The Americanization of the Jews

Robert Seltzer, Norman S. Cohen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780814739570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How did Judaism, a religion so often defined by its minority status, attain equal footing in the trinity of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism that now dominates modern American religious life?
THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE JEWS seeks out the effects of this evolution on both Jews in America and an America with Jews. Although English, French, and Dutch Jewries are usually considered the principal forerunners of modern Jewry, Jews have lived as long in North America as they have in post- medieval Britain and France and only sixty years less than in Amsterdam.
As one of the four especially creative Jewish communities that has helped re-shape and re-formulate modern Judaism, American Judaism is the most complex and least understood. German Jewry is recognized for its contribution to modern Jewish theology and philosophy, Russian and Polish Jewry is known for its secular influence in literature, and Israel clearly offers Judaism a new stance as a homeland. But how does one capture the interplay between America and Judaism?
Immigration to America meant that much of Judaism was discarded, and much was retained. Acculturation did not always lead to assimilation: Jewishness was honed as an independent variable in the motivations of many of its American adherents- -and has remained so, even though Jewish institutions, ideologies, and even Jewish values have been reshaped by America to such an degree that many Jews of the past might not recognize as Jewish some of what constitutes American Jewishness.
This collection of essays explores the paradoxes that abound in the America/Judaism relationship, focusing on such specific issues as Jews and American politics in the twentieth century, the adaptation of Jewish religious life to the American environment, the contributions and impact of the women's movement, and commentaries on the Jewish future in America.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Ironies of American Jewish History

Robert M. Seltzer

Jewish history is singular, not least because of its incongruities. The migrations, invasions, defeats, and myriad other crises of the ancient Israelites, a small people that was among the least of the kingdoms, became the matrix of the cosmic historiography that came to dominate Europe, North Africa, and western Asia after late antiquity. Not exceptionally distinguished in art, technology, or warfare, the Jewish impact flowed from a handful of surviving oracles, hymns, legal codes, and tales of ancestors and from an abiding drive to metabolize the symbolic forms of nearby cultures according to an obsession that only the God of Israel was truly divine. Few in number relative to the populations alongside whom they lived, the Jews generated a collective image that loomed preternaturally large throughout the medieval and early modern centuries in the minds of Christendom and Islam and, of course, in the Jewish conception of the significance of their group existence. Modern Jewry has sought in various ways to reduce that incongruous image to manageable proportions—to normalize and humanize it—with limited success and considerable failure. Because of the powerful valence of the image of the Jews, modern Jewish history, far from being one more chapter appended to a chronicle of many centuries, has become an intellectual world in itself, a complex series of encounters and adjustments in which, ironically, the Jews are both a paradigm for many other small groups and a special case.

Jewry’s record of reactions, initiatives, and restructurings in the last two centuries is often said to be prototypical of vulnerable religious, ethnic, and social minorities responding to accelerating and sometimes cataclysmic change. Yet it is a story like no other. In the mid-eighteenth century, the preponderance of a marginalized but proud Jewish people, defined by loyalty to the Torah and its God, lived in a diaspora stretching from Alsace and the western German and northern Italian states to the eastern reaches of Poland-Lithuania and, in a second swath, from Morocco across North Africa and the southern Balkans to the Middle East, Iran, and beyond. Farther out, harbingers of immense shifts about to be set in motion were the newest Jewish communities on the Atlantic—Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Curacao, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Newport. Less than two and one-half centuries later, the Jewish people had become transformed into an incomparably more complex social grouping living in a handful of economically advanced countries, marked by an ideological and behavioral diversity virtually unparalleled in Jewish history such that “who is a Jew” became a question that concerned even the Jews themselves.

Yet another way Jews found themselves to be prototypical and exceptional is that they underwent, before many other minority groups, the possibilities and metamorphoses summoned by the rampant urbanization, mobility, and secularization that accompanied modern education, economic change, and political upheaval. On the one hand, sectors of the Jewish people confronted early what wider elements of the population experienced later, making Jews pioneers in the self-transformations forced on minorities in the last ten or fifteen decades of modernity. On the other hand, the desire to avoid total rupture with the past and to maintain continuity evoked a series of creative responses by Jewish elites. Bound together in new arrangements and modes of self-awareness, modern Jewry’s exertions to maintain order and cohesion constitute a many-sided drama not usually given its due in comparative history. Efforts to achieve conclusive liberation led to the prolonged struggle for Jewish emancipation in the European diaspora, to a preoccupation with revolutionary politics in some countries, and to movements for Jewish self-emancipation and return to the ancient homeland. Catching up to a European Enlightenment that was embarked in new humanistic and universalistic directions led to a new continuum of Jewish denominations and theologies and eventually to the inclusion in it of secular ideologies of Jewishness. The Haska-lah, Wissenschaft des Judentums, Neo-Orthodox Judaism, Classical Reform, Positive-Historical Judaism, Bundism, Diaspora Nationalism, Political Zionism, Spiritual Zionism, Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and other programs of thought and act were all symptoms of the power over Jews of calls for justice, equality, fraternity, and hope. Yet none of the programs of reformation ended up as their initiators intended. They and the other ideologies of Jewish regeneration turned out to have critical limits, leaving the Jews just as vulnerable as they had always been to the deracinating lures of integration and assimilation on the one hand and to campaigns of vilification and extermination on the other hand. Whatever modernity may turn out to be, it has never stood still.

Locating this kaleidoscope of reactions and counterreactions in its proper context calls for a special academic field: the comparative study of modern Jewish diasporas. Jews in most lands have found themselves on the edge of social and intellectual change but confronting different givens. As a result of the economic and political development (and revolutions) of the nation-states in which Jews live, each Jewry had to respond to its own set of challenges in its own way.

Four especially creative Jewries have contributed most to the remaking of the Jewish people: those of Germany, Russia and Poland, Israel, and America. From German Jewry came a tripartite denominational structure that has marked modernized Judaism since the mid-nineteenth century, as well as most of the fecund schools of modern Jewish philosophy, from the Enlightenment of Moses Mendelssohn to the existentialism of Franz Rosenzweig. Russia and Poland constituted a greenhouse of secular Judaism—literary, nationalist, and socialist—and became the home of vibrant forms of traditional religious Judaism, especially the yeshivah world and later Hasidism. The Yishuv and the State of Israel has been the exemplary setting for social experimentation and redemptive ingathering, as well as the means for Jews to take a new stance as a nation and find a voice in the international arena.

It is more difficult, however, to delineate what American Jewry has accomplished in relation to its special environment.

Although the Jewish population of the United States has numbered in the millions since about World War I, the Jewish encounter here with modernity is actually one of the longest: in the year 2004 it will have lasted three and one-half centuries. (Jews have lived as long in North America as they have in postmedieval Britain and France and only sixty years less than in Amsterdam—and English, French, and Dutch Jewries are usually considered the principal harbingers of modern Jewry.) The tale most often told is that of immigrants arriving in America to escape the disabilities and misfortunes of the Old World: how they, their children, and their grandchildren sunk roots in a land that seemed to promise an end to the degradations of poverty and exile. Another well-established story is that of the creation by American Jewry of a host of new organizations, institutions, and agencies to cope with the religious and political milieu of the United States. But there is much more. In the last four decades American Jewish studies has become a full-fledged branch of American ethnic and social history, exploring such themes as the presence of Jews in far-flung parts of the continent and disparate sectors of the economy, the migration of Jews from region to region of North America, their impact on the polity and popular culture of the United States, the growth of Jewish educational institutions, and the politics of American Zionism. The resulting picture indicates how an Americanized Jewry emerged from a melting pot of Old World Jewish subcultures and became internally divided along new fault lines, producing its own dialectic of vectors and forces pointing … where? We will return to that question later.

This book is a selection of recent work by some of the most accomplished scholars and researchers in a burgeoning field. The committee that invited these essays was interested in the interplay between Jews and the ideal of America, that is, between dreams and realities: between the Jewish dreams of America and what happened to the Jews as they became part of the mainstream to a degree that did not occur elsewhere. For Jews, America was a land of immense opportunities and, for Judaism, immense dangers. It offered Jews as individuals the opportunity to live free of the restrictions that often persisted in the Old World and Jews as a group the opportunity to find a safe home. But America threatened personal disorientation and collective disintegration, corrosion of family ties and the demise of a distinctive Jewish culture, with a rapidity much greater than almost anywhere else in the world. Rumors of the promise and risk of America arrived on the other side of the Atlantic not long after the initial groups of Sephardic Jews landed here. By the late eighteenth century, America as a brave new land of freedom and equality became a key constituent of the ideal of a place where Jews could live with complete dignity and new self-respect. Hopes and perceptions are, after all, autonomous forces in the calculus of intentions and acts. First-generation German-speaking Jewish immigrants from Central Europe and first-generation Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe were lured by a novus ordo seclorum where revolutionary developments were creating a new nation. Not a few of the younger immigrants took advantage of the plasticity afforded by immigration to throw off the shackles of tradition and recreate themselves as dejudaized Americans. Others saw the amor-phousness of America as summoning them to lay the foundations for forms of Jewish association and identity that, though modified in the Depression and the war years, persisted in the golden age of American Jewry that lasted to the midsixties.

The essays in this book illustrate the paradoxical effect of the Americanization of the Jews: America undermined and energized Jewish commitment. Much was discarded and much was saved. Acculturation (in the sociological use of the term presupposed in these papers) did not always lead to assimilation: sometimes the most acculturated were among the most conscious of their Jewish identity and the most preoccupied with Jewish affairs. Despite rapid and severe acculturation, Jewishness was honed as an independent variable in the motivations of more than a few of its American adherents—and has remained so, even though Jewish institutions, ideologies, and even Jewish values have been reshaped by America to such a degree that many Jews of the past might not recognize as Jewish some of what constitutes American Jewishness.

How the American environment differed has been repeatedly analyzed by the historians of American Jewry. Jewish immigrants came to an America populated largely by Europeans who had created a society with only traces of medievalism. Negative stereotypes of the Jews were offset by a Puritan identification with the history of biblical Israel so that, in American Christianity, disdain for a long-superseded Judaism was countered by esteem for the living descendants of the people of the Old Testament. From the beginning, the Jewish situation was more propitious even than in England (and the legal status of the Jews there was more benign than for Jews in most of the lands of continental Europe). In colonial British America there were no restrictions on Jewish economic activity and religious life so that, in the era of the American Revolution, there were no ghettos to be razed, no limits on how many Jews could be married, no Jewish taxes to be abolished, no Pale of Settlement to be demolished; likewise, there were no autonomous batei din, no venerable yeshivot, no government-recognized ge-meinde or landesrabbiner to sustain an established community. Restrictions on the election of Jews to public office were rapidly abolished by most states; in some localities Jews were not particularly welcome (New England until the mid-nineteenth century), but there were no explicit limits on the freedom of Jews to live where they chose, to engage in any business or profession, and to consider themselves citizens of a country that, for all its bursts of nativism and decades of rejection of nonwhites and non-Nordics, was still more hospitable to immigrants than any other.

History, of course, offers instances of other frontiers where Jews have been welcomed because of their mobility and entrepreneurial skills. In industrializing nineteenth-century America, Jewish immigrants came to be not only peddlers and shopkeepers but also workers in expanding industries, such as clothing manufacture, that other Jews had largely created. The growing economy of the new nation lured Jews as it did other immigrants, but the image of America as the land of freedom was compelling: the United States promised liberty and justice, the chance to be people of worth and dignity, the opportunity to start life anew and rise to respectability and even prominence.

Arguably, the most remarkable feature of the America polity from the Jewish perspective is the Enlightenment ethos of its foundational documents. The universalist rationalism in the Declaration of Independence appealed to the rights of human beings as such, so that this charter of the American social contract was rooted in a notion of natural reason that by implication included non-Christians without caveat. The constitutional prohibition of an established church provided for a sweeping separation of religion and state that made the United States the political order most neutral to competing or friendly denominations. Although as a religion and an ethnic group Jews were legally invisible on the federal level, Clermont-Tonnerre’s 1789 dictum that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals” was realized earlier in America than in revolutionary France, where it was enunciated. Yet in America the Jewish religion was able eventually to attain a greater degree of informal legitimation as one of a plurality of publicly recognized faiths than Judaism achieved in any other diaspora; given the relative paucity of Jews involved, it is all the more remarkable that the Jewish tradition managed finally to gain equal status in the trinity of Protestantism-Catholicism-Judaism that has given a special tone to recent American life.

In the first phase of American Jewish history there was an overarching Jewish communal structure in each place where Jews settled in sufficient numbers. After the American Revolution it became clear that Jewry was free, within certain parameters, to reorganize itself the way it wanted. By the middle of the nineteenth century, American Judaism was structured according to the model of denominational Protestantism: larger communities had an increasing number of independent congregations, each conducting its affairs according to its own bylaws, relying solely on dues and contributions of its members, and selecting its officers and spiritual leader according to its own standards and desires. Membership in the Jewish community was stripped of any legal sanctions in America earlier than elsewhere and became even more a matter of personal choice as each new generation matured and as American Jewry increased in number and geographical distribution. American individualism has been commented on extensively from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Robert N. Bellah’s Habits of the Heart: the radical individualism of America meant that Jews could choose as they wished among the Jewish options that appeared in the nineteenth century, that they could decide whether they would be Jewish in a strong way, or even be Jewish at all.

Nineteenth-century American Jewry gradually created a broad range of new intercommunal institutions to supplement the multiple congregations that had come into being on a local level: fraternal and charitable organizations, federations of philanthropies and synagogues, rabbinical schools, newspapers in German, Yiddish, and English, settlement houses, labor unions, landsmanshaften. By the early twentieth century most of the present Jewish defense agencies had emerged, each imbued by an ideal of America and dedicated to protecting the Jews at home and abroad. The formation of new national organizations confirmed the fragmentation of the community, as well as the minority status within American Jewry of traditional Old World Judaism. Only in America did the vast majority of Jews identify themselves with the various forms of liberal, non-Orthodox Judaism. Never had a Jewish community been to such an extent voluntary and so divided.

Meanwhile, by the end of the nineteenth century a restrictive definition of America was beginning to crystallize in the antisemitism of the Gilded Age that eventuated in the social exclusions, educational quotas, immigration allotments, and public expressions of aversion to Jews that became more conspicuous in the twenties and thirties. This exclusivism was emphatically not the Jewish image of America, and Jewish leaders, organizations, and voters gave their support to those positions that represented an America that embraced all its constituent races, religions, ethnic groups, and social classes. According to some historians, the overlapping, competing, and fractious Jewish organizational network may have contributed to the difficulties American Jewry encountered in forging a coherent policy to deal with the upsurge of American antisemitism in the thirties and with the blatant threat of Nazi Germany. The same voluntaristic pluralism, however, may have amplified the vitality of American Jewry after World War II on a series of fronts. In a postwar era of renewed social mobility, revival of respect for religion, and eclipse of anti-Jewish prejudice, Jews moved in large numbers to the suburbs, where many joined synagogues and reacquired at least a minimum of Jewish practice. All American Jewish religious organizations were energized in some fashion, and Jews were increasingly united by a surge of support for Israel as a symbol of determination to survive after the Holocaust, as a necessary means of achieving Jewish autonomy independent of a hostile majority, and as a self-chosen Jewish way of life. While American culture became fascinated with the complex ethnic roots of its heterogeneous population, a concomitant interest in Jewish roots arose. A Jewish community had probably never enjoyed such a positive image as that of American Jewry in the fifties and sixties, nor felt more accepted.

In light of post-World War II developments, it has become possible to perceive yet another way in which America stood out in the course of Jewish history: as Jews have become Americanized, they had contributed much to the liberal ideal of Americanism itself. American culture was remarkably absorbent of certain of the ethnic features of the groups that constituted the American populace: in popular culture (foods, humor, music, slang) and in politics and intellectual life (the American labor movement, New Deal and Fair Deal liberalism, racial desegregation, civil liberties, avant-garde arts, new directions in literary criticism), Jews were quite conspicuous. Just as Jews had remade themselves and their religion in light of their ideal of America, so they projected into the American dream Jewish values and yearnings. If American cultural forms were reshaping Jewishness, Jews helped shape America’s conception of itself.

In the late sixties, however, there began to appear signals that called into question whether or not Jewish continuity and integration in America had been truly stabilized. Muting of antisemitism and enthusiasm for Israel were countered by fascination with Israel’s purported failings and by disparagements that, to sensitive ears (perhaps hypersensitive, perhaps prescient), seemed close to antisemitism in new dress. Of broader impact on the Jewish situation were the changes becoming increasingly apparent as a result of Jewish acceptance, changes that were rapidly and dramatically remaking most of American Jewry in the absence of a continued stream of immigrants from traditional Old World Jewish backgrounds and upbringings. The decline of social barriers went hand in hand with a weakening of inhibitions against marriage outside the faith. The Jewish birthrate declined and the divorce rate soared. Conversion to Judaism increased, as did disaffiliation. Was American Jewry headed for drastic shrinkage in numbers, if not outright extinction? The established denominational pattern seemed about to fragment. Feminism challenged age-old Jewish assumptions about gender and family. Changing sexual mores and yearnings for personal fulfillment threatened to disrupt the indirect, already tenuous connections of much of American Jewry to venerable values. The impact of a cohort of children raised part-Jewish and part-Christian posed dilemmas of principle and tactics for Jewish institutions. Was the Jewishness of many American Jews on the way to becoming a secondary or even a tertiary loyalty—a “postas-similation” Jewishness that faded in and out of the individual’s consciousness along with involvements in other categories now considered cultural identities of their own? Was cyclical Jewishness the next stage in a new reality in the making? One group of Jewish sociologists has been labeled the “transformationists” because they emphasize not the cumulative attenuation of Jewishness from one generation to another but the protean nature of American Jewishness as unexpected forms of Jewish self-expression appear. Another group, often called the “assimilationists,” dismisses the transformationalists as misguided Pollyannas.

American Jewish studies as seen from the nineties, therefore, is faced with questions different from those that predominated in the fifties, when American Jewish history came into its own as a distinct area of scholarly research and academic analysis. Is America still to be held exceptional to generalizations derived from all of Jewish history? Do recent developments indicate that broader diaspora-wide processes governing acculturation, marginalization, and decline are beginning to take hold, so that nineteenth-century Old World fears of America as corrosive to the integrity of Judaism are proving to be valid? Is the Jewish image of America as a uniquely benevolent home of an emancipated, normalized Judaism fated to be drastically modified or even abandoned, or will American Jewry be shown capable of generating its own self-perpetuation in yet another era of Jewish history?

Perhaps it is most helpful to pursue American Jewish dreams and realities as they relate to different glimpses of transformations in process. That is what we have tried to do in this book.

The first group of articles deals with the Jewish imagination. The essays of Steven M. Lowenstein and Jacob Kabakoff examine German and East European images of America in Jewish literature, including the literature produced by the Hebrew renascence of the turn of the century. European anticipations of the challenges that America would pose for Jewish immigrants were not so...