Jewishness and Judaism¹

footnotes: ¹ Talk on BBC Radio 3, 19 December 1988.

“The world makes many images of Israel,” wrote the historian Simon Rawidowicz, “but Israel makes only one image of itself – that of a being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.” One generation after another saw itself as the last link in the chain of Jewish history, and before it lay eclipse. Rawidowicz called the Jews the ever-dying people.

It was a truth spoken only half in jest. Ever since the beginning of European emancipation, Judaism had contemplated its own obituary, as Jews converted or assimilated or married out of the faith. The great nineteenth-century school of German-Jewish enlightenment, Judische-Wissenschaft, or the “Science of Judaism,” conceived of its task as the curator of a culture already embalmed. Moritz Steinschneider confessed: “We have only one task left: to give the remains of Judaism a decent burial.” Leopold Zunz foresaw the time – he placed it early in the twentieth century – when there would be no one left who could read and understand the great texts of rabbinic literature. Even the artists of literary renewal sensed that their beginning was also an ending. The poet Yehudah Leib Gordon, one of the architects of the reborn Hebrew language, wrote, “Who will tell me…that I am not the last poet of Zion and you my last readers?”

The thought of one’s own demise focuses the mind admirably, and obsessive Jewish preoccupation with crisis has proved to be one of the great self-refuting prophecies of all time. What none of these thinkers foresaw was the succession of events that were to change irrevocably the terms of Jewish existence: the rise of racial antisemitism, the massive emigration from Eastern Europe to America, the Holocaust, and the creation of the State of Israel.

And yet, as late as the 1960s, thinkers as penetrating as Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper were arguing that though everything had changed, nothing had changed. The thesis was best expressed by the French sociologist, Georges Friedmann, in a book published just before Israel’s 1967 war. It was entitled The End of the Jewish People? Its argument was that Jews were now faced with a choice of two assimilations, individual assimilation into the countries of the Diaspora, or collective assimilation into a secular Israeli state. Indeed it had been a long-standing assumption of secular Zionists that outside Israel, only strong religious commitment could secure Jewish continuity, and that commitment could not be sustained for the tide of secularisation was inexorable.

They seemed to be right. A series of demographic surveys of American Jewry in the 1970s showed a rapid erosion of the traditional indicators of survival. Jews were marrying late or not at all. Those that married were increasingly likely to divorce. They were proving themselves master-practitioners of birth-control. At one stage the average Jewish family was estimated at 1.2 children, the lowest rate of any religious or ethnic grouping in America, and well below replacement level. Most alarmingly to religious leaders, Jews had lost their inhibition against marrying outside the faith. One in three was doing so, and there were few of the new generation who held strong feelings about the matter, one way or another. In 1975, a Harvard computer, afflicted with more than usual melancholy, predicted that the American Jewish community would be reduced, over the next hundred years, from six million to tens or at most hundreds of thousands. The Jewish people was dying again.

But in the last few years an almost unprecedented phenomenon has appeared among the sociologists – Jewish optimism. Charles Silberman, in his major study of the state of American Jewry, concluded that Jews had finally arrived. Professions, professorships, corporate presidencies: all the closed doors were now open. The twin perils of Jewish modernity – antisemitism from the outside, self-hatred from within – were at an end. “American Jews,” he wrote, “now live in a freer, more open society than that of any Diaspora community in which Jews have ever lived before.”

Jews flourish in America. But does Judaism? Does there survive a coherent sense of what it is to be a Jew, or some substantive content to Jewish life? Professor Calvin Goldscheider has argued that this is the wrong question to ask. We are mistaken if we seek to measure the strength of contemporary Jewish life against traditional criteria – in terms, that is, of religious observance. For Jewish life is undergoing a transformation. Instead we should measure it by group cohesiveness and the strength and scope of its interactions. So long as Jews mix with Jews and are recognisably different from other groups, then we can speak of Jewish identity and continuity – however undefined that identity might be.

Behind the optimism lies an ironic transformation. Jews came to America in their millions between 1880 and 1920 in a flight from a Europe in which, as Heinrich Heine put it, “Judaism is not a religion; it’s a misfortune.” They came to the melting pot with a positive desire to be melted. They secularised, Americanised and acculturated with a rare fervour. The crowded inhabitants of New York’s Lower East Side Jewish ghettoes, traditional and still redolent of Eastern Europe, had scattered in two generations to all the corners of suburbia. Jews wanted to disappear.

However, so successful were the attempts to scale the heights of American opportunity that Jews found themselves together again at the top. They go to university, enter the professions, management and academic life, more than any other ethnic or religious group. They find themselves clustered together educationally, professionally, geographically and socially. In striving to integrate, they have become more like one another and less like everyone else. If tradition no longer binds Jews together, overachieving does. Twentieth-century America has proved to be one long series of variations on the Jew who went to a country club to get away from other Jews, and found it full of Jews who were trying to do the same.

Nor is this all. For the second generation of American Jews, Judaism was associated with Europe, poverty, the ghetto, and parents struggling with the language; and they cast it off like an old overcoat in the sun. For the third generation and the fourth it holds no such memories. At worst it stands for suburban rectitude; at best it has its own ethnic cache. Nor is a college education now, as it was decades ago, the great generational divide. Jews too were caught up in the ethnic revival of the 1960s and became prime examples of Hansen’s Law, that the third generation spends its time trying to remember what the second generation laboured to forget. There was a renewed interest in tradition, “roots,” even ritual observance. For the first time in two hundred years, assimilation was no longer a conscious goal.

There was another factor of great consequence. Israel’s isolation in the weeks preceding the Six-Day War had a profound impact on Diaspora Jewry. Another Holocaust seemed to be in the making, and this brought home, as nothing else had done, the full enormity of the first. Communal organisations, which had until now been largely concerned with domestic welfare and education, were mobilised in support of Israel, and a sense of kinship seized world Jewry, eclipsing all thought of divergent destinies. The Holocaust and Israel became and have remained the dominant themes for American Jews, despite the fact, as critics have pointed out, that having escaped the one and chosen not to live in the other, this is a curiously vicarious form of identity.

Which brings us to the contemporary paradox. The American Jewish community is one of the most secularised in history. Orthodoxy, the one strand of Jewish life that makes no substantive accommodations to changing times, represents less than 10 percent of the population. Fewer than half of America’s Jews are affiliated to a synagogue. In a recent survey, in answer to the question “Is religion very important in your life?” 61 percent of Protestants said yes, 56 percent of Roman Catholics, but only 25 percent of Jews. Some 90 percent of the present generation of Jewish Americans will have gone to college, making it perhaps the most educated population in history; but it will be one of the least Jewishly educated of all time.

Nonetheless, Silberman and Goldscheider have identified the salient fact that it is a community for the most part proud and positive about its Jewishness. What has occurred, in other words, is the very thing all nineteenth-century observers agreed was impossible: secular Jewish continuity in the Diaspora.

But is it viable? It has brought in its wake some intractable problems. Behaviour that in the past would have marked an exit from the Jewish community is now considered acceptable or at least something with which the community has to live. Those, for example, who marry outside the faith often still wish to be considered as Jews. Who, in such a case, will perform the wedding ceremony? And what of their children? Jewish law defines a Jew as one born of a Jewish mother. But if a Jewish husband, married to a non-Jewish wife, wishes to raise his children as Jews, can he do so without their having to undergo conversion? Reform Judaism in America has felt itself forced to reach an accommodation. It has de facto accepted that many of its rabbis will officiate at mixed marriages, and in 1983 it decided to deem as Jewish the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, subject to “timely and appropriate acts of identification” with the religion and its people.

This, the so-called patrilineal decision, has caused a furore, for it overturns a criterion of Jewish status that has been in force for at least two and a half thousand years. As a result of this and other Reform policies, many thousands of individuals consider themselves and are considered by their congregations to be Jewish, but are not so considered by most other Jews throughout the world. Some observers have warned of an imminent split within the Jewish world that will parallel the Jewish-Christian schism nineteen centuries ago, and the scenario cannot be complacently dismissed. It acutely illustrates the problem of reconciling Jewishness with Judaism, of giving religious legitimation to secular Jewish attitudes.

That aside, others doubt the staying power of an identity so tenuously conceived. What, after all, is Jewish ethnicity? Does it exist? Go to Israel, and you will see among its Jews a complete anthology of ethnic diversity: punctilious Jews from Germany, traditionalists from the Yemen, the black Jews of Ethiopia, ex-refuseniks from Russia, academics from America, a dozen different types of kaftan-wearing mystics, and so on through a living encyclopaedia of cultural and behavioural patterns. Jews do not form a single ethnic group but a great many; and most of the symbols of ethnicity – food, folksong, dress, even the Yiddish language – are not originally Jewish at all but the product of the local culture, for we are inveterate borrowers. I can remember my surprise at seeing a film of a Polish Catholic wedding and hearing the same songs that were in my childhood the very essence of Jewish music. Jewish ethnicity is often less Jewish than it seems.

Besides this, contemporary Jewish identity is secular, not secularist. There was, throughout the nineteenth century up until the Second World War, a dazzling array of Jewish heretics of all kinds: socialists, anarchists, Bundists, Yiddish culturalists and secular Zionists, each mapping out their revolutionary utopias. But Jews have since made their peace with the world, and today’s secular identity has no ideology.

At times, all that remains is a residual sense of marginality. Frederic Raphael once said, “I feel myself alien from everyone; that is my kind of Jewishness.” Arthur Koestler remarked that “Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism.” Even this is more nostalgia than reality, for whether in Israel or the Diaspora, for the first time in centuries, Jews feel that they belong.

So a most curious phenomenon has emerged: Jewishness without Judaism, or at least Judaism as traditionally conceived. For perhaps the first time in two hundred years, since the process of emancipation began, Jewish identity is no longer regarded as a burden but a natural fact. Jews no longer seek to escape by a conscious strategy of assimilation. At the same time, and equally without precedent, Jewish identity has little identifiable content. The secular Jews of the Diaspora are happy to be Jews, but are not quite sure what that means.

Perhaps only one nineteenth-century thinker foresaw what in fact has happened, the great cultural Zionist, Ahad ha-Am. For Ahad ha-Am, Judaism as a religion was no longer tenable in a secular age. The alternative for Jewish survival was a Jewish nation in the land of Israel. But he was convinced that not all, or even a majority, of Jews would go to live there. Israel nonetheless would achieve what was necessary for the Diaspora as well, namely, a complete redefinition of identity. Judaism would be rewritten with the word “God” removed, and in its place, “the Jewish people.” Religion would be translated into a culture. Judaism would subtly be transformed into Jewishness. It would fulfil Emil Durkheim’s sociological idea of the function of a religion: not a way of serving God but an instrument of social cohesion. The central value of the new Judaism would be the Jewish people itself. It seemed at the time an improbable scenario, but it has come to be.

The question is, can it continue to be? Jewish tradition brought together religion and peoplehood in the concept of covenant. To be a Jew was to be born into a people with a shared history of suffering and hope. But it was also to be born into a way of life, a religious destiny. The problem with making peoplehood alone a self-sufficient value is that, with Jews across the world sharing neither a common language, nor land, nor culture, nor belief, peoplehood itself stands in need of explanation. In the absence of tradition, Jewish peoplehood dissolves into a variety of subcultures, brought together only at moments of crisis.

There is little doubt that in the last twenty years the covenant of peoplehood has been renewed. The Holocaust has made Jewish identity seem inescapable. The State of Israel and the openness of Western multi-ethnic societies has made it tolerable. There has been a Jewish revival. But the covenant of faith has not been renewed. And the tension between religious and secular Jews in Israel, and between Orthodoxy and Reform in America, has been rising to dangerous levels. Never has Jewish unity seemed so desirable and at the same time so hard to bring about.

So the argument today is how to read the Jewish future. The optimists point to the new ethnic affirmation. The pessimists point to the old and still continuing religious decline. The ever-dying people at least knows this: that in contemplating its future pessimism has always prevailed, and that it has never once come true.