Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

Sefaria · Jewish Thought > Modern > Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks · 920 sections

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Hirsch knew secular culture at first hand. Despite the fact that his grandfather, Mendel Frankfurter, had organized a Jewish school in Hamburg, Hirsch himself was sent to the local German grammar school. His Jewish studies were influenced by the Rabbi of Hamburg, Isaac Bernays, one of the first rabbis of the new type. At the age of twenty he studied for a year under another model, Jacob Ettlinger. He went on to the University of Bonn, where he developed a friendship with the future Reform leader, Abraham Geiger. In 1830 he accepted a position as the Rabbi of Oldenburg, a post previously held by Nathan Marcus Adler, later to become Chief Rabbi of England. It was there, during his eleven years in office, that Hirsch wrote the works that were to make him famous: Horeb, a systematic interpretation of Jewish law, and The Nineteen Letters on Judaism, published in 1836.
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Hirsch confronted Reform on its own terms. Its premises could be granted, but the conclusions it drew were mistaken. Emancipation was to be welcomed for it offered Jews the chance more fully to live out their mission, which was to be an exemplary people set in the midst of other nations. It was to be a living witness to an existence determined not by the pursuit of power or pleasure but devoted instead to God. This imposed on Jews the “duty of separation, of ethical and spiritual separateness,” while at the same time involving themselves in the welfare of their host nation as active and constructive citizens. “Picture every son of Israel a respected and influential priest of righteousness and love, disseminating among the nations not specific Judaism…but pure humanity.”
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This vision countered the claims of both the more defensive traditionalists, who saw participation in secular society as threatening, and the reformers, who argued that it meant giving up Jewish disciplines of “separation.” A major part of Hirsch’s work was devoted to showing that the commandments, far from being ritual to be accepted or rejected as “tradition,” were in fact symbolic enactments of profound ethical truths. Particularly original was his understanding of the chukkim, “the nonrational” laws, as ways of living out “justice toward the earth, plants, and animals.” Reform claimed to emphasize ethics over ritual. But it was, Hirsch argued, precisely in its ritual that Jewish ethics was concretely expressed. He pilloried Reform as an attempt to ease the burden of Jewish law, seeking to scale down Judaism to the level of man instead of raising man to the level of Torah.
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Hirsch’s Judaism was breathtakingly free of any nostalgia for the past, for the ghetto and its enclosed culture. “I bless emancipation,” he wrote, “when I see how the excess of oppression drove Israel away from a normal life, limited the free development of its noble character, and compelled many individuals to enter…upon paths which they were too weak to refuse to enter.” The secularization of culture also meant the liberation of Jewish thought from its dependence on non-Jewish systems of philosophy. Hirsch criticized Maimonides for entering “Judaism from without” and presenting it in neo-Aristotelian terms. The spiritual challenge of Jewry’s newfound freedom was “to know Judaism out of itself” without apologetics or foreign borrowings.
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The challenge could be met by a new form of Jewish education, one in which secular studies would be pursued from a specifically Jewish vantage point. “Nature should be contemplated with the spirit of David; history should be perceived with the ear of an Isaiah.” Hirsch called this synthesis, using a mishnaic phrase that had been earlier revived by Wessely, Torah im derekh eretz, “Torah combined with the way of the world.” He was critical of the schools of his day. The more traditional chadarim taught Judaism as “a mechanical habit.” The Reform schools saw Judaism as “something which should be interred in the grave of a past long since dead and buried.” A new kind of Jewish school would train young Jews to “be as familiar with the language of the Bible as they are with the language of the country in which they live…. Their eye should be open to recognize the world around them as God’s world and themselves in God’s world as His servants.”
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The Nineteen Letters still, a century and a half after their publication, have the power to surprise by their extraordinary exhilaration at the breakdown of the old structures of Jewish life. To be sure, Hirsch admits, religious authority has been undermined. Reform abounds. The medieval kehillah has been dismantled. There are grave dangers that Jews will prefer economic and social advance to religious duty. But in the new freedom no authority can compromise the pursuit of truth and the power of example. Hirsch is absolutely confident that authentic Judaism will thrive by the competition of ideas in an open society. “Let the scales swing! The freer they hang and the more violently they now swing up and down, the truer and purer will be the estimate of the right principle of faith and life which they will determine in the end.”
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Modern Orthodoxy
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Hirsch was uncompromisingly Orthodox. Though he welcomed modernity, he made it clear that if there was a conflict between Judaism and the ethos of the age, it was the latter that would have to give way. “Instead of complaining that [Torah] is no longer suitable to the times, our only complaint must be that the times are no longer suitable to it.”
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He was bitterly critical of Reform’s reduction of Judaism’s demands to the social aspirations of the bourgeoisie. It had, he said, “distilled the ancient world-ranging spirit of the Torah into a single aromatic drop of perfume so fragrant that…they could carry it round with them in their waistcoat pockets without being ashamed.” He was no less critical of the more conservative Zechariah Frankel for suggesting that the Oral Law was subject to historical development. He reserved some of his sharpest remarks for the movement for the academic study of Judaism, “Jewish Science.” To treat Judaism as a subject of detached historical analysis was, he argued, to rob it of all vitality. “What they have produced is not a physiology of living Judaism, but a pathological anatomy of a Judaism which according to their idea is already dead.” It was a criticism to be echoed a century later, in almost the same language, by the secularist Gershom Scholem.
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But, though he himself did not use the term, Hirsch’s Orthodoxy was distinctively modern. There was no going back to the ghetto, which he saw as artificially limiting Judaism’s intellectual horizons. Hirsch made a clear distinction between custom and law. The particular forms in which Judaism had been expressed in the past were not sacrosanct except when expressly stipulated in the form of halakhah.
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On the surface, this expressed itself in a number of cosmetic changes in synagogue style. In Oldenburg Hirsch adopted many of the aesthetic modifications that were associated with the early reformers. In the synagogue he wore clerical robes, preached in high literary German, introduced a choir, and insisted on decorum. He deleted the Kol Nidre prayer on Yom Kippur on the grounds that the renunciation of vows was being cited by critics as evidence of Jewish untrustworthiness. In Moravia he performed weddings inside the synagogue, then a new and suspect practice. In the fraught atmosphere of German Jewry these innovations seemed subversive. But Hirsch made a sharp differentiation between style and substance. Judaism could take on modern forms so long as its beliefs and laws were unchanged.
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But the perception went deeper. Hirsch was the first to recognize that Jewish identity in the modern state was quite different from what it had been in the enclosed, autonomous community of the Middle Ages. There Judaism embraced the totality of life: language, dress, culture, cuisine. To be sure, it was not hermetically sealed against outside influences. Jews were inveterate borrowers from their surrounding cultures. But within the community such borrowings were quickly naturalized and became part of the organic texture of Jewish life.
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Now, under emancipation, Judaism would embrace only part of life: the home, the school, and the synagogue. Vast areas of the Jews’ experience – at work, in social life, as a citizen, and as a participant in the arts and sciences – would be conducted in a secular context. Hirsch saw that being secular rather than Christian, these experiences were halakhically neutral and thus permitted. But Jewish identity would not be split, rather than integrated, between Jewish and secular involvements – Torah and an increasingly significant derekh eretz. Hirsch called this dual personality Mensch-Jissroel, “man-Israel.”
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Hirsch did not see this as an inner conflict. But it is precisely here that his thought had most in common with nineteenth-century Reform. The synthesis between the two identities is created by Hirsch’s emphasis on the Jewish “missions” to humanity, and his marked downplaying of Judaism’s national motifs. The land and State of Israel were, he argued, not significant in themselves. They were merely one context of Judaism’s religious role. Exile and dispersion were not a disaster. Instead they “opened a new, great and widespread field for the fulfillment of its mission.” Jews prayed for a return to Zion, but that lay in the messianic future and “actively to accelerate its coming is prohibited to us.” Hirsch was neutral or negative toward the developing Zionist movement, unlike his contemporary, Hildesheimer, and his Italian counterpart, Samuel David Luzzatto. His successors took this further and led the campaign for Orthodox dissociation from the Zionist movements, which resulted in the creation of Agudat Yisrael.
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Hirsch, in other words, created an Orthodoxy for a post-emancipation diaspora. It proved remarkably effective, though not quite in the way he intended. European society was in no mood to regard Jews as models of “pure humanity.” Nor did the academic study of science and history lend themselves, as Hirsch had hoped, to religious interpretation. To the contrary, Darwinian biology and Hegelian history challenged, if they did not refute, religious belief. What emerged instead was a compartmentalized identity, and what Hirsch’s model community in Frankfurt showed was that such an identity – nurtured and supported by a strong school and synagogue framework – was viable and could be passed on across the generations.
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One could be part of the modern world without religious compromise. But there was a price to be paid in divided selfhood. The traditional harmony of the religious personality was gone. That lack of integration between the Jew as Jew and as secular citizen has haunted modern Orthodoxy to the present day. A much later thinker, R. Joseph Soloveitchik, was to come to the conclusion, in the sharpest possible contrast to medieval Jewish thought, that the essence of religious experience lay in ceaseless conflict.
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Rav Avraham Kook
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Not surprisingly, there were others who dissented strongly from this conception of Jewish life. Traditionally, Judaism had embraced both private and public life. One could not confine it within the space allocated by modern society to religion – the family and the local congregation – without robbing it of its breadth, richness, and diversity. The dichotomy, essential to diaspora modern Orthodoxy, between religious and secular, ran counter to the whole thrust of Judaism which sought the sanctification of all aspects of existence. The Torah had envisaged this taking place through the building of an ideal society in the land of Israel. In exile, in their autonomous communities, Jews had created a kind of surrogate Israel with its own clear borders and its self-sufficient culture. But the ghetto and shtetl were disintegrating. Emancipation now made the terms of exile intolerable. Judaism would survive only among the few, and even then in artificial and constricted forms. There was no alternative but to rise to the challenge of messianic destiny and once again attempt to build a Torah-centric society on the soil of the promised land.
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No one presented this view more forcibly than R. Avraham ha-Cohen Kook (1865–1935), an Eastern European mystic who became the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine. R. Kook came from a world different from that of Samson Raphael Hirsch. The Jews of Eastern Europe, unlike those of Germany, developed no Reform movement. Enlightenment and the breakdown of tradition came instead in the form of an often militant secularism. And whereas Western European culture encouraged an emphasis on the individual, the East was more collectivist in its thought. From these influences came Jewish socialism and communism, movements for a Jewish cultural identity expressed in Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and the main body of support for political Zionism.
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R. Kook could not interpret these expressions of secular Jewish identity as negatively as Hirsch had seen Reform. Firstly, they were strong affirmations of Jewishness, without the assimilationism that haunted German Jewry. Secondly, some of the secularists had deep roots in the tradition. Volozhyn Yeshivah, where R. Kook had studied, included among its alumni the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), the writer Mischa Berdyczewski (1865–1921), and the historian and literary critic Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), all approximate contemporaries of Kook. Volozhyn, despite its rigid policy of excluding secular study, became a center of heated debate among its students about Zionism and modern thought. It was here that R. Kook discovered the religious roots of Jewish secularism. Thirdly, he was intellectually and temperamentally a mystic, convinced of the inner holiness of the Jewish soul, however rebellious its outer manifestations. These perceptions combined to produce the most positive evaluation ever given by an Orthodox thinker of non- and anti-religious Jews. How, then, was the breakdown of Judaism to be explained and overcome?
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The explanation lay in the fact of exile, galut. The solution lay in the end of exile by the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael. No Jewish thinker since the prophets had expressed himself in such visionary terms about the renewal of Jewish life in its land. “Eretz Yisrael,” he wrote, “is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being.” Biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical motifs fuse in Kook’s remarkable rhapsody to the power of the land to overcome the doubts and conflicts of exile. “It is the air of the land of Israel that makes one wise, that illuminates the soul to enlighten that element which is derived from the world of unity. In the land of Israel one draws upon the light of Jewish wisdom, upon that quality of spiritual life which is unique to the people of Israel, upon the Jewish world view and way of life which are essentially derived from the dominance of the world of unity over the divided world.”
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Exile leads to the slow death of the soul. In the diaspora “the pristine well of the Jewish spirit stops running.” Judaism survives, but in attenuated forms, as the study of texts and the fulfillment of the commands. It is no longer coextensive with the whole of life. It cannot live in the present, for it is sustained only by the past and the future “by the power of a vision and by the memory of our glory.” Naturally, then, some larger spirits – Kook called them “souls of chaos” – grow restless with conceptualized and institutionalized Judaism, and rebel. These are the “pangs of cleansing” that precede the messianic age. Exile has reached its natural and Providential end. “The diaspora 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 Yisrael.”
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The heart of the religious consciousness, for R. Kook, is the sense of the unity of all creation. Evil is only apparent. All falsehood comes from seeing objects, events, and ideas as things in themselves. Once their place in the order of creation becomes clear, so too does their goodness and essential sanctity. Thus socialism, considered in itself, is evil. It leads to materialism and oppression. But it has a holy core. It is a protest against injustice. Secular Zionism is an evil when it takes nationalism as an end in itself. It too, though, is essentially holy for it embodies a self-transcending love for the Jewish people. In R. Kook’s kabbalistic terminology, exile is the “world of division” and tends naturally to make Jews think in segmented and divisive ways. Israel is the “world of unity” which will harmonize, and therefore sanctify, the various Jewish secularisms.
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As well as unity, R. Kook’s thought turns constantly on the idea of teshuvah or return, understood in its full range of biblical and rabbinic resonances: the religious return to tradition, the ethnic return to peoplehood, and the geographical return to the land. The three are inseparable. Teshuvah had been understood in rabbinic thought primarily as repentance for sin. But for R. Kook, sin means separation and teshuvah means reunification. Even secular Zionism was therefore part of this process, for it had reunited Jews with their people and land, and the third component – reunification of Jews with Judaism – was bound to follow. All this is seen, in R. Kook’s writings, as part of the Divine flow of time, an evolutionary current that was bearing Jews, with or against their will, toward a spiritual rebirth.
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R. Kook’s conception of Judaism is almost a polar opposite of that of Hirsch. Far from seeing derekh eretz as neutral, R. Kook believed that the religious task was to sanctify the secular: agricultural labor, the arts and sciences, and the political process. He saw positive significance in the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. General culture, he wrote, was like a garment. Specifically religious acts were like the fringes on the garment, which revealed it to be a holy object. But Jews could only sanctify a culture that was in essence a Jewish culture. This was now impossible in the diaspora. Emancipation, far from heralding a new mission for Jews in exile, in fact signaled the end of that long chapter of Jewish history. A revival beckoned, but it would take place elsewhere.
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The Strategy of Resistance
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Hirsch and Kook represent the working out, within the parameters of tradition, of the tensions that produced the two great breaks with tradition – Reform Judaism and secular Zionism, respectively. Hirsch showed that the rich premodern life of Torah could be translated into the narrower ambit of a “religion” without any halakhic or ideological concessions to modernity. Kook showed that the idea of Judaism as the spirit of a “nation” could be articulated without secularizing the ideas of land, state, or people. Alongside Hirsch was a range of thinkers who, while subscribing to his idea of Torah im derekh eretz, interpreted it somewhat differently; most notably, R. Soloveitchik. Alongside R. Kook, too, were those who saw the relationship between Judaism and Zionism in less messianic, more pragmatic terms, most notably, R. Isaac Reines. Hirsch and Kook, then, do not between them exhaust the range of Orthodox responses to modernity, but they do define two broad directions, what one might loosely call modern Orthodoxy on the one hand and religious Zionism on the other.
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But there was a third alternative. This was to reject the terms of Clermont-Tonnerre’s choice altogether, and decline the offer of emancipation. Sociologists call this strategy neotraditionalism. In the contemporary Jewish vocabulary it is sometimes described as ultra- or right-wing or charedi Orthodoxy. What is important for our analysis is that – in common with Hirsch and R. Kook, and unlike Chasidism and nineteenth-century English and French Jewries – it arises from a conscious confrontation with modernity. It is not tradition as such, but Orthodoxy in the presence of alternatives. Though it negates modern culture, it is dialectically related to it. Its architect was the great leader of Hungarian Jewry in the early nineteenth century, R. Moses Sofer (the Chatam Sofer, 1762–1839).
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Born and educated in Frankfurt, R. Sofer had seen at first hand the early impact of the Enlightenment. Convinced that secularization carried greater dangers for Jewish continuity than the religious persecutions that had preceded it, he set about organizing an active defense of the old order. In strict halakhic terms, for example, Moses Mendelssohn had not advocated any religious reforms. But he had begun the process of German-Jewish acculturation. His translation of the Bible into German was, for many, the gateway into a new language and from there into its new and disruptive ideas. R. Sofer sharply opposed the translation, as he did the schools that had been created along the lines recommended by Wessely. They were attempts to rationalize tradition and render it acceptable to the intellectual assumptions of the age. As a result they would expose it to an environment in which it could not survive. What Hirsch was later to see as neutral, permissible changes of custom and style, R. Sofer saw as the first breaches in the fence around Jewish identity. Adapting a talmudic maxim, he declared chadash assur min ha-Torah, “the new is biblically forbidden.”
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His successors were to view the kind of adaptations undertaken by German Orthodoxy as a danger to Jewish survival, a kind of incipient reform. They opposed aesthetic changes in the synagogue – vernacular sermons, choirs, ministerial robes, and moving the bimah or reader’s platform from the center to the front of the synagogue. Though R. Sofer was not opposed to all forms of secular education, he was certainly averse to giving it the independent legitimacy later to be implied in Hirsch’s ideal of synthesis. His followers were also deeply suspicious of the professionalization of the rabbinate. Azriel Hildesheimer, who was ultimately to found a successful rabbinical seminary in Berlin, encountered massive opposition when he first attempted the project in the Austro-Hungarian community of Eisenstadt.
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Underlying these attitudes was a judgment sharply at odds with that of Hirsch and Kook. Modernity is systematically destructive of Jewish faith, observance, and identity. There is no way of negotiating it successfully, either through diaspora synthesis or the dynamic of a Jewish state. The alternative is to resist it. This is not in itself a novel idea within the Jewish tradition. In a sense, Jewish life in biblical and rabbinic times had been built on separation and segregation. But the old barriers were collapsing. New ones had therefore to be erected in their place. This meant a conscious, deliberate, and voluntary withdrawal from secular society, and ultimately from those elements of the Jewish community that had accommodated themselves to it. The significance of R. Moses Sofer in the development of modern Jewry is that he saw the choice in these clear-cut terms and made his decision unerringly against the current of the age.
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But this in itself would not have been successful had it not been for his further foresight. Only a minority could be expected to opt for an Orthodoxy thus defined. The problem was how to make that minority self-sustaining and turn it into an elite that would eventually, through its leadership, feed back into the wider community. The answer lay in the creation of a new institution, or rather the evolution of one of Judaism’s oldest institutions: the yeshivah. The yeshivah had traditionally been simply a place of talmudic instruction and had been closely linked to the local community. The new yeshivah was to differ from the old in several important respects. It would be an independent establishment, financed by voluntary donations elicited by its emissaries. It would draw its students from a wide geographical catchment area. Its aim would not be merely educational. It would create within its walls an intense, enclosed, and total environment from which secular ideas would be excluded. Its students would be a peer group, a spiritual aristocracy. They would be encouraged to see themselves as the select guardians of tradition. They would be leaders in the defense of faith. The yeshivah would become, in other words, a fortress against a hostile world.
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R. Sofer created his yeshivah shortly after his arrival in Pressburg in 1808. It quickly became the largest since Babylonian times. Others appeared throughout Eastern Europe: Mir, Slobodka, Telz, Lomza, and Ponevezh among them. Perhaps the most famous was the yeshivah of Volozhyn, founded in 1802 by R. Chaim Volozhiner and renowned for its outstanding teachers, R. Naftali Berlin (the Netziv, 1817–1893), and R. Joseph Baer Soloveitchik (the Bet ha-Levi, 1820–1892) and his son R. Chaim Soloveitchik (the Brisker, 1853–1918). Each had its own distinctive subculture and style of study, and they generated strong loyalties among their alumni.
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During the second half of the eighteenth century, the confrontation that divided East European Jewry came between chasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim. R. Sofer belonged to the anti-chasidic school. But it quickly became apparent that the two groups were on the same side in the battle against acculturation. Though they did not formally join forces until the founding of Agudat Yisrael in 1912, they gradually developed strong structural similarities.
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On the one hand, the yeshivah created an environment not unlike that of a chasidic community. Removed from home, segregated from the local community at a formative period of their lives, the students came to invest their yeshivah heads with the same kind of quasi-parental authority with which chasidim regarded their Rebbes. Leadership dynasties began to appear, not the least of which was represented by R. Sofer’s own son and grandson. Many yeshivot, too, found it necessary to supplement talmudic study with devotional and ethical teaching. Musar, as this group of disciplines became known, was non-mystical, but it was a functional equivalent of Chasidism. In the opposite direction, as the nineteenth century progressed, the chasidic movement itself began to emphasize talmudic study and create its own yeshivot. Chasidic leadership became less charismatic and more organizational. Despite their profound differences, the two movements were converging sociologically and institutionally.
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Covenantal Interactions
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These, then, were the traditional alternatives. There were the Jewries of England, France, and Italy which adapted to modernity without the need for philosophical self-definition. There was German Orthodoxy, born out of the confrontation with Reform, epitomized in Samson Raphael Hirsch’s articulate synthesis of Judaism and secular culture. There was R. Kook’s religious Zionism, with its unique blend of mysticism and East European collectivism. And there was the movement, initiated in Hungary by R. Moses Sofer, to resist modernity by creating enclaves of Jewish learning.
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They differed in their cultural styles and in their evaluation of and interactions with the wider society. Their emphases were different, as were their images of the ideal Jewish life. It should be clear though that these variations, pronounced though they were, were less due to the inner logic of Judaism than to the encounter between Judaism and several very different societies. In each case the Orthodox objective was the same: to preserve a community that embodies the values by which Jewish lives had been lived since biblical times. How this was best to be achieved depended on the social context. What was viable in Germany was judged counterproductive in Hungary. The challenges to Judaism differed between Berditchev and Birmingham.
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What the various Orthodoxies held in common was the conviction that Jewish values and law were not human constructs, open to change, but a Divine revelation, commanding loyalty through the generations. They were nonnegotiable. Even radical social and intellectual upheaval could not change the terms of the covenant on which Jewish existence was based. If Jews had survived the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of national autonomy, the Crusades and the blood libels, the Spanish Inquisition and Chmielnicki massacres, they would survive the blandishments and animosities of emancipation, and on the same terms: according to the laws of Moses and Israel. To the question, “Which takes precedence, Sinai or the spirit of the age?” an Orthodox Jew can give only one answer. Samson Raphael Hirsch spoke for all when he wrote: “We declare before heaven and earth that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilization and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us truly religion, the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way.”
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We have charted the diverging paths of Jewish modernity. The Count of Clermont-Tonnerre’s speech to the French National Assembly in 1789 set in motion a fundamental questioning of Jewish identity that has lasted to the present. Some saw it as essentially religious, but were convinced that Judaism must make accommodations to its new environment. Thus were born a series of denominations, Reform, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and Conservative. Others saw it as essentially national. From them flowed a succession of Jewish secularisms, cultural, political, ethnic, and above all, secular Zionism, the project of rebuilding the Jewish people within the framework of its own modern state.
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There were those, though, who believed as a matter of profound religious faith that the Jewish destiny must continue the path trodden by Abraham, Moses, Hillel, Akiva, Rashi, Maimonides, the Baal Shem Tov, and the Vilna Gaon. They were labeled by their opponents, “Orthodox.” The existence of the adjective testified to the schisms already dividing European Jewry. Orthodoxy itself was united in seeing that the religious and national elements of Judaism could not be divorced from one another. But it was internally divided as to which should be emphasized as the imperative of the hour. Samson Raphael Hirsch stressed the religious, R. Kook, the national. Each agreed that modernity promised benefits as well as dangers to Jewish life. From this judgment, R. Sofer on the one hand, chasidim on the other, dissented. Judaism, they argued, should resist rather than go with the flow of the times.
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Two hundred years later, how have these alternatives fared? Which evaluations proved accurate and which strategies successful? What is the state of Jewish identities in the late twentieth century?
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Contemporary Affirmations
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On the threshold of modernity Voltaire delivered a prediction. “When the society of man is perfected…the number of Jews will necessarily diminish. The rich among them are already beginning to detest their superstitions; theirs will be no more than the lot of people without arts and laws who, no longer able to enrich themselves through our negligence, will no longer be able to sustain a separate society, and who…ignorant even of their own books, will assimilate among the scum of other peoples.”
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One cannot evaluate the impact of modernity on Jewish life without coming to terms with the harsh implications of Voltaire’s remark. Delivered in 1761, it was a secularized equivalent of an ancient Christian belief. Jews, in that theological perspective, would ultimately disappear as a separate people through their conversion to Christianity. Samuel Heilman has noted that emancipation was, in a sense, a “new version of the age-old Christian efforts to convert Jews.” Now, instead of demanding a religious transformation, “Christians were demanding a Jewish conversion to secular citizenship.” The effect would be the same. Through enlightenment, cultured Jews would be cured of their primitive religious beliefs. The others would lack leadership, knowledge, and, in the new commercial order, an economic base. They would simply disappear.
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Visions of the End
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It is impossible to read the literature of the nineteenth century without sensing how deeply this perception had, in one way or another, been internalized by Jews. Jews were in flight from Judaism. There were the systematic attempts of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud to exorcise Judaism by curing mankind of religion in general. Rational thought in the case of Spinoza, social and economic revolution in the case of Marx, and the cure of neuroses in the case of Freud would free humanity from the grip of religion and bring Judaism to an end.
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There was the drive to assimilation, felt throughout Western Europe and the early Jewish settlement in America. Liberal Jews shared the conviction that antisemitism was, as Arthur Hertzberg has put it, a “chastisement for the sin of imperfect assimilation and the goad toward the messianic day when the Jews, by completely refashioning themselves in the image of proper Westerners, would have won the acceptance that they would then merit.”
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There was the alienation that Thorstein Veblen saw as the essence of the modern Jewish intellectual. “It is by loss of allegiance, or at best by force of a divided allegiance to the people of his origin, that he finds himself in the vanguard of modern enquiry.” And there was the complex psychology of Jewish self-hatred from Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine to Otto Weininger and Theodor Lessing.
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Mordecai Kaplan began his analysis of twentieth-century Jewry with the sentence, “Before the beginning of the nineteenth century all Jews regarded Judaism as a privilege; since then most Jews have come to regard it as a burden.” It was a burden they sought, where possible, to escape. The early Reform literature is pervaded by a sense of crisis. A generation of Jews was growing up with little knowledge of and still less sympathy for their religious heritage. Judaism was disintegrating, and there was a desperate need to salvage something, however reduced, of its essence.
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The literature of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy is still more fraught. It has an overwhelming mood of pathos. The old structures were collapsing and religious leaders were powerless in the face of change. After the First World War, even the last refuge of tradition, the East European shtetl, was beginning to dissolve. In the year that the modernist Kaplan was diagnosing the fate of American Judaism, a traditionalist in Eastern Europe was lamenting, “At one time…the benches in the Bet Midrash in every town were full from corner to corner and the echo of the voice of Torah reached distant places. And now! The benches of the Bet Midrash are empty, the sound of Torah is stopped, a terrible stillness hangs over the Bet Midrash.”
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Even those who sought to create new forms of Jewish expression were haunted by the fear that their own work would prove quixotic and futile. One architect of the new “Science of Judaism,” Leopold Zunz, declared that it was now possible to study rabbinic literature with academic detachment because the genre was at an end. The living tradition of Hebrew study had been carried “to its grave” and one could now examine it as a “sealed” historical phenomenon. Another member of the movement, Moritz Steinschneider, declared, “We have only one task left: to give the remains of Judaism a decent burial.”
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That was in Germany. In Eastern Europe secular Jews were creating a literary renewal. But here too there was a mood of fated failure. The poet Y. L. Gordon wrote, “For whom do I labor? Who will tell me the future, will tell me that I am not the last poet of Zion and you my last readers?” As he was writing, a new poet was emerging, Chaim Nachman Bialik, who described himself, too, as “the last of the last.”
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The early Zionist theoreticians, for their part, were convinced that Jewish survival in the diaspora was at an end. Pinkser, Nordau, and Herzl saw the problem in terms of the dangerously high and rising current of antisemitism. Jacob Klatzkin believed that the Jewish people would disappear of its own accord even without persecution. “The hold of the forms of our religion, which have served as barriers between us and the world for about two thousand years, has weakened and there are no longer any strong ghetto walls to protect a national entity in the Galut.” Even if some attenuated Judaism were to survive, it would not, he declared, be “worthy of survival.” Jews would be condemned to a “rootless and restless wandering between two worlds” and would become “individuals diseased by ambivalence, consumed by contradictions, and spent by restless inner conflict.”
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If there is one leitmotif running through Jewish and non-Jewish responses to emancipation, it is that Jewish existence, especially in the diaspora, had reached its final chapter. Here and there Jews might remain. But Judaism, or some affirmative Jewish identity, was beyond recovery. These are not the stray perceptions of individuals afflicted with more than usual melancholy. They embody a mood that dominated several generations and ran across the entire ideological spectrum. One writer, Alan Miller, has described the nineteenth century as a collective Jewish nervous breakdown. Not since the Book of Lamentations had there been such bleak and unrelieved pessimism about the Jewish future.
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The Persistence of Jewishness
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The obituary was premature. Surveying the contemporary Jewish world two centuries after the French Revolution and the destructive and self-destructive forces it set in motion, a Jew surely feels moved – even as he remembers the ovens of Auschwitz – to recite the ancient words of the She-hecheyanu blessing, “Who has kept us alive, and helped us to survive, and brought us to this time.” For the first time in almost two thousand years there is again a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Jews flourish in the diaspora. There is an unprecedented revival of Jewish learning. There are more Jews studying in yeshivot than at any time since the days of the Babylonian academies. In America, there are more than a thousand Jewish studies programs in universities. The literature of Jewish self-hatred is at an end. The fact of Jewish birth is no longer viewed as a burden, a stigma, a misfortune. All this seemed improbable in 1789, impossible in 1939. A half century after the Final Solution, young Jews sing in the streets of Jerusalem, Am Yisrael chai. The people Israel lives.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.16
Why has it happened? Why did Jewish identity not simply evaporate during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as had been predicted by the most informed observers? There are no simple answers. But this at least is clear. The social processes that were generally believed to be moving in a single direction turned out to be more complex and multifaceted than was recognized at the time. Against the current of assimilation there were reactions and resistances. In part, these had to do with the unique Jewish experience of modernity. In part, they parallel more general trends in the secularization of society.
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Assimilation is a two-way process. It implies a willingness on the part of a minority to be absorbed. But it also implies a willingness on the part of the majority to absorb. The liberal theorists who first propounded the social and political programs of emancipation had inordinate faith in the power of reason to dispel prejudice and superstition. They tacitly assumed that hostility to Jews in the majority society was a relic of Christian attitudes. Once culture became predominantly secular, tolerance would follow. The disappearance of anti-Jewish discrimination would open the way to the absorption of Jews into the social mainstream.
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They reckoned without the persistence of prejudice. As Max Nordau was to say in his speech to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, “In order to produce its full effect, emancipation should first have been realized in sentiment before it was proclaimed by law.” It was not. Suspicion of Jews remained. Law and theory were in advance of the public mood. The liberals were guilty, he said in retrospect, of trying to impose “creations of pure intellect [on] the world in reality.” The result was a rebellion of popular sentiment and the mutation of Christian anti-Judaism into its secular equivalent: racial antisemitism.
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Jews found themselves being excluded, as Jacob Katz has documented, from supposedly secular meeting grounds such as the Masonic lodges. Unless they converted and were baptized, they found avenues of professional advancement closed to them in the civil service, sciences and arts, and in the universities. There were many tragic cases of Jews who had made every effort to cast off their Jewish heritage and yet who found themselves rejected by the Gentile society of which they had tried so assiduously to become a part. Again, Nordau went to the heart of the problem. The emancipated Jew, he said, “flees from his Jewish fellows, because antisemitism has taught him too to be contemptuous of them, but his Gentile compatriots repulse him as he attempts to associate with them. He has lost his home in the ghetto, yet the land of his birth is denied to him as his home.”
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But if conversion was to be the only route to social acceptance, it was not a price most Jews were willing to pay. This was not an attitude of Orthodox Jews only. Across a wide range of commitments, the act of baptism seemed to Jews to be dishonorable, a form of betrayal. Even converted Jews, like Heine, were ambivalent about what they had done. Heine himself wrote to a friend in 1826, “I am now hated by Christian and Jew alike. I am truly sorry that I permitted myself to be baptized. I do not see that my lot has improved; rather, since then, I have had nothing but ill-luck.”
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The Paradox of Assimilation
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The combination of antisemitism and persisting Jewish loyalties led to a paradoxical development. It was precisely those who had been most inclined to assimilation who were most affected by, and sensitized to, anti-Jewish attitudes in the host society. Within the traditional community, an increasingly tolerant approach to Christianity had developed from the seventeenth century onwards, and this was sustained during the nineteenth century. It was the reformers, among them Abraham Geiger and Ludwig Philippsohn, and later Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, and Leo Baeck, who developed a systematic critique of Christianity and set out to prove the superiority of Judaism.
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At a later stage it was a succession of deeply estranged Jews – Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Max Nordau, and Theodor Herzl – who were radicalized by antisemitism into a new affirmation of Jewish identity in the form of secular Zionism. The dialect of Jewish courtship and Gentile refusal led, in other words, to new Jewish affirmations among those who were least disposed to maintain a traditional Jewish identity.
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The same process had been at work in more recent times among secular Jewish intellectuals. The model here is Franz Kafka, and the group includes writers and critics like George Steiner, Leslie Fiedler, and Lionel Trilling. For them the very feeling of marginality, of belonging nowhere, becomes the content and basis of a new mode of Jewishness. The paradox was best expressed by the writer Frederic Raphael who declared, “I feel myself alien from everyone. This is my kind of Jewishness.”
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The dialectic was to have a further turn. For it was to those who had experienced these schizophrenic identities that the completely non-Westernized Jew had made a powerful impact as a figure of wholeness, vigor, and authenticity. Already in 1862 the secularized Moses Hess was contrasting German Jewry unfavorably with the chasidim, whom he held up as models of Jewish vitality. The process became more marked during the early decades of the twentieth century, partly because East European Jews were beginning to arrive in Germany in increasing numbers, and partly because the First World War took Jews serving in the German army eastward, where some encountered the shtetl for the first time. The Ostjude, or Eastern Jews, became a powerful symbol in the imagination of assimilated Jews, as an antidote to the rationalized, diluted, acculturated Judaism they saw among their parents and peers.
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Among those who were affected by this mood of anti-Westernization were Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Jiri Langer. In Rosenzweig’s case it led to a partial return to tradition; in Langer’s yet more so. But it generated a more fundamental intellectual turn, away from the rationalism and universalism that had held a previous generation captive, towards a reassessment of the Jewish mystical tradition and the value of an unapologetic assertion of Jewish differentness. In Buber and Scholem it led onward to Zionism.
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The religious history of European Jewry between the First and Second World Wars has been insufficiently studied, dwarfed as it was by the cataclysms of the nineteenth century on the one hand and the Holocaust on the other. But it was a period of Orthodox revival, one in which many new yeshivot were opened and in which the Orthodox community became more self-confident and politically active. The circle around Franz Rosenzweig was not the only one in which teshuvah – a return to Jewish roots and sources – was in the air. Had the Shoah not killed the movement in its infancy, a major shift of sentiment might have gathered momentum. As it was, in the wake of the destruction, Jewish life shifted to Israel and America, two relatively new Jewries institutionally and demographically. The teshuvah movement did not make its appearance there until the 1960s, where it took observers by surprise.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.28
In retrospect, though, this now appears to be part of the inner dynamic of modernization, in which assimilatory forces are countered in later generations by the search for authenticity. Sociologists have formulated this elegantly as Hansen’s law: the third generation seeks to remember what the second generation labored to forget. Earlier gestures of acculturation now come to be seen as compromises. Jews who had avoided or resisted the modernization process now stand out, not as anachronisms but as archetypes of integrity and wholeness. Counter-assimilation as well as assimilation is part of the dynamic of modernity.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.29
The Limits of Secularization
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But the revival of Jewish identity has been part of a more widespread phenomenon. Sociologists, until the 1950s, had widely held to a cluster of assumptions about the effects of modernization on religious and ethnic behavior. The “secularization thesis” predicted a gradual decline of the role of religion in society. The growth of scientific knowledge meant, or so it was assumed, that religious beliefs would no longer be needed to explain the universe and the place of the individual within it. As industrialization and bureaucratization changed the face of the economy and government, decisions would be increasingly taken on rational grounds, with tradition playing a diminishing role. The very notion of human progress which so dominated the nineteenth century implied a revolution of thought from a tradition-bound to a future-oriented society. These and other factors combined to signal the marginalization of religion and its eventual eclipse.
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What no one predicted was that by the late twentieth century, religion would continue to dominate political conflict in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, other parts of the Middle East, and Latin America. Nor was it foreseen that there would be a resurgence of conservative or what is sometimes called “fundamentalist” religiosity in both Christianity and Islam. The strength of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is particularly striking in the United States, a society that has undergone advanced secularization. The same is true about another feature of American society: the growth, especially since the 1960s, of new sects and cults, some utopian, some concerned with the search for mystical experience.
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Sociologists are divided as to how to interpret these phenomena. Do they signal the return of religion to a place of prominence, or are they its last death throes? Both cases have been argued. Indeed, Will Herberg, in his Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) argued that both were true. American society was becoming more religious and more secular at the same time. Religious affiliation and observance was rising but religious belief was declining. Churches and synagogues now had less to do with traditional faith than with social belonging and a celebration of the American way of life. This trend has since been labeled “civil religion,” and long before it was identified as such, it had its Jewish theoreticians.
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Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), the son of a rabbi and one of the fathers of modern sociology, argued that the function of religion was to create group solidarity. Achad ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg, 1856–1927), the proponent of “cultural” Zionism, applied this to Judaism. Jewish faith and practice were to be reinterpreted as expressions, not of the Divine but of the national will. One of his famous remarks was that “more than the Jewish people has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jewish people.” Judaism could in effect be rewritten with the word “God” deleted and in its place the phrase “the Jewish nation.” Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1982), influenced by both Durkheim and Achad ha-Am, proposed a new definition of Judaism as the “evolving religious civilization” of the Jewish people. Religion could fulfill its social function without reference to a supernatural God. He called his philosophy Reconstructionism, and it has organized its own synagogues and rabbinical seminary in America.
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Achad ha-Am and Kaplan, in their drastic secularization of Judaism, reveal how traditional forms persist even in the absence of religious belief. But belief itself has not been dethroned to the extent that was once foreseen. The secular state leaves a vacuum in the lives of its citizens. John Stuart Mill foresaw a situation in which the state did not attempt to legislate morality but left it to the private choices of individuals, insofar as they did not harm others. To a large extent this has occurred in Western societies. What he did not foresee was the deeply unsettling effect of the collapse of a shared public morality. Again it was Durkheim who first charted the personal disorientation that ensued. He called it “anomie.”
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.35
The loss of community, moral absolutes, and a sense of personal meaning have been among the major discontents of secular society. Peter Berger notes that “modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear.” Here lie some of the roots of the unexpected present strength of religious movements – among them Orthodox Judaism – that emphasize authority, discipline, and objective truth. To the extent that they refuse to admit “modern consciousness” and its pluralism, relativism, and individualism, they become compelling alternatives in a society marked by alienation, confusion, and personal anonymity. They offer clear moral guidance. They give direction to personal life. They allow the individual to inhabit a meaningful universe. They recreate the institutions – above all, the local community and the family – in which life can be lived with a sense of continuity, purposefulness, and historical depth.
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To be sure, sociology is not theology. The truth of religious beliefs is unaffected by their attractiveness or otherwise in a given age. But the Jewish believer may well feel that there is a more than accidental relationship between a religious life, personal fulfillment, and the strength of community. Revelation and creation proceed from the same source: therefore, there is an inner connection between the life of the commands and human flourishing. The discontents of secularization, seen from this perspective, point to the impossibility of constructing a social order on human values alone. To say this is, of course, to have made a leap of faith. But even without it, the available evidence points to the striking persistence of religious institutions, some highly secularized, others resolutely not so, long after a previous generation of social theorists had predicted their extinction.
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Enduring Ethnicity
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The same is true about ethnicity. Just as the secularization thesis envisaged the eclipse of religion, so the “melting pot” theory of the modern state assumed that within three or so generations, the distinctive subcultures of immigrants would be lost as the children and grandchildren progressively acculturated. This process was particularly poignant for Jews, for whom ethnicity and religion are closely intertwined.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.39
Early on in the nineteenth century, French Jews had observed this happening to their own society. “The grandfather believes, the father doubts, the son denies. The grandfather prays in Hebrew, the father prays in French, the son does not pray at all. The grandfather has remained Jewish, the father is assimilated, the son no longer identifies.” The problem was compounded by the unique ambivalence many Jews had and still have toward social integration. On the one hand, they wished to retain their group identity. They opposed conversion and intermarriage. On the other hand, they did not seek to be publicly identifiable. Charles Liebman remarks that “Jews incessantly demand that they be treated as if Jewishness does not exist. Nothing pleases most Jews more than to be told that they don’t look Jewish or behave Jewishly.” The comedian Jackie Mason, who specializes in Jewish ethnic humor, comments on the ambivalence of his audiences. They laugh loudly, then complain at the end of the performance: “Too Jewish.” Sidney Morganbesser formulated the axiom of diaspora Jewishness in a memorable phrase: Incognito, ergo sum.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.40
Jewish acculturation took place in all societies that opened the doors of emancipation. In America, Jews relentlessly pursued an upward path on the social ladder. The process occurred three times over, first to the early Sephardic immigrants of the eighteenth century, then to the German Jews who arrived between 1815 and 1880, and then to the vast wave of Eastern European immigrants – more than 3 million of them – between 1880 and 1920. Their desire to be Americanized was passionate. Some of the best-known anthems to the American dream were written by Jews: Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” The route involved a progression from small to larger businesses and from there to management and the professions; a university education; a move to the outer suburbs; and often a change of name. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some 50,000 Americans each year made court applications to change their family name. Eighty percent of them were Jews.
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Part of the process, perceived as such, was an abandonment of Judaism. Religion was a barrier to social mobility. To the second generation, parental piety was part of an Eastern Europe they had left behind. The very secularity of America and its rigid separation of church and state was integral to its openness as a society. Jews became and remain measurably the most secular of all ethnic groups. In a Gallup survey published in 1984, in answer to the question, “Is religion very important in your life?” 61 percent of Protestants and 56 percent of Catholics, but only 25 percent of Jews, answered in the affirmative. A succession of surveys has showed synagogue attendance among Jews to be markedly lower than church attendance among Christians.
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If there was one proposition on which the several nineteenth-century approaches to the Jewish future were agreed, it was that there could be no such thing as secular Jewish survival in the diaspora. Jewish identity might be religious in the golah or secular in Eretz Yisrael, but these were exclusive alternatives. There could be no persisting ethnic identity outside Israel. This view was expressed well into the second half of the twentieth century by Jewish secularists like Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper, and Georges Friedmann. For the Jew who was not religious, there was a choice between individual assimilation in the diaspora and collective assimilation in Israel.
PART III; PRESENT.Chapter 4; Contemporary Affirmations.43
Recently, however, evidence has been accumulated by American-Jewish observers like Charles Silberman, Calvin Goldscheider, and Steven M. Cohen to show that Jewish ethnicity survives in surprisingly vigorous forms. Jews, argues Cohen, “may indeed represent the single white refutation of the universality of the melting pot thesis.” To be sure, the conclusion depends not only on the evidence but on a particular way of interpreting it. Traditional indicators of Jewish continuity – synagogue affiliation, religious observance, and resistance to intermarriage – show a steady decline. This, for sociologists like Charles Liebman, points toward the undeniable fact of American-Jewish assimilation. The “transformationists,” though, argue that new modes of Jewish ethnicity are emerging and it is by these that the community must be judged.
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The question, Goldscheider insists, is: Do Jews hold together as an identifiable group? If ethnic strength is to be measured by “the number and intensity of in-group interactions,” then the answer is Yes. What emerges from his studies is the paradox that Jews have been so successful in their pursuit of Americanization that they have become more like one another and less like everyone else. They go to college, pursue postgraduate studies, and enter the professions more than any other religious or ethnic grouping. The educational and economic gap between Jews on the one hand, and Protestants and Catholics on the other, has grown larger over time. “The growing occupational similarity among Jews,” he argues, “implies greater similarity in lifestyle, residence, values, schooling, family, and economic and political interests. These patterns mesh together in ways to reinforce Jewish cohesion and distinctiveness.” If Judaism no longer unites Jews, overachieving does.
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Jewish identity, in this analysis, has no definitive content. But it persists. It is measured by relatively loose associations: Jewish friends, Jewish attitudes – in particular, support for the State of Israel – and an occasional religiosity on major Jewish festivals and life-cycle events. There is also evidence to show that the major upheavals associated with assimilation stabilize by the fourth generation, at which point children tend more closely to resemble their parents’ behavioral patterns. These newly optimistic forecasts are very recent: they date from the 1980s. As late as 1976, a report of the Harvard Center for Population Studies was predicting a decline of the American Jewish community within a century, from 6 million to 944,000, or in another estimate, 10,420 Jews. The newer perception suggests that just as contemporary urban and suburban culture does not extinguish religion so it does not eliminate ethnicity. Instead it leads to a subtle dialectic of accommodation and resistance, to new modes of Jewish expression, and to the revival, after an initial period of adjustment, of an affirmative Jewishness.
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The End of Normalization
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These are sociological factors. But perhaps the most notable change that marks the late twentieth century as a significant turn in Jewish modernity lies at the level of consciousness. Throughout the nineteenth century, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, Jews were profoundly affected by the universalism of Enlightenment thought. This was the intellectual equivalent of the social process of assimilation, and it left little room for Jewish particularity. Humanity, ethics, and religious truth were universal concepts, arrived at by reason and accessible to all. Where, in this scheme of things, was there room for the ideas on which Judaism and Jewishness rested: revelation, a chosen people, and a code of conduct that embodies Jewish singularity and the desire not to be like everyone else?
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Almost all Jews who entered into an inner dialogue with these Enlightenment assumptions were deeply affected by the conflict. At one level it led to the many visions of the disappearance of Judaism and of Jews as an identifiable people, with the possible exception of a “saving remnant” in the small enclaves of the yeshivot and the chasidic circles. At another level it led, in Reform Judaism, secular Zionism, and among Jewish immigrants to America, to a profound desire for the “normalization” of Jewish existence.
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In Reform it led to a negation of religious differentness in favor of a universal ethical mission. In the newly emancipated European Jews and immigrant Americans, it led to a kind of strategic social invisibility. Jews learned not to speak with a Yiddish accent, wear head coverings in public, or display the indiscreet familiarities of the ghetto. John Murray Cuddihy described this as “the ordeal of civility,” and Maurice Samuel reflected that “the Jews are probably the only people in the world to whom it has been promised that their historic destiny is – to be nice.” In secular Zionism it led to a negation of the whole ethos of the Jewish past and a desire to be ke-khol ha-goyim, like all the nations. The Israeli secularist Amnon Rubinstein put it bluntly: “‘To be a goy’ was…the dominant theme of Zionist philosophy in its formative period.”
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Though these attitudes persist, two seminal events in Jewish history have brought about a revolution in Jewish sensibilities. The first, the Holocaust, was a murderous assault on the Jewish people in its irreducible singularity. Regardless of their faith or lack of it, their nationality, their degree of acculturation or their utility, Jews as such were scheduled for destruction. The second, the birth of the State of Israel, was marked not by harmony but by conflict and immediate war. Israel has not been normalized within the international political arena, and increasingly the phrase that seems to encapsulate her destiny has not been “like all the nations” but am levadad yishkon, “the people that dwells alone.”
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The shift in consciousness was not immediate. But it came with stunning force in the weeks surrounding the 1967 Six-Day War. Isolated and under threat, Israel seemed in danger of the unthinkable: a second holocaust. It was then that the trauma of the Shoah, long repressed, came to the surface both in Israel and the golah. The sudden and unexpected victory, and especially the reunification of Jerusalem, seemed to many to be a moment of almost messianic significance. A long-accumulated burden of self-doubt and stigma was lifted. Throughout the world Jews walked with a new pride. Head coverings, especially the kippah serugah or knitted skullcap associated with religious Zionism, reappeared among the young.
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Deep connections were made where there had previously been dissociation. American Jewry, which until then had been somewhat passively Zionist, was energized into political and fundraising support for Israel. In Israel itself there was a new consciousness of the diaspora. Hitherto almost all Zionist thinkers had seen Israel as shelilat ha-golah, the negation of the diaspora. Israel would end antisemitism. As Ben-Gurion argued, hostility to Jews was purely the result of statelessness, of “our peculiar status that does not accord with the established framework of the nations of the world.” In the early years of the state, memories of the Holocaust had been deliberately suppressed as a shameful episode of Jewish passivity.
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Now many of these attitudes were revised. Diaspora Jewry became suddenly prominent as Israel’s sole unconditional ally. Gentile hostility began to be seen as an enduring feature of Israel’s existence. The words of the Haggadah came to mind: “In every generation they rose up against us to destroy us.” Memories of the Holocaust, which had been stirred by the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, surfaced in 1967 in the form of the imperative, “Never again.”
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The Return of Jewish Particularism
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The Six-Day War was a unique moment which gave dramatic focus to trends that had been slowly forming before: the emergent ethnicity of Jews in the diaspora and a search for identity among a new generation of Israelis. In retrospect it may yet emerge as the most significant catalyst of Jewish identity since the events of 1789. A period of history was over. Jews had passed through the fires of emancipation. In America they had acquired acceptance and social standing. In Israel they had achieved statehood. The battles of the nineteenth century no longer needed to be fought.
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The Jewish people had survived the lure of assimilation and the onslaught of attempted genocide. The Shoah taught that Jews could not hide their singularity. After 1967 it seemed that Israel too was being forced into a special destiny. Writing in the wake of the Six-Day War, Milton Himmelfarb perfectly described the mood that came over Jews throughout the world: “Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable…. The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers. Big things seem to happen around us and to us.”
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A. Roy Eckardt has described the change as the “new Jewish stand,” a determination to stand up to the world, assertive and unashamed. Its most significant feature is a revival of particularism. Jewish concerns have turned inward, toward Israel and Jewish survival. Jews in the diaspora have become more activist and high profile. Though the religious meaning of the Holocaust and the State of Israel remains elusive and much debated, their existential impact has been clear. Israel is the affirmation of life over Auschwitz’s shadow of death. Jewish survival has become charged with a vast resonance.
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Emil Fackenheim, again writing in 1967, gave these ideas their most famous formulation: “I confess I used to be highly critical of Jewish philosophies which seemed to advocate no more than survival for survival’s sake. I have changed my mind. I now believe that in this present, unbelievable age, even a mere collective commitment to Jewish group-survival for its own sake is a momentous response, with the greatest implications.” It translates itself, he said, into a 614th commandment. “The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” Whether frustrating Hitler is an adequate or healthy basis for Jewish continuity is open to question. But the quest for normalization was over. The concern was now for the survival of the am segulah, the people that with or against its will has singularity thrust upon it.

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023. Via Sefaria (sefaria.org), Sefaria-Export. Version source: https://korenpub.com/products/arguments-for-the-sake-of-heaven Licence: CC-BY-NC. Source.