Diaspora Debates

“Now that the mission of the wandering Jew is completed, he must discard the knapsack and cease to be an accomplice in his own destruction.” Such was the judgement of Arthur Koestler in 1949, writing in the wake of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel.¹ (London: Macmillan, 1949), 335.

footnotes: ¹ Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917–1949

Koestler’s analysis was stark. To be a Jew was to be a member of a nation and to have longed, for 1,800 years, for the return of that nation to its land. So long as Jews existed in the diaspora they were an anomaly. They were in but not of their surroundings. Here lay the root of the “Jewish problem” and of antisemitism. There was only one possible solution, and with the birth of Israel it had become actual. Jews must return to their land. If they chose – like Koestler himself – not to return, then they must assimilate and cast off, once and for all, any claim to a separate identity.

Since the proclamation of the state, “the attitude of Jews who are unwilling to go there, yet insist on remaining a community in some way apart from their fellow citizens, has become an untenable anachronism.” Koestler himself had been a supporter of Zionism, seeing in Israel a “haven for the homeless in the teeth of prejudice, violence and political treachery.” But now that the goal of the movement had been achieved, he and others who had worked for its realisation “are at last free to do what they could not do before: to wish it good luck and go their own way, with an occasional friendly glance back and a helpful gesture.” Koestler remained firm in his convictions. There was, he wrote in 1976, a single choice facing Jews: “emigration to Israel, or gradual assimilation to their host nations.”² (London: Pan, 1977).

footnotes: ² Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage

Koestler summed up the dilemma of the Jew since the beginning of European emancipation. Judaism was a religion, but Jews were a people. Because of this, Judaism was a religion unlike any other and Jews were a people unlike any other. They were a people constituted by a religion, and their religion was a covenant with a particular people. Neither definition was translatable into the terms of the modern European secular nation‒state. In the language of post-Enlightenment political thought, a religion was the private creed of individuals and a nation was a territorial‒political entity. If Jews were a religious group, they could not be a nation. And if they were a nation, they had no place in Europe. This was the tragic choice, formulated in the wake of the French Revolution in 1789, which reached its demonic climax in the Final Solution: the vision of a Judenrein Europe.

Friends and enemies, liberals and conservatives, agreed on this fundamental axiom about the Jews: that their only point of entry into European society lay through assimilation and thus their disappearance as a distinctive people. The disagreement lay in whether they believed this to be possible or not. Liberals thought it was, and as a result they encouraged emancipation. Conservatives thought it was not, and they therefore opposed it. The liberal argument won the day. But Jews did not assimilate. They acculturated and became, with astonishing speed, masters of European literature, philosophy and science. They maintained the lowest of public profiles as Jews. In some cases, especially among the social and intellectual avant-garde, they converted to Christianity. But they remained, in the eyes of others, a people apart.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Réflexions sur la Question Juive, is in this respect a classic text. Written in 1946, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it is an analysis of and a protest against antisemitism. The anti-Semite is, par excellence, an inauthentic being, one who projects his guilts upon others. “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”³, translated by George Becker, (New York: Schocken, 1965), 13. Antisemitism is an evil which must be eliminated. “Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights.”⁴ What is more, Jews must have the courage to affirm their identity. “Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew – that is, in realising one’s Jewish condition.”⁵

footnotes: ³ Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew ⁴ Ibid., 153. ⁵ Ibid., 136.

But in the course of this salutary diagnosis Sartre comes to a remarkable conclusion. Jews possess nothing that makes them Jews. They have no land and no history. They have neither shared interests nor shared beliefs. The only thing they have in common and that makes them distinctive is antisemitism. This is Sartre’s paradox: that it is not Jews who create antisemitism but antisemitism which creates Jews. It follows that if antisemitism is eliminated, so too will be Jewry. It is wrong, says Sartre, forcibly to assimilate Jews. It would be inhumane, and so long as there is antisemitism, it will not work. Nonetheless, the authentic 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.”⁶ In a world free of prejudice, in other words, there would be no more Jews.

footnotes: ⁶ Ibid., 150.

This was not simply a view held by others about Jews. It was deeply internalised by Jews themselves and by none more so than by the early Zionists. In the modern world, they argued, only a national identity was a viable one. In the diaspora Jews lacked a national identity, and therefore they would not survive as a people. Religion had served to keep Jews as a people apart for some 1,800 years. But it could do so no longer. Its hold was weakening under the impact of Enlightenment and social change. The only question was whether the process was malevolent or benign. Would Jews disappear through persecution or assimilation? That they would disappear was inevitable. Only by reconstituting themselves as a nation in their land would Jews secure their continuity. The diaspora had run its course. It was at an end.

No one put the case more forcibly than Jacob Klatzkin. The end of the ghetto, he wrote, meant the end of Judaism. “Galut [Diaspora] Jewry cannot survive and all our efforts to keep it alive can have only a temporary success.” Besides which, diaspora Judaism was no longer worthy of survival. Jews might remain who wished to assimilate but who, because of antisemitism, found themselves unable to do so. But their connections with any Jewish belief or practice would be tenuous. They would find themselves branded as Jews without any answering commitment from within. They would be “rent and broken human beings…diseased by ambivalence, consumed by contradictions, and spent by relentless inner conflict.”⁷ (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 323–24.

footnotes: ⁷ Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea

Klatzkin was a secularist who had broken away from the religious tradition in which he had been raised. But the most visionary of the religious Zionists, Rabbi Abraham Kook, concurred. Diaspora Jewry, he wrote, is “disintegrating at an alarming rate, and there is no hope for it unless it replants itself by the wellspring of real life…which can be found only in Eretz Israel.” The long exile had been intended to purge Jews of the excessive materialism they had shown during their national existence. But the process had gone too far. Judaism had now become over-spiritualised. It had lost contact with life. The rebellion of East European youth against the Judaism of the ghetto was all too understandable. All that was now left in the diaspora was “the shadow of a vision.”⁸

footnotes: ⁸ Ibid., 429.

The Holocaust confirmed these dark forebodings. The birth of Israel as a state fulfilled Zionism’s highest hopes. The central premiss of the Zionist argument – shelilat ha-golah, negation of the diaspora – seemed to have been proven unequivocally true by the course of history. How has that argument fared in the past four decades?

New diaspora, old problems In 1840 some 90 percent of world Jewry was situated in Europe. By 1982 that figure had become little more than 20 percent. In 1840 only 1 percent of world Jewry lived in America, North and South. By 1982 America was where half of Jewry lived.⁹ (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 33. Today’s diaspora is a new phenomenon, no longer European but American. Some three million Jews had fled to America from Eastern Europe in the wake of the Russian pogroms during the years 1880 to 1920. The Holocaust destroyed most of the remaining centres of European Jewish life. The postwar diaspora is not the one Klatzkin and Kook knew. New York and Los Angeles have taken over from Berlin and Vienna. Lakewood and Boston have replaced Volozhyn and Berditchev as centres of Torah. Jewry over the past century has been marked by vast migrations and dislocations. The question at the forefront of Jewish consciousness has been: Would the new diaspora reproduce the patterns of the old?

footnotes: ⁹ Daniel Elazar, People and Polity

The answer seemed to be yes. The warnings were signalled by a series of demographic and sociological studies charting trends in the world’s largest Jewish community, that of the United States. The story they told was a disturbing one, along three axes. The first was mixed marriage. During the 1920s the rate had been estimated as no more than one percent. By the 1950s it had risen to between 10 and 15 percent. During the 1960s it rose sharply again. Precise figures were hard to determine, for the rates varied between one city and another. In large centres where Jews were residentially concentrated and community life was more intense, the figures were lower. In more dispersed areas, they were higher. But estimates converged on the figure of one in three.¹⁰, edited by Jonathan Sacks (London: Jews’ College Publications), 179–208; Sergio DellaPergola and Uziel O. Schmeltz, “Demographic Transformations of American Jewry: Marriage and Mixed Marriage in the 1980s,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume V, edited by Peter Medding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169–200. By 1991 it was revised upward again to one in two.¹¹, May 1991.

footnotes: ¹⁰ Samuel Heilman, “The Jewish Family Today,” in Tradition and Transition ¹¹ New York Times

Since the days of Ezra and before, intermarriage has been the critical index of the disintegration of Jews as a distinctive group. Judaism is not a private faith of individuals. It is embodied in communities, above all in the family. The survival of Judaism depends on the decision of Jews to marry other Jews and raise their children as Jews. The high mixed marriage rates of American Jewry suggested to sociologists no less than to rabbis that its survival was becoming increasingly tenuous. The traditional barriers against intermarriage were collapsing. The 1975 Boston survey revealed that while four in ten Jews above the age of sixty held negative views about it, only one in twenty of 18–29 year olds did so.¹² (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 19. It was becoming accepted as a normal feature of Jewish life.

footnotes: ¹² Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change

The corresponding figures for British Jewry are unavailable. But a report by the Research Unit of the Board of Deputies in 1989 concluded that “The combined evidence of numbers of synagogue marriages, age at marriage and the marital status of those marrying suggests that as many as two thirds of young single Jews of marriageable age are not marrying in a synagogue.”¹³ It is not clear whether the missing two-thirds are forming mixed marriages, marrying other Jews but without a religious ceremony, delaying marriage, or simply not marrying at all. At any event the figure suggests that the Anglo-Jewish experience mirrors that of American Jewry.

footnotes: ¹³ Board of Deputies Research Unit, press release, 18 June 1989.

The rate of formation of Jewish marriages was one cause for concern. The second was the stability of those marriages themselves. Divorce has always been possible in Jewish law and carries no religious stigma. Nonetheless, in the past it took place against a general backdrop of family stability. Nor was this accidental. Jewish law goes to great extremes to preserve the integrity of marriage through a cluster of provisions ranging from modesty in dress, the regulation of sexual life and the separation of the sexes at public gatherings. Two themes dominate the biblical literature: sexual fidelity, seen as a close counterpart to religious fidelity, and the family as the vehicle of handing on the Jewish tradition. Maimonides, referring to biblical Israel, called the family “the foundation of the state,”¹⁴, 3:41. and among the medieval philosophers, Gersonides, Abarbanel and Joseph Albo all pointed out the inner connection between the strength of the Jewish family and the transmissibility of the values of the Jewish past.¹⁵ to Exodus 20:12; Abarbanel, Commentary ad loc.; Albo, Ikkarim, III, p. 26. The relationship was reciprocal. Jewish tradition protected the family, and the family preserved the tradition. A rapid acceleration of rates of divorce could thus be expected to be both a symptom and a further cause of collapse in the structures of Jewish life.

footnotes: ¹⁴ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed ¹⁵ Gersonides, Commentary

It has occurred. A recent American survey covering the years 1982–1987 showed that one in five Jewish marriages ended in divorce.¹⁶ (North American Jewish Data Bank, 1989). A British survey arrived at the figure of one in six.¹⁷, (London: Board of Deputies, 1986), 14. These remain below the national averages in both countries, but they remain alarmingly high by traditional Jewish standards. The phenomenon poses great problems for the Jewish community. There is the question of divorce itself. Jewish law requires the consent of both husband and wife before a religious divorce can be granted. A legal remedy exists in the case of husbands, but despite various proposals none has yet found general acceptance in the case of wives whose husbands refuse to grant consent. This gives rise to the agonising tragedy of the agunah, the woman unable to remarry. Then there is the question of institutional adjustment. Can the synagogue, the locus of Jewish life in the diaspora, move from its traditional family orientation to provide a sense of belonging to the increasing numbers of divorced and single-parent families? Above all, there is the question of continuity. Can Jewish identity be transmitted in the fragile, provisional and temporary structures of the contemporary family?

footnotes: ¹⁶ Barry Kosmin, Nava Lerer and Egon Mayer, Intermariage, Divorce and Remarriage among American Jews, 1982–1987 ¹⁷ Stanley Waterman and B. Kosmin, British Jewry in the Eighties

The third area of concern was the declining birthrate. Industrialisation, secularisation and affluence are powerful agents of birth control. Jews, whose birthrates had generally been higher than those of the surrounding populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have been deeply affected by these trends. Throughout the twentieth century American‒Jewish fertility as measured by family size has been below that of the national average. At one stage in the 1970s it dropped to 1.2 children per family, well below replacement level.¹⁸ It has since recovered somewhat, but the overall demographic decline continues. The same is true of British Jewry, which has seen its estimated population shrink from 450,000 in the 1950s to some 330,000 today. The picture is repeated in most other diaspora communities.

footnotes: ¹⁸ Heilman, “The Jewish Family Today,” 193.

Because Judaism is the religion of a people, demography is inseparable from theology. The first command recorded in the Torah is “Be fruitful and multiply.” The patriarchal promise, reiterated throughout the book of Genesis, is of a covenantal family that would be as many as the stars of the sky, the dust of the earth and the sand of the seashore. Yet the Bible records a continuing tension between the promise and the reality. Moses declares, “The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you are the fewest of all peoples.”¹⁹ The prophets speak repeatedly of a mere “remnant” that will return. The covenantal people lives continually on the brink of its own extinction, seeming to survive only by a series of miracles. How many Jews there are is a matter of religious as well as ethnic consequence.

footnotes: ¹⁹ Deuteronomy 7:7.

The theological dimension of demography was, as we saw in our chapter on the Holocaust, taken up by contemporary thinkers like Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg.²⁰ (New York: Schocken, 1978), 43–57; Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1977), 7–56. To have Jewish children in a world in which Auschwitz is possible is, for them, an ultimate affirmation of faith. Jewish survival is the post-Holocaust imperative. Clearly, then, the failure of Jews in the diaspora to respond to this imperative calls for explanation, whether theologically as a loss of faith, or sociologically as testimony to the continuing effect of secularisation on Jewish life.

footnotes: ²⁰ Emil Fackenheim, “The People Israel Lives: How My Mind Has Changed,” in The Jewish Return Into History

The initial indications, then, were that the new diaspora was recapitulating the patterns of the old. To be sure, America was not Europe. In Europe Jews had had to contend with the powerful prejudices of a church‒state culture. In America, a less traditional society with a marked separation of church and state, the battle was in some respects won from the outset. Here it was not so much public pressure to assimilate that was causing the erosion of Jewish values and institutions. It was the disintegrative force of modernity itself: social and geographic mobility, the weakening of ethnic ties across the generations, the marginalisation of religious practice in a highly secular society and the damage done to the family by the individuation and autonomy of modern consciousness. Jews, having felt excluded for so long from the cultural mainstream, embraced modernity’s openness with a passion unsurpassed by other ethnic and religious groups. They were measurably more secularised than Protestants and Catholics. The damage done to the fabric of Jewish life was the obverse side of the opportunities America offered. American integration inevitably brought Jewish disintegration.

But this was precisely the argument of shelilat ha-golah, negation of the diaspora, translated from pre-war Europe to contemporary America. And so indeed several American Jewish analysts concluded. In 1956, Ben Halpern wrote: “There is a sifting going on in the Jewish world. Broken Jewish communities, or Jewish communities still breaking up, are dividing, as in a centrifuge, into a stream moving to Israel to combine as a new community and immobile individuals who stay behind to face a Jewish future that has become acutely questionable.”²¹, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken, 1983), 125. In 1973 Charles Liebman, in his The Ambivalent American Jew, concurred. “The American Jew is torn between two sets of values those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival. These values appear to me to be incompatible.”²² (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), vii. In 1981 Arthur Hertzberg arrived at the same conclusion. “In the Diaspora we have taught effectively all the substitutes for the older religion, and the erosion in all the diasporas continues unabated… There is an answer to the question: Is Jewish continuity safe in the open society? The answer is: No.”²³ 1:1 (May 1981), 46–53.

footnotes: ²¹ Ben Halpern, The American Jew: A Zionist Analysis ²² Charles Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew ²³ Arthur Hertzberg, “The Emancipation: A Reassessment After Two Centuries,” Modern Judaism

The case was echoed from Israel itself. In 1977 Hillel Halkin, in his Letters to an American Jewish Friend, wrote:

In countries where the secular state assumes a liberal, democratic character and antisemitism is institutionally fought or discouraged, assimilation must run rampant, for the Jewish community, stripped of all regulatory or coercive powers and unable to sustain its traditional religious culture or to offer any meaningful substitute in its stead, cannot possibly compete for the allegiance of its members with the lures of society at large.²⁴ (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1977).

footnotes: ²⁴ Hillel Halkin, Letters to an American Jewish Friend

The diaspora was suffering from acute senilic decline and the future of Jewish history lay entirely with the young state of Israel. His view was taken up and restated a year later by Harold Fisch in The Zionist Revolution: “The Jews of the Diaspora are in the position of having carried the burden to this point; and it is with an unconscious sigh of relief that they have discharged it and placed it on younger shoulders.”²⁵ (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 104.

footnotes: ²⁵ Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution

Koestler and Klatzkin were therefore correct and so was Sartre. Once the ghetto walls had been breached, only antisemitism preserved Jewish identity in the diaspora. Minority status placed Jews in an impossible dilemma. They were threatened physically by persecution and spiritually by the absence of persecution. The Holocaust had killed Jews by hatred. The open society would kill Judaism by kindness. It was a lucid reductio ad absurdum of life outside Israel.

Revival or assimilation? However, since the mid-1980s a counter-argument has mounted with considerable force. The debate was initiated by Charles Silberman’s book A Certain People, published in 1985,²⁶ (New York: Summit Books, 1985). and was reinforced by a group of sociologists, among them Calvin Goldscheider and Steven M. Cohen.²⁷ (London: Tavistock, 1983); American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988); Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); The American Jewish Community (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986); Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). To understand how unusual the counter-argument is, we must recall how overwhelmingly pessimistic the prognosis for Jewish survival had been over the past two centuries. Silberman offered the rarest of all attitudes to the diaspora Jewish future: optimism. Judaism was not threatened by the open society. To the contrary, it was liberated by it.

footnotes: ²⁶ Charles Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today ²⁷ Steven M. Cohen, American Modernity and Jewish Identity

Jews, argued Silberman, had prospered in America. To be sure, they had initially encountered forms of antisemitism which had impeded their entry into some areas of employment and which had led, among the second generation, to a widespread abandonment of Judaism and a conscious embrace of Americanisation. But times had changed. Jews were now thoroughly at home in America and were able to be more self-confident in their Jewishness. This had led to a greater openness to tradition and to a more active and high-profile Jewish community. Antisemitism too had declined, so that young Jews could now accept their identity without embarrassment or shame. The significant fact was that Jews had overwhelmingly chosen to remain identified as Jews. America was different. “American Jews now live in a freer, more open society than that of any diaspora community in which Jews have ever lived before.”²⁸, 23.

footnotes: ²⁸ Silberman, A Certain People

Behind these conclusions lay a series of arguments, some relating to modernisation in general, others relating to the definition of Jewish life, that amounted to a substantive revisionist case. The first was that ethnic identities have turned out to be more tenacious than earlier sociologists had predicted. The process of modernisation, it was once believed, would spell the end of distinctive subcultures. Ethnic and religious minorities would be unable to sustain themselves as their members became progressively integrated into a national culture. It has not happened that way, and since the 1960s the theory has had to be revised. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan were among the first to note that the melting pot had not eliminated ethnic loyalties.²⁹,*(*Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). Peter Berger, among others, has noted that the state has now become too remote from the individual to provide the basis of identity.³⁰ (London: Penguin, 1979). Perhaps, too, the very success of immigrant groups in establishing themselves as part of society has enabled them to transform that society into more pluralistic forms. Whatever the theoretical frame, the phenomenon itself is undeniable. Minority religious and ethnic identities have been resurgent since the 1960s.

footnotes: ²⁹ Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot ³⁰ Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity

This deeply affected the American Jewish community. The civil rights movement, in which many Jews were involved, led some to apply the lessons they learned from their encounter with American blacks to themselves. If black was beautiful, perhaps Jewishness might be as well. The interest in rediscovering “roots” had its effect on Jews too, and led to a significant number of baalei teshuvah, religious returnees.³¹ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). The alternative lifestyles explored by the student counter-culture of the 1960s had their Jewish echo in the chavurah movement, the flowering of small community groups in which Jewish rituals were explored in fresh ways. The ground was thus prepared for the radicalisation of American Jewish consciousness that took place around the time of Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967. There was a sense, borne of Israel’s isolation and reflections on the Holocaust, that Jews were cast into a singular fate. This new particularism led in turn to a renaissance of Jewish cultural, academic and philanthropic activity. In short, America’s newfound ethnic pluralism created the cultural space in which a more affirmative, particularist approach to Jewish identity was possible.

footnotes: ³¹ See M. Herbert Danzger, Returning to Tradition: The Contemporary Revival of Orthodox Judaism

The second argument, stressed particularly by Goldscheider, was that the rapid educational and occupational strides made by American Jews did not necessarily entail group disintegration. Hitherto it had been assumed that upward mobility on the part of an ethnic group was associated with its assimilation. Goldscheider argued that this had not happened for the simple reason that Jews had remained distinctive in their upward mobility. They were more likely than other ethnic and religious groups in America to have had a college education and to be employed in the professions, management and academic life. The result was that if neither religion nor shared values held them together, social, economic and cultural forces still did. “A detailed examination of family, marriage, childbearing, social class, residence, occupation and education among Jews and non-Jews leads to the unmistakable conclusion that Jews are different.”³², 171.

footnotes: ³² Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change

Most controversial was the argument over the interpretation of intermarriage. Silberman, Goldscheider and Cohen argued that it does not represent the threat to Jewish continuity previously assumed. Jews are now assimilating but they are not assimilationist. They are not acting out a conscious decision to leave the community. Accordingly intermarriage, which had always been seen as a decisive exit from Judaism, is now no longer so. The outmarried neither see themselves nor are seen by others as having left the fold. They retain Jewish links through friends, residential and occupational associations and to some degree institutional affiliation. Silberman drew the simple mathematical inference. “If half the children of intermarriages are raised as Jews, there will be no net reduction in the number of Jews, no matter how high the intermarriage rate is.”³³, 303.

footnotes: ³³ Silberman, A Certain People

But the new optimism is not built solely on sociological observation. It is predicated on a particular form of sociological interpretation. Silberman and Goldscheider have been described as transformationists, and the term accurately describes their approach to the description of the contemporary Jewish community. The optimists do not deny the progressive attenuation of the links between Jews and Judaism. Goldscheider has written of “ineffective, inadequate and unsuccessful Jewish education, pervasive ignorance…decline in temple and synagogue participation.”³⁴, 186–87. Religious observance, Jewish knowledge and synagogue affiliation are waning among the majority of American Jews. Judged by traditional indices, the Jewish community is failing to sustain itself.

footnotes: ³⁴ Goldscheider and Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews

But these indices, the transformationists argue, embody a mistaken view of Jewish identity. There is no essence of Jewishness specifiable in advance, certainly not one determined by the religious criteria of Judaism. Instead in America – and to some extent in other diaspora communities also – Jewish identity persists, but it is sustained and is to be measured by relatively loose associations: Jewish friends, common attitudes – in particular, support for the State of Israel – and an occasional religiosity manifested on major festivals and life cycle events. The substantive point made by the optimists is that contemporary urban and suburban culture eliminates neither religion nor ethnicity. Instead it leads to a subtle dialectic of accommodation and resistance, to new modes of Jewish expression and association, and to the revival, after an initial period of adjustment, of distinctive patterns of group behaviour.

Their interpretive point, however, is that change is not to be seen as decline. Instead it is to be seen as transformation. As Jews change, so too does what counts as Jewishness. At one time this might have been adherence to Jewish law. At another it may have been membership of a synagogue. At present it may be no more than working, socialising and living in close proximity to other Jews. For Goldscheider, “The strength of the Jewish community reflects the number and intensity of in-group interactions. The more the bases of interaction and the greater its intensity, the more cohesive is the community.”³⁵, 1. So long, therefore, as Jews regularly meet and mix, it makes no difference what the content and context of these meetings are. Continuity persists through change.

footnotes: ³⁵ Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change

Most controversially, it follows from this definition that children of mixed marriages will be regarded as Jews so long as they continue to see themselves as Jews and interact with other Jews. This conflicts radically with the halakhic criterion of Jewish status, according to which one is a Jew only if one was born to a Jewish mother or had undergone conversion. Goldscheider is insistent on this point. “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 behaviourally, communally and culturally, and how the community defines them.”³⁶, 19.

footnotes: ³⁶ Goldscheider, The American Jewish Community

The transformationists’ case has been strongly challenged at two different levels. Firstly, on the substantive issue of the demographic strength of American Jewry, Sergio DellaPergola and Uziel Schmelz dissent.³⁷ The argument that the American‒Jewish community is in the throes of a revival and that therefore America does not reproduce the patterns of other diaspora communities is refuted by the evidence. A close examination of recent demographic data, they maintain, reveals a picture of reduced and delayed marriages, low fertility, increasing divorce, growing incidence of out-marriage, a relatively low proportion of children of mixed marriages raised as Jews, and a greater outflow from than inflow to the Jewish community. Regardless of any argument from transformation, these signal a diminishing community.

footnotes: ³⁷ DellaPergola and Schmeltz, “Demographic Transformations of American Jewry,” 169–200. See also Goldscheider’s rejoinder and DellaPergola and Schmeltz’s reply, ibid., 201–14.

More broadly, Charles Liebman has taken issue with the interpretive assumptions of transformationism. Jewishness, he argues, has an essential connection with Judaism. Not all expressions of Jewish group solidarity are equally significant. “Attending synagogue and eating in Chinese restaurants are both activities that bring Jews into greater propinquity. But I do not believe that they have the same implications for the strength of Jewish life.” The difference between the transformationists and those like himself whom he labels “traditionalists” is not whether Judaism can survive in the diaspora, but “whether there is an essential Jewish (Judaic) quality against which American Jewish life can be measured.” If the answer is yes, then it follows that “there is a point where Judaism or Jewishness might so transform itself that it can no longer be called Judaism.”³⁸ (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), 61–73.

footnotes: ³⁸ Charles Liebman, Deceptive Images: Toward a Redefinition of American Judaism

Liebman detects continuing signs of Jewish erosion in America: the growth of mixed marriage, the cursory character of Jewish education, low rates of synagogue affiliation, and the amorphous character of Jewish culture. These, he argues, are to be seen as signs of assimilation. But the transformations in American Jewry mean that the concept of assimilation itself now has to be reassessed. In the past it referred to the individual. It meant a decision to cease identifying as a Jew. That form of behaviour is, for a variety of reasons, less prevalent today. Instead, Liebman argues, assimilation should be seen as a collective phenomenon. It is “a process of attenuation of ties between American Jews and the Jewish tradition and/or between American Jews as a collective body and the collective body of Jews outside the United States.”³⁹

footnotes: ³⁹ Ibid., 82.

The heart of the dilemma is this. It is possible to identify a particular form of American Jewishness which is sufficiently different from other modes of American ethnicity to warrant the inference that Jewishness persists. But at the same time this may be so different from the way Jews in the past or Jews outside America have lived that it is inaccurate to call it “Jewishness.” Instead it should be called “American‒Jewishness.” The cogency of Liebman’s argument lies in the fact that the word “Jew” necessarily involves reference to a people and a past, not simply to a section of that people and to the present. Not every sign of American‒Jewish vitality is necessarily a sign of Jewish vitality per se. Liebman here recapitulates the argument of early theorists, among them Will Herberg,⁴⁰ (New York: Anchor Books, 1960). who saw the postwar American religious revival as a sign not of the sanctification of society but of the secularisation of religion.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew

Secular and sacred Behind every sociology there is a theology. And the debate between transformationists and traditionalists is the latest manifestation of two fundamental debates about the meaning of Jewish destiny. The first is the question: What is it to be a Jew? The second is the question: What is the meaning of exile, galut, in contemporary Jewish life?

The first relates to the much more general question of the relationship between religion and society. Emile Durkheim was among the first to ask the question, not of the meaning or transcendental authority of religious systems, but of their function. His suggestion that religion served to create and preserve group solidarity opened the way to a Copernican shift in the understanding of Judaism. Two thinkers in particular – Ahad Ha-Am in Russia and Mordecai Kaplan in America – were deeply influenced by this idea. Ahad Ha-Am put it most famously in his remark that “More than the Jews have preserved the Sabbath, the Sabbath has preserved the Jews.” Instead of seeing religion as the way in which society served God, they saw it as the way in which God served society. Judaism might be translated into the sensibilities of a secular age if the word God were deleted and in its place were written, the Jewish people.

Thus for Ahad Ha-Am Judaism was the expression of the national spirit of the Jews, while for Mordecai Kaplan it was their evolving civilisation. Both edited out the concept of a transcendent God. And though Ahad Ha-Am was a cultural Zionist while Kaplan was primarily concerned with Jewish life in America, they shared a broadly similar view of the future relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Israel would constitute a revolution in the history of Judaism, allowing it to be seen less as a religion than as a national culture, and this would in turn revitalise the diaspora which would be sustained on the bases of ethnicity and a secularised form of Judaism.

Their inversion of the relationship between religion and society meant that, necessarily, Judaism would undergo unpredictable transformations. For Judaism now followed rather than dictated social developments in Jewish life. It would become a sacred legitimation of secular change. To be sure, Ahad Ha-Am believed that there were normative values within the Jewish tradition. But once the decision has been taken to see religion as a function of society rather than vice versa, that position is hard to sustain. The sociological perspective of transformationism is closely related to this view of Judaism, which collapses the distinction between what Jews do and what they ought to do.

This process is best observed in the phenomenon described by Jonathan Woocher in America, Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya in Israel, as civil religion.⁴¹ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). The term, coined by Robert Bellah, refers to the appropriation of religious symbolism by secular agencies. In American Jewish life, especially since Israel’s 1967 war, the most powerful of these agencies have been the Jewish Federations, involved in philanthropic, welfare and political endeavours on behalf of the American‒Jewish community and Israel. As Woocher has demonstrated, the Federations have developed a rhetoric which amounts to a religious system in its own right. Its central theme is the historical drama of the Holocaust and the State of Israel seen as a transition from death to rebirth. Its tenets are the unity of the Jewish people, mutual responsibility, Jewish survival in a threatening world, the centrality of Israel to Jewish existence worldwide, the enduring values of Jewish tradition, philanthropy and social justice, and Americanness as a virtue.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews

The civil religion of American Jews is not Judaism. It focuses on public occasions rather than private life. Its forum is not the synagogue but fund-raising dinners, missions to Israel, and the aspects and occasions of secular Jewish organisational life. Its existence testifies to one of the central paradoxes running through this book: to the fact that contemporary Jews feel a strong sense of belonging to a people and its history but without a personal commitment to the religious laws and traditions that constituted it as a people and gave specific shape to its history. Civil Judaism is the latest manifestation of the process of which Ahad Ha-Am and Kaplan were the theoreticians: a religion with the Jewish people rather than God at its centre.

To a large extent also, American Reform and Reconstructionist Judaisms have followed a similar trajectory, though they remain recognisably religious institutions. Their positions have in effect been legitimations of attitudes and behaviours independently arrived at by American Jews in their dialectic between integration and survival. The most notorious instance of this was the Reform rabbinate’s decision in 1983 to adopt patrilineality as well as matrilineality as prima facie grounds for Jewish status. Thus a child of either a Jewish mother or father could be declared Jewish without conversion, on the basis of “appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.” This, along with the willingness of most American Reform rabbis to officiate at mixed marriages, amounted to a religious legitimation of a sociological reality: intermarriage as a fact of modern Jewish life.

It did more. For the first time it introduced into Judaism the idea that – independently of conversion – there can be Jews by choice. Peter Berger has noted that one of the essential features of modern consciousness is its replacement of fate by choice, and has reminded us that literal meaning of the word haeresis is “choice.” “In a very real sense, every religious community in the pluralistic situation becomes a ‘heresy,’ with all the social and psychological tenuousness that the term suggests.”⁴² (London: Allen Lane, 1970), 62. This applies with particular poignancy to the situation of Judaism in a secular society. Central to traditional Judaism are three implicit axioms: that one is born a Jew, that the claims of Jewish identity take precedence over all others and that without requiring any further assent one is bound by Jewish law. The terms of Jewishness are thus written in the language of fate, not choice. By contrast, the leading exponent of American Reform Judaism, Eugene Borowitz, argues that autonomy is the central value in contemporary Jewish life.⁴³ (New York: Behrman House, 1983), 243–72. Tradition and modernity are here in radical conflict. Once Judaism is defined by personal choice and becomes a role rather than an identity, the way is open to the possibility, and by now in America the reality, of individuals who see themselves as both Jews and Christians and practise selective rituals of both religions.

footnotes: ⁴² Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels ⁴³ Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought

The sharpest critiques of the secularisation not of Jews but of Judaism have come from two Orthodox thinkers. Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Leibowitz has polemicised tirelessly against what he sees as the various idolatries of modern Jewish life. One of these is the shift from heteronomy to autonomy, from a God- to a humanity-centred Judaism. Judaism, he reminds us, is a set of commands, not a system of ethics. Commands are our way of serving God. They are not directed to societal or personal needs. Admittedly, Jewish thinkers from the early rabbinic period onwards have sought “reasons for the commands.” But these, Leibowitz argues, are theological constructs, not facts of religious faith. We pray not as an expression of the spirit but because we are commanded to pray. The paradigm of faith is the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. Here Abraham submits, simply and completely, to the divine command. There are no reasons for this command, nor did it serve any human purpose. Faith means submission to the will of God, concretised in the halakhic system.⁴⁴ (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1979); Emunah, Historiah ve-Arakhim (Jerusalem: Akadamon, 1982). For a summation of these views in English, see Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Commandments,” in Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New York: Scribner’s, 1987), 67–80.

footnotes: ⁴⁴ Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yahadut, Am Yehudi u-Medinat Yisrael

Peter Berger has described how modernity “subjectivises” religion in a double sense. First, “religion becomes increasingly a matter of free subjective choice.” Second, “religious ‘realities’ are increasingly ‘translated’ from a frame of reference of facticities external to the individual consciousness to a frame of reference that locates them within consciousness.”⁴⁵ (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 166. The first subjectivisation – the kind that characterises Reform Judaism in America – would be resisted by all Orthodox thinkers. Normative Jewish conduct is not determined by personal choice. The second is what Leibowitz is concerned to challenge. A subtle secularisation takes place when Jewish law is left intact but interpreted as a means to personal fulfilment or social cohesiveness. Against Durkheim and the appropriation of his theories for religious ends, Leibowitz writes that “There is an absolute opposition between service to God through the Torah and its commands and the service of ‘the God in the heart’ or ‘the conscience’ of humanistic religion, which ultimately can be nothing but service to man.”⁴⁶ This turns God from an end to a means and is nothing short of idolatry.

footnotes: ⁴⁵ Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy ⁴⁶ Leibowitz, “Commandments,” 73.

Rabbi Soloveitchik’s argument is contained in a searching and subtle essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith.”⁴⁷ 7:2 (Summer 1965), 5–67. Starting with the two accounts of the creation of man in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, Soloveitchik describes two typologies of human existence which he calls majestic and covenantal man. Majestic man, made in God’s image and commanded to subdue the world and have dominion over the animals, is inquisitive and manipulative, the author of science and technology. Covenantal man, made from the dust of the earth and commanded to “serve and guard” the garden, is passive and receptive, a being of wonder and relationship. Soloveitchik does not describe them as such, but we recognise here an idealisation of the secular and conventionally religious personalities.

footnotes: ⁴⁷ Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition

In the past, Soloveitchik argues, the two types coexisted within the personality of the Jew. Action as well as passivity, the pursuit of knowledge as well as awe before the unknowable, were both parts of the religious life. The Jew saw himself as God’s creation, but he was also, as the sages put it, “a partner of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the work of creation.” Within this tension, Jews lived. In the twentieth century, however, the balance had dramatically shifted. Hitherto the secular had been contained within the sacred. Now it was threatening to infiltrate the sacred and reduce it to the secular. The danger to religion lay not in atheism but in its own translation into cultural, psychological and aesthetic terms. Modern man turns to religion for happiness; to a place of worship for an uplifting experience; to faith for therapy and peace of mind. Against this, “the man of faith must bring to the attention of the man of culture the kerygma of original faith in all its singularity and pristine purity in spite of the incompatibility of this message with the fundamental credo of a utilitarian society.”⁴⁸

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Ibid., 62–63.

Here then is one central dilemma of Judaism in an age in which the majority of Jews have undergone advanced secularisation. Is secularity to be embraced, at the cost of the abandonment of much of Jewish law and the loss of the idea of a transcendent and commanding God? Or is it to be resisted, at the cost of parting company with most Jews? Reform, Reconstructionist and Civil Judaisms take the first route, Orthodoxy the second. As we have seen, the argument over the sociology of the contemporary diaspora turns upon a similar question: Is what Jews do, or what tradition says they ought to do, to be taken as normative? Does social reality determine our idea of Judaism, or does Judaism determine our interpretation of society?

Diaspora or exile? But equally at stake in the argument between traditionalists and transformationists is another and less frequently articulated question. Just as the existence of the State of Israel posed the problem of the meaning of redemption, so the persistence of the diaspora raises the problem of the meaning of exile. The very word “diaspora” is a neutralisation of the theological charge contained in the word galut, exile. A diaspora is a dispersion; an exile is a punishment, a dislocation, an unnatural state of being. How far does the word galut apply to the contemporary American experience?

Israeli thinkers tend to agree on two propositions: that the diaspora is galut, and that galut is at an end.⁴⁹ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). Diaspora Jewish survival is threatened equally by the existence and absence of antisemitism. The one leads to persecution, the other to assimilation. What is more, a full Jewish life is impossible outside Israel. Only in Israel is Judaism part of the public domain. Only there is it part of a national culture. Only there can a Jew live free of the ambivalences and equivocations of minority existence. This argument, driven home by such thinkers as Nathan Rotenstreich and Eliezer Schweid, lies beneath the surface of the traditionalists’ critique of the transformationists. American Jewry is not healthy but sick in both quantitative and qualitative terms. One of the symptoms of its sickness is that it fails to recognise its own malaise. Gershom Scholem put it bluntly, citing the Hasidic aphorism that “The greatest exile is to not realise that one is in exile.”⁵⁰ This was the condition of American Jewry.

footnotes: ⁴⁹ See Arnold Eisen’s important study, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming ⁵⁰ Cited in ibid., 148.

American Jewry, for its part, had long lived with a definition of Zionism that did not entail negation of the diaspora. Louis Brandeis, one of the most distinguished figures of American Jewish history had, in 1915, established the classic terms of American Zionism. It did not involve dual loyalties. To the contrary, “loyalty to America demands…that each American Jew becomes a Zionist.”⁵¹ (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 520. American support for a refuge from persecution and a place of Jewish national renaissance fell perfectly within the terms of its concern for social justice and the brotherhood of man. Brandeis’s Zionism was political only, but Solomon Schechter and Mordecai Kaplan looked to the land of Israel to provide spiritual and cultural regeneration to world Jewry as a whole. Far from displacing the diaspora, Israel would revitalise it.

footnotes: ⁵¹ Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea

Since the creation of the state the paradoxes of American Zionism have multiplied. Certainly since 1967, Israel has been at the heart of American Jewish self-definition. Israel, observers have noted, has become the religion of American Jews. At the same time, American‒Jewish aliyah – emigration to Israel – is low and falling.⁵² (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989). The “Lakeville” study, a survey of attitudes in a representative Jewish community completed just prior to the Six-Day War, found that while 91 percent of Jews interviewed favoured financial support of Israel, only 1 percent considered living there or encouraging their children to do so. Charles Liebman has suggested that to American Jews, Israel is “home” in the sense that Eastern Europe was to an earlier generation: a place by which one defines oneself precisely by not living there.⁵³, 106.

footnotes: ⁵² See Chaim Waxman, American Aliya ⁵³ Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew

The Six-Day War led to a further contradiction, both sides of which were embraced by American Jews. Israel’s victory enhanced its image as the triumphant affirmation of Jewish survival. But its isolation prior to the war dramatised Israel as the embodiment of the perennial Jewish condition of vulnerability. On the one hand, Israel is seen as needing the support of the diaspora; on the other it is viewed as a symbol of the independence of the Jewish spirit.

American Jews, for their part, are deeply disinclined to see their situation as one of galut. If exile is defined politically as persecution, disenfranchisement and insecurity, they can point to their own freedom, integration and social prominence. If it is defined spiritually as the alienation of man from God, it exists in secular Israel no less than in secular America. If it is defined as homelessness, then the very existence of Israel lifts the category of galut from Jews both in Israel and outside. Home, said Mordecai Kaplan, quoting Robert Frost, “is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” In this sense, Israel is home not only to its own inhabitants but to Jews everywhere. But if America is not galut, where then lies the unique significance of Israel for American Jews?

These inner tensions have deepened in the past two decades. Many Israelis have emigrated to America: they outnumber the Americans who have chosen to live in Israel.⁵⁴ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Their existence at once refutes and confirms an American Zionism which sees Israel as a place to which one goes, not leaves, but which sees America as a uniquely benign environment for Jews. The same perplexity has been created by the desire of many Russian Jewish emigrants to live in America rather than Israel. Which of the two is the land of refuge? The Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Lebanon campaign of 1982 and the Palestinian Intifada raised questions about Israel as the place where Jews can live without fear. Publicised conflicts between secular and religious raised questions about Israel as the locus of Jewish personal freedom. At the same time American Jews are aware that without Israel, their own Jewish life would lack focus and security. The relationship between the two Jewries is one of intense sibling rivalry.

footnotes: ⁵⁴ For a study of Israelis in America, see Moshe Shokeid, Children of Circumstances

No one has been more forceful is exposing these ambivalences than the American scholar Jacob Neusner.⁵⁵ (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981); The Jewish War Against the Jews (New York: Ktav, 1984); Israel in America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985); Who, What and Where Is Israel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989). Zionism solved a critical problem for American Jews. It allowed a reconstruction of Jewish identity in the face of the disintegration of the religious base of Jewish peoplehood. Jews in America felt that they were different from other Americans and linked to other Jews throughout the world. But they could not articulate how and why. Zionism provided the answer. Jews were united in their concern for the land. For modern American Jews the transition from Holocaust to Israel is not just history but mythology. It explains who Jews are and why. They are the people who experienced shoah u-gevurah, Holocaust and heroism, threat and survival, destruction and redemption. But the answer, right for Israelis, is wrong for American Jews. It explains what it is to be a Jew in terms of events that happened to someone else, somewhere else. American Jews did not live through the Holocaust. They choose not to live in Israel. Therefore the story by which they explain the Jewish condition is a vicarious one, and fails to provide meaning to and for themselves.

footnotes: ⁵⁵ The argument is developed through Neusner’s books Stranger at Home

Israel does not negate the diaspora, because Judaism is a matter of holy lives as well as holy places. Galut cannot be reduced to a spatial or political category. Exile means “alienation, disintegration, inner strife.” In that sense American Jews are in galut, alienated as they are from their own traditions. But that is not a galut that can be eliminated by geographical relocation, a trip across the ocean. Israel solves the problem of Jewish national existence, but not the problem of Jewish spiritual existence. “The Jewish people is my homeland. Wherever Jews live, there I am at home. And Zionism is the highest expression of the Jewish people’s will to endure. I am a Zionist because I am a Jew.”⁵⁶, 135.

footnotes: ⁵⁶ Neusner, Stranger at Home

From Jews to the Jewish people The contradictions in contemporary diaspora self-understanding are, to some extent, a mirror image of the dilemmas traced in the previous chapter about Israel itself. Is Israel exile transported to the holy land, or the beginning of redemption? To this argument the diaspora has added other dimensions of its own. Does “homelessness” describe the experience of Jews in America? Most Jews, by staying there, implicitly answer in the negative. Even those who would say yes might argue, like George Steiner, that the Jewish destiny is precisely to lack a home. The theological problem posed by the modern state of Israel and the diaspora is that Judaism did not contemplate the possibility of a non-messianic national rebirth. That there might be a return by some, but not the majority, of Jews to the land; that Jews might feel themselves at home in the diaspora even while recognising the centrality of Israel; that return to the promised land might be geographical and political but not spiritual; that Israelis themselves, having come, might leave; that Israel might not end, but simply transform, hostility towards Jews – these were scenarios unanticipated in covenantal history.

The theme of exile and return is written too deeply into Jewish consciousness for it to be easily subverted. Every major figure in the Pentateuch – Adam, Cain, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and the Israelites – experiences exile. The story of the covenant begins with the command of God to Abraham to leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house. The festival of Passover is an enactment of exodus. The festival of Tabernacles involves living for eight days in a temporary dwelling. The tantalising question for Jews in a century of unprecedented exoduses and ingatherings is how to feel at home in the land of Israel and homeless in the diaspora, when the one is surrounded by enemies and wars and the other seems marked by freedom and security. Arthur Koestler, in the essay with which we began this chapter, wrote that “if the mystic yearning for the return to Palestine is eliminated from the Jewish faith, its very foundations and essence will have gone.”⁵⁷, 332. That is the proposition which today’s diaspora simultaneously affirms and denies.

footnotes: ⁵⁷ Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment

The arguments we have explored thus far press us inexorably to a fundamental question. Most Jews have been profoundly affected by the Holocaust and the State of Israel. They have been the definitive events of modern Jewish history, moments of such consequence for the meaning of covenantal destiny that no Jew can evade coming to terms with them and their implications. But they have led, as we have seen, in two opposite directions.

On the one hand they have yielded a bewildering irreducible variety of interpretations. The Holocaust refuted and confirmed Jewish faith. Israel was the beginning of or a fateful diversion from redemption. Israel at once negates and revitalises the diaspora. Outside Israel, Jews are assimilating or, to the contrary, merely evolving. The conclusion to which these conflicts point is unmistakable. There is no present consensus on the nature of Jewish destiny.

On the other hand, the history of the Holocaust and the State of Israel have convinced many, perhaps most, Jews that there is a single and indivisible Jewish destiny. The Holocaust threatened Jews as Jews without distinction. Israel’s unfolding drama suggested to those there and in the diaspora that its fate concerned all Jews, the diaspora included. The strongest sense to have emerged in Jewish life in the past half-century has been of a people linked by the bonds of a common history and responsibility. Hence Neusner’s remark that “The Jewish people is my homeland.”

But can these two phenomena coexist? How can there be a single people so divided as to what constitutes this people and its singularity? We are driven to a central question of post-Holocaust Jewish thought. For how can there be a people defined by a land which embraces also those who choose not to live in that land? How can there be a people defined by a faith and way of life which most of its members do not share? How can there be a people shaped by a recent history who are utterly divided in their understanding of that history? Is there still a Jewish people and if so, in what sense?