From Integration to Survival to Continuity

A sense of history is part of what it is to be a Jew. Admittedly, much of Judaism is timeless – our beliefs, our values, our way of life. One of our most potent symbols is the ner tamid, the everlasting light that, like the bush Moses saw in the desert, “burns and is not consumed.” We are an eternal people bound to the eternal God. The days, the years, the centuries pass, but Judaism and the Jewish people remain.

But there is another dimension to Jewish life: an acute sensitivity to time. Jews were the first people to see “the hand of God” in history. In one of the classics of modern Jewish scholarship, Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes:

It was ancient Israel that first assigned a decisive significance to history and thus forged a new world-view.… “The heavens,” in the words of the psalmist, might still “declare the glory of the Lord,” but it was human history that revealed His will and purpose.… Far from attempting a flight from history, biblical religion allows itself to be saturated by it and is inconceivable apart from it.

This sense of time yielded an entirely new type of religious personality, the prophet. Unlike Moses who transmitted laws which were “everlasting statutes,” the other prophets spoke to their own generation and its challenges. For some, such as Jeremiah, the challenge was exile. For others, like Ezekiel, it was preparation for return. “Each generation,” said the sages, “produces its own search and its own leaders.”

There are several Jewish commandments to count time. There is the counting of the Omer, the forty-nine days between Pesach and Shavuot. There is the institution of the Jubilee, with its command to count forty-nine years and declare the fiftieth holy. Through these disciplines, we learn that each day and year contains its unique challenges and opportunities: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” And there is yet another, if less precise, mandate which might be called the prophetic imperative. This tells us to count epochs. The prophetic challenge is to identify an age and its problems. Indeed, the inner history of Israel could be written solely in terms of what each era saw as its particular challenge and opportunity.

My thesis is this: we are entering a new era in modern Jewish life, one which presents quite different problems from those which have dominated the Jewish agenda hitherto. The crisis of continuity has arisen now because we are still using the priorities and strategies of an earlier age. The problem is not that it is difficult to create continuity. It is that for many years past, continuity has not been our dominant concern. There were other urgent issues which demanded our attention. The situation has now changed, but we have not yet responded by redirecting our efforts. The result is that we find ourselves fighting yesterday’s battles instead of today’s.

INTEGRATION What were yesterday’s battles? They can be summarised in two words: integration and survival.

From the nineteenth century until 1967 the key word of European and American Jewish life was integration. The secularisation of the West and the rise of the nation-state offered Jews the possibility of becoming full participants in the majority society and its culture, something that had been impossible since the age of Constantine in the third century. Emancipation bestowed on Jews the full range of civic rights. But it carried a price, namely that Jews passed through what John Murray Cuddihy has called the “ordeal of civility” and adapted to the manners and mores of Europe. It meant the end of a certain kind of Jewish apartness and the beginning of a journey “out of the ghetto.”

Most Jews welcomed the new age, but it quickly proved to be the start of a prolonged crisis of identity which has haunted western Jewry to this day. For some Jews the inner conflict between being an heir to the covenant at Sinai and a citizen of the modern state was simply too great. Some assimilated out of Judaism altogether. Others adapted its demands until, instead of being the way of life of a particular people, Judaism became the “religion of ethical universalism.” At the other extreme, there were those who rejected modern culture and decided that if Jews were to remain Jews, they would have to choose not integration but segregation.

In Britain, however, Jews found a society that was both more tolerant and less ideologically driven than elsewhere in Europe. Most found themselves able to reconcile their twin identities. The traditionalism of English life harmonised with the traditionalism of Jewish sentiment and produced, by and large, a happy marriage. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Jews could point to such role-models as Sir Moses Montefiore who could move with equal ease between the City and the royal court, and the synagogue and the bet midrash. In Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler they had a religious leader who combined unbending Orthodoxy with Victorian decorum. Even Benjamin Disraeli, who had been converted to Christianity as a child, could refer to his Jewish origins with pride. All this was in marked contrast to the tormented inner struggles of Central and Eastern European Jewry and the reckless abandonment of tradition by the Jews of the United States.

The pursuit of integration had a marked effect on Jewish education. Victorian England had Jewish schools. But their primary purpose was to protect Jewish children from the then active efforts of Christian missionaries. Beyond this, as Israel Finestein puts it, Jewish schools were seen as “valuable instruments for anglicisation.” They were set up largely to assist the Jewish working class – above all, the new immigrants – to become vocationally trained and to adjust to English society. In a sermon delivered at the New West End Synagogue in 1887, Hermann Adler, Nathan’s son and successor as Chief Rabbi, spelled out the prevailing philosophy of the Jewish establishment of his day. Their task, he declared, was “to anglicise, humanise and civilise” the new East European immigrants, and “to enable them to become absorbed in the intelligent, industrious, independent wage-earning classes of the country.”

Within its own terms, this policy worked remarkably well. The story of successive generations of Anglo-Jewish immigrants has been one of rapid rise “out of the ghetto” and, in many cases, to public prominence in the arts and sciences, business and industry, academic and political life. Jews acculturated with astonishing speed and became the very models of upward mobility. By and large, too, the innate conservatism and tolerance of British society worked to the benefit of Jewish identity. There were moments of awkwardness and occasional outbreaks of antisemitism. For the most part, however, Jews were content to remain Jews and join and occasionally attend synagogues. Integration was possible, and few other Jewries achieved it with so little drama and apparently so painlessly.

SURVIVAL The turning point, in world Jewish terms, came in 1967. Looking back at that moment some eighteen years later, two American scholars, Steven Cohen and Leonard Fein, described it as the time when the dominant theme of diaspora Jewish life turned “from integration to survival.”

The catalyst for this change was Israel, specifically the threat to its existence in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War. The effect of the 1967 war was felt no less in American Jewry. It was one of those rare moments – like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – which can fairly be said to have changed Jewish consciousness and left its permanent mark on our collective personality. Ironically, it was in 1967 that diaspora Jewry finally discovered the Holocaust, which had taken place more than twenty years before. It took the threat of a second devastation to unlock the floodgates of feeling about the first.

There is a difference between history and memory, especially group memory: between what happened and the way we frame our perceptions of what happened. Israel’s battle for survival in 1967 came to be seen by a whole generation of American Jews as something more than a remarkable military victory, and as something other than a miracle in the traditional sense. It became a symbol, an emblem of a new Jewish identity. Jews had been sentenced to death in the Shoah. Israel now came face to face with the spectre of a second holocaust at the hands of its hostile neighbours. But the Jewish people survived. Indeed, that was our fate. Jews are the people who are threatened but who survive.

The new survivalism was significantly different in mood and attitude from the old integrationism. Israel became far more prominent in Jewish life worldwide. Several commentators were moved to say that Israel had become the religion of the diaspora. Activism began to permeate Jewry. Jews were to be found less often praying to God than raising funds, mobilising support and engaged in political lobbying on behalf of Israel or Soviet Jewry or the fight against antisemitism.

The ideal of integration had been based on a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This was best expressed in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, a statement of the then prevailing views of American Reform: “We recognise in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect the approach of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.” Reason and tolerance would prevail. Prejudice would die. Less than a century later, those hopes were finally dashed. Accordingly, survivalism took a darker view. The Holocaust had revealed man’s persisting capacity for evil in the midst of great civilisation. Israel’s continuing isolation showed the sheer tenacity of antisemitism, now transmuted into anti-Zionism. For Jews, the modern world had proved to be a dangerous place indeed.

This gave impetus to a new Jewish particularism. Jews found themselves suddenly interested not in what made them the same as everyone else but in what made them different. A generation of young Jews began to search for their roots and lost religious heritage. They took the “path of return.” Across a wide spectrum of religious affiliation, Jews developed a new interest in ritual – the codes and actions of Jewish difference. They became far readier than any previous generation since emancipation to give public expression to their Jewishness. Israel had given them pride. Thoughts of the Holocaust had given them defiance.

There was one other factor in this transformation. It had nothing to do with Israel or indeed with Jewishness as such. The 1960s were also the time when a certain cultural model began to be challenged and overthrown: what became known in America as the “melting pot” and in Britain as assimilation. This was the idea that a society possessed a single dominant culture into which all minorities must eventually merge. Instead, a new model emerged – pluralism or multiculturalism – which held that society was a mosaic of different groups with differing ways of life, none of which held primacy over any other. This change, along with the epic events in Israel, profoundly affected Jews.

To understand why, we must remember the deep effects of secularisation on the Jewish community, most notably in America. In the 1960s, Gerhard Lenski found Jews to be markedly less “religious” in their attitudes than either Protestants or Catholics, a finding which remained true in the mid-1980s. Clearly, this signalled a crisis for any traditional Jewish identity. To be Jewish, whether in the ancient or the modern world, was to be a member of a people defined by its faith and religious code. But the constellation of forces in the 1960s now made possible a quite different definition. The struggles of the Holocaust and the State of Israel could be seen as less to do with God than with the Jewish people and their will to survive. The pluralism of contemporary American life gave Jews a mandate to continue to survive. Jews could now see themselves as something other than a religious community. They were, and increasingly saw themselves as, an ethnic group.

These changes took place most dramatically in America. Nevertheless, they had an effect on Anglo-Jewry as well. Here too, the Shoah and Israel become touchstones of Jewish identity. Fund-raising and political activism took on a new significance in Jewish life. At any time before 1967 there could be no doubt as to which were the most significant positions of lay leadership within the community. They were the President of the Board of Deputies and the President of the United Synagogue, the two positions which externally and internally epitomised Anglo-Jewry as a religious community. Today, Anglo-Jewish leaders are as likely to be drawn to the secular fields of Israel, welfare and defence as to the synagogue and representation.

Britain is a less plausible home than America for the idea that Jews are simply an ethnic group. There are fewer Jews here, too few to sustain a viable ethnic subculture. Besides, pluralism and the associated separation of religion and state never belonged to British values as they did to America, the land of immigrants. Nonetheless, significant numbers of young Jews do now see their identity in essentially ethnic terms. For them, Jewish belonging is a matter of mixing with other Jews, supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism and has no especially religious connotation.

THE PASSING OF AN ERA Just as integrationism apparently resolved the “problem” of being Jewish in a modern secular society, so survivalism rallied Jewish energies at a time of flagging commitment. It highlighted the role which the State of Israel played in making Jews worldwide feel more secure and more capable of action when particular diaspora communities are under threat of persecution. Survivalism played no small part in the worldwide Jewish response to the plight of Soviet and Ethiopian Jewry. Equally importantly, it gave Jews a way of seeing themselves as part of a single people at a time when religious and cultural differences had penetrated so deeply that perhaps nothing else was capable of uniting them. Not all Jews could relate to the concept of the covenant at Sinai. Most, however, could identify with the idea that, but for an accident of history, they might have been victims of Hitler’s Final Solution.

The idea of survival energised Jews for a generation. But it can do so no longer. The turning point has been the realisation, in the 1990s, that young diaspora Jews are disaffiliating at an unprecedented rate. Jewish commitment to survival has not proved strong enough to ensure that Jews survive.

It took some time before the extent of the crisis was understood. As we noted in Chapter 2, in the mid-1980s a school of American Jewish sociologists, known as transformationists, argued that the Jewish community was not endangered by high rates of intermarriage. If the non-Jewish partner converted, or if at least half the children of mixed marriages were raised as Jews, there would be no net loss to the community and perhaps even a gain. Such was the argument of figures like Charles Silberman and Calvin Goldscheider.

That optimism has now proved dramatically unfounded. Few non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages convert, and few bring up their children as Jews. This is so, despite the fact that the liberal denominations in America have virtually abandoned preconditions for conversion, and have chosen, through the controversial “patrilineal” ruling of 1983, to recognise the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers as Jews. In short, despite every liberal accommodation to mixed marriage, the American Jewish community is losing Jews at a prodigious rate.

Anglo-Jewry is different from American Jewry. On the whole, we are more traditional, more affiliated and better educated Jewishly. Nor have the issues been debated here with the same clarity and vigour as across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, the experience of American Jewry in the 1990s allows us to see the deep shortcomings of survivalism as a philosophy of Jewish life. Paradoxically, survivalism fails as a strategy for survival.

It makes sense when what is at stake is physical survival. When lives are at risk or freedoms are in danger we need no further justification for our concern. Physical survival has dominated twentieth-century Jewish history. The Holocaust and the State of Israel have been central to our thoughts. The Holocaust stands as the ultimate symbol of the threat facing Jews. Israel stands as the guarantor of Jewish life and liberty worldwide.

However, physical survival is not seriously endangered in either America or Britain. What is at risk is neither life nor liberty but identity. The question is not “Will we survive?” but “How will we survive?” As Jews? Or as something else, whose Jewish content will rapidly dissipate through the generations until nothing of it remains? We should not forget that physically, the lost ten tribes survived. They were merely lost to Jewish history. They chose to live as something other than as members of the people of Israel.

Survivalism answers no questions. It proposes no content for Jewish life other than life itself. In order to sustain even a minimally coherent view of why Jews should remain Jews rather than fade into anonymity, it has to postulate the darkest possible view of the human condition, namely (1) that Jews are uniquely singled out for persecution, (2) that they will remain so even if they marry out and merge into general society, and (3) that at times of danger they can rely on no other help than from themselves. For a generation waking to the trauma of the Holocaust at a time when Israel stood embattled and alone, these propositions seemed luminous in their certainty. It is doubtful in the extreme, however, whether any people can sustain itself on so negative a self-definition.

Traditionally, on Pesach, Jews solemnly acknowledged that “It was not one alone who stood against us to destroy us; in every generation there have been those who stood against us to destroy us.” Collective Jewish memory begins in the book of Exodus with slavery and the threat of genocide. Yet, what follows is not survivalism but a declaration of faith. The story ends not with endurance but redemption. Liberation from Egypt leads on to righteous living, not merely to being alive. The Psalmist begins by saying, “I will not die but live.” But he continues: “and I will declare the works of God.”

What would Pesach be without its intimate connection with Shavuot? What would Israelite freedom be without the further festival of revelation? What would Jewish life have been without some content to inspire pride and purpose? Imagine the Bible as a narrative of mere survival. We would read about the Israelites becoming slaves in Egypt. We would thrill to the story of how they were led to freedom and to a land of their own. Then we would read about how they mingled and married with the local population and became as dead to the pages of world history as the ancient Jebusites and Perrizites. Could that conceivably be a story to inspire identification or belonging?

Survivalism has had its day. At a certain point in the evolution of modern Jewish consciousness it played a vital part, rousing Jews throughout the world to a full awareness of the epic nature of the events through which they had lived and in which one third of them had died. Future generations will look back on our days with awe and wonder, reflecting on how close the Jews came to extinction and how – toughened by the fires of hell on earth – they fought back to affirm life.

The postwar era, however, has now passed. It will live on eternally in Jewish memory. But it is not present Jewish reality. Israel is engaged in peace negotiations with its neighbours. The Jews of Eastern Europe are free to go on aliyah. Ethiopian Jewry has been rescued. Predictably, there will be moments of crisis in the future. We are not yet living at that time of universal peace for which we daily pray. Nevertheless, the period of high drama, in which the mere physical survival of the Jewish people hung in the balance, is over. Another challenge lies ahead. A new epoch has already begun. A third word must now enter and dominate the Jewish mind. The word, as will be clear from everything I have written thus far, is continuity.

THE HOLD OF THE PAST Think of the figures listed in the last chapter for contributions to Jewish causes in 1991. They indicated that, communally, we allocated to education a fraction of what we gave to welfare and Israel. I suggested that these priorities make no sense at all. They go against Jewish principles and, in terms of the future of Anglo-Jewry, are little less than suicidal.

We can now understand them. In the age of integration, Jewish schools were largely unnecessary. In the Victorian era, institutions like the Jews’ Free School in London, which in 1894 numbered 3,600 pupils, fulfilled an urgent function. They inducted the children of immigrants into British society. Once large-scale immigration ceased, so too did the raison d’être of such institutions. By 1939, the entire pupil population of Jewish day schools in Britain had declined to 3,000. For the next generation, the cause of integration was best served by Jews attending British state or public schools, especially as they became less overtly Christian in character. Jewish education was delegated to a system of part-time, supplementary schooling: the cheder or talmud torah. Its second-class status was often painfully clear in terms of makeshift accommodation and teachers who were poorly qualified and even more poorly paid.

We are now long past that stage. The task of integration was accomplished with breathtaking speed and glittering success. For decades we have realised that the task now was not Anglicisation but Judaisation. Our children have often overachieved as British citizens but underachieved as Jews. Nonetheless, habits of mind formed in the Victorian age have become deeply engrained in our attitudes and institutions. Our consistent underspending on education stems directly from the age of integration, which no longer exists but still holds Anglo-Jewry captive in its sense of priorities.

In the age of survival, other priorities came to the fore: Israel and its wars, the rescue of Jewish communities endangered or oppressed, the Holocaust and how to understand it and perpetuate its victims’ memory. Such issues dominated the agenda for twenty-five years, from 1967 to 1992. But as I have emphasised, physical survival does not guarantee Jewish continuity, least of all when that survival affects Jewries elsewhere, not here.

A whole generation of Anglo-Jews has grown up having learned the lesson that Jewishness is something that happens to someone else, somewhere else: in Germany, Austria and Poland in the 1930s, more recently in Russia, Ethiopia and above all in Israel. These are central chapters in modern Jewish history. Yet they do not explain what Jewishness means to me, here, now. They do not even explain what connects me as a Jew in Britain to these events and those people in other places and at other times. The proposition that “all Jews are responsible for one another” is a religious one based on the idea of covenant. If I lack that idea and the religious vision of which it is a part, what sense am I to make of the bond that links me to people whose language I do not speak, whose history I do not know and whose aspirations I do not share?

Survivalism still dominates our community, and explains the massive disproportion between the funds we send Israel and those we devote to the Jewish needs of our own children. But with the aliyah of Ethiopian and Russian Jewry well under way and the changing political landscape in the Middle East, it is no longer the imperative of the hour. A new age has begun, and with it a quite new challenge.

FROM SURVIVAL TO CONTINUITY An era is defined by what we cannot take for granted. The best indicator that times have changed comes when something that was simply not an issue for previous generations becomes urgent and problematic. The era of integration began when Jews who had hitherto led culturally enclosed lives were suddenly faced with the challenge of becoming part of another social order. The era of survival began when Jews, who had always known sporadic violence, were faced with the threat of cold, systematic annihilation. The era of continuity is about to begin with the realisation that the transmission of Jewish identity across the generations has become fragile and altogether at risk.

The difference between the three great epochs of modern Jewish history can be summarised simply. In the first, we were challenged to show that a Jew can live as an Englishman or American. In the second, we were challenged to show that a Jew can live. In the third, we are being challenged to show that a Jew can live as a Jew.

The move from survival to continuity will mean a fundamental shift in communal priorities. It will mean that as well as devoting our energies to saving Jewries abroad we will have to take on board the huge task of saving Jewry at home. It will mean that instead of taking Jewish identity for granted we will have to take it as something to be created. It will mean a momentous decision to engage in education and outreach in all its many forms and contexts on a scale never before attempted. It will mean building a community in which, in the words of Professor Isidore Twersky, every Jewish child and adult has the opportunity “to be exposed to the mystery and romance of Jewish history, to the enthralling insights and special sensitivities of Jewish thought, to the sanctity and symbolism of Jewish existence, and to the power and profundity of Jewish faith.”

It can be done. Surveying the past two hundred years, one is awestruck by the sheer power of the collective Jewish will once it has been mobilised. There were those who believed that integration was impossible and that the open society spelled the end of Judaism. There were others who believed that survival was impossible. Antisemitism, they believed, was inexorable and Zionism was doomed to fail. They were utterly wrong. Out of integration came a dazzling array of Jewish contributions to the economic, industrial, financial, academic, scientific, political and literary life of the West. Out of survival came the unique national renaissance of the State of Israel, barely fifty years after Theodor Herzl declared that “If you will it, it is no dream.” If integration and survival proved possible, how much more so is continuity in a tolerant diaspora and in an age of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. Having passed every trial in our long and troubled history, it is unimaginable that we should fail the last: the trial that consists simply in this, that there are no trials.

Continuity can only be achieved, however, if we recognise that an era has passed and a new era begun. As we have seen, our priorities as reflected in the pattern of our charitable giving remain firmly locked in the past. They were right once, but they are wrong now. We have lived through two epochs which, from the perspective of Jewish history, have been utterly unprecedented. There was the wave of antisemitism throughout Europe in the 1880s, the mass migration of Jews to the west, the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel, Israel’s wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982 and the great sequence of ingatherings culminating in Operation Moses and Operation Exodus. These were crises and emergencies in which the normal priorities of Jewish life were temporarily suspended. Now we must recover those priorities because, in the process, we neglected the Jewish future of our children, and we are beginning to pay the price.

There remains, though, a massive psychological barrier to be overcome. Possibly the most chilling words to have emerged from the entire American debate about Jewish continuity are these, by Dr. Steven Bayme:

A survey done at Brandeis University of philanthropists who donate $100,000 or more to Jewish organisations discovered that no single issue so energised potential donors as the fear that their grandchildren would not be Jewish. However, the same survey indicated that these philanthropists were most reluctant to devote their funds to such an endeavour for fear that nothing constructive could be done about it.

Behind this fear are two presuppositions which have developed a tenacious hold in recent years, inducing paralysis where action is most needed. One is that only the ultra-Orthodox will survive as Jews. The other is that only Israelis will survive as Jews. If either or both of these assumptions is true, then for the majority of Jews today continuity will prove impossible. Nothing need be done, because nothing can be done. In fact, neither of these assumptions is valid, as I will now attempt to demonstrate.