Vogel, noted, the resolution subtly changed the whole basis of Jewish status. For while it included children of Jewish fathers, it also excluded children of Jewish mothers who did not choose to identify as Jews. In effect it “Protestantized” Jewish status, shifting it from a biological endowment to a personal religious choice. The irony was overwhelming. In its pursuit of “peoplehood” American Reform had thoroughly “religionized” Jewish identity.

The shock waves were deep and immediate. A host of scholars and religious leaders outside Reform warned of what Reuven Bulka called “the coming cataclysm.” Irving Greenberg posed the question, “Will there be one Jewish people by the year 2000?” The patrilineal decision had focused attention on the cumulative effect of Reform policies on divorce and conversion. Greenberg suggested that within the foreseeable future, between 15 and 20 percent of the American Jewish community would be “socially and halakhically separated from traditional Jews.” Self-ascribed identity was in headlong collision with halakhic norms. The prospect was real of the greatest schism since Judaism and Christianity parted company. As Lawrence Schiffman’s timely study Who Was a Jew? pointed out, that schism too had eventually turned on the question of personal status: “The ultimate parting of the ways for Judaism and Christianity took place when the adherents to Christianity no longer conformed to the halakhic definitions of a Jew.”

Israel and “Who Is a Jew?”

The problem sharply illustrates the proposition that the word “Jew” presupposes criteria that span time and space. That continuity of definition is the basis of the continuity of Jewish peoplehood. Jakob Petuchowski put the point well: “It is…the halakhah dealing with ‘personal status’ which guarantees the underlying unity of the ‘holy community.’”

Sociologists on the one hand, the Reform rabbinate on the other, may propose new criteria of Jewish identity that accord with the contemporary American experience. But Jewish status cannot be localized without fragmenting Jewish peoplehood. An American consensus might emerge that ran counter to standards that obtained in the past, and to the way Jewish status is understood elsewhere. But it would have no effect on the meaning of the word “Jew” as determined by tradition and by other Jewries. Indeed, the precipitating point of crisis is almost certain not to come from within America itself, but from Israel where the Orthodox rabbinate exercises a monopoly of Jewish religious authority.

Several major controversies have already arisen in Israel. In 1958 the question arose of how children of mixed marriages should be registered in the national registry. The interior minister recommended a position not unlike that of the patrilineal principle: if either parent were Jewish, the child could be registered as Jewish if both parents agreed. The National Religious Party resigned from the cabinet over the issue. In the ensuing cabinet crisis Ben-Gurion temporarily revoked the decision and took the views of an international group of Jewish scholars. In the light of their responses the government voted in favor of retaining the halakhic criteria.

Similar results followed in a series of test cases. The Shalit case, for example, established that a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could not have their children registered as Jews in nationality only. To be a Jew nationally involved being a Jew religiously. The attempts to separate the two identities have thus far failed. But continuing tension surrounds the Law of Return, under which any Jew who decides to live in Israel can automatically become a citizen without undergoing a naturalization procedure. The law is central to Israel’s self-definition as the state of the entire Jewish people. But, as amended in 1970, it defined as a Jew someone born of a Jewish mother or one who had been converted to Judaism. Since then there have been sporadic but intense efforts to have the phrase amended to specify conversion “in accordance with halakhah,” the most recent following the November 1988 Israeli general election.

The issue has significance far beyond its immediate concern. The number of Reform and Conservative converts in America is large; the number of those directly affected by the Law of Return – those who choose to live in Israel – is small. In Israel itself the Reform and Conservative rabbinate has no official status. An amendment to the Law would therefore have direct repercussions on perhaps no more than half a dozen individuals a year. But it would, by implication, delegitimate all conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis anywhere in the world. Its significance for the Conservative and Reform movements is potentially immense, given their deep attachment to Israel on the one hand, and the unity of the Jewish people on the other.

Not all Orthodox authorities are in favor of the amendment. The British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, argued as long ago as 1974 that “the religious character of the Jewish state will be determined not by legislation or coercion, but by persuasion.” The criteria of who is a Jew should in any case be determined not by secular legislation but by the religious courts. This view was recently echoed by Rabbi Norman Lamm who stated that “a secular body such as the Knesset is not the right forum to determine halakhic issues.” Rabbi J. David Bleich has suggested that the Law of Return be restricted to naturally born Jews. Converts would then apply for naturalization, and there could be no objection if “State officials, without in any way passing on matters of halakhah, use objective judgment in considering even technically invalid conversion as evidence of a convert’s sincere desire to identify with the aspirations and common destiny of the citizens of the State of Israel.”

These are attempts to defuse the crisis, and ultimately to take it out of the purview of legislation. But the substantive issue remains. No Orthodox authority disputes the invalidity of non-halakhic conversions. The problem persists, erupting occasionally, smoldering continually, threatening to shatter the fragile coalition of world Jewry and splitting it between Orthodoxy and the non-Orthodox, religious and secular, Israel and the diaspora.

Identity and Survival

In this chapter we have considered only a few of the leading themes of the contemporary debate on Jewish identity, its content and criteria. We have argued that neither the imposed identity created by antisemitism, nor the vicarious identity lent by Israel to the diaspora, represent coherent visions of a Jewish life. They embody latent conflicts and ambivalences. They hover awkwardly between a desire for normalization and an assertive singularity. They focus on Jewish survival without giving inner meaning to that survival.

We then turned to the minimalist identity traced out by a school of contemporary Jewish sociologists, and given religious legitimation in some of the policies of the American Reform movement. We raised the question of how far Jewishness could be divorced from Judaism, and how far Judaism could be subordinated to Jewishness. The issue came to the fore in the question of Jewish status: Who is a Jew? Here the possibility of eventual schism remains disturbingly real. As diaspora Jewish ethnicity is increasingly evacuated of traditional religious content, what is local in Jewish life becomes more prominent than what is universal. Whether a shared concept of Jewish peoplehood can long endure such a process is open to doubt.

We have argued that the problems of Jewish survival outlined in the previous chapter cannot be divorced from the problems of Jewish identity surveyed in this. Both are symptoms of the secularization of a religious tradition. The question that arises, therefore, is: What has been the fate of that section of the Jewish world that has held tenaciously and on principle to the classic terms of the tradition? What has been the fate of Orthodoxy in the last two decades?