RELIGION OR

ETHNICITY?
RELIGION OR
ETHNICITY?
Jewish Identities in Evolution

EDITED BY Z V I GITELMAN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, NewJersey, and London
Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Religion or ethnicity?: Jewish identities in evolution / edited by Z vi Gitelman.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-4450-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8135-4451-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Jew s— Identity. 2. Jew s—Civilization. 3. Humanistic Judaism. 4. Judaism and
secularism. 5. Jews— Israel—Identity. 6. Secularism—Israel. I. Gitelman, Zvi Y.
DS143.R374 2009
305.892*4—dc22
2008016701

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To Felix Posen— visio n ary activist
 Contents

Introduction: Jewish Religion, Jewish Ethnicity—The

Evolution of Jewish Identities
ZVI G IT E L M A N I

Part I Jew ish n ess and Judaism in the Prem odern Era

1 Secularism, Hellenism, and Rabbis in Antiquity

YARON Z. E LIA V 7

2 What Is a Judaism? Perspectives from Second

Temple Jewish Studies
G A B R IE L E B O C C A C C IN I 24

3 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition and Its Echoes

in Jewish Communities
MI R I A M B ODI AN 38

4 Spinoza and the Origins of Jewish Secularism

STEVEN NADLER 59

Part II Challenges o f Secular Jewishness in Modern Times

5 Yiddish Schools in America and the Problem of

Secular Jewish Identity
DAVID E. FISH M A N 69

6 Beyond Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity

to German-Jewish History
SCOTT S P E C T O R 90

7 Jewish Self-Identification and West European

Categories o f Belonging: From the Enlightenment
to World War II
TODD E N D E L M A N IO4

8 People o f the (Secular) Book: Literary Anthologies

and the Making o f Jewish Identity in Postwar America
JU L I A N LE V IN S O N 131
 CONTENTS

Part III Secular Jew ish n ess in Israel Today 147

9 Secular-Jewish Identity and the Condition of

Secular Judaism in Israel
C H A R L E S S. L IE B M A N AND TAACOV TAD GAR I49

10 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy:

Masortim in Israel
TAACOV TADGAR AND C H A R L E S S. L IE B M A N 171

11 What Kind o f Jewish State Do Israelis Want? Israeli and

Arab Attitudes toward Religion and Politics
MARK T E S S L E R 193

12 The Construction o f Secular and Religious in Modem

Hebrew Literature
S H A C H A R P IN S K E R 221

Part IV Secular Jew ish n ess in the D iaspora Today 239

13 Jewish Identity and Secularism in Post-Soviet

Russia and Ukraine
ZVI G IT E L M A N 24I

14 Judaism, Community, and Jewish Culture in American Life

Continuities and Transformations
C A LVIN G O L D S C H E ID E R 267

15 Beyond Apikorsut: A Judaism for Secular Jews

ADAM CHALO M 286

Conclusion: The Nature and Viability o f Jewish

Religious and Secular Identities
ZVI G IT E L M A N 303

Contributors 323
Index 325
RELIGION OR
ETHNICITY?
 Introduction
JEWISH RELIGION, JEWISH ETHNICITY —
THE EVOLUTION OF J E W I S H IDENTITIES

ZVI GITELMAN

Is “Jewish” an ethnic or a religious adjective? Can one be Jewish without practicing

the religion known as Judaism? This volume analyzes the relationship between Jewish
religion and Jewish ethnicity by surveying ways in which Jews over the millennia have
defined themselves, with some reference to how they have been defined by others.
Jews have long engaged in redefining themselves in a wide variety of countries and
cultures. Therefore, the Jewish experience enables us to understand better broader
issues of ethnic identity, national formation, the relationship between religion and
ethnicity, and the transformation of cultures and identities. Jewish experience is also
highly instructive on whether and how a group whose nexus was historically reli­
gious can shift the ties that bind to culture and ethnicity in modem societies.
The Jewish collectivity has continually redefined itself, sometimes as a faith com­
munity, sometimes as an ethnic group, nation, cultural group, or even a race. The
modern distinction between religion and ethnicity was made when the Jews were
emancipated in eighteenth-century Western Europe. Today the place of religion in
their ethnicity varies widely, from high but declining salience among British and
American Jews, to a minor role among most Latin American Jews, and to almost no
role among those in and from the former Soviet Union. Jews in the former Soviet
Union think of themselves primarily as an ethnic group (“nationality”), not a reli­
gious one, because both state and society taught them to do so, while most Jews in
Western Europe and America think of themselves as both a religious and an ethnic
group. Nevertheless, both groups identify with each other and generally consider
themselves part of the same “Jewish” entity.
The aim of this volume is not to classify the Jews “once and for all” but to exam­
ine how and why they and others have defined and redefined themselves, and to
what effect. We also ask what the history of these transformations reveals about
relations among ethnicity, religion, and culture. The chapters examine empirically
the proposition that in modem Europe, Israel, and North America there has been a
transformation of Jewish identity from a religious basis toward one that can accom­
modate secular Jewishness, however conceived. But can such a sense of Jewishness
take root and be transmitted over generations in societies where Jews are free to
adopt the majority culture?
 2 ZVI G IT E L M A N

The first section of the book deals with antiquity and the premodern era during
which religion (Judaism) and ethnicity (or “Jewishness," which is not quite the
same as Yidishkayt) were not differentiated. Indeed, in ancient Hebrew/Israelite/
Jewish culture, and perhaps in other cultures, the very notion of religion as a belief
system that could be described and analyzed may not have existed. While ideas of
nationhood are articulated in the Hebrew Bible (am, le-om, goy), the modem Hebrew
word for religion (dat) appears rarely and its meaning is different from today’s.
Did the separation between religion and ethnicity begin when Jewish and Greek
cultures came into contact? Some have seen a conflict between Judaism and
Hellenistic culture as the precursor of the religious/secular divide of modern times.
Yaron Eliav argues that this is not the case, and that the boundaries between Jews
and non-Jews, and between Jewish and other cultures, were more fluid than many
have assumed. Analyzing Judaism around the time of Jesus, Gabriele Boccaccini
argues that the important difference between Judaism and Christianity became eth­
nic, not ideological. Religious ideas preceded notions of Jewish ethnicity. Before the
Maccabees, religion defined ethnicity, but afterward religious diversity was confined
within the boundaries of an ethnicity, of a shared way of life. Rabbinic Judaism, one
of several forms of Judaism in antiquity, emerged as normative and for several cen­
turies defined Judaism in all parts of the Jewish diaspora.
This changed radically in Western Jewish societies in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. As Miriam Bodian shows, the European states weakened
Jewish communal authorities—as they were to do later in Eastern Europe—and
simultaneously the traditional community was weakened by challenges to rabbinic
authority by Sephardi crypto-Jews in Amsterdam and elsewhere. These Jews, who
had originated in Spain and Portugal, challenged rabbinic authority and can be
considered progenitors o f modern religious and secular Jewish movements that
challenged traditional rabbinic norms.
Perhaps the most widely known of these Sephardic Jews is Benedict (Baruch)
Spinoza. Steven Nadler argues against the popular notion that Spinoza was the first
"reforming" or even “secular" Jew. For Spinoza there can be no Jewishness without
Jewish law (halacha), and since he rejected its validity, he did not claim any Jewishness
for himself. Indeed, he might be considered the first Jewish intellectual to articulate
an identity in which neither religion nor ethnicity figured.
Jewish identity became complicated in the modem era due to the differentiation
of religion and ethnicity and the distinctions drawn in France and elsewhere between
religious and civic affiliation. Jews were challenged to find ways whereby their previ­
ous identities could be combined with the civic and social affiliations that were
opened to them. Could someone be Jewish by religion but French by nationality? Did
the acquisition of French or German citizenship mean that French or German ethni­
city had been acquired? Scott Spector revisits conventional notions of what it meant
to be Jewish and German for certain modern Jewish intellectuals. Todd Endelman
shows how uneven and contradictory the process of Jewish emancipation was in
Western Europe and concludes that “social acceptance and mixing lagged behind the
decline of belief and practice." Many West European Jews abandoned some of their
 Introduction 3

religious beliefs and practices but continued to mix and marry with Jews to a far
greater extent than they did with Gentiles.
The second section o f the book deals with the twentieth century and beyond.
Using the tools of several disciplines—history, social science, and literature—the
authors deal with nonreligious manifestations of Jewishness in several countries.
One of the most popular alternatives to Judaism as a basis of Jewish identity was
Yiddishism, a movement that regarded the Yiddish language, spoken by perhaps
seven million Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century, not just as an instru­
ment of communication but as a multifaceted culture. Other peoples—including
Czechs, Ukrainians, and Germans—were pointing to language as the “essence" of
their culture; Yiddishists did the same. David Fishman focuses on how Yiddishism
played out in the United States. The complexities of synthesizing culture, identity,
and religion—always a challenge to secular Jewish movements—were exacerbated
in the United States by the realities of immigration to a dominant culture that
admitted Jews, but, because the American ethos recognized religion more than eth­
nicity, accepted them as a religious group. The curricula and ideologies of Yiddish
schools in America illustrate the complexities of secular Jewishness.
Charles Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar examine two questions in Israel: has a secu­
lar Jewish culture developed in the Jewish state, and do those who define themselves
as “traditional," rather than “religious” or “secular,” resolve the tension between reli­
gion and secularity, particularity and universalism? Another aspect of the relations
among religion, culture, and Jewish identity in Israel is examined by Mark Tessler,
who uses public opinion data to survey Israeli Jewish attitudes toward the role of reli­
gion in the “Jewish state,” asking where that leaves the 1.4 million Arabs who are cit­
izens of that state. The relationship between religion and the nature of the state is a
burning issue in many Middle Eastern states, and Tessler compares opinion data from
Jordan and Egypt to the Israeli data.
The Soviet government, guided by Marxism, aimed to abolish religious belief
as incompatible with science and "progress.” It classified Jews as an ethnic, not reli­
gious, group. Several generations of Soviet Jews were socialized to this conception.
Zvi Gitelman and his colleagues examine post-Soviet conceptions of Jewishness in
Russia and Ukraine, using extensive surveys of several thousand Jews living there.
They find that most have accepted the Soviet conception o f Jewishness as ethnicity.
Despite efforts to renew Jewish religious practice and belief among them, post-
Soviet Jews remain largely secular. Whether they shall be able or even wish to con­
struct a viable nonreligious Jewish culture remains to be seen.
Analysts of American Jewry, the largest diaspora Jewish population in the world,
have raised questions about its religious commitment and decliningjewish affiliations.
Calvin Goldscheider, a demographer and sociologist, believes that social and especially
familial ties, are keeping the American Jewish community connected, perhaps in the
same way that Todd Endelman discerns among West European Jews in centuries past.
Goldscheider believes that Jewish values undergird these social connections.
There is a small group of American Jews who try to express their Jewishness in
an organized, communal, but nonreligious form. While they call their institutions
 4 ZVI G I T E L M A N

“congregations” or temples, they are not theists but seek to articulate their
ethnicity through study and celebration. Adam Chalom, who leads such a congre­
gation, examines the group's ideology and social characteristics in his chapter on
secular, humanist Judaism.
Literature often serves as a prism through which to view societies and their val­
ues. In recent years, books by Jewish authors on Jewish themes have gained a wide
readership, presumably mostly among Jews. Some have suggested that this literature
might be the basis for reinvigorating a-religious Jewish identity and culture. Julian
Levinson examines three anthologies of Jewish literature published in different peri­
ods in order to discern the ways in which American Jews have understood their
Jewishness, whether secular or religious. Shachar Pinsker also turns to literature—
Hebrew in this case—to analyze how classic modem Hebrew authors tried to adapt
rabbinic texts to the a-religious modem Hebrew culture they were constructing.
The interplay between Jewish "religious" and Israeli “secular” literatures continues
to this day.
In the concluding chapter, Zvi Gitelman shows how Judaism began as a tribal
religion and how the attempt to disaggregate religion and ethnicity that began in the
eighteenth century has taken different forms in various places and different times.
Zionism is perhaps the most successful "secular” movement among Jews, since it
achieved its aim of establishing a Jewish state, which, in turn, has produced a het­
erogeneous Jewish culture, some of it inflected with religion. Outside of Zionism,
several forms of secular Jewishness have proved to be evanescent, but new modes of
expression of Jewishness arise all the time. This may be read either as a sign of
extraordinary adaptability and flexibility or, as others may see it, as a constant futile
search for the impossible: Jewishness without Judaism.
Of course, changes in outlook and identification amongjews are closely related
to changes in the larger societies in which they live. Their ever greater integration
into European and American societies guarantees this will be the case. The very
fact that significant numbers of Jews continue to debate issues o f Jewish viability,
cultural content, and belief indicates that these matter to them and, hence, that
Judaism and Jewishness are important components of their individual identities.
To prepare this book, we brought together leading American, European, and
Israeli scholars for a series of colloquia and a major conference, where drafts of chap­
ters were thoroughly discussed and revised. This enterprise would not have been pos­
sible without the financial support and intellectual stimulation of Felix Posen. He
challenged us to think about Jewish culture as evolving, living, and multifaceted, and
in continuous dialogue with—but perhaps independent of—Judaism. While express­
ing his own views vigorously, he did not try to guide or constrain those of others. By
the same token, he is unlikely to agree with some of the authors in this collective
enterprise. We dedicate this book to Felix Posen with great appreciation and respect.
JEWISHNESS AND JUDAISM
IN THE PREMODERN ERA
It is widely accepted that Jews have been for centuries and remain today both an
ethnic and religious group. However, the very concepts of “religion" and "ethnic­
ity" did not exist in antiquity, or at least were not differentiated. Religion was so
pervasive that nonreligion was hard to imagine. In the ancient Near East, there
seems to have been no concept of religion since it suffused the lives of all peoples
to such an extent that it was not a thing apart. There were no atheists or secularists
that we know of in the ancient world, and no ancient Indo-European language had
a special word for religion.
Nevertheless, some have discerned in the conflict between Hellenizing Jews
and the rabbis the antecedents of conflict between modern secular and religious
Jews. Yaron Eliav argues that the relationship between Judaism and Greco-Roman
culture has nothing to do with the conflicting categories of religion-secularism,
which modern Jews have projected on it. Secularism does not provide a meaningful
category for the understanding of ancient Judaism. There was a definable Jewish
identity, but its texture and content remained fluid for centuries.
Gabriele Boccaccini maintains in his chapter that the important difference
between Judaism and Christianity is ethnic, not ideological. Religious ideas pre­
ceded notions of Jewish ethnicity, but ethnicity became more salient. Christianity, a
movement within Judaism, lost its ethnic Jewishness and became dissociated from it.
By the late Middle Ages, Jewishness was defined as rabbinic Judaism. But in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were challenges to rabbinic author­
ity by Sephardi crypto-Jews, whose role in undermining rabbinic rule is addressed
by Miriam Bodian. Crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal sounded the first notes of
individuation and the development of a personal religion.
Perhaps the best known of these Jews, certainly outside Jewish circles, was
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, who preceded the challenges Bodian describes and is
often regarded as the first secular Jew. Steven Nadler rejects this idea and maintains
that for Spinoza there can be no Jewishness without Jewish law (halacha), and since
Spinoza rejected the validity of halacha, he did not claim any Jewishness. Thus, he
was not the first secular Jew, but perhaps an important early modern model of
the secular individual, someone for whom religious affiliation or heritage plays no
role whatsoever in his identity.
 Secularism, Hellenism,
and Rabbis in Antiquity

YARON Z. ELIAV

Participants in current discussions, inside and outside academia, about the nature of
Judaism often present the conflict between ancient Judaism and Hellenistic culture
as the earliest prototype for the antagonism and tension between Jewish religion
(particularly in its orthodox, halachic manifestation) and the modern secular world.
Ironically, this model appeals to both participants in the current cultural debate. For
example, in the days preceding Hanukah, it is common to hear teachers in ultra­
orthodox educational institutions or community rabbis in synagogue sermons pre­
figure the battle of religion against secularism as the struggle o f the Hasmoneans
against both the Greek kingdoms and Jews inclined toward a Hellenistic way of life.
This paradigm places mityavnim (Hellenizing Jews) and modern secular (as well as
acculturating and assimilating) Jews on the same side of a great divide. Many ortho­
dox Jews seem eager to depict themselves as comrades-in-arms of the Hasmonean
pietists in Judaism’s age-old campaign against its nemeses. Similarly, on the other
end of the polemical spectrum, secular Jews, inclined toward and sustained by the
ideological characteristics of Western civilization, empathize with the supposed
Hellenistic bedrock of that tradition. Adherents of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Jewish enlightenment appealed to Hellenistic trends in ancient Judaism,
which they identified even among the rabbis of the Talmud. They argued that
Judaism should incorporate the positive elements of non-Jewish society, eschew tra­
ditional Jewish separatism, and indeed reconstruct the Jewish religion entirely.1
The rise of Zionism complicated matters even further, adding a fascinating
angle fraught with internal contradiction to the discussion. Advocates of an inde­
pendent Jewish state that would empower the Jewish people and end their depend­
ence on the protection of other nations harked back to the image o f the Maccabees
(as well as Bar Kochba); after all, the Zionists considered them to be the last inde­
pendent Jewish rulers before the modern state of Israel. The Zionist movement
transformed Hanukah into a national festival, overflowing with symbols of free­
dom and Jewish might. Such tendencies impacted, for example, the choice of name
for the major Zionist youth movement in 1926: the Young Maccabees (Makkabi
ha-Tsa’ir), and for the Jewish Olympics: the makkabiyah. The same tendency is
evident in Israel's choice of the menorah—the seven-branched candelabrum from
the Jewish Temple famously kept alight by the Hasmonean rebels—as the national
emblem.2
 8 YARON Z. E L I AV

However, I suggest that these modern notions about religion and secularism
have little, if any, precedent in the ancient world and in the historical encounter of
Jews with the Hellenistic, Greco-Roman cultures. To substantiate this assertion, I
will first address religious consciousness and experience in the ancient world. A stu­
dent of early periods must always remain cognizant of the fundamental differences
that separate the modern era from previous ages. This is particularly true with
regard to the study of religion. The dramatic advances in the natural sciences, the
technological-industrial revolution, and the replacement o f devout belief with sec­
ularism have radically transformed the religious environment. In ancient times,
people perceived reality through categories that today we would call “religious.”
The cosmology of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean basin was replete with divine
beings: deities, goddesses, spirits, souls, angels, demons, and mythological mon­
sters.3 Today we know these entities only from the realm of special effects in
Hollywood cinema, but in the classical era they surrounded people everywhere,
from the heights o f the temples on Mount Olympus, through the abstractions of
philosophical writings, down to the latrines in which people relieved themselves.
One of these latter facilities, for example, discovered almost intact in Pompeii, con­
tains a fresco of the goddess Fortuna in all her glory. The graffito to her right reads
"cacatorcave malum” (defecator, beware of evil), and beneath it a man crouches over
a small altar, probably moving his bowels. To contemporaries of the fresco, this
depiction resembled neither a sacrilege nor a derisive caricature. On the contrary,
the elementary human function o f excretion, with its concomitant odors and phys­
ical exertion, demanded expression, just as bathroom graffiti, for all their humor­
ous and scatological intent, demonstrate today. However, in the ancient mind, this
basic act was understood in the language of religion, incarnated (in the Roman
case) in the guise of Fortuna. Keith Hopkins has captured this quintessential aspect
o f the ancient world succinctly in the title o f his recent book, A World Full of Gods.4
Pervasive and invasive, religious mentality shaped the lens through which the
people of the Roman world viewed their surroundings and performed their every­
day routines. Religious vocabulary and imagery seeped into every strata of lan­
guage, assisting people in mediating, explaining, and interpreting their interactions
with their environment. Names and characteristics of gods, myths, legends, and folk
beliefs fashioned the cognitive templates that granted validity both to natural phe­
nomena and human situations, just as scientific “truth” shapes the contours of our
present world. Although they worshiped one God, ancient Jews shared with their
neighbor polytheists the plurality of divine expression—that is, an all-encompassing
religious mentality.
Therefore, the historical relationship between Judaism and Greco-Roman cul­
ture has nothing to do with the conflict between religion and secularism that mod­
ern Jews, troubled by and fixated on the issues o f their time, have projected onto it.
I will try to place the story of Judaism, Hellenism, and the rabbis in historical con­
text. The subsections o f this chapter will examine issues of cultural interaction,
identity, and worship during the five hundred years following the destruction of the
Jewish Temple in Jerusalem—the era some call (rather misleadingly) the rabbinic
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 9

period.5 A twofold claim runs throughout these discussions: First, secularism does
not provide a meaningful category for the understanding of ancient Judaism.
Second, ancient Jewish religion and way of life are far removed from the rabbini-
cally centered Judaism o f the Medieval and Modern eras, even in the eyes of its
opponents.

Hellenism and Judaism: General Context

Few events affected the history of the ancient world as profoundly as the conquests
of Alexander, son of Philip the Macedonian, also known as Alexander the Great, in
the thirties of the fourth century b.c.e. For nearly one thousand years, until the
appearance of Islam in the first half of the seventh century C.E., the Mediterranean
world in general and its eastern shores in particular—the regions of Phoenicia,
Syria, and Palestine-Israel—participated in a great cultural experience that came to
be known as Hellenism. A precise elucidation of the multifaceted, convoluted, and
complex civilization of this era is beyond the scope of this essay. However, we may
take note of its central features: a syncretistic religious landscape in which worship
of Greco-Roman gods and belief in Greco-Roman mythologies melded with the
worship of local deities; the Greek language gradually becoming the lingua franca
of the eastern Mediterranean and functioning alongside the indigenous Semitic
dialects as the cohesive element in an otherwise disparate environment; and, most
important, a cultural and social milieu structured by a colorful blend of Western and
native elements—in architecture and art (and the aesthetic realm in general); in gov­
ernment (in its legal, political, and economic manifestations); throughout the vari­
ous strata of social hierarchy and affiliations; and in the mundane details of leisure
and daily life. In a gradual process that spanned centuries, Hellenism touched and
significantly altered almost every aspect of life.6
One cannot overemphasize the relevance of these developments to the forma­
tion of ancient Judaism. Most, if not all, of the major components of ancient
Judaism crystallized during this period; for example, the Bible, as a central sacred
composition believed to encompass the direct revelation o f God; Jewish law, as a
system that directs the lives of its members; and the synagogue, as the communal
institution that networks these people. These elements took shape, although in a
remarkably fuzzy process, within or in close proximity to the Greco-Roman world.
This stands in striking contrast to the underlying tendency in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Jewish scholarship to describe ancient Judaism according to the
famous biblical rubric "Am levadad yishkon” (a nation that dwells apart).
Until recently, most textbooks portrayed Judaism throughout its ancient his­
tory as a coherent, if not homogeneous, unity. Despite internal conflicts, disputes,
and differences over both minor and major issues, according to this view the Jewish
people ranged themselves steadfastly against the outside world in its Greek guise.7
Judaism, in the view that was accepted then and, to a large extent now, was based
on monolatry values in stark contrast to Greek polytheism. This contrast prevailed
in all other areas of life, such as daily behavior, language, literature, and legal and
governing institutions. Consequently, by defining Hellenism and Judaism as two
 10 YARON Z. E L I AV

distinct, separate, and largely hostile categories, these modern writers went on to
define the connection between them in terms o f influence, a category usually car­
rying negative connotations of assimilation. Some Jews willingly and consciously
“Hellenized”—that is, they adopted some aspects of Greek culture, such as language
or personal name, or worse, abandoned their original way of life entirely and went
to graze in foreign fields. Elsewhere I have characterized this portrayal in modem
scholarship as the image of “two fighters in the boxing ring."8 In other words,
despite their mutual influence and cross-fertilization, Judaism and Hellenism were
suspicious of and antagonistic toward one another, locked in a perpetual battle that
often led to violent conflict and bloodshed.
Current scholars have rejected most of the elements of this view, especially
with regard to the Second Temple period—the first four hundred years of the
Jewish-Hellenistic encounter. They have shown that the nature of the relationship
between the Jews and Greek culture was much more complex, and that Greek-
Hellenistic culture percolated into, and in many cases molded, the most basic com­
ponents of Jewish life. Even the first Hasmoneans, portrayed in I and II Maccabees
as the saviors of Judaism from the grips of Hellenism, were immersed in the fun­
damentals of the Greek worldview.9 Legal and governing institutions, such as the
Sanhedrin (a Greek word), and even the most inward levels o f human experience,
such as perceptions of the world and nature, not to mention the Jewish God, were
imprinted with the general cultural textures of the Mediterranean basin, namely
Hellenism.10
But did this cross-fertilization and mutually influential relationship persist in
the period after the Second Temple, from 70 c.E. to the Muslim conquest at the
beginning o f the seventh century? The rest of this chapter endeavors to illuminate
this period. By conservative estimates, scholars assess the population of the Roman
Empire at the beginning of the first millennium c.E. to have been between fifty to
sixty million, inhabiting the lands around the Mediterranean basin. An educated
guess numbers about five (conservative estimates say two) million Jews among
them.11 Between 10 and 20 percent of the empire's Jewish population lived in
present-day Israel or Palestine, then a Roman province, first called Judea and later
Syria-Palestina. The rest lived in cities and villages throughout the Mediterranean
world, in Egypt and North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Rome, and beyond, in
Gaul (today France) and the Iberian peninsula—noncontiguous islands of Jewish
habitation usually referred to as the Diaspora. These numbers, albeit imprecise,
and their geographical distribution establish the Jews as the largest and most widely
dispersed ethnic minority under Roman rule. Such noticeable presence immedi­
ately raises questions about the nature of this community, the substance of its life,
and its relation to the world in which it existed. Thus we turn from geography and
statistics to politics, society, culture, and religion.

Identity and Lifestyle

The question “Who is a Jew?" has been answered in myriad ways, and defining
Jewish identity in the ancient world involves no less complexity or difficulty. The
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 11

rubric "Jewish" (yehudi), which began as a geographical-tribal marker (one who

lived in the territory called Judea or who belonged to the tribe of Judah), had devel­
oped into a signifier of cultural, religious, and national identity by the second cen­
tury b.c.e. (2 Macc. 2:21 offers the earliest testimony). Roman law—and before that,
Hellenistic imperial correspondence—as well as many non-Jewish authors
acknowledged a Jewish reference group with unique characteristics and a discern-
able historical heritage anchored in ancient times.12 These sources confirm the exis­
tence of a definable Jewish identity while simultaneously assailing the signifiers of
Judaism. But, most important, the texture and content o f that identity remained
fluid for centuries. Jewish identifying marks, such as dress and language, which later
demarcated the boundaries between members of this group and others, had not yet
matured into sharp identifiers in antiquity. In a cultural environment in which iden­
tity is not hermetic, a person could be "a good Jew," at least by self-definition, while
being an Idumean and a Roman at the same time.13 Alternatively, a Jew could also be
a Christian and vice versa.14
Theologically, and in hindsight, it may be possible to locate clusters of ideas
that could represent the nucleus of ancient Judaism, or at the very least denote a
certain strand within it. Yet clearly no consensus beyond the superficial level has
ever been reached on such notions; various groups and sects differed among and
within themselves about any number of principles. Even if all acknowledged the
importance of a given tenet in the world of Judaism, such as belief in the God of
Israel and the traditions conveyed about him by the scriptures (that is, he created
the world, brought Israel out of Egypt, gave the Torah, and so on), people per­
ceived the nature and essence of this God in contradictory ways. Philo of
Alexandria's philosophical divinity, for example, modeled on the high god of Greek
paideia and his subordinate agent (the logos), was nothing like the concrete, almost
flesh-and-blood God who nearly rubbed shoulders with Bar Kochba's armies,
according to some rabbinic tales.*5 And both of these images fall far from the heav­
enly, sometimes dualistic God who emerges in many mystical and apocalyptic
works. Yet it seems that if we brought Philo and Bar Kochba together (even though
historically impossible) and overcame the language gap between them (Philo spoke
and thought in Greek, whereas Bar Kochba's mother tongue was Aramaic), both
would have agreed that they believed in the same deity—the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob who granted the Torah to Israel.
But even this kind of (modernly constructed) consensus does not resolve the
problem of identity. Diversity and flexibility characterized the ancient marketplace
of faiths and views, and people mixed and matched their spiritual groceries eclecti­
cally and without product loyalty (at least not in modern terms). Instances of
unabashed gentiles who believed in the God of Israel and took part in worship
of him in synagogues are well documented.16 Likewise, many of those who pro­
fessed Jesus’ messianic status retained their adherence to the God of Israel and con­
tinued to observe his laws in later generations, even when criticized by other
Christians who felt that the very meaning of their faith involved separation from
Judaism.17
 12 YARON Z. ELI AV

Finally, many (or even all) Jews took part at some level or other in the Roman
experience (romanitas) that pervaded the Mediterranean and did not necessarily see
their participation as contradictory to Judaism. For example, some Jews who held
official positions in municipal administrations must have participated actively and
centrally in the city cult, which was the norm in those days, even if certain Roman
legislation pronounced their exemption from such obligation.18 Jewish communi­
ties that chose to depict the image of the sun god Helios, mounted on his chariot
and bearing identifying attributes, on the mosaic floors of their synagogues offer
another example.19 These instances point to the messiness of the cultural environ­
ment of the ancient world. In this context, the very act o f searching for a coherent
ancient Jewish theology is fundamentally mistaken, and is perhaps an outgrowth of
the theological intensity of Christianity. For reasons beyond the scope of this essay,
Christian thinkers tended to arrange the set of ideas that defined their way of life
into an organized system by Late Antiquity and even more so in the Middle Ages.
In this sense, premedieval Judaism was, with a handful o f exceptions, a nontheo-
logical religion. If a certain framework did exist, it encompassed amorphous and
noncompulsory traits.
More than theology, ancient Judaism featured a shared historical heritage based
freely and without concrete obligation on the biblical ethos. Jews identified them­
selves and were perceived by their Gentile neighbors as the descendants of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, members of a nation who had been enslaved in Egypt,
taken out of bondage with signs and wonders, received the Torah at Sinai, and
whose twelve tribes had inherited the land of Canaan.
In this pre-theological environment, Jewish experience centered on a way of
life, a long list of smaller and larger details that shaped the time and space of the
individual and the family, weaving the practitioners, even if only loosely, into what
was called "the Jewish people.” In addition to the Temple, which already lay in
ruins by this period, and the Jewish God, who naturally attracted much attention,
this way of life included the following components:

1. the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week on which labor was prohibited, a
day devoted to prayer, family feasts, and rest;
2. dietary laws, which proscribed certain foods, in particular specific types of
meat and especially pork, a common ingredient in the Roman diet;
3. circumcision.

These core practices are supplemented frequently in our sources with references to
burial practices, the sabbatical year, and annual festivals. Jewish writers of different
strands articulate this almost obsessive tendency to encapsulate Judaism in practi­
cal paradigms, and itemize its essence in (what we now call according to the
Rabbis) "halachic” details. The roots of this legal propensity are found in the sacred
writings that Second Temple Jews revered as their foundation texts: first among
them, the Five Books of Moses, also known as the Torah. At their core, these scrip­
tures convey the God of Israel's requirement that his subjects observe strictly his
precepts (the mitsvot). The Torah communicates these guidelines as legal strictures,
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 13

dictating permitted and forbidden actions for God's people. Through the mitsvot,
the Torah endeavors to shape the Jew's entire way of living—from his diet to his
farming, his family, the marketplace and economy, not to mention his army and its
wars. Of course, the Torah also devotes much attention to the laws that lay out the
proper procedures for the sacrificial process o f the Temple, the highest institution
in the life of ancient Jews (see below). It also specifies a series of annual feasts,
which created a link between agriculture and the changing seasons of the year, on
the one hand, and the nation's mythological-historical heritage on the other, pro­
ducing a Jewish dimension of time, a calendar. These holidays included festivals
in memory of the exodus from Egypt (Passover), receiving the Torah (Shavu'ot),
and later the victories of the Hasmoneans (Hanukah), as well as fasts and days
of mourning commemorating the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the
nation.
Many Jewish writers from the Second Temple period recognize the importance
of the divine way of life. Philo endowed the laws with allegorical-philosophical
meaning; Josephus explained them in language comprehensible to his Greek-
Roman readership; while other books, such as Jubilees, addressed a solely Jewish
audience.20 The brevity and ambiguity with which the Torah formulates its decrees
stimulated Jewish groups in the Second Temple era to interpret and shape them in
varied ways, each group disputing the interpretations of the other. The Judean
Desert (or "Dead Sea”) scrolls provide a lively example o f such a legal-polemical
debate.21 Many of the messages the authors of the canonical Gospels attribute to
Jesus also express his disagreement with legal interpretations that the Pharisees, one
of the central groups at the end of the Second Temple period, bestowed upon the
Torah. Yet, at the same time, they confirm the centrality of the mitsvot in his world
(contrary to later Christian claims that Jesus rejected the Torah's practical com­
mandments and advocated their replacement with a spiritual doctrine).22 The Sages
built upon this legal tendency and enhanced it in the years after the destruction.
However, one caveat is necessary in this regard: many modern scholars are not
sufficiently sensitive to the necessary distinctions between the function of Jewish
law in ancient Judaism and the supremacy of rabbinic halacha in the medieval and
early modern world. Clear-cut and considerable differences set these two historical
moments and their legal systems apart. Ancient Jewish law existed in a relatively
rudimentary, and therefore amorphous, state; at the time, no one had yet produced
a legal code that would regulate Jewish life beyond the important but rather vague
statements of the Torah. By contrast, through the Middle Ages, the great rabbinic
legal scholars including Rabbi Isaac of Fez (1013-1103), Maimonides (1135-1204), and
Rabbi Jacob ba’al haturim (died c. 1340) produced any number of codices, each
expanding, elaborating, and clarifying their predecessors. Furthermore, Jews in
antiquity lived in a relatively flexible and unenforceable legal environment. They
were able to navigate more freely than their medieval descendants, who lived
according to a much more organized written system of halacha that predominated
and determined Jewish religious experience (even if, as some scholars convincingly
claim, the system was not as rigid as we tended to think in the past). Jewish life in
 14 YARON Z. E L I AV

antiquity should be seen as a diversified and porous continuum on which individual

Jews and groups (families, communities, geographical settings) located themselves
differently, appropriating some aspects of Jewish law and rejecting others, inten­
tionally or otherwise.
Yet another characteristic of Jewish life in the Roman world distinguished it
from both earlier and later periods. Like other minorities at the time, and unlike the
Jews of the medieval world, when firm boundaries encompassed many facets of
daily routines and alienated Jews from Christians, Jews in the Roman era lived in a
relatively open and commonly shared cultural environment that extended to even
the furthest reaches o f the empire and embraced its members regardless of their
ethnic or religious orientation. Two examples from Asia Minor illustrate this point:
In the dty of Aphrodisias, some high-ranking non-Jewish city officials (called theose-
beis or God-fearers in the Jewish inscription of the story) cooperated with their
Jewish neighbors in the establishment of a public kitchen for the needy.23 Toward
the center of Asia Minor, in the city of Acmonia, one Julia Severa, a high priestess
of the house of the divine emperors and president o f the city’s competitive games,
donated the “house" of the local synagogue.24
The same social and cultural dynamics emerge from an examination of the
Roman bathhouse. Scholars who have reconstructed Jewish life in the Roman
world by applying norms developed later could not conceive of Jews participating
in the cultural milieu that transpired in the bathhouse. After all, this institution
encapsulated the essence of the romanitas, with its nudity, sports, and hedonistic
fixation on the human body. In fact, the opposite is true. Not only did Jews attend
the bathhouse regularly, they also lauded its benefits and partook in its cultural pro­
ceedings.25 This flexibility applied even to features of Roman life that, at first
glance, seem to be highly problematic for Jews, such as the numerous statues that
permeated the Greco-Roman urban landscape. Rabbinic literature expresses sur­
prisingly lenient and diverse attitudes to these statues. The rabbis' views about
three-dimensional sculpture are articulated in accordance with common modes of
viewing sculpture throughout the Mediterranean.26 Magic is yet another feature
that Jews happily shared with other constituents o f the ancient world, as could be
seen vividly in the many magical texts (a full Jewish recipe book o f magic formulae
survived in the Cairo Genizah, Sefer ha-Razim), amulets, and curse tablets that
exhibit Jewish traits, as well as numerous references to magic (not all unfavorable)
in rabbinic literature.27 Such shared cultural textures undermine the modern schol­
arly view which reconstructs the encounter between Jews and Hellenistic, Greco-
Roman culture as two distinct and predominantly hostile entities that at the most
negotiated with and influenced each other. At least with regard to Late Antiquity,
this model must be revised.

Ritual
This period also witnessed a total revision of the ritual system of the Jewish world,
one of the most significant revolutions ever undergone by any religion. The wor­
ship of gods was one of the basic and indispensable elements of human experience
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 15

in the ancient world. At their core, Israelite and subsequent Second Temple
Judaism were cultic religions, which means they exhibited two basic components:

1. the existence of Temple or Temples;

2. the worship of God through offerings—mainly animal sacrifices, but also
vegetarian offerings (called "meal offerings,” especially all kinds of grain
breads) and liquids (like oil and wine, or "libations” ).

In this respect, Judaism resembled all other religious systems in the ancient Near
East and the Greco-Roman world, which formed the cultural environments of the
Israelite tradition and Judaism, respectively. While sacrifices and offerings may seem
fetishistic, if not primitive, to the modern observer, to ignore them is to overlook
a fundamental aspect of the ancient Jewish experience. On the grounds of the
Temple, up to one hundred animals a week (thousands during the major holidays)
were butchered, skinned, and burned on a huge altar. The odor of flowing blood,
massive quantities of spoiling meat, and thousands of pounds of scorched livestock
was overpowering. This is what ancient religious procedures consisted of, and for
contemporaries of these rituals, the odor was sweeter than the finest perfume. In
fact, a Jewish tradition configured the spatial layout of the Temple as “Mount
Moriah,” from the Hebrew mor—myrrh, a kind of perfume. Ancient texts tell us
that the appearance of smoke coiling up from the altar prompted the highest joy
from the populace (e.g., Sir. 50:16-9). After all, it signified that God had received
their sacrifice. This seemingly simple act embodied no small achievement in a world
that had not yet witnessed the modern technological-industrial revolution, which
radically transformed the religious landscape. In the ancient Mediterr-anean, gods
supplied the necessary safety nets in an environment replete with agony and
insecurity. They helped people interpret, understand, and control their fate, and
thus everyone strove to be in their favor.
Ancient people, in general, and Israelites and then Jews, in particular, conceived
of the temple as the house of a god, any god. Within this domestic conception of
sacred space, sacrifices functioned as the “communication lines” through which the
public, standing outside the house (a gap representing the cosmological breach
between the human and the divine), could connect with the godly entity who
resided within.28 Simultaneously their doctor, lawyer, financial advisor, and psychi­
atrist, God existed beyond immediate reach but remained accessible nevertheless.
Accordingly, the common belief held that God must dwell among his people.
Judaism differed from other religions throughout the Roman Mediterranean in that
the latter viewed their gods as a human or semi-human figure, and therefore placed
their images in the temples. The Torah insisted on the non-anthropomorphic
nature of God, and thus prohibited his depiction. So the Temple in Jerusalem stood
naked, devoid of statues. Instead, ancient Israelite thinkers formulated the elusive
concept of Shechina (presence), meaning that only the intangible essence of God
inhabited the sanctuary. Beyond this difference, however, all ancient religions
shared common practices with regard to the spatial organization of worship. The
Jewish Temple resembled a huge house, consisting o f two main chambers: the
 16 Y A R O N Z. ELI A V

Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant stood and God's presence resided;
and the outer chamber, called kodesh or heichal, containing the sacred vessels (fur­
niture). The vessels included the menorah, a golden table holding a dozen loaves of
bread, and a small bronze altar for incense (analogous in the domestic conceptual­
ity to electricity, a pantry with food, and a ventilation system to dissipate the potent
smell). The huge altar for sacrifice stood just outside the entrance to the building
(functioning as the "intercom'' that established communication).19
Another important aspect of the cultic religion involved the location o f the
masses during worship. They were neither permitted to enter the Temple, which
was considered "sacred” (i.e., off-limits), nor were they allowed to participate in the
sacrifice of their own offerings. These privileges were granted exclusively to the
priests (kohanim in Hebrew), who were seen as God's servants and in charge of
maintaining the house (Temple) and implementing the entire sacrificial process.
The populace would gather in the courts and the huge compound surrounding the
Temple, and bring their offerings to a certain point to hand over to the priests. They
then watched the procedures from a distance. Thus the individual was separated
from the core of religious activity, and the encounter with God remained indirect
through a sacrifice handled by someone else.
In the ancient world nearly everyone (as far as we know) seemed happy with this
arrangement. Jews everywhere revered the Temple of God, even if some—like
Jesus, who according to the Gospel writers overturned the tables in the Temple's
court (Mfe. 11:15-9 and parallels)—criticized the priests who controlled it or disap­
proved of the corruption that developed around it.30 Notwithstanding these occa­
sionally dissonant voices, by the last centuries o f the First Temple period (seventh
and sixth centuries b .c . e .), the Temple had become the most beloved institution of
the people of Israel. In the days of the Second Temple, this popularity reached an
unprecedented peak. Hundreds of thousands flocked to its compound during the
Jewish holidays to be in the vicinity of God. From all over the world, Jews voluntarily
raised a special annual levy, called the half-shekel, for the maintenance of the Temple.
On the conceptual level, the Temple served as a fundamental and, in their minds, irre­
placeable element of the encounter with God, i.e., the hub o f the religious experi­
ence. Prayers were directed towards the Temple; sins were absolved through the
offering of sacrifice; and in general, the practice of Judaism was dependent upon its
existence. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Temple exceeded its practical religious
status and became the best-known emblem of the nation of Israel.31
Although not instantly, all of this changed after the destruction o f the Temple.
Beyond the horrendous physical blow—tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead (a
number doubled and tripled by later rebellions) and the loss o f property and land—
the Jews remained without the institution that had enabled their lives. It is no sur­
prise that many Jews (although certainly not all) concluded that Judaism had
reached its end. With the eradication of the mechanism that had linked them with
God, Israel's connection with its protector had been cut off, and the way of life
nourished by that union terminated.32 The paucity of sources from this period
prevents us from measuring fully the circulation of such beliefs. I surmise it is no
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 17

coincidence that it is in this period when Jewish groups that believed in Jesus for­
mulated their first comprehensive narratives about his teaching. These accounts
should be seen, at least in part, as responses to the vacuum created by the Temple
destruction. The gospel accounts offer a formula of redemption in place of the
security the Temple provided. The halachic framework of the Sages also sought in
a fundamental way to supplant the loss of the Temple by providing an answer to
the question of what constituted a Jewish way of life in its absence.
In time, the synagogue filled the spatial void left by the Temple's destruction.33
The origins of this institution reach back to centuries prior to the Temple's destruc­
tion, which explains the stories about Jesus set in synagogues. At that time, the syn­
agogue was a gathering place for a local community, mainly for the sake of reading
the Torah publicly on the Sabbath. But after 70 C.E., the synagogue’s appearance
and role changed dramatically. Although we cannot firmly date the stages of its
development, the synagogue gradually became (as it remains) the prime locus for
the worship of the God o f Israel, and unquestionably the most important institu­
tion in Jewish life.
The ancient synagogue emerges as a multifunctional cultic and communal
establishment, diversified in appearance and substance. In addition to the worship of
God through prayer and the housing of the torah scroll in a special ark, some com­
munities, for example in the Bosphoros kingdom, practiced and documented the
manumission of slaves in this institution.34 Other synagogues held the public
archives of the people associated with it (non-Jews included?) and housed other
functions of community life such as schools for the youth. Most of all, the building
embodied the spatial layout so central to ancient identity—its iconography (most
but not all of which is later to the period discussed here), brought to life and perpet­
uated the memories of a shared past as communicated by the scriptures; and a space
for various Jewish celebrations, such as the Sabbath, annual holidays, marriages, and
other local festivities, as well as for the pronouncement of local hierarchy and power
(evidenced by who sat where, honors inscribed on stone or mosaic, etc.).
To summarize, the synagogue, a religious institution par excellence in the mod­
ern world, functioned on many levels of communal life that would be labeled sec­
ular today. More importantly, ritual and worship in their ancient context were not
confined to the realm of religion, but rather were an essential component of
human experience, an existential mode that transcended the boundaries of a par­
ticular faith or conviction. This point of view blurs the dividing lines between
Jewish and Hellenistic, Greco-Roman institutions of worship. Apart from the
essential (though trivial) fact that people invoked different divinities in these insti­
tutions, they all partook in the same human experience of the ancient world and its
most basic sensibilities, in which gods were everywhere, and everyone worshipped
something.

The Rabbis in Antiquity

The Rabbinic Movement (generally called in Hebrew HAZAL, an acronym for “our
sages, may their memory be blessed”) is the anachronistic title given to the men
 18 YARON Z. E LI AV

who created rabbinic literature.35 The term intends to exalt and set them apart as a
homogeneous group with a distinct ideology and systematic philosophy of life,
which shaped the character of Judaism, its institutions, and its way o f life to the
present. According to this view, rabbinic literature contains the essence of Judaism
after the destruction o f the Temple: a way of life developed, honed, and led by
those who wrote these works—the rabbis. Thus the common label in collective
Jewish memory for the centuries after 70 C.E. was the rabbinic period (or, in some
cases, the period of the Mishnah and the Talmuds, after the two major rabbinic
texts). The foundation of this view lies in the Middle Ages (although doubted by
some modern scholars), when most streams in the Jewish public accepted rabbinic
literature as a cornerstone of Jewish life and as the soul o f Judaism. The leaders of
Jewish communities in the Medieval Jewish Diaspora viewed themselves as the suc­
cessors and followers of the rabbinic sages who created this literature. Accordingly,
they adopted for themselves the collective title of “rabbi,” which they had
bestowed upon their predecessors.
The veneration of rabbinic texts ensured their preservation from one genera­
tion to the next—first as handwritten scrolls and then codices—and also assured
their printing in thousands of copies. Yet this process of perpetuation undermined
the ability of modern scholars, many of whom came from circles that revered the
rabbis, to reconstruct the context in which the texts were composed. In fact, many
times the process entirely distorted that context. The result is that most current
scholars reject the view that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen­
tury: that most Jews in the ancient world defined themselves and lived their lives
according to the ideas and instructions found in rabbinic literature.36
The sages' status in antiquity was much more modest, and their authority—if
they had any at all—was more meager than the traditional view would allow. The
creators of rabbinic literature were learned Jews—scholars—who were active in
Palestine in the generations after the destruction of the Second Temple, and from
the third century, in the Persian Empire (or “Babylonia,” now part of Iraq; a few of
those scholars arrived there even earlier). Like other intellectuals throughout his­
tory, both Jewish and non-Jewish, the rabbis seem to be animated by their natural
proclivity toward learning. They devoted their lives to scholarship and erudition.
The focus of their studies, the foundation texts of their curriculum, consisted of
the Jewish scriptures, which later became the Bible. Their preferred field of study
centered on legal discourse, which did not preclude other branches of learning,
such as philosophy and mysticism, although these latter do not seem to stand out
in the rabbinic material. Accordingly, rabbinic sages endeavored to channel what
they believed to be the eternal truth of God as articulated in the Torah (the first
five, most important books of the Bible) into meticulous and well-structured legal
formulae. In a long and gradual process, rabbinic legal scholarship grew into an
all-embracing legal system. They named it Halacha—God's way of life.37
The small group of intellectuals who crafted the rabbinic tradition had limited
impact on the Jewish public in Palestine, and even less on the Jewish communities
elsewhere in the Mediterranean region. There were never more than a few dozen
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 19

active at any given time, and sometimes even fewer.3® At first, and for several genera­
tions, the sages functioned as individual scholars, teachers who gathered small num­
bers of students on a personal basis. Whatever links existed among them were loose
and limited, and generally restricted to intellectual interests and scholarly debates.
The situation began to change slowly only at the beginning o f the third century
c.E. with the project of redacting and publishing the Mishnah, the first comprehen­
sive compilation of rabbinic legal material. Dating from approximately 200 C.E., the
Mishnah is a legal text, a type of compendium (or legal anthology) to which there
are but few parallels from this early period. The quality and precision of its phrase­
ology and scrupulous editing, combined with its intellectual vigor, rank the
Mishnah at the top of the ancient world’s legal documents. The view, embraced by
some modern scholars (as well as orthodox Jews), that the Mishnah is a type of
legal codex, a charter or rule of behavior addressed to the public at large and meant
to lay out and dictate the Jewish way of living, should be roundly rejected.39 Texts
of such pragmatic nature are well known in the Middle Ages; for example,
Maimonides's Mishneh Torah and Joseph Karo's Shulkhan Aruch. The earliest such
works date back to the end of the Byzantine period and were discovered in the
Cairo Genizah, a repository of ancient Jewish texts discovered in the nineteenth
century. The genre continued to evolve in Persia after the rise of Islam under the
guidance of a group known as the Geonim, hundreds of years after the Mishnah.
However, the editors o f the Mishnah executed an entirely different agenda, evi­
dent in the fact that the work does not provide clear and unambiguous legal ruling
on nearly any subject. On the contrary, its editors gathered and then offered several
opposing positions on every issue. Those who wished to conduct their life accord­
ing to the Mishnah would find themselves quickly at a dead end. Whose views
should they follow? Rabbi Eliezer's, Rabbi Yehoshua's, Rabbi Meir’s, or Rabbi
Shimon Bar Yohkai's? Lacking the sophisticated hermeneutic tools that developed
in much later generations and which enabled choice between opposing positions,
there was no way to decide between the dissenting voices of the Mishnah. The edi­
tors were apparently uninterested in reaching such a verdict. Furthermore, as
shown in the work’s first line, the text ignores the larger public. It requires prior
knowledge of nuances and complex legal concepts the sages had developed. The
Mishnah itself does not convey this preliminary knowledge, and without it the text
is accessible only to those conversant with the sages' legal thinking—a doctrine so
difficult to grasp that the untrained person could hardly understand it.40 The
Mishnah contains no hint that its editors presumed, expected, or hoped that their
text would turn out to be what it eventually became: a Jewish foundation docu­
ment of the same, and in some cases even higher, standing than the Torah itself.
The original target audience of the Mishnah were the sages themselves.
Thus the Mishnah was the creator (or at least the instigator) rather than the
creation of the rabbinical movement. It wove the fabric that brought together
individual intellectuals who had previously been linked, if at all, only loosely and
informally and turned them into a group founded on recognition of the impor­
tance of the text it had created.
 20 YARON Z. BLIAV

The third century opened a new stage in the history of the sages. First, they
diverted their intellectual focus from the scriptures to the Mishnah itself. Some of
the rabbis, apparently displeased with the final product, launched a supplementary
work, the Tosefta. But this new composition assumed the Mishnah’s internal
organization—six orders, each covering a large category of subjects, and further
divided into subsections called tractates—thus acknowledging its appreciation of
the older work.41 In the third century, centers of learning (yeshiva) were organized,
some with dozens o f students who arrived from distant communities such as Persia
to hear the teachings o f the sages and study the Mishnah.42 Some students even
transported the Mishnah outside the borders of the Roman Empire and founded
centers of study in Sasanid Persia. Other works amassing the sages’ commentaries
on the Bible—the Midrash—began to appear at this time as well. The third century
is the first period where one can discern a movement led by the sages, even if they
still had a long way to go until accepted by most, if not all, strata of the Jewish pub­
lic, and until the legal products of their scholarship—the halacha—became the
obligatory infrastructure of Jewish life. That happened only after the rise o f Islam,
outside the traditional borders of the Roman world, in Persia, and from there back
to Palestine, and thence to North Africa and Europe.

Conclusion
History plays a tricky game with modem analogies, blurring what from a distance of
time might seem like clear-cut dichotomies, and churning the various constituents of
current discussions into unfamiliar blends. This is particularly true when present
debates are modeled on ancient precedent, such as the one that stirred around the
role of secularism in Jewish society. Here I have striven to nuance and complicate
(and to a large degree dismiss) the too-neat picture of continuity that locates the roots
of the strife between Jewish religion, in particular in its orthodox, rabbinic form, and
secularism in the ancient world. First, as I have shown, there was no secular experi­
ence in the ancient world, at least not in the way this category is grasped today. The
various facets of Jewish life in antiquity reviewed here, including the practical aspects
of daily routines, ritual procedures, and more abstract notions of consciousness and
identity, were overwhelmingly anchored in the religiosity of the time. Secularism
does not find a place along the gamut of Jewish manifestations in ancient times.
Nevertheless, the decisively religious world of antiquity was nothing like the ortho­
dox, predominandy rabbinic version that governed the Jewish sphere from the
Middle Ages and on. No firm lines separated the Jews from their fellow Mediterr­
aneans, and even the most intimate aspects of the worship of God shared large con­
ceptual ground with other forms of worship. Moreover, the rabbis of that time were
quite different from orthodox figures of today; it would be unimaginable, for
example, for a present-day haredi rabbi to attend a Roman bathhouse. The so-called
rabbinic version of Judaism and the ascent of rabbinic figures to social and political
power were practically nonexistent in those early days, and were perhaps only in a
rudimentary stage of development that by no means could have been the core of
Jewish life. Thus from every angle, the modern paradigm that ties disputes around
secularism to the ancient world should be abandoned.
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 21

NOTES
1. For an exhaustive discussion o f the image o f Hellenism in modern Jewish discourse, see
Yaacov Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making o f the Modem
Secular Jew , trans. Chaya Naor and Niki Werner (London: Littman Library o f Jewish
Civilization, 1997).
2. Another source for the menorah's significance in modern Zionist symbolism comes from
its appearance on the arch o f Titus, which ties it to the same paradigm o f freedom/power; see
Rachel Hachlili, "The Menorah, the Ancient Seven-Armed Candelabrum: Origin, Form and
Significance,” Journal for the Study o f Judaism Supplement Series 68 (2001).
3. An illuminating articulation o f this all-embracing religious spirit that prevailed in the
ancient world, with emphasis on the period under discussion, can be found in Peter Brown’s
extensive work on the subject. See, for example, the chapter on religion in Peter R. L. Brown,
The World o f Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson,
1971), 49-112; and his recent article “Christianization and Religious Conflict,” in The Cambridge
Ancient History XIII: The Late Empire, a .d . 337-42;, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 632-664. There he has characterized the "reli­
gious common sense" o f the period as "a spiritual landscape rustling with invisible presences—
with countless divine beings and their ethereal ministers’’ (632).
4. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph o f Christianity (New York: Free
Press, 1999). The wall painting from Pompeii is reproduced in plate 1.
5. On the misconceptions in naming periods and what informs them, see Yaron Z. Eliav,
"Jews and Judaism, 70-429 c.E.," in A Companion to the Roman World, ed. David Potter (Oxford:
Blackwell, forthcoming).
6. The best summary for English speakers is still Frank W. Walbank et al., eds., The
Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7, The Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984), part 1.
7. Among the numerous examples, see the classic Haim H. Ben-Sasson et al., A History of
the Jewish People (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). For more recent scholars who have
continued to apply this model, see my study in the following note.
8. Yaron Z. Eliav, “The Roman Bath as a Jewish Institution: Another Look at the Encounter
between Judaism and the Greco-Roman Culture," Journal for the Study o f Judaism 31, no. 4
(2000): 416-454 (quote on 417).
9. Martha Himmelfarb, "'H e Was Renowned to the Ends o f the Earth’ (1 Macc. 3:9):
Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees" (forthcoming).
10. An example o f a recent study that makes these arguments rather convincingly for the
Second Temple period is Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish
Tradition (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1998).
11. Keith Hopkins, "Christian Number and Its Implications,"Journal o f Early Christian Studies
6, no. 2 (1998), 185-229; Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 b. c. e . to 640 C.E.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 10-11; cf. Brian McGing, "Population and
Proselytism: How Many Jew s Were There in the Ancient World?" in Jews in the Hellenistic and
Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London: Routledge, 2002), 88-106.
12. The various sources are collected in Miriam Pucci ben Zeev, Jewish Rights in the Roman
World: The Greek and Roman Documents quoted by Josephus Flavius (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1998); Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1987); Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem:
Academy o f Sciences and Humanities, 1974-84).
13. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings o f Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties
(Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1999), 13-24. Herod, the Jewish king o f the last part of
the first century b . c . e ., represents a classic example.
14. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition o f Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University
o f Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
15. Philo Quod Deus est immutabilis, PT Ta’an. 68d.
 22 Y A R O N Z. E L I AV

16. Paul R. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 127-166.
17. Paula Fredriksen, "W hat ‘Parting o f the Ways’? Jews, Gentiles, and the Ancient
Mediterranean City," in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95, eds. Adam H. Becker and Annete
Yoshiko Reed (2003): 35-63.
18. Linder, The Jews, 103-107,120-124.
19. Martin Goodman, “The Jewish Image o f God in Late Antiquity,” Jewish Culture and
Society under the Christian Roman Empire, Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 3,
eds. Richard Kalinin and Seth Schwartz (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 133-145.
20. Philo, De specialibus legibus, Jos. AJ 4:196.
21. The best example is the text known as the Halachic Letter (MM 7 ; 4Q 394-399); see Elisha
Qimron and John Strugnell, eds., Qumran Cave 4, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert X (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994).
22. Paula Fredriksen, FromJesus to Christ: The Origins o f the New Testament Image ofJesus (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 98-106.
23. Joyce Reynolds and Robert Tannenbaum, Jews and God-fearers at Aphrodisias: Greek
Inscriptions with Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987), 5 line 1, 26-27.
24. Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social
Interaction (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 463-478.
25. Eliav, "The Roman Bath," 416-454.
26. Yaron Z. Eliav, "Viewing the Sculptural Environment; Shaping the Second
Commandment," The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. 3, Texts and Studies in
Ancient Judaism 93, ed. Peter Schäfer (2002): 411-433.
27. Peter Schäfer, “Magic and Religion in Ancient Judaism," in Envisioning Magic: A Princeton
Seminar and Symposium, ed. Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg (Leiden: Brill, 1997), i 9 ~43-
28. GenR. 68:12 (Theodor and Albeck 784-786) is one rabbinic articulation o f this idea.
29. The notion o f shechinah finds an intriguing parallel in Greco-Roman conceptualities o f
the divine presence in statues; see Yaron Z. Eliav, "On Idolatry in the Roman Bath House—Two
Comments," Cathedra: For the History o f Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv (in Hebrew) no (2003): 173-180.
The best comprehensive presentation o f the Jewish Temple and its various features remains
Théodore A. Busink, Der Tempel vonJerusalem von Salomo bis Herodes; eine archäologisch-historische
Studie unter Berücksichtigung des westsemitischen Tempelbaus, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1970-80).
30. Craig A. Evans, "Opposition to the Temple: Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls,"Jesus and the
Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Jam es H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 235-353; Edvin
Larsson, "Temple-Criticism and the Jewish Heritage: Some Reflections on Acts 6-7," New
Testament Studies 39 (1993): 379-395.
31. This idea is nicely reflected, for example, in the wide range o f articles in William
Horbury, ed., "Templum Amicitiae: Essays on the Second Temple Presented to Emst Bammel,”
Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 48 (1991).
32. E.g. 2 Bar. 10 (Charles 39-41), 44 (Charles 60-61); Sotah 15:10-15 (Lieberman 4.242-4).
33. The ancient synagogue, with its numerous references in ancient texts and abundant
archaeological material, attracted much attention in modem scholarship. Much o f the follow­
ing is loosely based on the sometimes divergent views o f Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue:
The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Shaye J. D. Cohen, "The
Temple and the Synagogue," The Temple in Antiquity: Ancient Records and Modem Perspectives,
Religious Studies Monograph Series 9, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo: Brigham Young
University, 1984), 151—174; Steven Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity o f the Synagogue during the
Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame: University o f Notre Dame Press, 1997); Rajak, The Jewish
Dialogue, 301-499.
 Secularism and Rabbis in Antiquity 23

34. Elizabeth Leigh Gibson, "The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions o f the Bosporus
Kingdom," Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 75 (1999).
35. For good summaries o f the relevant details in this section, consult Shmuel Safrai, ed.,
"The Literature o f the Sages,” Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum 2, no. 3
(1987); Hermann L. Strack and Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash,
2nd ed., trans. Markus Bockmuel (Edinburgh: Clark, 1996).
36. The secondary literature on this topic is too vast to list here. For a concise summary, see
Catherine Hezser, “The Social Structure o f the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine,” Texts
and Studies in Ancient Judaism 66 (199 7): 1-42, 353-404.
37. Cf. Safrai, The Literature, 121-209.
38. Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class o f Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak
Ben-Zvi, 1989), 66-69; Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Place o f the Rabbi in Jewish Society o f the
Second Century,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary o f America, 1992), 157-173.
39. Abraham Goldberg, "The Mishna—A Study Book o f Halacha," in The Literature o f the
Sages, ed. Safrai, The Literature, 213-214.
40. A fascinating development occurred in tandem with the invention o f print, which
allowed the wide dissemination o f rabbinic texts among many strands o f society, to the extent
that even young children gained access to this overly difficult material. Many o f the new con­
sumers o f rabbinic literature, by and large intellectually unequipped to wrestle with these
texts, endorsed alternative methods to engage with them. In other words, they conceived a
learning system for rehearsing the texts without fully understanding them, in which melodies,
pilpul, and other means replaced comprehension.
41. For recent reconsideration o f this text and its relationship with the Mishnah, see Judith
Hauptman, “The Tosefta as a Commentary on an Early Mishnah,” Jewish Studies, an Internet
Journal 3 (2004): 1-24.
42. Levine, The Rabbinic Class, 25-29; Hezser, The Social Structure, 195-214.
 What Is a Judaism?
PERSPECTIVES FROM SECOND TEMPLE
JEWISH STUDIES

GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

In the last few decades, scholars of ancient Judaism and Christian origins have been
engaged in a debate about the nature and essence of Judaism. Such a debate con­
cerns not only what Judaism was in antiquity, itself and in relation to Christianity,
but also has profound implications for our understanding of what Judaism is today.
Everything started when the normativity of Rabbinic Judaism and the myth of its
antiquity and unchangeability, at least in premodern times, began to be openly ques­
tioned. Until the early 1970s, the model of Judaism as a monolithic system of thought,
troubled only by the presence of marginal sects and by the confrontation with rival
Christianity, was still largely accepted.' In the words of Jacob Neusner, “People were
used to thinking in terms of a single, encompassing and normative Judaism, which
defined the context in which all religious writings deriving from Jews—except for that
of Jewish followers of Jesus—found a place. The other writings attested to yet another
unitary and normative religion, Christianity.”2 In between, in the no-man's-land at
the border between Judaism and Christianity, there were writings rejected by both.
They fell into yet another category, that of sectarianism. They were Jewish apocrypha
and pseudepigrapha—bizarre fantasies of radical sectarian (if not dysfunctional)
minds, doomed to theological oblivion and historical insignificance.
The irony was that in spite of their differences, Jews and Christians had effec­
tively worked as a team for centuries to create and sustain the idea of Judaism as an
unchanging, unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) system: the idea that since
Moses’ time there had been only one Judaism—that is, Rabbinic Judaism. Such an
idea had proven to be functional to both Jewish and Christian self-understanding.
It also provided a setting convenient to both for their conflict. For oppressed Jews,
the model served to emphasize their enduring fidelity to an ancient and unaltered
tradition as well as polemically to sanction the complete otherness of Christianity
(as well as any other “heresy”) compared to the one Judaism. On the other hand,
triumphant Christians used the same model to stress the absolute newness and
uniqueness of their religion and to support their contention of having replaced an
outmoded, sclerotic religion.
Although the continuous fortune of Josephus (and o f his Christian and Jewish
doubles, Hegesippon and Josippon) throughout the Middle Ages demonstrated the

24
 W hat Is a Judaism f 25

diversity of ancient Judaism, the Jewish sects aroused no interest, their memory
being only occasionally resurrected by the curiosity of the erudite (Philastrius and
Epiphanius among the Christians; Ibn Daud and Maimonides among the Jews).3 The
decisive dramatic conflict between the Synagogue and the Church, both so well
defined in their respective roles, certainly had no need of other, minor characters—
in fact, they were quickly forgotten. In either triumph or distress, both the rabbis
and the Christians had good reasons to consider themselves the only authentic heirs
of the one Judaism, which the former claimed to have faithfully maintained and the
latter to have faithfully fulfilled.
The legacy of the single-Judaism model extends well into modern times and
shaped the origins of modern scholarship. It took the Second World War and the
Holocaust to change things. In the post-Holocaust climate of reconciliation
between Christians and Jews and in the wake of the breathtaking discovery of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, the entire framework of certainties that for centuries had regu­
lated Jewish-Christian relations suddenly collapsed. If Jesus was a Jew (not the blue­
eyed, Scandinavian hero of the movies) and “sectarian" movements like the
Essenes looked perfectly at home in the diverse environment of the first century,
something had to be wrong with the perception of what Judaism and Rabbinic
Judaism were in antiquity. In the late 1970s, the works of Ellis Rivkin and Jacob
Neusner conclusively showed that Rabbinic Judaism was not normative Judaism,
but a reform movement that became normative only at a later stage in Jewish his­
tory.4 The synchrony between biblical and rabbinic origins was broken, and so was
the very foundation of the continuity and stability of the entire history of Judaism,
based on the equation “Judaism = Rabbinic Judaism = Orthodox Judaism." A
seemingly limited historical problem such as redefining the relationship between
Second Temple Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism had led scholars to nothing less than
the monumental task of re defining Judaism.

From Judaisms Back to Judaism

The task of defining what Judaism was would prove to be much harder than defin­
ing what Judaism was not. In the early 1990s, the idea of multiple Judaisms gained
momentum and recognition, so much so that in 1994 Neusner could boldly
announce: “The issue, how to define Judaism, is now settled: we do not. We define
Judaisms."5 We were, on the contrary, only at the beginning of a long process of
theoretical clarification. Philip R. Davies raised the timely question: “The replace­
ment of the concept of Judaism by the concept of Judaisms solves one problem
only to create another, perhaps even more fundamental one—namely what it was
that made any Judaism a Judaism .. . . The plural Judaisms require some definition
of Judaism in the singular, in order itself to have any meaning."6 The Neusner
model offered a refreshing emphasis on Jewish diversity, but its potential to develop
into a comprehensive model was somehow restrained by its inability to engage in a
constructive dialogue with other approaches and by its disturbing tendency to
freeze and isolate each variety of Judaism from the others in almost impermeable
systems without a coherent theory of what “Judaism” (singular) was. “In the
 26 GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

history of Judaism, we can identify numbers of different Judaisms. . . . All together,

of course, we observe continuities but these prove hardly definite of the distinctive
traits of any one system. So, in all, Judaisms flourished side by side. Or they took
place in succession to one another. Or they came into being out of all relationship
with one another.”7
Three post-Neusner models have emerged that challenge or correct his mul­
tiple Judaisms model. The most conservative and minimalistic approach is that
advocated by E. P. Sanders since the late 1970s and recently revived by Seth
Schwartz.8 According to this view, any discourse about Jewish diversity and histor­
ical changes must be taken as regarding only the accidents, not the essence, of
Judaism.
E. P. Sanders strongly rejects “the assumption that Judaism was divided into
parties”9—that is, that there may have been not one Judaism but many. Underneath
the diversity of Second Temple Judaism, he recovers the profound unity of “com­
mon Judaism” as “that o f the ordinary priests and the ordinary people. . . . [W]hat
was common in two senses: agreed on among the parties, agreed on by the popu­
lace as a whole.” 10 The result of Sanders' “common-denominator theology” is the
conceptualization of the essence of Judaism as “covenantal nomism.” 11
What in Sanders’s view is the result of a sophisticated sociological analysis of
Jewish literature and Jewish “practice and belief” in the Second Temple period
becomes, in the work of Seth Schwartz, little more than a polemical assumption. “I
reject the characterization of Judaism as multiple.”12 “The three pillars of ancient
Judaism—the one God, the one Torah, and the one Temple—cohere in a single
neat, ideological system."13 Whereas Sanders saw sectarianism as a marginal yet
actual phenomenon of dissent, Schwartz has stressed unity and cohesion. “The
main sects were in fact an integral part of the Torah-centered Judaean mainstream
elite."14 Even the apocalyptic material was “the product of the same scribal and
priestly elites and subelites who produced Jewish literature in general, and presum­
ably it reflects their attempt to neutralize, judaize (i.e., interpret in Jewish terms),
and assert control over problematic, perhaps in part magical, elements of Judaean
religion.” 15 The very concept of conflict, dissent, and competition, which specialists
in Second Temple Judaism and apocalypticism have been emphasizing as the most
characteristic element o f the period,16 is entirely dismissed as a mere optical illu­
sion, “a trick of perspective.”17
Such an approach is essentially apologetic. In spite o f any diversity, Judaism
regains its familiar and reassuring unity. Of course, Judaism is ever-changing and
diverse, and the Second Temple period does not equal the rabbinic period.
However, Jewish society in late antiquity was "complex, loosely centralized but still
basically unitary” ; "fragmentation” occurred as a result of "accommodation to
direct Roman rule,” 18 not as a consequence o f internal conflict and competition.
The emergence of Rabbinic Judaism as well as of any other new stage in the history
o f Judaism does not signal any breakthrough but the continuous adjustment of
"common Judaism" to different historical forms and circumstances. Accidents may
change it (and in fact they continuously change it over time), but in its essence
 W hat Is a Judaism? 27

Judaism has no history: over the centuries, beyond the plurality of its diverse his­
torical manifestations, Judaism was, is, and always will be "covenantal nomism.”
Lawrence Schiffman has parted from Sanders and Schwartz as he unreservedly
accepts the dynamism and pluralism of Judaism and the existence of competing
groups: "Can we speak of a normative tradition at any time in pre-Rabbinic times?
I think not/'19 Schiffman also, however, has supported the idea of an intellectual
unity of Judaism over the centuries, but this unity is demonstrated not by the per­
manence of an unchanged essence but by a gradual and consistent process of evo­
lution of an ever-incremental tradition. In his words, "continuity can only be
achieved in a tradition which adapts and develops.''20 Evolution means diversity, dis­
continuity, conflict, and dead possibilities before mainstream Judaism finds its nat­
ural course. Sectarianism provides the necessary antitheses on which new, more
advanced syntheses are built. "What Judaism and the Jewish people needed was to
experiment by playing out the results of the old conflicts to see how the various
approaches would work in this new era. Thus, the sects were a proving ground
from which emerged an answer to which way Judaism would move in the post-70
c .e . period."21 Out of the Judaisms of the Second Temple period, "the rise of the
rabbinic form of Judaism . . . was no accident. The Judaism that emerged at the end
of the Talmud era had been chosen by a kind of natural selection process in the
spheres of history and religion.”22 In other words, while Sanders and Schwartz
stress that the essence o f Judaism remains unchanged in spite of its history,
Schiffman claims that the essence of Judaism is given by the history of its intellec­
tual evolution. Judaism is what it has become.
Schiffman is definitively correct in his criticism of the Neusner model when he
points out that we cannot "isolate each Judaism from the others, not only from
those that existed at the same time, but also from those that came before."23 In his­
tory there is no such thing as a group or movement that suddenly appears from
nowhere. A group or movement always emerges from somewhere, as a modifica­
tion or outgrowth of a previous group or movement, upon the foundations that
others have laid before them. However, forcing the diversity of Judaism into a
single line of evolution, as Schiffman has done, is a Hegelian enterprise, aimed to
present one's own tradition, philosophy, or religion as the providential synthesis of
historical processes. The problem of Jewish diversity is not merely a diachronic
problem to be solved from a teleological perspective. With the same criterion, one
could consider Christianity as the climax of Judaism, following the history of the
"Jewish Church” from its biblical and prophetical foundations until the time of
Christ, dismissing Pharisaism and Rabbinic Judaism as late and erroneous “antithe­
ses,” and then following the Christian synthesis through the progress of the
Christian Church up to the present. This is what the historiae sacrae (so popular in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) used to do, before the genres of the
"History of Israel” and of "Church History” established themselves as autonomous
units.24
Shaye J. D. Cohen and Martin S. Jaffee have offered quite an interesting
variant to the evolutionary model.25 They doom as theologically motivated and
 28 GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

absolutely hopeless any attempt to find an ideological unity of Judaism, be it

described as an unchangeable essence or a single incremental tradition. Where
Sanders and Schwartz find “a single body of doctrine and practice” 26 and Schiffman
"a straight evolutionary line culminating inevitably in a victorious rabbinic
Judaism,”27Jaffee sees "patterns of disharmony and points o f intellectual and social
stress, a picture of flux and experiment, rather than one o f continuity and broadly
recognized authority.”28
Cohen has compared Judaism to a "bumblebee which continues to fly, unaware
that the laws of aerodynamics declare its flight to be impossible.” 29 The absence of
any internal logic or law of ideological continuity does not mean, however, that
there is no “unity within diversity.”30 It only means that this unity must be sought
elsewhere, in the ethnic bond that links the Jewish people to its religious expres­
sions. Neither for preserving the Jewish “essence” uncontaminated, nor for reach­
ing the most perfect ideological synthesis, but for keeping the ethnic bond, “the
rabbis were the winners of ancient Jewish history.”31 Judaism is the history of its
people.
The ethnic model has the great advantage of discarding concepts of “race” or
“genetics” in defining the Jewish identity. Quoting authors such as Anthony
D. Smith and Ernest Gellner,32 Cohen has identified an ethnos as “a named group,
attached to a specific territory, whose members shared a sense of common origins,
claimed a common and distinctive history and destiny, possessed one or more dis­
tinctive characteristics”—among which “the most distinctive. . . was the manner in
which they worshiped their God, what we today would call their religion . . . and
felt a sense of collective uniqueness and solidarity.”33
The ethnic model also has the great advantage of almost completely getting rid
of disturbing theological assumptions. Christianity, for example, is neither a
“heresy” of covenantal Judaism nor an “antithesis” that before being discarded
helped lay the foundations for the rabbinic synthesis. Christianity is simply a vari­
ety of Judaism that ceased to be such when it broke its bond with the Jewish people
and “became a religious movement overwhelmingly gentile in composition and
character.”34
The problem is that by stressing the ethnic bond we miss entirely the ideological
continuity that still ties Christianity to Rabbinic Judaism even after the ethnic bond
was broken. This is what scholars of the “partings of the ways” have discovered—an
unbroken “fraternal link" as that between “twins” born from the same womb. In
the words of Alan F. Segal:

The time of Jesus marks the beginning of not one but two great religions of the
West, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. . . . As brothers often do, they picked
up different, even opposing ways to preserve their family heritage. . .. Rabbinic
Judaism maintains that it has preserved the traditions of Israel. . . . Christianity
maintains that it is the new Israel, preserving the intentions of Israel’s prophets.
Because of the two religions' overwhelming similarities and in spite of their
great areas of difference, both statements are true.35
 W hat Is a Judaism ? 29

As the title of a recent book edited by Adam Becker and Annette Reed points
out, “the ways never parted"—Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are simply differ­
ent outgrowths of ancient Judaism.36

Judaism, Jewishness, and Judaicness

In order to define the unity of Judaism, some scholars have chosen to privilege the
intellectual approach, which identifies Judaism primarily as a coherent system of
thought, be it described as a temporal essence (Sanders, Schwartz) or an incremen­
tal historical tradition (Schiffman). Other historians have taken the ethnic approach
instead, which identifies Judaism primarily as the expression of the religious iden­
tity of the Jewish people over the course of centuries (Jaffee, Cohen).
In my work on middle Judaism, I have focused on the intellectual dimension of
Judaism while rejecting apologetic and theological assumptions.37 The results have
confirmed the conclusions of Segal; no clear boundary can be set between
Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism in their relation with the previous tradition of
Israel. From the intellectual point of view, Second Temple Judaism is neither the
end point of an already established monolithic Judaism before Jesus (late Judaism)
nor the starting point of a linear process of evolution naturally leading to the rab­
binic stage (early Judaism). Those centuries are the transitional and diverse age
(middle Judaism) of many competing Judaisms, in which both Christianity and
Rabbinic Judaism had their intellectual roots and experienced their social origins.
The Christian and the rabbinic systems of thought are certainly distinct and
very different from one another. However, each movement is in an analogous line
of continuity and discontinuity with ancient forms of Second Temple Judaism.
The Christians built their system of thought on the theological foundations
that the Enochic tradition had laid for centuries before Jesus around the principle of
the demonic origin of evil.38 The result was a parallel development of the ancient
religion of Israel according to a trajectory different from that of Rabbinic Judaism,
a trajectory in which ultimately the Torah was subordinated to the Messiah and
ethnicity was no longer considered a prerequisite for membership. In so doing, the
Christians undoubtedly sacrificed part of the rich intellectual heritage of ancient
Judaism while enhancing the aspects they found more congenial; but this is also
what the rabbis did.
Rabbinic Judaism built its system of thought on the theological foundations of
the covenantal theology that the Pharisees (and before them the Zadokites) had
created in the post-exilic period.39The rabbis stressed the centrality of the Torah by
claiming its preexistence and expanding its boundaries to include the oral Torah,40
thereby strengthening the bond between ethnicity and religion into an unprece­
dented identification. In so doing, the rabbis enhanced part of the rich intellectual
heritage of ancient Judaism while sacrificing other aspects, exactly as the Christians
did. While each party has for centuries claimed just the opposite and even agreed
on the rival's claim, Christianity is no less conservative than Rabbinic Judaism, and
Rabbinic Judaism is no less innovative than Christianity
 30 GABRIELE BOCCACCIN I

In sum, the clear discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism, emphasized

by Jaffee and Cohen on the ethnic level, is not as apparent on the intellectual level,
where continuity prevails over discontinuity. Should we then conclude that
Christianity is still a Judaism, as it is an intellectual outgrowth o f previous Judaic
systems just as Rabbinic Judaism is? And if this is true for Christianity, what should
we say about Samaritanism and Islam? They are also religious systems that devel­
oped from the ancient religion of Israel. Should we also define Samaritanism and
Islam as varieties of Judaism?
It seems that scholars have arrived at a standstill. The ethnic approach alone
does not account for the special and permanent bond that still links Judaism to
Christianity (and also to Samaritanism and Islam). On the other hand, the intellec­
tual approach alone is unable to set clear boundaries between these religions with­
out having recourse to the historically unacceptable categories of “heresy” or
“antithesis." Where the ethnic approach is too exclusive, the intellectual approach
seems to be too inclusive.
If we keep taking either the ethnic or the intellectual element as the only
marker of the unity and identity of Judaism, we will never find a coherent solution.
We need to build a more sophisticated model that would reconcile both elements
in a harmonious framework. I have maintained the importance of a conceptual and
terminological distinction between the ethnic and the intellectual aspects of
Judaism, or between “Jewishness" and "Jewish,” on the one hand, and “Judaicness”
and “Judaic,” on the other. These terms in modern English (when used) are actually
synonyms, but ours are no longer the happy times when scholars still used to speak
the language of ordinary people. In a technical vocabulary, “Jewishness" and
"Jewish" should refer to the people, history, and culture o f ethnic Jews, while
"Judaicness" and “Judaic” should be used with reference to the monotheistic
religion of YHWH.
Studies of Jewishness and Judaicness are very important and complementary,
and may be pursued autonomously according to each scholar's own legitimate
research interest. It is one thing to trace the history of the cultural and religious
expressions of Jewish ethnic identity (the history of “Jewishness,” or of what is
“Jewish"), and another thing to trace the history and intellectual evolution of
Israelite monotheism (the history of “Judaicness," or of what is "Judaic"). Both his­
tories overlap, yet they do not coincide. A history of Jewishness would give room
to the secular (not only religious) manifestations of Jewish thought, but would only
marginally include Samaritanism and Christianity (limited to their Jewish stage)
while totally excluding Islam (which never knew a Jewish stage). A history of
Judaicness, on the other hand, cannot ignore the enduring intellectual relations of
Judaism with Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam.
Even more important, neither the history of Jewishness nor the history of
Judaicness equals the history of Judaism. A Judaism is not simply a Judaic system
believed or practiced by just anyone (this would be the necessary conclusion if the
emphasis is placed exclusively on the intellectual element—that is, on Judaicness
without Jewishness). Nor is Judaism only whatever a Jewish group believes or does
 W hat Is a Judaism ? 31

(this would be the necessary conclusion if the emphasis is placed exclusively on the
ethnic element, or Jewishness without Judaicness).
In order to have "Judaism," we must have both Jewishness ami Judaicness (not
necessarily in precisely the same proportion). Only the presence of, and tension
between, these two elements defines the boundaries of Judaism. Some examples
from ancient history will help illustrate my contention.

At the Beginning It Was Judaicness

Most specialists of ancient Israel would characterize the ancient Israelite religion as
a Canaanite religion and the Israelites as a Canaanite people. During the monarchic
age, polytheism was normative. Henotheistic trends became more apparent only
with the reform of King Josiah, and monotheism finally developed among the
exiled Judahite elites in Babylon.41 At the time of the “return,” the monotheistic
religious system elaborated by the priestly House of Zadok won its battle for lead­
ership against the House o f David and its prophets and defined in Judah a new
entity in people of Israelite descent. Although later sources would romantically
speak of an “emptied land” that welcomed the exiles, in reality a bitter confronta­
tion occurred between the returnees and the remainees. At the beginning, there­
fore, it was religion (Judaicness), not ethnicity (Jewishness), that set the boundaries
of Judaism as the new “community of the exile.” In order to strengthen their ideo­
logical diversity, the returnees, through the creation o f genealogical lists of exiled
families and the prohibition of intermarriage outside the community, transformed
what originally was only a regional branch o f the Israelite people (the Judaeans)
into an ideological category (the Jews). This category increasingly took the features
of an ethnic entity distinct not only from the Canaanite peoples o f the land but also
from the pre-exilic Israelite identity. By the time of Sirach (beginning of the second
century b .c . e .), the Samaritans, who shared common Israelite descent and even
assimilated the Mosaic Torah and yet did not recognize the Zadokite leadership or
conform to their practice and belief, were not considered "Jews,” members of the
same community or ethnos: they became the “others” : “the foolish people that live
in Shechem" (Sir 50:26), "not even a people” (Sir so ^ ).42
Before the Maccabean period, however, the emphasis remained on Judaicness,
not on Jewishness. The Tobiads are a case in point. This influential family of
Israelite descent lived long on the fringes o f Jewish society and resisted several
attempts to exclude them from the community of the exile, only to be accepted at
the end of the third century b .c.e. by virtue of political alliance and ideological
compromise with the ruling Zadokite priesthood. Once tested, the ideological
boundary proved to be still stronger than any ethnic boundary.

Then Came Jewishness

The Maccabean crisis started as a theological conflict that divided the more
Hellenized urban upper class from the less Hellenized (and largely oppressed) rural
class. The end of the Zadokite rule, which neither faction had the interest to
restore, created a split among rival priestly families, the Hellenized party's attempt
 32 GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

at replacing the Zadokite Torah being led by no one less than the high priest,
Menelaus.
The genius of the Maccabees was to turn the Zadokite Torah from a priestly
law into the national law of Israel. What originally was a theological conflict about
Judaicness became a matter of Jewishness, a national war of liberation against
Greeks and "false" Jews. It is in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt that the term
"Ioudaismos" first emerged to define the national identity of the Jews based on the
observance of the Mosaic Torah.43
This did not guarantee uniformity; on the contrary Judaism remained even
more divided.44 The Maccabean war, however, changed the nature of Judaism.
While before the Maccabees religion defined ethnicity, religious diversity was then
confined within the boundaries of an ethnicity, of a shared way of life. Leaving or
entering Judaism was increasingly understood as implying a crossing of an ethnic
boundary. Even those varieties of Judaism (for example, Hellenistic Judaism),
which went further in their allegorical interpretation of the Torah and were more
eager to attract Gentiles, preserved the ethnic distinction between Jews and Gentile
God-fearers. If Judaism was the religion of the cosmos, the Jews remained sepa­
rated by birth from the Gentiles as the chosen priests of humankind. In the words
of Philo, "a priest has the same relation to a city that the nation of the Jews has to
the entire inhabited world" (Spec. Leg. II.63).
From the Persian period to the Hellenistic-Roman period, the situation curi­
ously reversed. In the Persian period there were people (Tobiads and Samaritans)
who could claim to share the same ethnicity and yet were excluded because they
did not share the same religion. In the Hellenistic-Roman period, there were people
(Gentiles) who could claim to share the same religion, yet were excluded because
they did not share the same ethnicity. God-fearers could enjoy many of the privi­
leges of Jewish monotheism and even being associated with Jewish communities,
yet it was taken for granted that for the proselyte full membership was open only
through a process of ethnic adoption (see Philo, Spec. Leg. I.51). Jewishness had then
become the most conspicuous and least flexible boundary of Judaism.45

A Judaism (Christianity) Lost Its Jewishness

Christianity was born as a Jewish messianic movement. The Jesus movement, even
in its more radical expressions, was one o f the Judaisms of the Second Temple
period. Jesus and his first followers sparked much controversy. Their Judaism
attracted large crowds but also generated a lot of opposition by other competing
groups. The temple elite (the Sadducees) tried to suppress the movement, and
Christians repaid them with equal contempt. As for the Pharisees, the early
Christian tradition preserves a sort of ambivalent memory o f them as both friends
and foes. Apparently, the Pharisees were no less harsh in their theological opposi­
tion, yet they defended the right of the Christians to exist and dissent—an attitude
apparent in the Acts of the Apostles, where the Pharisees are praised for siding with
the Christians against the Sadducees (Acts 5:17-40; 23:6-10), and confirmed by
Josephus’s account of the death of James, which outraged the Pharisees against the
 W hat Is a Judaism? 33

Sadducean High Priest (Ant. 20:197-203). We know little about the reaction of the
Essenes or para-Essene groups. Theologically, they seem to have been the closest to
the Christian positions, but this does not mean that they welcomed the Christian
message unreservedly. At least in the case of the followers o f John the Baptist and
the Enochic group who authored the Parables of Enoch, we have evidence of
groups who preserved their distinct identity from the new Christian movement.
This variety of reactions is exactly what one would expect in the diverse and
competitive environment of the Second Temple period. From its inception, the
Jesus movement was controversial, yet no one questioned its being both Judaic and
Jewish.
Then it happened that a minority branch of Christianity, namely Pauline
Christianity, openly trespassed the boundaries of Jewishness, not simply by accept­
ing Gentile members (Christian Jews and Hellenistic Jews also used to do this) but
by abolishing the distinction between Jews and Christians within the new table fel­
lowship. The Judaism of Paul was still fully Judaic, but its Jewishness was now
largely compromised. Not surprisingly, the position o f Paul created a conflict not
only with the other forms of Judaism, but also within the Jesus movement—a con­
flict that ceased only when after the year 70, the balance o f power in the early
Church shifted decisively toward the Pauline communities. The "new” Israel, in
which the first Christians intended to welcome the Gentile converts, gradually lost
its cultural and ethnic continuity with the “old" Israel. Jewishness was neglected,
forgotten, and even despised as a bizarre heresy of minority fringes. Christianity
turned from a variety of Judaism that welcomed Gentile members into a Gentile
movement.
Yet, Christianity has never ceased to be Judaic, as Judaic as its Jewish sibling.
The most radical positions (like Marcion’s), which aimed to sever the Judaic nature
of the new religion, were contained and eventually rejected. The loss of
Jewishness, in spite of the preservation of Judaicness, prevents us, however, from
calling any of the modern Christianities a Judaism.46

And a Non-Jewish Community (Islam) Gained Judaicness

While Christianity provides the example of a Judaism that lost its Jewishness, Islam
is a non-Jewish community that gained its Judaicness. Unlike Christianity, Islam
was not born from within the Jewish people, nor was it ever a Judaism. Islam is a
religious community that took from Judaism (and Christianity) the element of
Judaicness and grafted itself into the tradition of the God o f Israel. This ideologi­
cal continuity, which automatically would assimilate Islam to Judaism if only the
intellectual dimension were considered, does not make Islam a Judaism, as the ele­
ment of Jewishness is completely missing. Even in its mythological expression,
the Islamic tradition clearly marks such a distinction by claiming descent from the
“other” son o f Abraham, Ishmael.
In relation to Christianity and Judaism, Islam applied the same supercessionist
attitude that the Christians had applied to Judaism, and Judaism and Christianity
reacted with the same claim of heresy that the Jews also applied to Christianity. But
 34 GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

once again this is a theological disputation. The fact that Islam is not and never
was a Judaism, does not signify in any way a lower degree o f legitimacy. If only the
element of Jewishness were considered, we would miss an essential element of
continuity that links Islam to Judaism. From the intellectual point of view, Islam is
no less Judaic than its Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian siblings.

Conclusion: Judaism as a Genus

The distinction between Judaicness and Jewishness offers the possibility of a taxon­
omy that fully respects the diversity of Judaisms (plural) and at the same time
clearly defines what "Judaism” is (singular). It also has the advantage of setting
objective, nontheological, and nonjudgmental boundaries between Judaism and its
siblings (Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam), while unreservedly acknowledging
what all these religions still have in common.
We have to think of Judaism as a genus. A genus is by definition a major cate­
gory in the classification, ranking above a species and below a family. The family is
that of "Abrahamic religions," which includes the whole set of monotheistic sys­
tems that sprang forth from the same Middle Eastern roots as a multibranched tree,
or as Martin Jaffee would say, "all religions claiming to possess revelations from the
God who first made himself known to Israel." The family of Abrahamic religions
includes several genera: Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam, each of
them being very rich and diverse in species.
Thanks to the distinction between Judaicness and Jewishness, both the link
between Judaism and its siblings (the other religions belonging to the same family),
as well as the particular identity of Judaism, are immediately apparent. While
Judaicness is the common element of all Abrahamic religions, the term "Judaism"
applies exclusively to the genus encompassing those many species (Judaisms),
which show both the features of Jewishness and Judaicness.
Since its inception, Judaism was made of several parallel systems. Some of
them had a short history; some flourished and developed side by side for centuries.
No Judaism ever existed in isolation. Intellectual diversity challenged the inner
development of each species, suggesting experiences o f merging and synthesis and
offering a continuous opportunity for borrowing and dialogue.
Sometimes the competition among species happened to increase so much that
not only was any sense o f mutual recognition destroyed, but also the ties of a pre­
viously shared ethnicity were severed (as in the case o f Samaritanism) or the origi­
nal Jewishness of a movement was repressed and forgotten (as in the case of
Christianity). Sometimes the seed of Judaicness happened to produce fruit in a
non-Jewish land (the fertile land of Islam). Thus, new genera and new species
within each genus were born, fueling a more and more complex mechanism of
borrowing, dialogue, and competition that has characterized and still characterizes
the history of the Abrahamic family in the extraordinary diversity of its historical
manifestations.
After more than twenty-five hundred years, the life blood of the family tree
does not show any signs o f exhaustion. Contemporary times have seen the rise of
 W hat Is a Ju daism ? 35

new conflicts and bitter crises with the revival of fundamentalism, but also an excit­
ing season of Christian-Jewish dialogue in the post-Holocaust era that has reshaped
the identity of two long-estranged genera.
The discussion about Judaicness—that is, about which Abrahamic religion is
“more Judaic”—is a theological problem about their Truth, a crucial question for
the religious conscience, yet a meaningless question from the historical point of
view. What defines and distinguishes Judaism vis-à-vis its siblings is the combina­
tion of Judaicness and Jewishness, not the claim of a higher or purest degree of
Judaicness. Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam belong to the same fam­
ily; they are all Judaic religions. On the other hand, what defines a Judaism vis-à-vis
the other varieties of Judaism is the different balance between these two constitu­
tive elements. This problem—as we have seen—marks the entire history of
Judaism since its very beginning. We see it still in action in the post-Enlightenment
question about whether Judaism is primarily a religion or an ethnos, and in the con­
temporary confrontation between secular and religious Jews.
In fact, the entire history of Judaism offers many different examples of how
these two elements are combined. We proceed from the identification of
Jewishness and Judaicness in Rabbinic Judaism to opposite varieties of contempo­
rary Judaism, where Judaicness is emphasized over against Jewishness (as in Reform
Judaism) or, vice-versa, Jewishness is emphasized over against Judaicness (as in
Secular Humanistic Judaism). The question to what extent one element can be
emphasized over against the other without breaking the boundaries of Judaism has
created and continues to create endless controversy in modern Judaism and in
some cases even prevents mutual recognition among different species of Judaism.
But once again, what the balance between Judaicness and Jewishness is or should be
is an ideological (or theological) problem, not a historical problem. Scholarly mod­
els do not solve problems and conflicts; the most we can expect is that they help us
better understand the nature of conflicts. Not a small accomplishment.

NOTES
1. See Alexander Guttman, Rabbinic Judaism in the Making: A Chapter in the History of
Halakhah from Ezra to Judah I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970); Louis Finkelstein,
Pharisaism in the Making: Selected Essays (New York: Ktav, 1972); J. Weingreen, From Bible to
Mishna: The Continuity o f Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976).
2. Jacob Neusner, “What Is a Judaism? Seeing the Dead Sea Library as the Statement o f a
Coherent Judaic Religious System," in Judaism in Late Antiquity, ed. A. J. Avery-Peck and B. D.
Chilton, vol. 3 (Leiden, NY: E. J. Brill, 2001), 3-21 (quotation on p. 3).
3. See Gabriele Boccaccini, Portraits of Middle Judaism in Scholarship and Arts (Turin:
Zamorani, 1992).
4. Ellis Rivkin, A Hidden Revolution: The Pharisees’ Search for the Kingdom Within (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1978); and Jacob Neusner, From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism
(New York: Ktav, 1978).
5. Jacob Neusner, The Judaism the Rabbis Take for Granted (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 12.
6. Philip R. Davies, "Scenes from the Early History o f Judaism,” in The Triumph of Elohim:
From Yahwisms to Judaisms, ed. Diana Vikander Edelman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995),
145-182 (quotation on pp. 147,151).
 36 GABRIELE BOCCACCINI

7. Jacob Neusner, preface to Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, ed.
Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, and Ernest S. Frerichs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), xi-xii.
8. See E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977); E. P.
Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 B .C.f.. -66 c . f.. (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International,
1992); and Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 b . c . e . to 640 C.E. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
9. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 11.
10. Ibid., 11-12.
11. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism.
12. Schwartz, Imperialism, 9.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. Ibid., 49.
15. Ibid., 15.
16. See Paolo Sacchi, History of the Second Temple Period (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
2000); Lester L. Grabbe, Judaic Religion in the Second Temple Period (London: Routledge, 2000);
and John Joseph Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic
Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
17. Schwartz, Imperialism, 2.
18. Ibid., 291.
19. Lawrence H. SchifTman, "Jewish Sectarianism in Second Temple Judaism ," in Great
Schisms in Jewish History, ed. Raphael Jospe and Stanley M. Wagner (New York: Ktav, 1981), 1-46
(quotation on p. 35).
20. Lawrence H. SchifTman, From Text to Tradition: A History o f Second Temple and Rabbinic
Judaism (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1991), 26.
21. SchifTman, "Jewish Sectarianism,” 35.
22. SchifTman, From Text to Tradition, 15.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. Boccaccini, Portraits o f Middle Judaism, xv.
25. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987);
Shaye J. D. Cohen,, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1999); and Martin S. JafTee, Early Judaism (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1997).
26. JafTee, Early Judaism, 245.
27. Ibid., 246.
28. Ibid..
29. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 26.
30. Ibid., 26.
31. Ibid., 18.
32. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1983).
33. Cohen, The Beginnings o f Jewishness, 7.
34. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 37.
35. Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1,179; see also James D. G. Dunn, The Partings o f the Ways
between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London:
SCM Press, 1991); and Hershel Shanks, ed., Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: A Parallel History of
Their Origins and Early Development (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992).
36. Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
 W hat Is a Judaism? 37

37. Gabriele Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 b .c . e . to 200 c.E. (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1991).
38. Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
39. Gabriele Boccaccini, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, from Ezekiel to Daniel
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
40. Gabriele Boccaccini, “The Preexistence o f the Torah: A Commonplace in Second Temple
Judaism, or a Later Rabbinic Development?" Henoch 17 (1995): 329-350; and Martin S. Jaffee,
Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 B.C.E.-400 C.E. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
41. Edelman, The Triumph o f Elohim.
42. James D. Purvis, “ Ben Sira and the Foolish People o f Shechem "Journal o f Near Eastern
Studies 24, (January-April 1965), 88-94.
43. Cohen, The Beginning of Jewishness, passim; Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall o f Jewish
Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).
44. Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing o f Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation
(Leiden: Brill, 1997).
45. John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan, 323
B .c .E -117 c.E. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996).
46. The only possible (and indeed, controversial) exception is "Messianic Judaism," which
claims (ideological not historical) continuity with the experience o f the Christian Jews o f the
first centuries and strenuously vindicates its Jewishness: "When we call our movement a type
o f Judaism, we are affirming our relationship to the Jewish people as a whole, as well as our
connection to the religious faith and way o f life which that people have lived throughout its his­
torical journey." See Mark Kinzer, The Nature o f MessianicJudaism: Judaism as Genus, Messianic as
Species (West Hartford: Hashivenu Archives, 2000), 5.
 7
Jï Crypto-Jewish Criticism of
Tradition and Its Echoes in
Jewish Communities

MIRIAM BODIAN

In the late medieval period, rabbinic law provided the legal and theological founda­
tion of Jewish communal life throughout the Diaspora. It shaped the educational
system, the structures o f communal self-government, and Jewish-Gentile relations,
as well as the activities o f worship and ceremony usually associated with religion.
"Religious life,” that is, was not separable from "Jewish life.” A Jew paid taxes to the
Jewish community, ate ritually slaughtered meat, was married under a khuppah, and
was buried by a Jewish burial society. The only alternative was to convert and join
another religious community.
All of this changed radically in western Jewish societies in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The governing and policing powers of the traditional
Jewish communal authorities were dismantled, first and foremost by the centraliz­
ing state. But the traditional community was weakened by other factors as well.
The opportunities that beckoned as a result of their emancipation lured Jews "out
of the ghetto." Assimilation to one degree or another followed. Leaving the syna­
gogue behind was made easier by the fact that doing so no longer necessarily
entailed conversion. For some, philosophical skepticism provided the impetus for
rejecting all traditional religious belief.
Because Jewish secularization was so strongly (and suddenly) impelled by external
developments in European society, it showed few manifestations of a phase that was of
the utmost importance in European secularization, namely the individuation of belief
within the traditional context of revealed religion. To be sure, such individuation can be dis­
cerned in the unique career of Moses Mendelssohn, who became deeply immersed in
Enlightenment thought in late-eighteenth-century Berlin without abandoning the fun­
damentals of traditional Jewish theology. Among other issues, Mendelssohn pondered
the problem of individual conscience when it conflicted with prescribed religion. (This
problem was not recognized in traditional Judaism and had become widely recognized
in Christian Europe only in the sixteenth century.) Mendelssohn's thinking on this prob­
lem led him to oppose coercive religious authority of any kind. However, by this time
the coercive powers of the traditional community were already being seriously eroded
from without. (Most of Mendelssohn's followers abandoned traditional Judaism after
his death and adopted some form of deism, for which they suffered no penalty.)
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 39

However, well before Mendelssohn, some noteworthy figures with strong

Jewish religious convictions were unwittingly developing a conception o f Judaism
that would, when transplanted to normative Jewish communities, pose a challenge
to rabbinic authority. These figures have been ignored in the study of Jewish secu­
larization for several reasons. First, they were not Ashkenazim, but Sephardi
crypto-Jews. Moreover, they are largely unknown to scholars, as a result of which
their connection to anticlerical and individualist religious currents in Portuguese-
Jewish communities has not been charted. But even if their careers had been
known to scholars, they would not necessarily have been regarded as material for
an essay on Jewish secularization, for the simple reason that they believed ardently
in “the Law of Moses."
They did not, in short, fit the stereotypical models of secularizing Jews. By this
I mean such types as the traditional immigrant lured by the American dream, the
yeshiva bocher turned socialist Zionist, or the German-Jewish poet who sought to
be simply a German poet. It is obvious how these types became agents of secular­
ization. It is more difficult to understand how fervent believers in a private concep­
tion of the Law of Moses became such agents. If anything, such a "type” might
bring to mind twentieth-century American experimentation among Havurah
youth or in New Age circles. But we would tend to associate these phenomena with
religious revival in a secular society rather than with secularization.
It might be helpful in addressing the phenomenon o f early modern “personal”
Judaism (or Judaisms) if we first consider the parallel phenomenon in Christian
societies and its link to secularization. This is an area that has long drawn the atten­
tion of Reformation scholars, who have acknowledged the importance of mar­
ginal, sectarian Christian groups and thinkers in bringing about the elimination of
state-supported clerical authority and laying the foundations for a rejection of all
religious belief.1 They have recognized that only with the elimination of such cler­
ical authority could a “secular” society emerge. That is, only in a society under­
girded by the principles of freedom of conscience and the separation of church and
state could a wide array of religious groups function on a voluntary basis, along
with secular ideologues o f every stripe.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the Protestant Reformation,
there were increasing manifestations of anticlericalism among pious Christians that
were directed not only at the Catholic Church, but at any church that dictated belief
and disciplined behavior. In the early Dutch Republic, a rather broad sector of
the public adhered to what Benjamin Kaplan has described as “a vehemently anti­
confessional form of piety whose most important strands were composed of spiritu­
alism and a distinctly Protestant brand of anticlericalism."2 There are many parallels
between the phenomenon described by Kaplan and the phenomenon I will describe
in this essay. The “Libertines" he has described were conditioned to anticlerical atti­
tudes during the Dutch Revolt against Spain and Catholic clerical authority. “But
where the revolt succeeded," he has written, “Libertines were not about to comply
with renewed demands for discipline, this time from the Calvinists."3 The
“ Libertines" were for the most part not, as this pejorative contemporary term
 40 MIRIAM BODIAN

suggests, without religion. Many of them were deeply pious. They believed that
salvation was a matter between the individual and God, with divine authority resid­
ing in Scripture. Their position, however, opened the way for unbelief as well. As
Kaplan has observed, “Once Libertines had positioned themselves beyond the reach
of the churches, free from the threat of discipline, they could believe anything they
wished. They could be spiritualize«, but they could also be humanists, neostoics,
skeptics, nicodemites, eclectics, or ‘rustic pelagians.' They could be truly indifferent
to religion.”4
In his classic work, The Secularization of the European Mind, Owen Chadwick has
succinctly articulated the relationship between the fight for freedom of conscience
and the processes of secularization. According to Chadwick,

Christian conscience was the force which began to make Europe "secular"; that
is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state, and repudiate any kind of
pressure upon the man who rejected the accepted and inherited axioms of soci­
ety. My conscience is my own. It is private. Though it is formed and guided by
inherited wisdom and by public attitudes and even by circumstances which sur­
round me, no man may intrude upon it. .. . How I may be true to it, whether I
may be true to it, whether allegiance to it is compatible with comfort or with
happiness, these decisions are for me and no one else. It shows me that I cannot
trample upon other people’s consciences, provided they are true to them, pro­
vided they do not seek to trample upon mine, and provided they will work with
me to ensure that our differing consciences do not undermine by their differ­
ences the social order and at last the state.5

It is important to note that in their fight against clericalism, heterodox

Christians employed tools of criticism against ecclesiastical traditions that would
eventually be used to reject all religious belief. In particular, they carried the use of
the historical criticism of tradition, as well as biblical criticism, far beyond the lim­
its established by "mainstream" Protestants (that is, Lutherans, Zwinglians, and
Calvinists). Moreover, at least among the rationalists, they relied on arguments that
reflected a strong sense o f the “naturally impossible,”6 from a point of view that
assumed unalterable laws of nature.
Such a sensibility was mostly alien to European Jewish culture before the
Enlightenment. But it was not entirely absent. What 1 will argue in this chapter is
that while, in general, the fundamental fight that brought into being "secular" soci­
eties—the fight for freedom of conscience—took place mostly in the Christian
arena, it was introduced directly into the Jewish arena in the seventeenth century
by crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal. 7

Historical Encounters with Portuguese

Jewish “ Heretics” in Western Europe
The western Sephardim o f converso background—the "Portuguese Jews"—were
notorious in the eyes of their Jewish contemporaries, Sephardi and Ashkenazi alike,
for indifference to the strict observance of rabbinic law and for certain "heretical”
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 41

opinions. Rabbi Hayyim Yosef David Azulai, an emissary from Eretz Israel,
recorded his shock at what he witnessed during his visits to the Bordeaux commu­
nity in 1755 and again in 1777-78.8 Many of the Sephardim he encountered exhibited
a rather unconscious but open laxity of a kind that could be found in Ashkenazi
communities only in the eighteenth century.9 But he also encountered Jews who, as
respectable members of their Jewish communities, openly articulated their rejec­
tion of the very foundation of rabbinic Judaism, namely the Oral Law. Such think­
ing was not new in Portuguese-Jewish circles at the time of Azulai's visit. From as
early as the second decade of the seventeenth century, certain Portuguese Jews
were expressing opposition in principle to rabbinic Judaism, a kind of opposition
that did not appear among Ashkenazim until the end of the eighteenth century.
In Out of the Ghetto, Jacob Katz argued the importance of distinguishing between
religious laxity, which can be found in any traditional society, and ideological oppo­
sition to tradition.10 The emergence of “secular Jews” occurred along different
paths, often including a process of gradual, unconscious alienation from traditional
religious life. But a conscious ideological reorientation was necessary before secular
Jewish life could be institutionalized. Such a reorientation has appeared, over time,
within all modem Jewish populations. But the earliest manifestations emerged in
the ex-converso population of Western Europe in the early seventeenth century.
There is now a considerable scholarly literature on rationalistic “heresy”
among the Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Among these
Jews, heterodox thought tended to combine philosophical rationalism with a liter-
alist, bibliocentric theology. For such Jews, there was little more reason to accept
rabbinic Judaism as it was expounded in their day than there was to accept
Catholicism or Calvinism. All of these traditions struck them as contrary to reason.
The names of the most notorious Portuguese-Jewish “heretics” who rejected
rabbinic Judaism are familiar—Uriel da Costa, Juan de Prado, and Benedict
(Baruch) Spinoza. In fact, all of these men were forced to leave the Jewish commu­
nity. But criticism of rabbinic tradition was a fairly widespread phenomenon within
Portuguese-Jewish communities, and an internal anti-rabbinic current persisted up
to the Enlightenment.11
The classic text describing the process of disillusionment with rabbinic tradi­
tion among the Portuguese Jews is Uriel da Costa’s "Autobiography,” which he
wrote shortly before his suicide in 1640. This is how da Costa briefly but vividly
described his initial encounter with rabbinic Judaism in Amsterdam, after he left
the Iberian Peninsula: “I had not been there [in Amsterdam] many days before I
observed that the customs and ordinances of the modern Jews were very different
from those commanded by Moses. Now if the Law was to be strictly observed,
according to the letter, as it expressly declares, it must be very unjustifiable in the
Jewish doctors to add to it inventions of a quite contrary nature. This provoked me
to oppose them openly: nay, I looked upon it as doing God service to defend the
Law with freedom against such innovations.” 11
In this passage da Costa strongly suggests that his idea of Jewish law had
been formed in the Peninsula on the basis of an independent reading of the
 42 MIRIAM BODIAN

Old Testament. When he arrived in Amsterdam and Hamburg in 1616, he discovered

to his dismay that the Jews there were not observing the Law as literally expounded
in the Books of Moses, but rather a vast and intricate “law” that bore little relation­
ship, in his view, to the precepts given at Mount Sinai.
The important Spinoza scholar Carl Gebhardt accepted da Costa's account
more or less at face value. As Gebhardt described it, da Costa, while still in the
Peninsula, “had gained a certain bare picture of the Law and Prophets; the postbib-
lical religious sources were not accessible to him due to his lack of knowledge
of Hebrew. But the Judaism he encountered in Amsterdam was a Judaism formed
by a two-thousand-year-old tradition, which Moses Uri Halevi first taught the
[ex-converso] émigrés in Ashkenazi form, and which around r6r6 was being taught
in Amsterdam by the rabbis Joseph Pardo of Salonica, Isaac Uziel of Fez, and Saul
Levi Morteira of Venice.” 13
However, subsequent authors have questioned da Costa's account from several
angles. There is, first of all, the problem of the integrity of the text o f the
"Autobiography.” 14 Second, there is the fact that da Costa's mother and her family
practiced a crypto-Judaism that I. S. Révah has described as “marranisme normale”—
a practice that included elements of postbiblical Judaism.15 If this was the case, da
Costa could not have been entirely surprised by the fact that contemporary
Judaism did not mirror a literal understanding of the biblical Law.
Yirmiyahu Yovel has speculated that da Costa unconsciously suppressed his
prior, though admittedly meager, knowledge of postbiblical Judaism. According to
the scenario Yovel proposed, da Costa began his career (as a student of canon law
at the University of Coimbra) as a reform-minded Catholic, with a notion o f mov­
ing toward a “pure” religious belief. After he turned to Judaism, he “expected
Judaism to be more amenable to a purifying reform than the Catholicism of
inquisitorial Iberia.” But he brought to this expectation little knowledge of
Judaism: “Above all, he did not realize the prodigal extent to which rabbinical laws
and precepts had taken over in Jewish life, or the rigid and powerful resistance they
would therefore show to any attempt at reform.” 16
Da Costa, however, nowhere mentions a time when he sought a reformed
Catholicism, and it is difficult to understand why Yovel's hypothesis is helpful or
necessary in order to understand da Costa’s career. Nor does his hypothesis address
the important question: Why in his account did da Costa fail to mention the crypto-
Judaism of his mother's family, of which (thanks to Révah) we can be sure? That is,
why did he misrepresent his background?
This was, I believe, a matter of self-image. The idealized self-image Uriel da Costa
cultivated and sought to project in his writings was that of a fiercely independent per­
son who relied entirely on his own powers of reason to interpret Scripture. This self-
image had already been formed at the time he wrote his angry work of 1623, Exame
das tradiçôes phariseas—a work that was incontestably of his authorship.17 In the
Exame, he presented himself as a person driven solely by an interest in the truth—
unlike the conforming Jews of the community, who in his view were motivated by
self-interest, or cowardice, or accident of birth, or conditioning. Da Costa regarded
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 43

himself as having achieved a higher level of insight than these Jews—not only the
rank and file but also the Jewish rabbinic and communal leaders who persecuted him.
Such a basic self-image was common to the leading “heretics" in the
Portuguese-Jewish diaspora. It was also common to certain university-educated
crypto-Jews in the Peninsula, some of whom became famous martyrs for Judaism.
These men—crypto-Jews and Jewish heretics alike—did see things differently from
most of their contemporaries. Leaving aside the question of superior wisdom, they
had achieved a high degree of detachment from traditional religious life. They were
liable to suffer considerable disenchantment when they encountered rabbinic
Judaism, in large part because while in the Peninsula they had constructed a con­
ception of Judaism that relied on individual reason and the conviction that the
Bible had a self-evident, literal meaning. This conception o f Judaism was uncon­
sciously formed in a way that made it impregnable to the critical arsenal they used
to attack Catholicism.
Let us consider for a moment Isaac Orobio de Castro's opinion about the ori­
gins of Portuguese-Jewish heresy. This prominent defender of Rabbinic Judaism,
an educated Portuguese Jewish physician, pointed the finger at men who had
received a university education before coming to Judaism. These men “had learned
sundry secular sciences, such as logic, philosophy, metaphysics, and medicine.
Their ignorance of God’s Law was no less than that of the others [i.e., other
ex-conversos who joined Jewish communities], but they reeked of pride, supercil­
iousness and arrogance, being convinced that they were expert in every subject
under the sun, and knew all that there was to be known.” 18 This opinion, stated in
Orobio’s Epístola Invectiva, has puzzled scholars. Orobio himself had such univer­
sity training, as did Isaac Cardoso, the staunch defender o f rabbinic orthodoxy in
Verona. Indeed, for both o f these men, a university education was crucial in their
path to rabbinic Judaism.
It seems probable that Orobio intuitively grasped a connection—one that seems
from the evidence to have had a basis in reality—between converso upbringing, edu­
cation in Iberian universities, and subsequent anti-rabbinic “heresy." He himself had
been able to distance himself from the philosophical criticism of religion by associ­
ating such criticism with the “idolatrous" Christian world.19 By doing this, he was
able to assimilate a rather sophisticated rabbinism as a new framework for belief. For
others, however, a conception of “true Judaism" remained entangled with a struc­
ture of thought formed in intellectual circles in the Peninsula—a structure that had
once helped provide a basis for a crypto-Jewish critique of Catholicism.
The case of Juan de Prado is also instructive. While still in the Peninsula, dur­
ing his studies at the Colegio Menor de la Madre de Dios o f Alcalá de Henares, he
was already toying with deistic ideas. He was reported to have asserted that all reli­
gions were equally good, and that Jews, Christians, and Muslims could achieve sal­
vation by observing the laws of their religions, since all three religions derived
from natural law, differing from one another only as a consequence o f political
necessity.10 Such a view might seem difficult to reconcile with Prado's ardent
crypto-judaizing. It is reasonable to assume, however, that a notion of rational
 44 MIRIAM BODIAN

natural religion underlay his particular version of crypto-Judaism, and allowed it to

coexist with an otherwise fundamentally skeptical position. This may have served
him very well in the Peninsula. However, when he actually encountered rabbinic
Judaism in the Diaspora, his fragile (and illusory) idea of historical Judaism was
shattered.
In what follows, I will try to show the close connection between (a) the emer­
gence of an aggressive, critical attack on Catholicism among converso intellectuals;
(b) the formation of an "unassailable" but illusory conception o f Judaism in the
Peninsula; and (c) attacks on rabbinic authority in the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.
First I will elucidate the major rationalist lines of anti-Catholicism among crypto-
Jews in the Peninsula. Then I will compare these with the major rationalist lines of
attack on rabbinic Judaism in the Diaspora—lines of attack that often began as part
o f a defense o f individualist notions of “authentic” Judaism.

Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Catholicism

A fundamental and widely articulated crypto-Jewish criticism of the Catholic tradi­
tion was that it was a human fabrication, one with no divine origins.21 Of course
this idea had always been implicit in classical Jewish anti-Christian polemics, but it
had not been the focus o f those polemics. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth cen­
turies, certain learned crypto-Jews believed they could show for a certainty that
Christianity was a human fabrication. Their numbers were small, but their impact
considerable.
In these elitist circles, it was common to disparage belief in Christianity for the
reason that the Gospels were the work of low-born, ignorant men. This attack was
no doubt partly a mobilization of Iberian social prejudices to disparage the earliest
"Christians.” But it was more than that. It was an attack by crypto-Jews for whom
the truth could be discerned only by the learned. Low birth was associated with
superstition and foolish beliefs. Such a view is evident in the remarks of Gon^alo
Vaez, a Portuguese student who appears to have studied in Salamanca, and who
told inquisitors in 1571 that "there was no reason to believe the law o f the Gospels,
because they had been written by fishermen.”22 Moses, in contrast to Jesus, was a
learned man, worthy of receiving revelation. Francisco Maldonado de Silva, an
inquisitorial prisoner in Lima, wrote in a statement of 1638 that if—as Christians
claim—the Trinity was a divine doctrine, God would not have hidden it from
Moses, "seeing that he was a scholar [doctor] and teacher o f the people of God.”23
In keeping with the social deprecation of Jesus and his circle, Jesus was por­
trayed as a magician who was able to fool his small, gullible following.24 In 1615, a
Mexican crypto-Jew belittled Jesus’ miracles, saying that “in those days there were
lots of spell casters who brought back the dead.”25 Francisco Maldonado de Silva
told inquisitors that his father had taught him “that Jesus Christ . . . had learned
magic arts with which he deceived a few ignorant people.”26 Diogo d’Assump^ao
asserted "that the law o f Christ was made by men who had to flee and hide among
rocks”—that is, outlaws or outcasts from society.27 The apostles, he said, were all
relatives of Jesus28—the implication being that no one else would have supported
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 45

his absurd aspirations. Social contempt for Jesus and his disciples could be extended
to the symbols of Jesus that played a role in Catholic practice, Luis Carvajal, for
example, told inquisitors that he found comical the idea that the consecrated host
was the body of Christ, since this object of worship and elaborate ceremony would
in fact be the body of a man who was born among shepherds, and whose disciples
were lowly and vulgar men.29
In general, literalist, bibliocentric crypto-Jews found the Church’s allegorical
exegesis ludicrous. As we have noted, Maldonado de Silva found no evidence for
the doctrine o f the Trinity in the Books of Moses. He further found "that there was
no place in all of Scripture that said there were three Divine Persons [my empha­
sis].”30 Similarly, a manuscript work found by the Portuguese Inquisition in the con-
verso Joao de Fonseca's possession argued that "neither the Old Law nor the New
recognized the mystery of the Trinity.”31 The author of this work also noted that
nowhere was it written that the Messiah promised by "the Law” (the Hebrew Bible)
would be divine.32
Fixity and stability were considered, in an age untouched by Foucault, key char­
acteristics of the truth. Adherents of all orthodoxies sought to show the greater
rootedness and continuity of their own beliefs in comparison to others. It was thus
supremely important to crypto-Jews that God repeatedly emphasized in the
Pentateuch that the Law he had given Moses was eternal and was not to be changed.
Some crypto-Jews even argued, no doubt savoring the irony, that Jesus had shared
this view. As Baltasar Carvajal reportedly said to his brother Gaspar, a Dominican
friar, "Even in the Gospel it is written that your Crucified One said, ‘Do not think
that I came here to annul the laws of the prophets or their holy and truthful
prophecies!’ ”33
It was more usual, however, for crypto-Jews to identify Jesus with the “false
prophet” defined in Deuteronomy, someone who was able to perform signs and
wonders, but who was to be judged an imposter because he sought to turn God’s
people away from the commandments. Given the frequency with which the pas­
sage concerning the false prophet was cited by crypto-Jews, it is not surprising that
Luis Carvajal, when asked by the inquisitors on what basis he had rejected the Law
of Christ for the Law of Moses, cited the relevant passage in Deuteronomy 13 as the
second of nine reasons.34 The same passage was part of an important conversation
between the Old Christian Hebraist Lope de Vera and a Portuguese judaizer at the
University of Salamanca. Don Lope was apparently impressed by the difficulty of
reconciling with Christianity the criterion God gave the people in this passage to
distinguish between a true or false prophet, saying that “if [a person who claims to
be a prophet] says Abandon the Law,’ you mustn't believe him.”35
For the most part, the crypto-Jewish attack on the Gospels was consistent with
centuries of Jewish anti-Christian polemic (except for its dogged insistence on the
exclusive authority of literal interpretation). Ultimately more threatening from the
point of view of rabbinic Judaism was the crypto-Jewish attack on the postbiblical
traditions of the Catholic Church. To some extent, this attack paralleled humanist
criticisms and Protestant propaganda. It is difficult to know how familiar such ideas
 46 MIRIAM BODIAN

were to crypto-Jews, but there was clearly some direct appropriation. In 1545, for
example, an Old Christian fidalgo charged as being a luterano stated that “the Old
Law called only for mental confession,” and that the Pope had ordered verbal confes­
sion to a priest only “so that lay people would be more subject to the Church.”36 At
about the same time, inquisitors confiscated a manuscript work in the home o f a
converso in Pombal that asserted that confession was ordered by the bishops, not by
God.37 Likewise, the judaizing martyr Diogo d’Assump^ao made a distinction
between an “Ur-Christianity” with a basis in a revealed text, and a falsified later tra­
dition, arguing “that originally the mass was only a 'pater noster' and that all the rest
was an invention and addition of the popes."38 It is almost unimaginable that such
formulations of crypto-Jewish belief would have appeared in the fifteenth century.
Diogo d'Assump9ao's view of Christianity merits a closer look. At a time when
he had probably not definitively abandoned Christianity for “the Law of Moses," he
regarded as “authentic” only practices which had their source in the New
Testament, and viewed all other Christian practices as human accretions. As he put
it, “The popes and councils, not understanding Scripture, made and followed
human laws.”39 (It is clear that by “Scripture” he meant at this time both the Old
and New Testaments.) Using the same basic analytic technique, he argued that, “in
the primitive Church [na igreja primitiva] they recited [only] the words of consecra­
tion [which appear in Mt 26:26-28, and are supported by 1 Cor 10:14-17],” and that
St. Peter and the Apostles "added all the other things as a [false] tradition of
Christ.”40 Particularly in the case of Diogo d'Assump^ao— a judaizing martyr who
had little or no Jewish ancestry—“Protestantish” trends in Portugal seem to have
played an important role in his theological development. This underscores the
important fact that nonconformist Catholics in the Reformation period were in
contact with crypto-Jews; that “Protestantish” trends resonated with crypto-Jewish
trends and vice versa; and that there was a sharing o f critical tools between both
parties that may have had important implications for ex-converso attacks on rab­
binic Judaism.
Educated conversos were well aware of the events that had an impact on theo­
logical perception throughout Europe. Something of the enormity of these events
for crypto-Jews is conveyed in the testimony of a conversa of Baeza in 1572. “When
the Council of Trent was coming to an end,” the record of her testimony reads,
“her mother had fasted forty days without eating until nightfall, and had kept
silent, and prayed repeatedly that it [the Council] should rule that all Christians
should keep the Law of Moses and praise God instead of Jesus Christ, because they
[the Christians] were living in deception.”41 There is more than a hint of apocalyp­
tic thinking in this passage. But apocalyptic thinking draws power from the aware­
ness of real historical upheaval. The passage may reflect a growing theological
self-confidence among crypto-Jews who observed the havoc in the Christian world
wreaked by the Reformation.42
For intellectual crypto-Jews of the type I am describing, one of the “proofs"
that Christianity was a human fabrication was that there was such wide disagree­
ment among Christians about doctrine. Interestingly, Diogo d'Assump^ao pointed
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 47

not only to the split between Luther and the Church, but also to splits within the
Church of Rome itself. The Franciscan friars, he argued, followed Duns Scotus or
Domingo de Soto, whereas the Dominicans followed Thomas Aquinas. “They had
great controversies among themselves, and what good was a Law with no stability
\Jirmeza]7”4i But he saw the divisiveness among the Protestants as a sign that these
“sects,” too, were human fabrications, which their leaders had produced to satisfy
their own ambitions.44
This fascinating former Capuchin monk also raised an issue that disturbed
other contemporary Christians in the wake of the overseas discoveries and con­
quests. “If the Law of Christ was valid," he said, “it would have to be communi­
cated to the entire world.” Yet it had reached "neither the negros nor [the people of]
another hundred thousand lands.”45 Indeed, Frei Diogo maintained that one of the
reasons he converted to Judaism was his realization that he "could not be obligated
to live in the Law of Christ since most of the world did not have access to it.”46
The crypto-Jews could not have known that in pursuing their polemic with the
Church they were participating in a dramatic shift in the way Europeans perceived
religious authority and the locus of that authority. This shift has been volumi­
nously documented for the Protestant world, with sweeping speculations about the
consequences for the structures of politics, social organization, and philosophical
thought. However, it has been addressed in relation to converso populations (to the
degree that it has been addressed at all) only impressionistically.
Especially among crypto-Jewish intellectuals, religious authority was a key
issue, and further study of Inquisition documents will no doubt furnish better evi­
dence of their views about it. It was natural for these men to arrogate to them­
selves the authority to decide for themselves in religious matters. This was partly a
result of circumstances: As crypto-Jews, they lived in the absence of a religious
hierarchy and had no choice but to rely on their own judgment.
Yet they did not, it should be stressed, conceive of freedom of conscience as
freedom to concoct a new religion. (That is, after all, what they accused the Church
of doing.) “Conscience,” as they conceived of it, was a human faculty that permit­
ted all men (and perhaps even women) to gain access to the truth directly, without
clerical intervention. It was associated with: the God-given ability to interpret
Scripture according to its self-evident meaning; the God-given ability to differenti­
ate between truth and falsehood through the exercise of reason; and/or a special
relationship with God, in which God illumined them concerning the truth. The
conviction that God had implanted in them the faculty they called “conscience” jus­
tified their uninhibited exercise of religious autonomy, and fortified them in their
struggle against clerical authority.
The language of the inquisitors and their notaries, on whose written record we
depend for most of what we know about the crypto-Jews, often reveals the conti­
nental divide that separated these officials from crypto-Jewish intellectuals in terms
of their assumptions about authority. Inquisitors regarded it as provocative and
insolent when crypto-Jews (or other types of heretics) used Scripture to defend
their views. The Portuguese university student Gon^alo Vaez, for example, was
 48 MIRIAM BODIAN

accused of teaching many persons the Law of Moses, "inciting them with verses
from the Old Testament” (provocándoselo por autoridades de la escriptura del testa­
mento viejo). When Vaez taught that there was no purgatory or hell, he deviated
from permissible behavior not only by teaching erroneous doctrines, but also by
using verses of Scripture for this aim.47
Crypto-Jewish resort to “reason” (or "natural reason” ) has been insufficiently
studied to allow for far-reaching conclusions. Crypto-Jews mentioned these terms
often enough, but not necessarily in a uniform sense. Sometimes reliance on reason
was implied indirectly, when a crypto-Jew stated that a certain Catholic dogma was
"impossible.” For example, Gonzalo Vaez argued that the Virgin Birth could not
have happened simply “because it is impossible for a woman to give birth as a vir­
gin.”48 At other times the term was mentioned explicitly, the teachings of the
Church being condemned as "contrary to reason.”
The most fully articulated defense I have seen for crypto-Jewish reliance on rea­
son was made by a Portuguese student with whom Lope de Vera had discussions.
(The student’s name is not given in the surviving documentation.) Lope de Vera
described one of his encounters with this student, and the inquisitorial notary
recorded it as follows:49

[Lope de Vera] said that . . . he knew this student was a Jew [i.e., a converso
judaizer] and had the intention of leaving Spain in order to judaize . . . and on
this occasion as on others they discussed certain ceremonies and articles of faith
of the Roman Church, condemning some of them. In particular [they agreed]
that it seemed impossible that God could be three and one, and that He could
be incarnate, and that He could be present in the consecrated host. And to sup­
port this [criticism], his companion cited a passage in Psalms [31:9] that states no
Use jijen sicut equs et mulus In quibus non est Intelectu [sic],50 which he recited,
meaning that God said we do not have to subjugate our understanding
[entendimiento] "like a horse or a mule” to things that seemed impossible to the
understanding.

One wonders whether this was a semi-humorous scriptural “source” for a con­
viction Lope de Vera already took for granted: that the “best” religion was the one
that most conformed to natural reason, and that one's God-given reason entitled
one to make a choice about belief. Such a conviction is also implicit in a conversa­
tion reported by another witness, who testified

that when Don Lope was with other students in a group, he said that our Holy
Catholic Faith contained many things that were difficult to believe, and that he
found there were other religions that were more in conformity with natural
reason (rafon natural), possessing doctrines that were less difficult and that
seemed closer to reason.51

Those “other religions” were Judaism and Islam. Indeed, Lope de Vera had con­
sidered fleeing to Muslim lands to adopt one or the other, after he had had a chance
to study both of them.
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 49

Even before his arrest, Diogo d’Assump^ao had apparently weighed the ques­
tion of whether he had a right to distinguish what was true or false for himself. His
outlook appears to have drawn from illuminist currents in the Peninsula. He saw
himself as an exceptional person, and seems to have believed that the very fact that
he was tormented by his consciencia inquieta was evidence o f his superior spiritual
qualities. “Seeing that God had given him discernment (juizo) and understanding
(entendimento) to recognize these things,” he had told a witness, “he would deserve
the highest penalty if he did not seek his salvation; and anyone who knew the Law
of the Jews and didn’t observe it was damned.”52
But when confronted directly by the inquisitors on the question of authority, he
gave a somewhat different answer. The exchange came when Frei Diogo asked
rhetorically, with characteristic audacity, “Who were St. Augustine and St. Jerome
to interpret the knowledge (sabiduría) of God?” The notary’s record continues
blandly:

And when it was said to him, Who was he to say this about St. Augustine and
St Jerome . . . ? He answered [in Latin], "I am thy servant, the son of thy hand­
maid" [Ps 115:16], and [he said] that St. Augustine was subject to the devil when
he said the messiah had come, whereas he himself was subject to God because
he was a Jew and observed the Law of the Jews, and that God did not reveal [the
meaning of] His Scripture to St. Augustine because he was a gentile, and
revealed it only to Jacob and Israel because [again in Latin] “He declares His
word to Jacob, his statutes and ordinances to Israel; He has not dealt thus with
any other nation” [Ps I47:i9~20].53

Diogo d’Assump^ao was far from being a consistent thinker or even a balanced
person. He did not embrace the idea that all persons were entitled to pursue the
truth for themselves, or that they possessed a natural God-given gift of reason that
would allow them to do so. Rather he claimed the special entitlement of the illu­
minist, chosen by God because of his spiritual qualities (and, it would seem, his
blood). He did, however, share with the more generic rationalist ‘ judaizers” a rejec­
tion of the Church's monopoly on exegesis and doctrine, a conviction of the trans­
parent artificiality of Catholic tradition, and a highly abstract and personal notion
of “Judaism.”

Ex-Converso Perspectives on Postbiblical Rabbinic Judaism

It was not the mere discovery of postbiblical Judaism that came as an unpleasant
surprise to some of the intellectuals who made their way to Jewish communities
in northern Europe. It was the discovery that rabbinic Judaism did not conform to
the contours of a “pure religion" as they had constructed them. The intriguing
question remains, of course, why some educated, rationalist crypto-Jews res­
ponded differently and embraced rabbinic Judaism. It may be that persons who har­
bored strong feelings of solidarity, identification, and responsibility toward their
coreligionists, like Orobio de Castro and Isaac Cardoso, were more likely to find
rabbinic Judaism compelling. The Jewish “heretics," in contrast, tended to regard
 50 MIRIAM BODIAN

the rank-and-file of the émigrés with contempt, as mediocrities who readily

mocked the absurdities of Catholicism while accepting the absurdities of the
Talmud as "Torah from Mount Sinai.” It may be said that these "heretics” were just
as intolerant of foolish ideas among Jews as they were of foolish ideas among
Catholics—perhaps more so. The “heretic” Juan de Prado, not surprisingly,
"mocked the statement of the Sages that the dead must go [rolling] underground
[to Eretz Israel for resurrection]. He said that it was impossible and irreconcilable
with what reason (o entendimento) dictates.”54
Such criticism o f the irrationality of rabbinic Judaism suggests structural paral­
lels between the crypto-Jewish attack on postbiblical Catholic tradition and the
ex-converso attack on postbiblical rabbinic tradition. A key proof-text for both cri­
tiques was Deuteronomy 4:2—“You shall not add to the word which I command
you, nor take from it." While the Church was mainly culpable for "taking from it,”
the rabbis had been prodigal, in the view o f the Portuguese Jewish “heretics," in
adding to it. When Uriel da Costa accused a defender of Jewish tradition of deviat­
ing from the true Law o f God, he could just as well have been rebuking a family
member who had become a Jesuit: "With a false cult,” he wrote [emphasis added],
“strange and foreign to what He asks of you, you are breaking and undoing His
laws, in a deluded effort to serve Him."55
One of the traditional arguments in defense of the Oral Law was that the
Written Law, by itself, raised innumerable questions and contained apparent con­
tradictions that required explanation. A "chain of tradition" going back to Moses
had been established whereby each generation of rabbinic scholars passed the
torch to those they had ordained with the authority to address new issues as they
arose. In traditional Jewish societies, the vesting of authority in a small number of
men who had undergone intensive scholarly training was accepted as entirely nat­
ural. Although the Written Law and the Oral Law technically retained their sepa­
rate status, Jews were conditioned from a very young age to see each as embedded
in the other. Thus when during the sabbath Torah reading, for example, the verses
were read prescribing "an eye for an eye,” a traditionally conditioned Jew would not
even register the literal meaning.
Educated ex-crypto Jews, in contrast, had learned as an important strategy of
crypto-Jewish existence to distill out the "true meaning" of the text from the
Church's “perversion" of it. They believed in the sufficiency of the revealed text and
in the capacity of the human mind to capture its correct meaning. The Church's tra­
dition of exegesis was not only a distortion but also unnecessary. Quite naturally,
they brought this model with them to the Jewish community, where they expected
to find the “true” meaning of Scripture honored. For some, it may have been hum­
bling to discover that their knowledge of Torah was so unsophisticated from a rab­
binic point of view. Others, however, viewed themselves as superior in sophistication
to the rabbis, just as they had regarded themselves as superior to the theologians of
Rome. They regarded their untarnished logic as unassailable. “If the Law [of Moses]
were not comprehensible without an oral explanation,” da Costa insisted, "it would
follow that the Law was imperfect and not open to understanding.”56
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 51

Considerable efforts were made by rabbinic figures entrusted with the guidance
of ex-converso congregations to inculcate a less absolutist perspective and an
appreciation of rabbinic reasoning. The Venetian rabbi Immanuel Aboab wrote a
work entitled Nomologia—a classic text in the Portuguese Jewish library—to refute
those who rejected the interpretations of the Sages on the naive grounds, as he saw
it, “that one may understand Scripture . .. from within itself, and that all of them
[the neophytes] will understand it fully with a little bit of study, and that one need
merely read it and observe it as it is written.”57
Aboab had had direct experience of such claims, as he related in the book:

In the year 1615, when I was in Italy, I was approached by two of our opponents.
(I can't think of a more appropriate term for them, since they oppose the truth
all Jews accept.) I tried to understand the foundations underlying their words,
since only by understanding a disease can one offer the appropriate cure. One
of them said to me angrily that he didn’t believe the words of our Sages to the
effect that Jacob was seventy-seven years old when he entered the house of his
father-in-law Laban, and eighty-four years old when he married Laban's daugh­
ters. How did they [the Sages] know such a thing? . . . The second ["opponent”]
. . . presented several challenges: First, how did the Sages derive all the details
and fine points of ritual slaughter, to such an extent that they prohibited eating
[animals] that had been slaughtered with a flawed knife, since in the Torah there
is no hint of this? . . . And he presented another argument, namely that the
Torah explicitly commands observing Passover for seven days, Shavuot for one
day, Rosh ha-shanah for one day, and Sukkoth for eight days; this being so, why
did the Sages alter the Torah, adding a day to each holiday, contrary to God’s
command, "You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from
it” [Dt 4:2], and to the verse, "Everything that I command you you shall be care­
ful to do; you shall not add to it or take from it” [Dt T3:i]?58

Some ex-conversos responded to rabbinic efforts as hoped and developed an

understanding of rabbinic controversy and irony, while others simply acquiesced to
the new reality and accepted rabbinic discipline. However, there were also those
who resisted what they experienced as a Jewish version o f clerical propaganda.
They sometimes viewed the rabbis and sages as gullible and superstitious, while
they impugned others' motives. Da Costa, for example, regarded the halacha that
prohibited eating cheese after a meal at which meat was served (as well as a multi­
tude of other halachot) as “ridiculous and superstitious.”59 But these laws were not
just foolish. The sages, he argued, “invented” the great edifice of Talmudic law
because they "saw the advantage [their innovations] would give them in dominat­
ing and subjugating the people to their dictates and rule."60
Probably no other text reflects the Iberian rationalist crypto-Jewish perspective
applied to rabbinic Judaism as succinctly as the seventh of the eleven propositions
that Uriel da Costa sent to the leaders of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in
Venice in 1616. Da Costa’s original text of the propositions is not extant, but fortu­
nately we have a Hebrew version prepared by Leon de Modena for the purpose of
 52 MIRIAM BOD1AN

refutation.61 I will quote the seventh proposition of da Costa’s text, in Modena’s

version:

It is tantamount to destroying the foundations of the Torah to say that we must

rule, in questions of the Law, according to the Tradition, and that we must
believe in it [the Tradition] just as we do in the Law of Moses itself. This is noth­
ing less than tampering with the Torah and creating a new Torah in contradic­
tion to the true one, when in fact there exists no Oral Law, only the Written one.
First, nowhere in the Torah itself is there mention of another Torah, whereas
[if such existed] it would have been proper to explain [the existence of another
Law] in the Torah itself. For anything aside from what is actually stated in the
Torah has no proof. Moreover, even if people who performed miracles would
testify to the existence of an Oral Law, we would have to disregard their words,
because since the Torah was given by God to the master of all prophets
[Moses], there is nothing by which we can distinguish a true prophet from a
false except [the prophet’s] endorsement of the Torah.
Second, the Torah itself makes clear that no other Law exists and that we
must follow its words alone, and none other.. .. Similarly we find in chapter
27: "Cursed be he who does not confirm the words of this Torah” etc., that is to
say, there is no Torah besides this one and I shall give you no other.
Third, even the new rulings in the time of Moses were included not in the
Tradition but in the Torah, as it says: "Difficult cases they brought to Moses"
[Ex 18:26], and the Torah commanded that this [procedure] should be followed
in the future, i.e., that difficult questions should be taken to the priest or the
judge, not that they should be ruled upon according to another Torah, but that
God should bestow His spirit upon them [the priest or judge] to rule according
to the Written Law.
Fourth, King Solomon .. . asked God for the spirit to understand and judge
according to the Torah. He did not judge difficult cases according to the Oral
Law but according to reason, and the people, seeing this, were amazed by his
wisdom. Judges must have the characteristics that Jethro told Moses they
should have, “able men . . . such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and
who hate a bribe” [Ex 18:21]. That [way of doing things] is the "Tradition” that
belongs to the Torah, no other.
Having shown that there is no other Torah or interpretation than the Written
one from God, it is evident that what has been called "Tradition" is merely
human, and it can be disputed, quite aside from the fact that it is in itself a great
breach to give a person reason to turn from the Law of Moses and to interpret
and distort and disseminate human interpretations in place of divine ones. It is
great heresy to regard these human [interpretations] as equal to divine ones, to
say that we are obligated to observe all the laws of the Talmud just like those of
the Law of Moses. However, it is possible that if we find in it [the Talmud] a
solution to a practical need, we should examine it, and if it conforms to the
Torah we can follow it, but if not, it should be disregarded.
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 53

In his later Exame das tradiçâes phariseas, da Costa raised another "proof" for the
inauthenticity of the Oral Law. This “proof" is particularly interesting in view of
the fact that Portuguese Jewish apologetes frequently pointed to the unity of the
Jewish people, in contrast to the fragmentation of the Christian world, as evidence
of the truth of Judaism. But da Costa took a view of rabbinic tradition that recalls
crypto-Jewish criticisms of the divided Christian world. If rabbinic tradition was, as
it was claimed, an integral part of the Torah conveyed at Mount Sinai, how, he
asked, can one account for the discord between the Sages themselves?62
Da Costa was the earliest figure, as far as 1 know, to point to the historical
Karaites (he conflated them with the “Sadducees") as having perpetuated authentic
Judaism.63 Other Portuguese Jews would follow in his footsteps.64 There would also
be Protestant observers who would adopt this idea. In a variation on the early mod­
ern European search for a universal, pure, natural religion, some Protestants took
an interest in contemporary Karaites as possible adherents o f a pure, unadulterated
Judaism, a counterpart to their own pure, unadulterated Christianity.65
Deism was but a step away, and Uriel da Costa eventually took that step, if we
can rely on the "Autobiography.” At a certain point, the cerebral contortions neces­
sary to reconcile Scripture with his notion of reason became too great, and da
Costa dispensed altogether with belief in a revealed religion. In this regard he antic­
ipated the great "heretics" of the 1650s—Spinoza, Juan de Prado, and Daniel de
Ribera.
The little evidence we possess about the later radical "heretics" during the time
they were members of the Amsterdam community indicates that, in their rejection
of the Written Law, they used the kind of rhetoric crypto-Jews used in the
Peninsula to discredit Jesus and his followers. Daniel de Ribera was reported to
have said that Moses “was a great magician” ; that as a leader he acted “in his own
interest and that of his brother [Aaron]"; and that Abraham "was merely a miser­
able shepherd, so that it was impossible that God had spoken with him.”66 Such
characterizations not only harked back to Diogo d’Assumpçâo, but also anticipated
Voltaire.
One of the most important legacies of the Iberian experience was the sense of
entitlement it gave such Jewish "heretics" to rely on their own judgment (or on
“natural reason," as they were more likely to put it). The religious autonomy that
was necessary to sustain crypto-Jewish life in the Peninsula became not only a habit
but also a right that could be defended. The very fact that Uriel da Costa, as a young
émigré from Portugal who had only recently arrived in a Jewish community, sent
his propositions against the Oral Law to the leaders of the Spanish and Portuguese
Jewish community in Venice reflects his very powerful sense o f entitlement.
A generation later, Juan de Prado articulated the issue clearly when he asked a
student the following question: “In matters of conscience, should a man act accord­
ing to what others tell him, or according to his own understanding?"67 He posed the
question again somewhat differently to another student, asking, “Why should we
believe in the Law of Moses more than in the teachings o f other sects?" He then
provided his own answer: "If we believe in Moses rather than in Mohammed, there
 54 MIRIAM B O DI AN

should be some cause for it; but in fact it is all in the imagination."68 The very pos­
ing of such questions was regarded as evidence against him in the proceedings that
led to his excommunication.
A few years after their excommunication, Prado and Spinoza attended some
social gatherings in Amsterdam where they met a certain Spanish captain. As fate
would have it, the captain later reported to the Inquisition, leaving a little piece of
evidence for scholars to unearth about how these men understood their separation
from the Jewish community. The captain reported as follows: "He heard Dr. Prado
and Spinoza say many times that they had previously been Jews and had observed
the Jews’ law, but they had distanced themselves from it because it was not good, it
was a falsehood, and for that reason they had been excommunicated. They had
investigated which was the best religion, in order to profess it, but to him [the witness] it
seemed that they did not profess any religion at all” [emphasis added].69 Whether
or not this is what Prado and Spinoza actually said, it is consistent with their belief
that they were qualified to judge for themselves what constituted the "best reli­
gion,” and that being "born into” or conditioned to a certain religion was not a rea­
son for observing it or accepting it as true.
By now, this conviction was held by a number of educated Europeans. The fact
that the first Jews to articulate such a conviction publicly were members of the
Portuguese Jewish population in seventeenth-century Amsterdam was not an acci­
dent. It should not, however, be explained simply as the result of a psychological
condition some scholars have identified as "marranism”—that is, a psychic condi­
tion of conflict and doubt induced by the experience o f living in a netherworld
between Christianity and Judaism.70 The confusions o f the converso milieu no
doubt contributed to the psychic detachment that was required before an early
modern thinker could view religions relatively. But other factors were equally
important. First, there was the experience of living in a clandestine subculture in
which there was no hierarchy of authority, no means of monitoring or disciplining
practice or belief, and no possible reason to exclude idiosyncratic thinkers, as long
as they opposed Catholicism. Second, and no less important, there was the expo­
sure to heterodox intellectual currents in Spain and Portugal (often but not always
through university studies)—currents that scholars have too often assumed to have
been suppressed in the Peninsula.71

Conclusion
The complex history of secularization in modern Europe has been told in numer­
ous ways, with varying emphases and according to different theoretical models.
The particular trajectory of Jewish secularization has usually been plotted starting
with the Ashkenazi Jews of eighteenth-century Germany. Yet the earliest Jewish
ideological justifications for the rejection of rabbinic authority predate those of the
German Jews by a century and a half and correspond to a different point of devel­
opment in European society.
Nevertheless, a systematic comparative study might yield some surprising
results. It might appear at first glance, for example, that the Sephardi "enlighteners”
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 55

of the seventeenth century were not troubled by the ethnic, nationalist aspects of
Judaism in the way that German maskilim would have been. Their explicit criticism
of rabbinic Judaism did not include an attack on Jewish ethnic exclusivity. This can
be explained, in part, because there was as yet no pressure on European Jews to
assimilate into the majority society. Yet the Amsterdam "heretics” hinted at a dis­
comfort with the idea of an obligation to Judaism that proceeded from a collective
covenant with God. They insisted that their commitment to the Law o f Moses
stemmed from individual rationalistic inquiry or illumination by God. Da Costa
and Prado, in particular, demonstrated a need to distinguish themselves from their
coreligionists by minimizing or even concealing the role o f particularistic Jewish
ethnicity in their careers. The path of religious individuation they had taken—one
that dovetailed with emerging trends in European thought—implied a conviction
that individual conscience alone should determine a person's choices in matters of
faith. In this respect, their thinking foreshadowed demands that would come from
Christian sectarians to remove religion from the public sphere. But the religious
individualists of the western Sephardi diaspora were not men with a social pro­
gram; nor could they have begun to anticipate the consequences of secularization
in modern western societies for the practice of the “Law o f Moses.”

NOTES
I would like to express my thanks to the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University
o f Pennsylvania for providing ideal conditions in the summer months o f 2003 for writing a first
draft o f this essay.
1. See, in particular, the discussion o f this scholarship in Silvia Berti, "At the Roots of
Unbelief," Journal o f the History of Ideas 56 (October 1995): 555-575- The religious roots o f skepti­
cism and secularism have been explored (or at least adumbrated) in several areas o f research: the
so-called radical Reformation; the emergence o f ideas about toleration; and the tangled knot o f
skepticism, rationalism, and mysticism in early modem thinking. Among the major contribu­
tors to this literature are George Huntston Williams, Jonathan Israel, and Richard Popkin.
2. Benjamin Kaplan, " ‘Remnants o f the Papal Yoke’: Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch
Reformation,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 25 (Autumn 1994): 658.
3. Ibid., 660.
4. Ibid., 668.
5. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 23-24.
6. On the importance o f the development o f a ‘‘sense o f the naturally impossible” for the
emergence o f unbelief, see David Wootton, ‘‘Lucien Febvre and the Problem o f Unbelief in the
Early Modern Period,” Journal o f Modern History 60 (December 1988): 695-730, esp. 714-723.
7. A word on terminology: I will use the term "converso" to refer to all persons descended
from forcibly converted Jews who lived as Catholics in Iberian lands. The term "ex-converso"
will refer to such Jews who had permanently left Iberian lands. The terms “crypto-Jew” and
“judaizer" will refer only to those conversos who adhered to Jewish beliefs or practiced Jewish
rituals, and not to the many conversos who had fully assimilated into Iberian Catholic society. I
should add that a few Old Christians, who possessed no Jewish blood, also became ‘‘judaizers."
8. See Hayyim Yosef David Azulai, Ma’agal tov ha-shalem, ed. Aaron Freimann (Jerusalem,
1934), 113-114-
9. Azriel Shohet has documented this development in Ashkenazi Jewry. See Azriel Shohet,
Im hilufe tekufot: Reshit ha-haskalah be-yahadut germania (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, i960).
 56 MIRIAM BODIAN

10. Jacob Katz, Out o f the Ghetto: The Social Background o f Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), 34-38.
11. On R Immanuel Aboab’s report o f his debate in 1615 with two Portuguese Jew s in Italy
who challenged aggadic exegesis and the Oral Law, see his Nomología o discursos legales
(Amsterdam, 1629), 2:29, 272-273. On the David Farar/Abraham Farar episode(s), which
entailed a challenge to aggadic exegesis and the Kabbalah, see Miriam Bodian, "Amsterdam,
Venice, and the Marrano Diaspora in the Seventeenth Century," Dutch Jewish History
(Jerusalem: Tel-Aviv University, 1984-89), 2:51-57. Discussions o f the wider phenomenon of
rejection o f the Oral Law among the Portuguese Jew s can be found in Shalom Rosenberg,
"Emunat Hakhamim,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, ed. I. Twersky and
B. Septimus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1987), 285-341;
Yosef Kaplan, “'Karaites' in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” in Sceptics, Millenarians and
Jews, ed. D. Katz andj. Israel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 202-208; Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity
to Judaism: The Story o f Isaac Orobio de Castro, trans. Raphael Loewe (Oxford: The Littman
Library, 1989), 122-178; Jakob Petuchowski, The Theology o f Haham David Nieto: An Eighteenth-
Century Defense o f theJewish Tradition (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1970), 32-105.
12. Uriel da Costa’s Own Account o f His Life (Exemplar humanae vitae), trans. John Whiston
(London, 1740), republished in Solomon and Sassoon, trans., Uriel da Costa, Examination of
Pharisaic Traditions, trans., notes, and intro., H. P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sasson (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1993). 557-
13. Carl Gebhardt, Die Schrijien Uriel da Costa (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1922), xxvii.
14. The Hamburg Lutheran pastor Johann Müller possessed a copy of the text, which he said
was written shordy before da Costa’s death and was found near his corpse. (See A. M. Vaz Dias,
Uriel da Costa [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1936], 28-29.) A copy o f the manuscript text in Latin is pre­
served in the library o f the University o f Amsterdam, but it is not written in da Costa's hand.
In 1687, Philip van Limborch published the text as Exemplar humae vitae, as an appendix to his
work De veñtate religionis Christianae arnica collatio cum erudito Judaeo. There has been consider­
able speculation that Limborch may have tampered with the text. However, many details
treated in the text have been corroborated by other sources.
15. I. S. Révah, "La religion d’Uriel da Costa, Marrane de Porto,” Revue de l’histoire des reli­
gions 161 (1962): 72-76.
16. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 46-47.
17. A copy o f this work was discovered only in 1990; it was published in facsimile with an
introduction and translation by H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon in 1993.
18. Kaplan, From Christianity, 149.
19. See ibid., 149-150.
20. O I. S. Révah, "Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne: Nouvel examen,” Annuaire du
Collège de France 72 (1972): 651.
21. In 1595, a Portuguese conversa in Granada told inquisitors that during the time she
judaized, "creyo . . . que el hir a misa y confesar y comulgar y todo lo demas que hacian los
christianos eran cosa compuesta e yinbentada por los hombres" (Garcia Fuentes, Inquisición en
Granada, 474). More than a century later, Francisco Maldonado da Silva’s father, an educated
surgeon in seventeenth-century Peru, taught his son "que todo lo que enseñaba la Iglesia de
Jesucristo. . . era fingido y compuesto.” (Günter Bôhm, Historia de losJudíos en Chile: El Bachiller
Francisco Maldonado de Silva, 1592-1639 [Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1984], 222).
22. José Maria Garcia Fuentes, La Inquisición en Granada en el siglo XVI: Fuentes para su estudio
(Granada: Autor, 1981), 98.
23. "Por ser doctor y preceptor del pueblo de Dios" (Böhm, Historia de los Judíos en Chile, 299).
24. This was actually a rather widespread and common idea among crypto-Jews in general.
(It was also a theme in the medieval Jewish tract Toledot Yeshu.) See David Gitlitz, Secrecy and
Deceit: The Religion o f the CryptoJew s (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 140.
 Crypto-Jewish Criticism o f Tradition 57

25. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 140, 170029. Criticism o f this kind undoubtedly had pre-
inquisition roots. In a very early trial in 1483 in Ciudad Real, a converso was reported to have
said that Jesus had not brought Lazarus back from the dead but rather the Church ‘‘had
invented this and it was ridiculous.” (Haim Beinart, Records o f the Trials o f the Spanish Inquisition
in Ciudad Real, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities,
1977-85), 2:217. Similarly, a conversa o f Soria said about the commemoration o f the Passion,
"God be cursed if I can believe that it happened this way; rather someone must have invented
it to cause trouble for the Jew s.” Carlos Carrete Parrondo, El Tribunal de la Inquisición en el
Obispado de Soria (148&-1J02). Fontes iudaeorum regni castellae, vol. 2 (Salamanca: Universidad
Pontifìcia de Salamanca, 1985), 143.
26. "Que Jesucristo . . . habia aprendido el arte magica con que habia engañado algunos
ignorantes" (Böhm, Historia de los Judíos en Chile, 1984], 288).
27. Arquivo Nacional de Torre do Tombo (hereafter AN TT), Inquisiçào de Lisboa, processo
no. 104,12r.
28. Ibid., i4r. Diogo d’Assumpçâo was by no means typical even for an educated crypto-Jew.
He was not known to be a converso at all, although more than one witness testified to rumors
that he had a Jewish ancestor, and at times he himself claimed Jewish ancestry. One witness tes­
tified to overhearing him in conversation on religious matters with a known New Christian
[i89r]. On this crypto-Jew, see Miriam Bodian, “ In the Cross-Currents o f the Reformation:
Crypto-Jewish Martyrs o f the Inquisition, 1570-1670," Past and Present 176 (August 2002): 85-90.
29. Procesos de Luis de Carvajal (el Mozo), ed. L. Gonzalez Obregón (Mexico City: Talleres grá­
ficos de la nación, 1935), 266-267.
30. Bohm, Historia de losJudíos en Chile, 283.
31. António Borges Coelho, Inquisiçào de Évora, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Caminho, 1987), 2:79.
32. Ibid.
33. Procesos de Luis de Carvajal, 473.
34- ibid., 235.
35. AHN Inq. Leg. 2135, no. 17, 25r.
36. António Baiâo, A Inquisiçào em Portugal e no Brazil: Subsidos para a sua historia (Lisbon,
1921), 145; José Sebastiâo de Silva Dias, Correntes de sentimento religioso em Portugal (seculos XVI a
XVIII), 2 vols. (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, i960), 2:514.
37. Coelho, Inquisiçào de Évora, 79.
38. ANTT, Inquisiçào de Lisboa, processo no. 104, 44r.
39. Ibid., 42r, 208V. This was, o f course, a common Protestant criticism o f Catholic tradition.
40. Ibid., 44b.
41. Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisición de Córdoba (Cordova: Excma.
Diputación Provincial, 1983), 133.
42. On this phenomenon, see Miriam Bodian, "In the Cross-Currents o f the Reformation:
Crypto-Jewish Martyrs o f the Inquisition, 1570-1670," Past and Present 176 (August 2002).
43. ANTT, Inquisiçào de Lisboa, processo no. 104, i2r-v, 184V.
44 - Ibid., 5r, i4r-v.
45. Ibid., 14V.
46. Ibid., 102V.
47. The denial o f an afterlife is a crypto-Jewish theme that has been associated with a linger­
ing medieval Averroist current. In particular, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, in his “ 'Nacer e
morir como bestias': Criptojudaísmo y criptoaverroímo" (in Inquisiçào: Ensaios sobre mentali-
dade, heresias e arte [Rio de Janeiro: Expressâo e Cultura, Sâo Paulo: Edusp, 1992], 11-34), argues
that this line o f thought was a clandestine continuation o f medieval Spanish Jewish
Averroism— he calls it “criptoaverroismo" (14)—that was repressed by the Inquisition in Iberian
lands, but resurfaced in full force among ex-conversos in the Diaspora (24-25). This may be so,
 58 M I R I A M B O DI A N

but among crypto-Jewish and Portuguese-Jewish intellectuals, this line o f thought lacked the
nihilist thrust it had gained in popular thought and was integrated into a broader critique o f
tradition (Catholic or rabbinic) based on a literalist reading o f the Bible.
48. "Porque era ynposible una muger parir virgen.” Garcia Fuentes, Inquisición en Granada, 99.
49. AHN Inq. Leg. 2135, no. 17, 25r-v.
50. "Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding" (RSV). The Vulgate, which was
being cited, reads “nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus quibus non est intellectus."
51. AHN Inq. Leg. 2135, no. 17, 24V.
52. ANTT, Inquisiçâo de Lisboa, processo no. 104, 13V and see 5r.
53. Ibid., 120V and see i85r.
54. I. S. Révah, "Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne: Nouveaux documents sur l'incroy­
ance dans la communauté judéo-portugaise à l'époque de l'excommunication de Spinoza,"
Revue des Etudes Juives 123 (1964): 395.
55. Da Costa, Examination o f Pharisaic Traditions, 52. Da Costa was addressing Samuel da
Silva, who had written a tract attacking da Costa's ideas.
56. Ibid., 55.
57. Immanuel Aboab, Nomología, o discursos legales (Amsterdam, 1629), preface to part 1.
58. Ibid., part 2, chap. 29.
59. Da Costa, Examination o f Pharisaic Traditions, 90.
60. Ibid., 59.
61. It is published in his Magen ve-Tsina, along with a rebuttal, and was republished in
Gebhardt, Schñften, 3-10. The translation is mine.
62. Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, 58-59.
63. See Examination of Pharasaic Traditions, 141-142,153-154, 234, 240. Da Costa draws a char­
acteristically dichotomous distinction between the authentic "Sadducees" and the so-called
Pharisees in the first o f these passages: "The Book o f Daniel was not accepted by the Jew s
called Sadducees, and this fact alone should discredit it. (As we have said, very little faith can be
placed in the testimony o f the Pharisees, seeing how these men made it their business—or their
madness—to change words, modify, twist, and misinterpret Scripture in order to confirm their
confused delusions.)"
64. See Yosef Kaplan, "'Karaites' in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” in Sceptics,
Millenarians and Jews, 196-236.
65. See Richard Popkin, "The Lost Tribes, the Caraites and the English Millenarians," Journal
ofJewish Studies 37, no. 2 (1986): 213-227; Popkin, "Les Caraïtes et l'Emancipation des Juifs,” Dix-
Huitième Siècle, 13, Juifs et judaïsme (1981), 137-147. The Puritan millenarian John Dury portrayed
the rabbanite Jews, or "Pharisees,” as "full o f superstitious imaginary foolish conceits, and thal-
mudicall questions and nicities in their Sermons and Bookes,” while Karaites were "rational
men that take up no doctrines but what the Scriptures teach, by comparing one text with
another” (Popkin, “ Lost Tribes," 218).
66. Révah, “Aux origines,” 402, 406.
67. Ibid., 392.
68. Ibid., 395.
69. I. S. Révah, Spinoza et le DrJuan Prado (Paris, 1959), 67.
70. For a classic description o f the “ marrano psyche," see J. A. van Praag, "Almas en litigio,"
Clavileño 1 (1950): 14-26.
71. See Bodian, "In the Cross-Currents of the Reformation," 66-67, 100-101.
 Spinoza and the Origins
of Jewish Secularism

STEVEN NADLER

There is a common conception that the seventeenth-century Dutch Jewish philoso­

pher Baruch de Spinoza played an important role in the secularization of Judaism.
This claim has been expressed in an interesting variety of ways: that Spinoza made
secular Judaism possible, that Spinoza laid the groundwork for an assimilated or
Reform Judaism, and even that Spinoza was himself the first secular Jew. In fact,
nothing could be further from the truth. Although it is not difficult to imagine why
one would give credence to the claim—given Spinoza's critique of sectarian reli­
gion and other features of his philosophy—I will show that to believe that Spinoza
envisioned a Judaism unencumbered by the prescriptions o f halacha, Jewish law,
and the strict observance of Jewish ritual is to misunderstand much of what
Spinoza said about both Judaism in particular and religion in general.
Let me begin by stipulating what I mean by the secularization of Judaism,
although other contributors to this volume offer different, perhaps more thought­
ful, understandings of the phenomenon. I do not intend this to be a rigorous def­
inition, but rather a working definition that is good enough for my limited
purposes. By "secularized Judaism," I understand what is sometimes called a cul­
tural or nonreligious Judaism. This would be exemplified by an individual who is
(according to halacha) Jewish and who expressly identifies himself or herself as
Jewish, but who does not follow Jewish law or order his or her life by Jewish ritual.
I might be willing to add to this definition the qualification o f “who does not
strictly follow Jewish law” or “who does not strictly order his or her life by Jewish
ritual,” but because this raises too many contentious and (I believe) absurd ques­
tions about whether or not Conservative or Reform Jews are "secular” Jews, I
would rather draw the line at a cleaner breaking point and stick with the simpler
idea that a secular Jew is a Jew for whom Jewish law and ritual play practically no
part in his or her life. It is a person for whom his or her Jewishness lies outside reg­
ular normative observance or even membership in a community. Such a person
must still maintain a strong sense of Jewish identity, a sense of belonging to a cer­
tain culturally or ethnically circumscribed group and to a certain history, and this
must make some practical difference in his or her life. This person may also have a
self-conscious commitment to what might be called secularized “Jewish beliefs
and values”—that is, certain moral and social principles that, while divorced from
 60 STEVEN NADLER

religious and theological foundations, nonetheless derive in some way from Torah
and Jewish history.
To say that Spinoza played a role in the origin of secular Judaism could mean
one of two things. First, it could mean that he explicitly envisioned the possibility
of living and thinking as a secular Jew, as a Jew outside any organized Jewish com­
munity and observance, and perhaps even that he himself led such a life. It could
also mean that Spinoza, while not explicitly envisioning such a thorough secular­
ization of one's Jewish identity or complete break from Jewish belief and obser­
vance, nonetheless argued for what Miriam Bodian has called "the individuation of
belief within the traditional context of revealed religion.” 1 According to this some­
what weaker reading of his contribution to the secularization of Judaism, Spinoza's
role was to defend a kind of freedom of conscience within a sectarian religion—in
this case, Judaism—such that one could pursue individualistic or assimilated or
even heterodox forms o f observance and nonobservance while remaining within
traditional Jewish communal life; that is, unlike the first case, without leaving
observance and communal membership completely behind. On either reading of
Spinoza's contribution to the secularization of Judaism, what he is supposed to
have seen is that one could be an unorthodox Jew but, nonetheless, still a Jew.
I would like to approach this question of Spinoza and the secularization of
Judaism from two vantage points: first, from the perspective of his life and, second,
from the perspective of his thought.
Any discussion of Spinoza's life, and especially one focused on his relationship to
Judaism, must begin with the following document, read from in front of the ark of
the Torah in the synagogue of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam on July 27,1656:

The Senhores of the ma’amad [the congregation's lay governing board] having
long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have
endeavored by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But
having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily
receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies
which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for
this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to
this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the
truth of this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of
the honorable hakhamim ["wise men," or rabbis] they have decided, with their
consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from
the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy
men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the
consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congre­
gation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written
therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned
Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the casti­
gations which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and
cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when
 Spinoza and Jew ish Secularism 61

he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in.
The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy
shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book
shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And
the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to
all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. But you
that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day.

The document concludes with the warning that "no one should communicate
with him, not even in writing, nor accord him any favor nor stay with him under
the same roof nor [come] within four cubits in his vicinity; nor shall he read any
treatise composed or written by him.”2
It was the harshest writ of herem, or ban, ever issued by Amsterdam's Sephardim,
and unlike other bans in the period—and there were quite a few, of varying degrees
of severity—it was never rescinded. That is, Spinoza was not just punished by his
Jewish community, he was expelled. What was his response to this vitriolic act of
ostracism? According to one early biographer, someone who knew Spinoza person­
ally, Spinoza said, "All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not
have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But, since they want it that
way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my
departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from
Egypt.”3 Clearly, by this point, Spinoza’s faith was gone and his commitment to com­
munal Jewish life practically nonexistent. Most likely, he did not even regret having to
give up running his late father's importing business, which he could not do without
membership in good standing in the Portuguese Jewish community.4
Was he not, then, after the herem, a Jew living a secular life, a cultural if not a
religious Jew? Does he not provide the perfect model for nonobservant Judaism?
The problem with looking at Spinoza in this way is that not only did he, after his
herem, cease to have any formal relations with the Sephardic congregation within
which he had been raised and educated, and not only did he, as I am absolutely cer­
tain, cease to practice any of the rituals and observances o f a halachic Jewish life,
but the mature Spinoza seems to have had practically no sense o f Jewish identity.
Being Jewish apparently played no role whatsoever in his self-image (although it did
continue to play a role in the image that others had of him, as we can see by
Christiaan Huygens's reference to him as "the Jew of Voorbuig” ).5 For the rest of
his life Spinoza clearly did not regard himself as a Jew, other than the nominal way
in which someone born to Jewish parents but raised in a perfectly secular house­
hold might feel compelled to admit that he is, in a sense, “technically Jewish.” One
is struck, for example, by the way the Jewish people are regarded in the Theological-
Political Treatise from the third-person perspective. "They" are the ones who lack
any kind of theological or moral "chosen-ness” ; “they” are the ones who have
emasculated themselves through their laws. More generally, Spinoza seemed in his
writings, including his extant correspondence, to lack all identification or sympathy
with Jewish religion and history, and even to go out of his way to distance himself
 62 STEVEN NADLER

from them. But to be even a secular Jew—as opposed to being a secular individual
whose background happens to be Jewish—would seem to demand some sense of
Jewish identity, even if the source of that identity lies not in any specific religious
beliefs or practices, or even in any religious beliefs whatsoever, but rather in at least
partially distinguishing oneself from others by one's belonging to a certain histori­
cal, ethnic, or social community. I do not think we can say that this was true of
Spinoza.
Thus, from the perspective of his life, I would insist that Spinoza was not the
first secular Jew, for he was not a secular Jew at all. If anything, he was an important
and perhaps the most prominent early modern model of the secular individual,
someone for whom religious affiliation or heritage—Jewish or otherwise—plays no
role whatsoever in his self-identity
But even if Spinoza did not see himself as a Jew in any sense and thus cannot be
said to have lived the life of a secular Jew, did not his philosophy in its entirety, with
its powerful argument for a secular, liberal, democratic, tolerant state, in which there
is freedom of religion and thought and a general assimilation of all citizens to its core
values; with its dismissal of Jewish law and ceremony as irrelevant to contemporary
life; and with his reduction of the "true religion'' to ethics, that is, to a basic set of
rational moral and social principles without any theological-metaphysical dogma—
indeed, without any real theology at all—lay the groundwork for what might be
called secular Judaism? Did Spinoza at least make it possible to be a modern Jew,
one who, while remaining a Jew, nonetheless makes certain essential accommoda­
tions to modern secular society and even leads a completely secular life—a Jew for
whom the demands of civil citizenship and social assimilation take precedence over
the requirements of a strictly Jewish life?
It is important to distinguish this strong kind of assimilation from the strictly
political assimilation with which Spinoza was sometimes concerned, the kind o f
assimilation that would accompany emancipation. Spinoza certainly saw political
assimilation as in principle compatible with the continued existence of Jewish reli­
gious life. There is no reason why Jews could not maintain their particular beliefs
and rigorously practice their religion as well as participate as full, emancipated cit­
izens in a secular state. Indeed, the principles of toleration demand this possibility.
To be sure, it is also important to remember that Spinoza feared that such societies
within society ultimately threatened the peace and unity of the state. In Spinoza’s
ideal polity, at least, there would be no sectarian differences either to dilute the alle­
giances of citizens to the state (or to the state religion) or to cause divisions among
citizens. But that does not mean that such a scenario o f sectarian emancipation
within a larger secular society, while undesirable, is not a possible one.
But this is political assimilation—a space within the state for the Jews to prac­
tice Judaism while nonetheless enjoying all the benefits and responsibilities as full
citizens. The stronger and more general assimilation that threatens the halachic
observance o f Judaism is another issue entirely. This kind of assimilation raises the
question of whether Jews can even survive as a group in the absence of the rigor­
ous observance of their laws and the strict practice of their rituals.
 Spinoza and Jew ish Secularism 63

Now there are a number of reasons why one might think that for Spinoza the
answer to the question is that they can, that Judaism in the absence of the Law is
certainly possible. First of all, Spinoza believed that the hatred directed at the Jews
has, over the generations, and even in the absence of halachic observance, helped
to preserve them as a separate people. Indeed, Spinoza insisted that even after Jews
have left Judaism behind and converted to some other religion, as happened in
Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, anti-Semitism, based not only reli­
gion but also on blood, served to maintain Jewish identity. "As to their continued
existence for so many years when scattered and stateless, this is in no way surpris­
ing, since they have separated themselves from other nations to such a degree as to
incur the hatred of all. . . . That they are preserved largely through the hatred of
other nations is demonstrated from historical fact [experientia]."6 And then there is
Spinoza’s remark, one that I am hesitant to take seriously, that "I consider the mark
of circumcision to be such an important factor in this matter that I am convinced
that this by itself will preserve their nation forever”7—just as, he insisted, the
Chinese have been able to maintain their identity solely through the pigtail. This is
not Spinoza at his finest, and I suggest we ignore this particular piece of evidence.
More important, there is Spinoza's claim, so central to the Theological-Political
Treatise, that the Jewish ceremonial law is no longer valid. The laws were instituted
by Moses and enforced by later Israelite political leaders solely for the purpose of
establishing a secure and stable state and for political and social well-being. With
the destruction of that state, and especially the Temple to which so much of the
ceremonial law was directed, the Law has lost its legitimizing context. It is now a
body of laws without a state, thus without a purpose. Of course, Jews continued to
observe those free-floating laws. But what would happen if the laws themselves, in
the absence of their legitimation, withered away? Would the Jewish people disap­
pear as well? Or, on the other hand, would the Jewish people continue in the
absence of their laws, only now as a more secular group? When Spinoza said, in
chapter 5 of the Treatise, that the Mosaic Law is no longer binding on latter-day
Jews, was he not recommending that they should pursue their Jewishness without
the Law? And isn't this just to foresee a kind of secular Judaism?
The answer to this question, at least insofar as we are talking about what
Spinoza envisioned, is a clear "no.” Spinoza believed, I would insist, that without
the Law, the Jewish people have no sustaining source of difference and identity, and
thus for him the notion o f a secular Jew—even in the face o f hatred and even with
his circumcision—would be incoherent.
In chapter 3 of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argued that there is no
theological or metaphysical or moral sense in which the Jews are “chosen” by God
and selected out from all other peoples. Their “chosen-ness” or “vocation” consists
only in the fact that for a long time the Israelites enjoyed political and social good
fortune and a secure and powerful commonwealth. This is not something that they
possessed uniquely, and, since by the seventeenth century the commonwealth was
gone, it is not something that continues to distinguish the Jew from the Gentile. In
Spinoza's eyes, of course, there can be no innate or internal factors that distinguish
 64 STEVEN NADLER

the Jew from any other person. No special moral quality, no divine advantage, and
especially no peculiar gifts of nature make a Jew. As we know from Spinoza's philo­
sophical masterpiece, the Ethics, all human beings are a part o f Nature to the same
degree and in exactly the same way, and there are no intrinsic differences among
them and no natural kinds to distinguish them one from another. The only thing
that separates the Jew from the Gentile is the Law. He emphasized that "the indi­
vidual Jew, considered alone apart from his social organization and his government,
possesses no gift of God above other men, and there is no difference between him
and a gentile.”8
Spinoza took a long view on this question. Why, he asked, have the Jews sur­
vived over so many centuries as a people, despite no longer having a common­
wealth and being scattered over all the nations of the world? What makes a Jew?
The answer, he said, is not because of God's having chosen and favored them, but
simply because, as we have seen above, "they have separated themselves from other
nations . . . through external rites.” Indeed, he noted that were the Jews to give up
those rites, the observance of Jewish law, then political assimilation would lead to
total assimilation, and Jewish identity would disappear. In the Theological-Political
Treatise, he cited the case of the Babylonian exiles. "They turned their back on the
entire Mosaic Law, consigned to oblivion the laws of their native land as being obvi­
ously pointless, and began to be assimilated to other nations.''9 In other words, the
result of secularity and assimilation is not secular and assimilated Jews; it is secular
and assimilated individuals who have left their Judaism behind. He also mentioned
(perhaps a little too optimistically) the case of the Jews o f Spain, whose full politi­
cal assimilation was conditional upon their giving up their religion—understood as
the observance of the Law—and the result of which was the disappearance of this
group of Jews; "no trace of them was left,” he wrote.10 The fact that Spinoza here
overlooked the laws of blood purity by which the Spanish themselves continued to
distinguish true Christians from Jewish Conversos indicates that for him there was
nothing to being a Jew other than the observance of the Law.
For Spinoza, then, the Law, halacha, was essential to Judaism. Judaism without
a robust divine “chosen-ness" is relatively unproblematic. But there can be no
Judaism unbounded by the observance of Jewish law. Take away the Law, and you
take away the Jew. To put it another way, for Spinoza, to be a Jew was to be a
halachically observant Jew. For what defined Jewish life for Spinoza were the tenets
of its religion and the set of ceremonial and other practices and laws that, with the
destruction of the Temple, have lost their raison d'être. And what defined Jewish
self-identity for him was to belong to a Jewish community that is constituted by the
self-conscious observance of those commandments.
In fact, we can generalize this point and say that for Spinoza any sectarian reli­
gious group was defined solely by its observance of a particular set of laws and rit­
uals. The contrast is with those partisans of what he called the "true religion,"
which is defined not by ceremonial observance but by the inner commitment to
what he called the "divine law”—that is, a simple set of basic moral principles that can
be summed up by the proposition "Love God and your fellow human being.” There
 Spinoza and Jew ish Secularism 65

are Christians, and then there are Christians. The former are sectarian, committed
to an elaborate body of rites, historical and theological doctrines, and a determi­
nate hierarchy of authority; the latter are those who see the true, nonsectarian, uni­
versal moral message of Jesus’ preaching. They recognize that external modes of
observance are totally accidental to religious virtue and, as Spinoza said, “con­
tribute nothing to blessedness."11
For Spinoza, then, to be a secular or assimilated or accommodationist Jew is
nonsense. It is to be a nonsectarian sectarian. For him, Judaism without an obser­
vance of its textually and historically defined tenets, laws, and ceremonies would be
an empty shell, a masquerade. These laws and rituals—along with Gentile anti-
Semitism—are what have preserved Judaism since the destruction of the Temple,
and what its essence now boiled down to. Of course, Spinoza had great contempt
for traditional sectarian religions, and Judaism in particular. And he certainly did
argue that Jewish law was no longer binding on contemporary Jews; perhaps in this
sense he unwittingly opened the door for a nonhalachic, even secular Judaism. But
it seems to me that he also had a very strict understanding o f what was to count as
Judaism. Spinoza may have been a religious reformer. But what he envisioned was
not reform within Judaism. Rather, what he had in mind was a universal rational
religion that eschewed meaningless, superstitious rituals and focused instead on a
few simple moral principles—above all, to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
After his ban from the Amsterdam congregation, Spinoza belonged to and par­
ticipated in no organized religion. I could just as easily have addressed in this essay
the oft-repeated claim that the post-herem Spinoza was a Christian, but that is not
even worth discussing. Sectarian religions represented, for him, one of the greatest
threats to social harmony and political well-being. They weaken the fabric of society
by introducing allegiances that may, in fact, be inconsistent with one's allegiance to
the state and thus run counter to the general public good. If Spinoza represented
anything, it was as the first truly secular citizen, someone for whom religious affilia­
tion played no role whatsoever in his self-identity and who argued that traditional
religious beliefs generated only superstition and the harmful passions of hope and
fear. Far from being the means to salvation and blessedness, he held that such beliefs
represented the most serious obstacle to our highest good. This, I believe, is
Spinoza’s greatest contribution to the origins of secular modernity.

NOTES
1. See the chapter by Miriam Bodian in this volume.
2. The Hebrew text is no longer extant, but the Portuguese version is found in the Book
o f Ordinances (Livro dos Acordos de Nafao e Ascamot), in the Municipal Archives o f the City
o f Amsterdam, Archives for the Portuguese Jewish Community in Amsterdam, 334, no. 19,
fol. 408.
3. Jean-Maximlien Lucas, in Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza's in Quellenschrijten, Urkunden und
Nichtamtlichen, ed. J. Freudenthal (Leipzig: Verlag Von Veit, 1899), 8.
4. For a more detailed study o f this event in Spinoza's life, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 6; and Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s
Heresy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
 66 STEVEN NADLER

5. Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoflf, 1893), 6:81.
6. Theological-Political Treatise (TTP), chapter 3, "Spinoza Opera," ed. Carl Gebhardt, 5 vols.
(Heidelberg: Carl Winters Verlag, 1925 [1972]; henceforth cited as “G"), 3:56. Translation from
Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
2001; henceforth cited as “S” ), 45.
7. TTP, chap. 3, G, 3:57; S, 45.
8. TTP, chap. 3, G, 3:50; S, 40.
9. TTP, chap. 5, G, 3:72; S, 62.
10. TTP, chap. 3, G, 3:56-7; S, 46.
11. TTP, chap. 5, G, 3:76; S, 65.
CHALLENGES OF SECULAR
JEWISHNESS IN MODERN TIMES
Influenced by socialism and nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, some East European Jews proposed that the key attributes of Jewishness
were homeland, language, history, and/or culture. Religious faith and observance
were no longer essential but only one dimension of the Jews’ national cultural her­
itage. Yiddishists, for example, championed the vernacular of East European Jews
as the vehicle for Jewish national revival and set up school networks to promote this
ideology and its culture. But, as David Fishman points out, when these schools
were transplanted to the United States, where Jews were regarded largely as a reli­
gious group, the intrinsic problems o f creating a secular Jewish culture and identity
were exacerbated, as can be seen in the curricula and ideologies of Yiddish secular
schools in America.
The separation of Jewish ethnicity from the Jewish faith is often seen as having
begun with the Reform movement in early-nineteenth-century Germany. “Classic"
Reform Judaism rejected the idea that Jews are a people or nation, declared them a
faith community only, and held that this allowed Jews to become Germans,
Frenchmen, Englishmen, and others, while restricting their Jewishness to Judaism.
Scott Spector explores Jewish identity as dealt with by Central European Jewish
intellectuals. He reexamines critically the usual conception of a spectrum of iden­
tities, ranging from complete assimilation to total Jewish identification. By the turn
of the twentieth century, the classical liberal-assimilationist position, with its opti­
mism about a potentially unproblematic fusion o f Jewish (private) identities and
German public ones, was no longer available.
Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lines between Jews and others
were clearly drawn. But with emancipation, acculturation, secularization, and inte­
gration, Jews and non-Jews in Europe debated how Jews should transform them­
selves and the extent to which they should do so. According to Todd Endelman,
“ordinary” emancipated Jews did not imagine a future in which they would
renounce or transcend their Jewish attachments, though they were willing and
even eager to redefine them. Christian emancipationists clearly envisioned a more
radical break with the Jewish past. In reality, integration and secularization were
uneven processes, so that social acceptance and mixing lagged behind the decline of
belief and practice. By the late nineteenth century the bonds among West
European Jews had become more social and ethnic than religious.
 y Yiddish Schools in America and the
Problem of SecularJewish Identity

DAVID E. FISHMAN

A self-consciously secular Jewish identity emerged in Eastern Europe in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the influence of two great systems
o f ideas: nationalism and socialism. Jewish nationalism created a paradigm shift in
the construction of Jewishness, in which the key attributes of the Jews were now
considered to be their markers as a nation: their homeland, language, history,
and/or culture. Jewish nationalists did not consider religious faith or observance to
be essential to the perpetuation o f the Jews and instead ascribed primacy to one’s
fidelity to the Jewish homeland, language, history, and/or culture. They looked
upon the Jewish religion as one aspect of the Jews’ national cultural heritage.
Meanwhile, the spread o f socialism among East European Jews, usually in com­
bination with some form of Jewish nationalism, brought an overtly atheistic and
antireligious worldview into the Jewish sphere of discourse. Jewish socialists not
only deemphasized the position o f the Jewish religion but also rejected religious
Judaism as a false system of ideas, harmful to the cause of social progress—and to
the Jews' own political and social liberation.1 Those Jews who were influenced
more strongly by the combination of nationalist and socialist ideas were usually the
ones who embraced an avowedly secular Jewish identity more clearly and sharply.
In Eastern Europe, a secular national identity was compelling to many Jews,
because it corresponded to political and social realities. The political realities are
well known: Eastern Europe was rife with nationalist movements, national con­
flicts, and virulent anti-Semitism, all of which together made it natural, and—given
the social exclusion and rejection o f Jews—almost necessary, for the Jews to define
themselves as a distinct national group struggling for its liberation.
But the underlying social conditions that spurred the adoption of a secular,
national identity by many Jews were equally important. In late-nineteenth-century
and early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the Jews were a rapidly modernizing
group. They became urbanized, industrialized, politicized, and, concomitant to all
o f those processes, secularized. The secularization of the Jews’ everyday lives in the
rising urban centers (Warsaw, Lodz, Odessa, Vilna, etc.) was ubiquitous, with the
role of religion shrinking in authority, scope, and intensity. But the Jews' accultur­
ation to either Russian or Polish language lagged considerably behind their secular­
ization (and other aspects of their modernization). In 1897, the vast majority of the
Jews in the Russian Empire spoke Yiddish, and only 27 percent could read and write
 70 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

in Russian. The Jews' social integration with their Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian
neighbors in the Pale of Settlement was also modest. All of which is to say that in
turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eastern Europe, “the secular Jewish nation" was not
just an ideological construct, but a term that seemed to correspond to a growing
social reality.
One version of Jewish nationalism that grew in popularity at the time was
Yiddishism—the movement that championed the Yiddish language, the vernacular
of East European Jews, as the vehicle for Jewish national revival. Yiddishists consid­
ered strengthening Yiddish language, literature, and cultural institutions to be a
central aspect of Jewish nation-building in the modern era.2 While Yiddishism was
in many ways similar to other ethno-linguistic nationalist movements in Eastern
Europe, it faced a particular problem that other movements did not: Most of the
Jewish cultural heritage over the preceding three millennia had been religious in
character and Hebrew in language. Just what did a secular Jewish national identity
based on the Yiddish language mean? What was the relationship o f secular Yiddish
culture to Jewish religious texts, concepts, rituals, and doctrines? Many Yiddishist
writers, artists, and intellectuals addressed and alluded to this issue, but more often
than not it was either skirted or ignored. The one arena where the question of sec­
ular Jewish national identity was confronted directly was education. The creation
o f modern Yiddish schools required that the abstract idea of secular Jewish nation­
ality be concretized into a curriculum for Jewish children. What, if anything, of the
Jewish religious legacy would be taught, and how would it be presented?
This chapter examines the American Yiddish schools' conundrum of synthesiz­
ing secularism and Judaism. These schools were created by immigrant educators
and intellectuals who operated with East European ideological conceptions of
Jewish nationalism, socialism, and secularism. While the schools themselves were
in America, the educators’ minds were distinctly East European. I focus on the
period from 1910 until 1947—the time of the schools’ establishment, upswing, and
strength, and prior to the hemorrhaging of Yiddish culture in America, the prolif­
eration of the synagogue congregational school, and the establishment of the State
o f Israel, all of which had a profound weakening impact on the Yiddish schools.

The Creation o f Yiddish Schools in America

At the time of the Czernowitz conference for the Yiddish language in 1908, modern
Yiddish schools were more of an idea than reality. The conference, famous for
declaring Yiddish a national language of the Jewish people, resolved to create a
World Bureau for the Yiddish Language, one of whose tasks would be "to establish
and support Yiddish model schools, and assist in the publication of model text­
books.”3 While the planned World Bureau never materialized, Yiddish schools
opened independently in the years immediately after the conference, both in
Tsarist Russia and in North America, as part of the general upswing of modern
Yiddish culture of that time.
In North America, the opening of the schools was preceded by appeals for their
establishment by Yiddish intellectuals and journalists. Joel Entin (1875-1959) noted
 Yiddish Schools in America 71

in April 1909 on the pages of the daily Di varhayt that the question o f providing a
Jewish education to the children o f immigrants as a supplement to their public
school education was growing in urgency. While religious parents could send their
children to heders, talmud torahs, and yeshivas, and Zionists had established a few
private schools of their own, there were no schools for the children of "parents
who are not religious and not Zionists, but are interested in Judaism (yidishkayt)
because of Jewish history or Jewish culture." Entin called for such parents to form
new Jewish schools "which would not teach religion or inculcate national ideas
which were repugnant to the parents. They would instead provide good instruction
in Jewish history, the Hebrew language, its ancient and modern classics, and in our
Yiddish language and literature.”4
In a follow-up article, Entin sharpened his definition of the schools’ constituency.
They were needed for the children of the tens of thousands of Jewish radicals in
America, the vast majority of whom was "opposed to the Jewish religion . .. but do
not want their children to become totally estranged from Judaism (yidishkayt).” The
schools were to provide a “Jewish cultural education." Entin proposed that the social­
ist Zionists were the most appropriate movement to establish such schools; he him­
self went on to establish and head the Farband schools, associated with Poale Zion of
America.5
At about the same time, the Bundist émigré journalist Tsivyon (pseudonym for
Ben-Tziyon Hoffman, 1874-1954), fresh off the boat from Europe, expressed similar
thoughts and sentiments. In an article on the cultural tasks of the Workmen’s
Circle, Tsivyon dismissed the organization's existing Sunday schools, which gave
children a socialist education in English, as an educational and moral abomination.
Instead, Tsivyon advanced what he called a “heretical" idea: the Workmen's Circle’s
Sunday schools should teach Jewish history and Yiddish.

Jewish children need to know Jewish history and Yiddish literature, just as
Russian children need to know Russian history and Russian literature, German
children need to know German history and German literature etc. . . .
I would like for the Jewish worker's children to grow up to be not just social­
ists, but Jewish socialists. . . .
Should we radicals hold fast to the opinion that we have nothing to do with
Judaism, and leave the monopoly over Jewish education in the hands of the
bourgeoisie? Or should we make, call it if you want, a compromise, and take
Judaism into our own hands? Instead of prayers and religion, we will teach our
children modern Judaism: Jewish history and Yiddish literature. From a socialist
perspective Jewish history and Yiddish literature are certainly "kosher,” or at
least not “treyf."6

Shortly thereafter Tzivyon became a member of the Educational Committee of

the Workmen’s Circle and one of the main supporters of its Yiddish schools.
The tension between a commitment to Judaism and an insistence on secularism
found in Entin’s and Tsivyon’s articles became a hallmark of the Yiddish schools
in America. While both authors self-consciously used the word yidishkayt, the
 72 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

traditional term for Judaism, and embraced it as a value, they were, by virtue of
their being socialists, openly “opposed to religion” and rejected "teaching prayers.”
Therefore Yiddish schools in America became a laboratory for exploring the mean­
ing of secular Jewish identity

Yiddish Schools in America: Four Systems

Now mostly forgotten, the Yiddish school movement was a dynamic and growing
educational trend in America during the years between the two World Wars. In
their heyday in 1934, some twenty thousand Jewish children were enrolled in
Yiddish schools in America and constituted 10 percent of American Jewish children
receiving a Jewish education.7 These were supplementary schools whose classes
met three to six days per week for one or two hours per day. Yiddish schools were
neighborhood institutions, averaging sixty children per school; the Yiddish school
system consisted overwhelmingly of elementary schools for children between the
ages of eight and twelve (only one thousand children, or 5 percent of the total were
enrolled in 1934 in Yiddish mitlshulti).8
The Yiddish schools in America were divided into four separate systems, with
different sponsorships and orientations. The Jewish National Workers' Alliance
(Yidish-natsionaler arbeterfarband, or simply Farband), the fraternal order associated
with Poale Zion of America, founded the first Yiddish schools in America in 1910,
and the first Yiddish teachers’ seminary in 1918. The Farband schools were distin­
guished from the others in that they taught Yiddish and Hebrew equally and devel­
oped the students’ interest in the yishuv in Palestine. Enrollment in 1934 stood at
5,598 students.
The Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute was established in 1918, based on a number
of nonpartisan Yiddish schools, the first of which was founded in 1913. The Sholem
Aleichem Institute was committed to nonpartisan Yiddish education and did not
teach Hebrew in its elementary schools until 1940. Enrollment in 1934 reached 1,976
students.
The Workmen’s Circle resolved to create Yiddish socialist schools in 1916; the
first such schools appeared in 1918. They paid equal attention to teaching Yiddish
and instilling socialism, and did not teach Hebrew in their elementary schools. In
1934 enrollment stood at 6,013 students.
When the Workmen’s Circle split in 1926 between the Communists and anti­
communists, the Communist faction took with it a significant number of schools.
In 1930 these came under the organizational sponsorship of the International
Workers’ Order (IWO). These schools were primarily committed to instilling the
values of communism and support for the Soviet Union. They did not teach
Hebrew. These schools had 6,800 students enrolled in 1934.

Ideological and Programmatic Statements

The ideological positions taken by Yiddish school systems were expressed in pro­
grammatic statements issued by their umbrella organizations during their forma­
tive years, the 1910s and 1920s. These statements revolved around three issues or
 Yiddish Schools in America 73

tensions: socialism versus Jewish nationalism, Yiddish versus Hebrew, and secular­
ism versus religion. The schools positioned themselves in various ways in relation
to these three topics.
With regard to the first dichotomy, Yiddish schools defined themselves alter­
nately as exclusively socialist and not Jewish national schools (e.g., the IWO), as pri­
marily socialist and secondarily Jewish national schools (e.g., the Workmen’s
Circle), as primarily Jewish national schools and secondarily socialist or progressive
(e.g., the Farband schools), or as exclusively Jewish national schools and not social­
ist (e.g., the Sholem Aleichem schools). With regard to the second dichotomy, the
Yiddish schools could attribute educational importance only to Yiddish and not to
Hebrew (e.g., the IWO and Workmen’s Circle schools), primarily to Yiddish and
only secondarily Hebrew (e.g., the Sholem Aleichem schools), or equally to Yiddish
and Hebrew (e.g., the Farband schools).
But when it came to the third dichotomy, secularism versus religion, there was
basic agreement on the surface level of pronouncements. All of the Yiddish school
systems defined themselves as secular and not religious. None defined themselves
as primarily secular and secondarily religious, or as both secular and religious. The
two terms were considered mutually exclusive.
The underlying ideological unity of the Yiddish schools lay in the fact that they all
defined themselves as secular schools for Jewish children that taught in Yiddish. The
other variables were open to disagreement. In fact, while the Yiddish schools were
referred to early on by various names, such as natsyonal-radikale shuln (national-
radical schools), yidishe folk-shuln (Jewish people’s schools), moderne yidishe shuln
(Modem Jewish/Yiddish schools), the name that became most popular and endured
was yidish veltlekhe shuln (Yiddish /Jewish secular schools). The name embodied their
primary commitments—to Yiddish and to secularity.
While the programmatic statements of the Yiddish schools systems all agreed
on using the term secular, they did not necessarily agree on its meaning, its relative
importance, or its curricular implications. For example, secularity occupied a mod­
est place in the Farband schools' declaration of principles, adopted at their first con­
vention in April 1914:

As Jewish nationalists we believe in the unity of the Jewish nation, and seek to
preserve it with all our energy and means. We wish to give our children an edu­
cation that will preserve that unity, and bind Jewish children with their brethren
across all times and lands.
As radicals and democrats, we seek to give Jewish children an education that
will be in harmony with the progress of science and free thought, and with pro­
gressive views on social justice and love for fellow men. Our education will
therefore include the following elements: Yiddish, Hebrew, Yiddish literature,
Hebrew literature (both old and new), Jewish history and Jewish folklore (folk­
songs, folk-tales etc.).
Our education seeks to develop in the child a healthy approach toward the
Jewish religion, viewing it from a cultural-historical perspective. Teachers
 74 D A V I D B. FISHMAN

should attempt to highlight to the children the national, ethical, and poetic
aspects of the Jewish religion. . . . As part of our education, the Jewish national
holidays should be celebrated in the schools.
Yiddish and Hebrew are equal in the National-Radical schools. Instruction in
both languages should begin simultaneously.9

The key phrases in this text are those of providing an education in harmony
with "science and free thought,” while nonetheless offering "a healthy approach to
the Jewish religion” and highlighting its "national, ethical and poetic aspects.” The
declaration thus assumed that there were aspects of the Jewish religion that were
of enduring value for secular nationalist Jews.
Secularism occupied a much more central position in the Declaration of
Principles of the Sholem Aleichem Schools, adopted at the 1927 conference of the
Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. It opened with the sentence that "the new Yiddish
school became possible and necessary thanks to the Jewish secular environment,
which arose during the last several decades, and which has become a creative force,
destined to play a great role in Jewish history.” It went on to state:

The language of the Jewish secular environment is Yiddish. Its culture is mod­
em Yiddish culture. Its world view is in accordance with the results of scientific
research. It does not consider religion to be the foundation of our spiritual life.
Jewish religious customs are only a part of our people’s creativity throughout
the generations. Hebrew, and those parts of Jewish creativity connected with
Hebrew (Aramaic), belong to our national cultural heritage. They are consid­
ered from an objective historic point of view.. . .
Yiddish secular schools must. . . give priority to subjects and activities which
relate to Jewish secular life and creativity, such as Yiddish, Yiddish literature,
Jewish folk creativity, and Jewish history. Jewish religious beliefs and customs
should be considered from a cultural-historical perspective. Hebrew and
Hebrew literature should be studied in upper grades (that is, in high school) as
a part of the accumulated Jewish cultural heritage.10

In this text, the relegation o f religion to a minor position in Jewish culture and
to the past is made quite bluntly: “n o t . . . the foundation of our people's spiritual
life” and "only a part of our people's heritage.” Hebrew is mentioned in the context
of reference to religion and as a subject to be studied in advanced grades.
The first statement on the goals of the Workmen’s Circle schools, adopted in
1919 by its Education Department and a council of educators, did ot address the
issue o f secularism directly. Instead it focused almost entirely on the polarity
between socialism and Jewishness, giving more weight to the former than to the
latter. The stated goals were the following:

1. To teach children to read, write and speak Yiddish well.

2. To familiarize them with the best works of Yiddish literature.
3. To familiarize them with the life of the workers and of the Jewish masses in
America and in other lands.
 Yiddish Schools in America 75

4. To familiarize them with the history of the Jewish people, and with events in
the struggle for freedom in general history.
5. To develop in them a sense of justice, love for the oppressed, love of freedom,
and honor for those who struggle for freedom.
6. To develop the feeling for beauty.
7. To develop in them idealism and the aspiration for great deeds, which are necessary
for every child from an oppressed class, on the path to a better social order."

An official brochure, issued by the Education Committee of the Workmen’s

Circle in 1920, explained that the schools had been formed to counteract the harm­
ful influence of the American public school—which alienated Jewish workers’ chil­
dren from their parents, the Jewish people, and the struggles o f the working
class—and to offer an alternative to Talmud Torahs. On the latter, it noted, “The
Talmud Torahs do not teach children the living language of the Jewish masses.
Instead they teach the language of the old decrepit Jewish past, which is absolutely
superfluous for the children, at least during their first several years of study. And
besides, the Talmud Torahs give children a religious education, which the great
majority of worker-parents would like to avoid.” 12
The curriculum of the schools was set as Yiddish language, Jewish history,
Yiddish literature, biographies of strugglers for freedom, and music/dance/recita­
tion. The exclusion of religion from the curriculum as something “decrepit”
(opgelebt) required no explanation or statement. It was taken for granted.
Finally, the 1929 declaration of principles of the Non-Partisan Jewish Workers’
Schools (which became the International Workers' Order Schools in 1930), defined
the schools exclusively as socialist. Its goal was “to develop a multi-faceted, bold,
joyful and struggling, proletarian personality, which will be able to participate in
the revolutionary struggle for power, and in the revolutionary work of building a
new socialist order. .. . The language of our school is Yiddish, but the language
serves to develop the internationalist spirit among the children.” It did not address
at all the question of Jewish nationality or secular Jewish identity.13
As is evident from the list of subjects given in these programmatic statements,
the American Yiddish schools did not teach Bible, siddur, Mishna, Talmud, or
halacha, at least not as distinct subjects. The curriculum was modeled after that of
a secular public school in America or Europe and provided for instruction of the
Jewish national language (or languages), literature, and history. Jewish religious
texts, concepts, and practices were either excluded from the curriculum or sub­
sumed under one of the above-mentioned subjects.14 The curriculum of language,
literature, and history allowed for considerable flexibility and difference of opinion
as to what was to be included or excluded. As will be discussed below, beyond the
formal curriculum, the question o f holiday celebrations loomed large.

Yiddish Language and Literature

The schools devoted their greatest energy and effort to teaching Yiddish reading
and writing, spelling, and grammar. Already in the 1920s pedagogues noted that
 76 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

Yiddish was not the children's native tongue, but rather a second language whose
proper acquisition required great effort. Yiddish educators were preoccupied with
the methodology of Yiddish language instruction, and many primers, readers,
grammar textbooks, and workbooks were published that addressed this objective.
Yet language and content were inextricably connected. What kind of Yiddish
texts would children read as they studied Yiddish over the course of five or more
years? What kind of Jewish knowledge would the primers and readers impart? The
answers varied according to the Yiddish school system. A comparison of two repre­
sentative and popular readers illustrates this point.
Joel Entin and Leon Elbe published a reader for the Farband schools in 1916,
called Fun idishn kval: A yiddish lehr-bukh un khrestomatye (From the Jewish Well-
springs: A Yiddish Textbook and Chrestomathy), which took a Jewishly maximalist
approach to the subject of Yiddish. It consisted o f 153 short texts, mainly by mod­
ern Yiddish writers, including poets Yehoash, Avrom Reisin, and Morris Rosenfeld,
and prose writers I. L. Peretz and Mendele Mokher Seforim, who authored the
most pieces in the collection.
Generally speaking, while Fun yidishn kval was a reader of Yiddish literary texts,
thematically it was devoted predominantly to the Jewish holidays, religious tradi­
tions, and ancient Jewish heroes. Thus, the poems by Yehoash included "Passover/'
“David’s Harp,” "The Hidden Saint” (Der lamed vovnik), "Rachel's Tomb,” "Shabbat
Nahamu,” ‘A Song to the Sabbath,” "The Night before the Giving of the Torah,” and
"Elijah the Prophet's Vision.’' The Mendele selections were not satirical or critical
depictions of the shtetl, but rather romantic depictions of traditional Jewish life found
in Mendele's later works, entitled "A Day in Elul,” "Midnight,” "Selichos Time in the
Forest,” and so forth. What is interesting about this selection of Yiddish literary texts
is the use of Yiddish literature as a vehicle for teaching about Jewish religious tradi­
tions. Children learned about "Shabbes Nahamu” and “Selikhos” not from going to
synagogue and reciting the special prayers for these occasions, but from a Yiddish
poem or story that told about them. Entin and Elbe sifted and mined Yiddish litera­
ture for a specific Jewish educational function—teaching about Jewish traditions—
which had been far from the original writers' minds and intentions. (Yiddish schools
did not even exist until the last few years of Mendele's and Peretz's lives.)
Moreover, a good part of Entin and Elbe's Yiddish reader consisted of material
which was not originally in Yiddish but in Hebrew. It included eighteen rabbinic
agadot taken from the Yiddish edition of Bialik and Ravnitsky's Sefer ha-agadah,
among which were tales about Moses, the giving of the Torah, King David, King
Solomon, Rabbi Akiva, the Temple, and the Prophet Jeremiah. And it included
Yiddish translations and adaptations of chapters from the Pentateuch, the prophets
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, and a poem by Yehuda Ha-Levi. Fun yidishn kval
opened with an agadah in which God praised Moses for being a faithful shepherd
and concluded with a complete translation of Isaiah 2, "And it shall come to pass in
the end of days.”
It is noteworthy that the Farband schools did not restrict the teaching of bibli­
cal and rabbinic material to the Hebrew language and literature part of their
 Yiddish Schools in America 77

curriculum, but included them in the Yiddish curriculum as well. (In part, this was
a pragmatic decision. Children came to the schools knowing some Yiddish from
home and thus acquired it more quickly than Hebrew. Teaching biblical and rab­
binic material in Hebrew meant delaying its instruction for several years.) Of equal
interest is the occurrence of God, revelation, angels, and prophets in a textbook
used by schools which were committed to providing "an education that will be in
harmony with the progress of science and free thought." We shall see just how this
was rationalized below.
An approach diametrically opposed to the teaching of Yiddish is provided by
Der onfanger (The Beginner) by Jacob (Yankev) Levin (1884-1958), the most popular
Yiddish primer in the Workmen’s Circle schools during the 1920s and 1930s.
Published in six books for six successive years of study, book one o f Der onfanger
went through thirteen printings between 1922 and 1935.
Books one (116 pages) and two (136 pages) taught the alphabet, basic words and
sentences, and then offered graded texts on topics from everyday life: family,
school, animals, nature, the seasons. Parables and fables about animals were the
most frequently represented genre. No specifically Jewish content appeared in
books one and two at all. There were no references to Jewish holidays, biblical sto­
ries, or even edited texts from modern Yiddish literature.
Book three (136 pages) was devoted to introducing children to the Hebrew com­
ponent of the Yiddish language. Levin noted in his introduction that the spelling
and use of the Hebrew component in Yiddish were controversial topics in the
Workmen’s Circle schools, with many on the left favoring a phonetic Yiddish
spelling of words of Hebrew origin and some supporting the minimization or elim­
ination of the Hebrew component. Levin supported moderate use o f the Hebrew
component and its traditional spelling, but he saw his task exclusively in terms of
language arts. The book’s Jewish content was minimal. In fact, it contained as many
tales translated from Russian and world literature (eight) as it did translations from
Hebrew aggadic sources.
Only in the final, sixth book of Der onfanger, which was presumably intended for
use in the last of the five-year Yiddish school or the first year of a Yiddish mitlshul,
was material related to Jewish religion included. Book six was an anthology of lit­
erary texts, arranged in sections named "The Bizarre” (oysterlishs), “Of Life," and
"Labor.” Some of the tales and poems in the first section revolved around rabbis
and Hasidic masters—Peretz’s “If Not Higher,” Joseph Opatoshu’s "Reb Itche," and
a poem by Avrom Liesin on Rabbi Akiva. There were also some stories by Peretz
that included supernatural themes (for example, angels and Elijah the prophet),
such as “The Seven Good Years” and “At a Corpse's Deathbed.” The section with
these tales was apparently entitled “The Bizarre” to mark them as unrealistic and
thereby justify their inclusion along with other tales of the fantastic. Jewish holi­
days and biblical heroes were absent from the sixth book of Der onfanger, and the
section called "Labor” dominated the book, occupying no of its 250 pages.15
Der onfanger leaves one to wonder how, if at all, students in Workmen's Circle
schools learned about Judaism.
 78 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

Jewish History
Part of the answer is provided by the second main subject in the curriculum of the
Yiddish schools: Jewish history. Biblical narratives were taught in the framework of
Jewish history, despite the fact that treating the Bible as history raised many prob­
lems for avowed secularists.
Chaim Lieberman (1890-1963), one of the founders of the Farband schools,
argued for the inclusion of biblical myths and miracles in teaching Jewish history.
“The history of facts and events appeals only to reason, whereas mythology and its
fascinating legends stimulate the imagination. The legendary part of history is just
as necessary for the child’s development as the dry, colorless facts.” 16 Specifically,
Lieberman advocated beginning instruction of Jewish history with the Genesis
story of creation, then continuing to the Flood, Tower of Babel, and so on. This
would powerfully convey to the children that the Jewish people were an integral
part of nature and an organic outgrowth of universal history.
Chaim Bez (Bezprozvany) (1904-1983), the pedagogue who developed the
teaching of Jewish history in the Workmen's Circle schools, took the opposing posi­
tion. Teaching the myths of Genesis would go against the schools' secular world­
view. It would also clash with the theory of evolution and with progressive ideas on
evil and the means by which evil should be combated. The teaching of Jewish his­
tory, he argued, should not begin with the story of creation, but with Abraham.
Bez did agree with the idea, which was raised by Lieberman and others, that
the teaching of biblical tales, though formally conducted under the rubric of Jewish
history, had mainly literary and aesthetic objectives: “to let the children enjoy the
pretty fables, stories, and poems that are contained in the Bible." In selecting Bible
stories to be taught to children, their artistic value was the paramount criteria.
“One should tell only those legends which, because of their artistic value, would be
told even if they had nothing to do with the Jews.”
Bez advocated altering the Biblical tales so that they would not convey theolog­
ical and religious ideas, which were inimical to atheists. He went to some length to
refute the view that the legends contained in the Bible were specimens of primor­
dial Jewish folk-creativity and should be maintained in their original form, much
like the tales of Greek mythology. He marshaled scholarly opinion to argue that
the original oral tales had been rational narratives, which only centuries later were
embellished with religious elements and messages. Therefore, by removing the
theological elements from biblical tales, one restored them to their original form.
The act of altering the stories was, consequently, justified from a scholarly perspec­
tive, ideologically and educationally necessary, and even artistically beneficial to the
stories themselves.
In balancing the principles o f the aesthetic enjoyment of Bible tales and main­
taining the schools' secular worldview, Bez struck the following compromise: “We
should liberate the legends from their theological coating, but not empty them of
the charm of extraordinariness. A donkey can speak, a rock can give forth water,
the sun and moon may stand still. But God does not reveal himself to people.
 Yiddish Schools in America 79

Angels do not go up or down from heaven, and they do not visit Abraham. Three
men visited the old patriarch."17
A textbook which presented the tales of the Pentateuch according to Bez's
approach was composed by Jacob (Yankev) Levin. Entitled Mayses un legendesfun der
Yidisher geshichte (Stories and Legends fromJewish History) (with no intended irony), it
was published in 1928 and achieved four printings by 1938. Mayses un legendes began
with the birth of Abraham and ended with the death of Moses, weaving together
biblical tales and some rabbinic Midrash, but completely eliminating God from the
narrative. Thus, Abraham destroyed the idols in his father’s shop, telling his father
that the idols had quarreled with each otjier, but he did not conclude, as in the
Midrash, that there was one supreme and incorporeal God.18
Certain stories where God figured as an actor were deleted, such as the binding
of Isaac, and others were modified, such as the burning bush, where Moses “heard
something, as if a voice were speaking to him.” Elsewhere, miraculous events were
retained, but not attributed to God: Sodom was destroyed by a storm of fire and
sulfur, Egypt was struck by ten plagues, but no attribution was given as to who or
what caused these events. The Dead Sea parted when Moses lifted his staff.19
Levin even rewrote the giving o f the Ten Commandments, which in his version
were declared by Moses when he went up on Mount Sinai. Gone was the first com­
mandment ("I am the Lord your God who took you out of the Land of Egypt"), the
second commandment was truncated to read “you shall not make idols or images,
you shall not bow down to them or worship them,” and the third was rendered “you
shall not swear falsely.” The tenth commandment was split into two to retain the
number of ten commandments.20 Levin justified his editorial method as follows:

While we have freed ourselves from the entire religious world-view, and lost our
awe for the Bible as a religious book, we have retained our respect for it as an
artistic-literary monument. . . . These are no longer religious tales, which are the
foundation of the Jewish religion. They are simply pretty stories which children
can enjoy, and which give them some cultural-historical information. . ..
All the stories in the Pentateuch are, after all, only stories, which have behind
them almost no historical background. . . . The removal of their religious and
supernatural elements helps to enlarge and elevate their heroes. Beforehand,
the heroes acted as heroes only thanks to the aid and inspiration of God. Now
they act on their own responsibility, at their own initiative, thanks to their own
greatness or smallness.21

The inclusion of Bible stories under the rubric of Jewish history was an ingen­
ious device, laden with irony. (Where else did the teaching of history consist largely
of material which the teachers considered nonhistorical?) It also involved excising
the laws and commandments from the Pentateuch. The law—whether ritual,
social, and ethical, whether it be the laws o f Passover, kashrut, charity, or honesty in
weights and measures—was not part of the Bible as taught in Workmen's Circle
schools. Only stories remained.
 80 D A V I D E. F I S H M A N

A rationalist and secular approach to postbiblical Jewish history was much easier
to sustain. Chaim Bez's Yidn amol (Jews in the Past), a text and workbook on Jewish his­
tory from the Babylonian exile to the Bar Kochba uprising, offered a quasi-Bundist
reading of Jewish history. It began with an excursus on the Jews as a worldwide
nation, for whom dispersion was a historical norm rather than an anomaly. The open­
ing section also stressed that Jewish life had undergone many changes throughout the
centuries: economically (from agriculture to commerce and later crafts), socially
(from rural life to cities), and culturally (from one language to another and one
worldview to another) as Jews interacted with different peoples. Thus, from the very
outset, Yidn amol disassociated itself from Zionist and religious views on the central­
ity of the land of Israel, Judaism, and Hebrew in the Jewish historical experience.22
The textbook favored social and political history over cultural and religious his­
tory in its narrative. It did not discuss the development of the oral law, rabbinic lit­
erature, or the ancient synagogue. Religious divisions in ancient Jewry were
presented in secular, cultural terms. The Hellenists abandoned the Jewish lan­
guage, did not celebrate Jewish holidays, admired all that was Greek, and were not
perturbed by Greek persecution o f the Jews. They were, in short, portrayed as the
ancient prototypes of “assimilationists.” Yidn amol depicted the Maccabean revolt
as a struggle for freedom against foreign imperial rule and brutal political oppres­
sion, without reference to the religious edicts of Antiochus.
The clash between the Pharisees and Sadducees was presented in Marxist, class-
based terms. The Pharisees were "a people’s party which expressed the moods of the
masses.. . . The Sadducees were the party of the rulers, the money-men and the land­
owners." Whereas the Pharisees opposed war, aggression, and imposing Judaism on
vanquished peoples, the Sadducees sought to conquer the port cities on the coast in
order to advance their economic interests. There was no mention o f religious differ­
ences between the two groups in Yidn amol, other than with regard to the doctrine of
the afterlife. The latter was explained as an article of faith developed by the poor
masses, which gave them comfort in their suffering, and which was adopted by the
Pharisees. The Sadducees, who were wealthy, had no need for such a doctrine. While
the Pharisees were always ready to ameliorate old, harsh laws, the Sadducees were
very strict. "The strictness of the Sadducean judges was simply a means to punish
harshly the dissatisfied members of the people." In short, the political and social
divides of late Imperial Russia were transposed onto ancient Judea.23
Yidn amol did not include a section on the sages of the Mishnah or legends
about individual sages (with the exception of Hillel). The teaching of legends
under the rubric of history was apparently restricted to the Bible, which was taught
to younger children. Interestingly enough, the book did have an extensive, and
sympathetic, chapter on Jesus o f Nazareth.

Jewish Holidays
As noted earlier, beyond the formal curriculum, Jewish holiday celebrations
remained an issue for the secular Yiddish schools. The first conference of
 Yiddish Schools in America 81

Workmen's Circle schools, held in 1920, resolved that the following holidays be
observed:

Passover—as the liberation holiday of the Jews, Lag Ba'omer—in commemora­

tion of the struggle of Bar Kokhba and Rabbi Akiva, May 1st—as the holiday of
workers' brotherhood and world peace, Chanukah—as the holiday of liberation
from Greek oppression, March 8th—the holiday of the workers' struggle for
liberation, Purim—as a children's holiday (costumes, shalakh-manos and other
forms of entertainment), 4th of July—the liberation of America, February 12th
(Lincoln’s birthday)—the liberation of the Negroes, Russian revolution—the con­
ference leaves the choice of day to the individual school [February or October],
Sukkos—one day.
The celebration of Shavuos as a nature-holiday was rejected by the confer­
ence, twelve votes vs. eleven.14

This list was noteworthy not only for its mixture of Jewish, socialist, and
American holidays, but also for its selections and deletions. As for the Jewish holi­
days, the notable absences were first, the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom
Kippur. The latter were presumably considered to be overtly religious, with their
themes o f divine judgment and repentance. Second, Simhas Torah and Shavuos,
with their focus on the Torah, were excluded. The traditional day o f mourning for
the destruction of the Temple, Tishah B’av, was also absent.25
Perhaps a more basic, and probably unconscious, omission was the celebration
or observance of the Sabbath. Indeed, most Workmen’s Circle and Sholem
Aleichem schools in the 1920s and 1930s held classes on Saturdays and did not mark
the Sabbath in any way.26
While Jewish holidays were not a formal subject in the curriculum, time was set
aside both to teach about them and to celebrate them. In the classroom, the holi­
days were largely taught "from a cultural historical perspective." This meant that
the teacher told the children how the holiday had been celebrated in the past. He or
she described the stories and legends, preparations, rituals, liturgical texts, and cus­
toms traditionally associated with the holiday. Then the teacher could, if he or she
desired, mention the critical scientific view of the holiday, which cast some doubt
on the historicity of the events it commemorated, or which placed the holiday itself
in the context of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. In either case, the teacher drew the
conclusion, either explicitly or obliquely, that while the holiday’s religious rituals
were no longer applicable, there was great Jewish-national and/or social signifi­
cance to the idea of the holiday.27
In the Farband schools, the critical, scholarly view on the holidays was not pre­
sented as a counterweight to the traditional one. Instead, the Jewish national
aspects of the holidays were accentuated. The Farband schools were, after all,
socialist-Zionist in orientation, and stressed the holiday’s relationship to the land of
Israel and Jewish national sovereignty, something the Workmen’s Circle and
 82 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

Sholem Aleichem schools did not and could not do. Nevertheless, in describing rit­
uals, the approach was “cultural historical." As Entin explained:

One might say that while we do not caution our children to "keep the Sabbath
day,” we do teach them quite well to “remember the Sabbath day." We do not
study the laws of Sabbath with young children, but we do instill in them a sense
of the beauty and holiness of the Sabbath.
We are Jewish nationalists, and we therefore explain to the children the
national significance of the Jewish holidays, and we celebrate them accordingly.
But we do not conceal from the children how Jews in the past, and the religious
Jews today, conceive of and observe the Jewish holidays.1®

Talking about the rituals of the holidays in the past tense rather than perform­
ing the rituals themselves was the central feature of holiday instruction in all three
Yiddish school systems. Yiddish educator Yudl Mark later scoffingly dubbed this
approach "museum Judaism."29 The Workmen's Circle took the most restrictive
approach—one could talk about rituals, but not display or demonstrate them. A
teacher who brought a lulav and esrog into class was reprimanded by his colleagues.
The Farband schools, on the other hand, were the most expansive in offering a "cul­
tural historical” exposition of religious rituals, and introduced a separate subject
into the school curriculum of the middle grades called "Jewish ethnology." Jewish
ethnology was the curricular framework for teaching about Jewish religious rituals,
texts, and concepts. The academic-sounding title intended to make clear that the
attitude was one of dispassionate distance and not religious belief.30
Holiday celebrations in the Yiddish schools usually took the form of school
assemblies, often with parents in attendance, at which the children presented a lit­
erary, dramatic, and musical program.31 Yiddish poems with holiday themes were
recited, and poets such as Avrom Reisin, Y. Goichberg, and others wrote holiday
pieces especially for the schools. Holiday material was gleaned from the pages of
the two main Yiddish children’s magazines, Kinder tsaytung and Kinder zhumal, pub­
lished respectively by the Workmen’s Circle and Sholem Aleichem schools.
Dramatic presentations were common. In practice, the main holiday celebrations
were Chanukah, Purim, and Passover, and in many Yiddish schools, they were the
only Jewish holidays celebrated.32
There were, however, clear boundaries to the school celebrations. Blessings,
prayers, and liturgical texts were not recited. Indeed, Chanukah candles were not lit
in Workmen’s Circle and Sholem Aleichem schools in the 1920s and 1930s, because
this was considered a religious ritual (with a blessing) which commemorated an
ostensible divine miracle.33

The Shift toward Tradition: 1938-1947

The attitude of Yiddish educators toward Jewish religious tradition began to shift in
the late 1930s. The growing sympathy toward tradition was, to a large extent, part
 Yiddish Schools in America 83

of a broader trend among Yiddish intellectuals who became disillusioned with

European civilization as the brutality of German Nazism and Soviet Communism
became evident, and as they observed the indifference of the West toward the
plight of European Jewry. In 1938, Jacob Glatstein published his well-known poem
“A gute nacht velt,” with its putative call for a return to the ghetto, and a group of
Yiddishist intellectuals headed by Elias Tcherikower published the journal Oyfh
sheydveg, which renounced socialism, emancipation, and secularism as false gods.
The turn to tradition among Yiddish educators was, consciously and unconsciously,
an expression of their rapprochement with the rest of Jewry—with the nonsocial­
ist and non-Yiddishist Jews—in a time of common peril. As such, it gained even
greater momentum during the years of World War II and the European Jewish
catastrophe.
Other, more internal forces underlay the shift toward tradition in the Yiddish
schools. Foremost was the changed complexion of the schools' student population
in the quarter century since their establishment. In the 1910s, Jewish religious tradi­
tions were strong in the students' homes and immigrant neighborhoods. The
children came to the Yiddish school with a certain pool of traditional Jewish reli­
gious ideas and knowledge, which the schools sought to either combat, transform,
or supplement. But by the late 1930s, educators noticed that the children in the
Yiddish schools were clean slates when it came to knowledge about traditional
Judaism. Whatever knowledge the schools did not provide, the children would sim­
ply not have. The sight of graduates who could speak Yiddish, but knew virtually
nothing about Judaism and felt no connection to it, led some educators to revise
their thinking.34
The intellectual leader of the movement for traditionalism was Leybush Lehrer
(1887-1964), the director of the Sholem Aleichem Institute, as well as the head of
YIVO's psychological-pedagogical section. In a series of books and articles, lec­
tures, and meetings, Lehrer argued that Judaism was not a religion at all, but a
national cultural system of symbols, collective memories, and rituals. Lehrer con­
tended that the meaning and value of Jewish customs was social-psychological
rather than rational, and that many of them could be practiced, even without any
belief in God.35 While not supporting all of Lehrer's theories, Yudl Mark
(1897-1975), the Consultant for Yiddish schools at the Jewish Education Committee
of New York and editor of the Yiddish school’s pedagogical bulletin, also advocated
greater tradition in the schools. The Sholem Aleichem schools led the trend toward
tradition, and the larger network o f Workmen's Circle schools followed, albeit
more slowly and cautiously.
In 1938, the conference of the Sholem Aleichem school teachers resolved to
introduce Chumash as a separate subject, to celebrate all Jewish holidays, and instill
a positive attitude toward Jewish customs and practices.36
In 1940 Khumeshfar kinder (Chumash for Children), compiled by Shloyme Simon
(1895-1970) and based on the Yehoash Yiddish translation of the Bible, was pub­
lished. This 260-page book was intended for somewhat older children than the
 84 D A V I D E. FISHMAN

targeted audience of Levin’s Mayses un legendes fun der yidisher geshichte. Although
abbreviated and linguistically edited, it was in many ways a traditional Chumash. It
did not attempt to read God out of the text: It opened with "In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth,” the Ten Commandments were presented in their
original form, as was the text of shema yisrael. Narrative still overwhelmingly
outweighed law, with Genesis occupying half of Khumesh far kinder, but a crucial
twenty-three-page section gave a digest of biblical laws by subject: fair justice,
damages, supporting the weak, loans, slaves, death penalty, cities of refuge, war,
the king, shemita, yovel, agriculture, Sabbath, holidays, idolatry, and everyday
behavior.37
A Sabbath ritual began to appear in the Sholem Aleichem schools at about this
time—a Friday afternoon school assembly, or a Friday night program for parents
(with occasional student participation) called an oynegshabbes (joy of the Sabbath).
First introduced by Lehrer at the Sholem Aleichem Institute’s summer camp, Camp
Boiberik, the following ceremony was adopted in the Sholem Aleichem schools:
candles were lit (without a blessing) and the traditional hymn "Sholem Aleichem”
and Yiddish Sabbath songs were sung in unison. Selections from the weekly Torah
portion were read (in Yiddish). An intermission for refreshments and conversation
followed. After the break, selections from Yiddish literature were recited. The
Yiddishist oyneg shabbes was thus a mix of traditional religious ritual (candles, the
hymn “Sholem Aleichem”), communal singing, and a literary program. While
some schools charged an admission fee to the parent oyneg shabbes, teacher
Shloyme Simon noted in his memoirs that “we can say with complete confidence
that there was often more religious feeling in our oyneg shabbes, than in many syna­
gogues during their davening.”*8
Similarly, holiday celebrations also developed away from the concert or liter-
ary-dramatic program in the direction of public ceremonial ritual. In 1940, the
Sholem Aleichem Institute published Undzer hagode (Our Hagadah), a Yiddish lan­
guage hagadah compiled by a committee of educators, which became the basis for
the Workmen’s Circle’s A naye hagode shel peysekh (A New Hagadah for Passover), pub­
lished in 1946. Here, as in the oyneg shabbes, the syncretism of religious ritual and
secular culture was on display.
In the Workmen’s Circle’s A naye hagode shel peysekh, much o f the structure of
the traditional hagadah was maintained. It opened with the raising of a cup of wine
(and reciting a poem instead of a blessing), and ended with the singing of "Had
gadya.” Many sections were identified by Hebrew names (ke-ha lahma anya, avadim
hayinu), although the text itself was entirely in Yiddish. The hagadah featured the
traditional four questions, a rhymed dramatic reading based on the four sons, and
the traditional passages on matzah and maror.
But otherwise, this hagadah was different from all others. It consisted largely of
Yiddish poems on the Egyptian slavery and Moses, and of select biblical passages
(not from the hagadah) on the Exodus. God was not mentioned even once in its
account of the story of the Exodus. (He did make a brief appearance toward the
end, in the text of Isaiah’s vision on the end of days.) The tension between tradition
 Yiddish Schools in America 85

and secularism reached its culmination in the section entitled "ve-hi she-amdah/’ In
the traditional hagadaht it read:

And it [the promise from God to Abraham] stood by our ancestors and us. For
more than one has risen up against us to destroy us. For in every generation
they rise up against us to destroy us. But the Holy One, blessed by He, saves us
from their hand.

In A naye hagode shel peysekh, the passage was rendered quite differently:

LEADER: And what stood by us in all generations, our ancestors and us? For
more than one has risen up against us to annihilate us. For in every generation,
enemies arise to destroy us! What stood by us in all generations?

ALL ASSEMBLED: Our faith in truth and justice, and our courage to dedicate
ourselves to all that is holy and dear—rescue us from the hands of our enemies.39

The Workmen's Circle hagadah also negotiated carefully between the themes of
Jewish national liberation and universal liberation. While it included the traditional
passage of anger against the Gentiles, "pour out thy wrath,” and a short song on
Elijah the prophet coming “with Messiah the son of David,” it did not offer the tra­
ditional concluding exclamation “next year in Jerusalem” or any other reference to
a return to the Land of Israel. Instead, A naye hagode shel peysekh inserted poems by
S. An-sky and A. Liessin that celebrated the Jews' moral passion, derived from cen­
turies of wandering and suffering, to build a better world. The final poem in the
booklet, before "had gadya" was Avrom Reisin's paean to world peace, "Dos naye
lid" (The New Song):

Un zol vi vayt, nokh zayn di tsayt

fun libe un fun sholem;
dokh kumen vet, tsi fri tsi shpet
di tsayt—es iz keyn kholem.40

As part of this turn toward tradition, the Sholem Aleichem schools, which had
initially been adamantly Yiddishist and anti-Hebrew (see their 1927 declaration of
principles above), resolved in 1940 to introduce the teaching o f Hebrew into their
elementary schools. Despite pedagogical objections that teaching two languages
simultaneously would be too difficult and despite ideological objections to creep­
ing Zionism, the argument which won the day was that without Hebrew the chil­
dren would be deprived o f the possibility of ever using a siddur.41
The réévaluation of tradition in the 1940s also made an impact on the central
subject in the Yiddish schools—Yiddish language and literature. The canon of liter­
ary texts taught in the higher grades of the Yiddish elementary schools and in
Yiddish mitlshuls shifted quite sharply. One need only compare two anthologies pre­
pared by the same authors—Chaim Bez and Zalmen Efroikin's Undzer vort (Our
Word) of 1935 with their Dos yidishe vort (TheJewish Word) of 1947.
 86 DA V I D E. F I S H M A N

The thrust o f Undzer vort was to integrate the teaching of socialism and Yiddish
literature, rather than having them taught as separate subjects. (See the seven goals
of the Workmen's Circle schools above.) Parts i and 2 of the anthology, entitled
"Worker Children” and "Poverty and Struggle,” featured Yiddish literary selections
on Jewish poverty in the old country and America, strikes, demonstrations, the
socialist movement (including the texts of the "International" and the Bundist
anthem "Di shvue"), and racism in America. Part 3, "War,” depicted the horrors of
the First World War from the antiwar perspective of American socialism. These
three sections occupied 70 percent of the anthology. Judaism was relegated to the
back of the book, to the sections called "The Jewish Child in the Old Country” and
"Stories and Legends.” Stories on the Jewish holidays were presented in the section
on the foreign and far-off old country past, whereas the immediate past and pres­
ent were occupied with social struggle.42
Twelve years later, Bez and Efroikin’s was an entirely different kind of literary
anthology. Social struggle shrank to a theme inside the section entided "America.” The
major rubrics were those on the Jewish holidays and collections of aggadic tales in sec­
tions called "From the Old Well." There were separate sections for three major writ­
ers—Sholem Aleichem, Avrom Reisin, and I. L. Peretz—and a section on the
Holocaust. Instead of the biographies of socialist leaders (Eugene V. Debs, Ferdinand
Lassalle, Karl Marx) found in Undzer vort, Dos yidishe vort offered biographies of
medieval rabbis (Rashi, Yehudah Ha-Levy, Judah the Pious, and Meir of Rothenburg).
The enhanced position of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz was the main revision
in the Yiddish literary canon for young readers. Sholem Aleichem's stories were
used to portray the shtetl, the heder, and Sabbath and Jewish holidays; Peretz's folk-
stimleche geshichtn and khsidish were used to present religious and Hasidic themes in
artistic form. Whereas these two classic authors occupied 12 percent of Undzer vort
(fifty-five pages), their selections constituted 25 percent of Dos yidishe vort (eighty
pages). The réévaluation of the religious tradition and longing for the destroyed
world of East European Jewry went hand in hand and together led educators to
place greater emphasis on Sholem Aleichem and Peretz. Youth editions of two of
Sholem Aleichem's major works, Funem yarid and Mod peysi dem khazns, appeared
for the first time in New York in 1940 and 1946, during the period o f increased tradi­
tionalism. And the first anthology of Peretz’s works for Yiddish mitlshuls appeared
somewhat later, in 1952.43

Secular Jewish Identity in the Yiddish Schools

While the American Yiddish schools embraced the idea of secular Jewish identity,
there was considerable disagreement, internal tension, and ambivalence when it
came to concretizing this idea in a school curriculum. The Workmen's Circle and
Sholem Aleichem schools, while opposed to religion, hedged when it came to con­
ducting the radical surgery o f excising the religious out of Jewish identity alto­
gether. Secular rationales—sometimes quite artificially contrived—were found to
justify the telling of Bible tales, the celebration of Jewish holidays, and the teaching
of (or rather about) Jewish religious customs. Only in the Soviet Union and among
 Yiddish Schools in America 87

American Jewish Communists was the idea of a new, fully secular Jewish identity
based on Yiddish taken to its logical conclusion.
The one firm antireligious taboo in the American Yiddish schools of the 1920s
and 1930s was God—speaking of God as a living, acting being or reciting prayers
and blessings. The Farband schools overcame even the ban on God by adopting a
"cultural historical” and "ethnological” approach to religious and liturgical texts,
which were studied as part of the national literary heritage and for the sake of
national unity with religious Jews. The Sholem Aleichem schools adopted a similar
approach beginning in 1938.
Given the ideological inconsistencies and ambiguities exhibited by the Yiddish
secular educators, it is useful to understand their conflicted relationship to religious
tradition not only as an expression of their ideological positions but also as a prod­
uct of their life experiences. Most Yiddish educators belonged to a single genera­
tion. They were born in Eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century
and went to traditional heders. They broke with religious faith and observance and
joined a Jewish or Russian socialist movement around the time of the 1905 revolu­
tion and emigrated to America (or migrated to an East European metropolis) by
1917. Central to their life story was their rebellion against their politically and cul­
turally conservative parents, and against the older generation of their town or
street (and later on, their geographic separation from their parents and native com­
munities). Although they identified themselves as social radicals, they had not
played an important role in political events or in the labor movement per se. Their
initiation into radicalism was the Sabbath day when they joined a gathering of
young men and women in the forest outside of town, or in a secluded apartment,
and lit a cigarette, talked with members of the opposite sex, exchanged revolution­
ary pamphlets, and sang revolutionary songs. In short, their rebellion against their
religious upbringing was integral to their coming of age. Indeed, their rebellion
against religion was a much more vivid and dramatic experience than their adop­
tion of radical political and social ideas.
Years later, in confronting the question of religion and secularism, these
Yiddish educators were unconsciously revisiting the most important event in their
lives, the time when they broke with their parents. Leybush Lehrer was the only
Yiddish educator to openly state that a great collective psychodrama was at work in
the secularism of Yiddish educators. Writing in the late 1930s and 1940s, Lehrer
called on his fellow Yiddish educators to make their peace with their dead parents
and with their childhood communities, which were being destroyed by the Nazis.44
Writing as a polemicist on behalf o f more tradition, Lehrer failed to notice that the
Yiddish educators' ambivalence toward their parents and their childhood religious
upbringing was greater than for what he gave them credit. They could not part
with the stories of the Chumash, even as they threw God out of the text; they could
not resist talking about the rituals of the holidays, even as they dismissed them as
mere "cultural history.” Nevertheless, Lehrer had put his finger on the complex
interplay between the ideology and the social psychology of a generation of East
European Jews that lay at the heart of Yiddish secularism.
 88 D A V I D E. F I S H M A N

NOTES
1. On the secularizing role o f nationalism, see Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno:
University o f Nevada Press, 1991). On the difficult relations between Zionism and Jewish reli­
gious orthodoxy, see Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist
Movement (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society o f America, 1988), and Gideon Shimoni,
Zionist Ideology (Hanover: University Press o f New England, Brandeis University Press, 1995).
2. This is the subject o f my book, The Rise of Modem Yiddish Culture: Historical Studies
(Pittsburgh: University o f Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
3. Di ershte yidishe shprach-konferents (Vilna: YIVO, 1931), 86-87.
4. "Vi zol men dertsien undzere kinder do in land?” Di varhayt, April 1909, reprinted in Yoel
Entin: Gezamlte shriftn (New York, i960), 1:1-4.
5. “Di bildung fun yidishe zin un tekhter,” Di varhayt, January 13, 1910, reprinted in Yoel
Entin: Gezamlte shriftn, 10-14.
6. Tzivyon, “ Der arbeter ring un zayne kultur-oyfgaben,” in Der arbeiter ring: Zamel buch—
suvenir (New York: Workmen’s Circle, 1910), 167-187, portions o f which are cited by Sh. Niger,
In kamf fa r a nayer dertsiung (New York: Educational Department o f the Workmen's Circle,
1940), 45- 46 .
7. Herman Frank, “Di yidishe shul bavegung iber der velt," Shul-almanach: Di yidishe mod-
eme shul oyf der velt (Philadelphia: Central Committee o f Workman’s Circle Schools, 1935),
348-364; see figures on 353, 356; Israel S. Chipkin, Twenty-Five Years of Jewish Education in the
United States (New York: Jewish Education Association o f New York City, 1937), 37,117.
8. F. Gelibter, “ Di Arbeter Ring shuln,” Shul-almanach, 27-66, see especially 38-39,57; Frank,
“ Di yidishe shul.”
9. L. Shpizman, "Etapn in der geshichte fun der tsionistisher arbeter-bavegung in di
fareynikte shtatn,” Geshichtefun der tsionistisherarbeter-bavegung in amerike (New York: Yiddisher
Kemfer, 1955), 2:408.
10. “ Printsipn fun sholem aleichem folk institut (1927)," in Der derech Jim sholem aleichem insti­
tute, ed. Sh. Gutman (New York: Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, 1972), 117-118.
11. Niger, In kamf fa r a nayer dertsiung, 108. The goals are included in the brochure Di yidishe
arbeiter ring shul, ed. Jacob (Yankev) Levin (New York: Educational Department o f the
Workmen’s Circle, 1920), 8.
12. Der yidisher arbeiter ring shul, 7.
13. The full text o f the declaration is printed in Shul-almanach (Philadelphia, 1935), 150-151.
The IWO schools, which offered antireligious instruction in the 1930s, are not examined in this
essay
14. The exceptions to this rule were the Farband schools, which did teach Bible as a separate
subject.
15. See Yudl Mark's evaluation o f Der onfanger and other textbooks in “ Di lernbicher far der
yidisher shul in amerike," in Shul-pinkes, ed. Shloime Bercovich, M. Brownstone, Yudel Mark,
and Chaim Pomerantz (Chicago: Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, 1948), 260-335.
16. Chaim Lieberman, Di yidishe religion in der natsyonal-radikaler dertsiung (New York, 1915), 28.
17. Ch. Be-ni (Bezprozvany), “ Nit ratsionalizirn nor primitivizirn," Shul un lerer, no. 1
(January-March 1927): 32-36.
18. Jacob (Yankev) Levin, Mayses un legendes Jun der yidisher geshichte, vol. 1, Fun Avrom’s geburt
biz Moyshe’s toyt (From the birth of Abraham until the death of Moses) (New York: "Yidishe
Shul"/H ebrew Publishing Co., 1928), 4-5.
19. Levin, Mayses un legendes, 16, 76, 85.
20. Ibid., 90- 91 . The seventh commandment against adultery was also changed to read “You
shall not act spoiled [tselozn]."
21. Ibid., vii-viii.
 Yiddish Schools in America 89

22. Ch. Bez (Bezprozvany), Yidn amol (New York: Max N. Meisel, 1932), 9-14.
23. Ibid., 104-122.
24. Niger, In kamf far a nayer dertsiung, 115-116.
25. The omission o f certain American holidays was also telling: There was no Washington's
Birthday (perhaps because the United States was a capitalist nation) and no Memorial Day (the
Workmen’s Circle had opposed American entry into the Great War).
26. See the memoirs o f teachers Shloyme Berkovitch and Aaron Glants-Leyeles in Shul-
pinkes, 187-188, 213.
27. See the poignant description by Berkovitch in Ibid, 180-186.
28. Joel Entin, "Our New Jewish Education,” in Gezamlte shriftn, 90-91.
29. Yudl Mark, "Judaism and Secularism in and around Our Schools," Shul-pirtkes, 9-68,
quote from p. 22.
30. Entin, Gezamlte shriftn, 68.
31. Unzershul 2 (January 1932): 31; Unzershul 2 (February 1932): 31. Unzershul was the monthly
journal o f the Education Department o f the Workmen's Circle.
32. In 1935, the pedagogical bulletin o f the Sholem Aleichem schools published bibliogra­
phies o f available Yiddish holiday plays for Chanukah, Purim, Passover, Shavuot, Lag
Ba'omer—and May 1. "D er inhalt fun di biz itstike pedagogishe buletenen," Pedagogisher
buleten, no. 1 (November 1941): 4.
33. Yudl Mark, Shul-pinkes, 16-17.
34. See, for example, Leybush Lehrer, “ Veldeche yidishkayt" (1937), in Azoy zenen yidn (New
York: Matones, 1959). 303-312, and his penetrating analysis o f the causes leading to a réévalua­
tion o f Jewish tradition in Yiddishist circles in "Got, un azoy vayter" (1942), in Azoy zenen yidn,
313- 318.
35. Leibush Lehrer, Yidishkayt un andere problemen (New York: Matones, 1940): idem, Azoy
zenen yidn; Fun dor tsu dor (New York: Matones, 1959). In English, see his Symbol and Substance,
with an appreciation by Aaron Zeidin and translated by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York, 1965).
36. Yudl Mark, "Toward a History o f the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute," in Der derech fun
sholem aleychem institute, 17-30. A year later, in 1939, the Workmen’s Circle schools adopted a res­
olution urging the composition o f uniform ritual ceremonies to celebrate Passover, Purim,
Chanukah, and May 1 in the schools; Niger, In kamf far a nayer dertsiung, 135.
37. Shloyme Simon, comp., Khumesh fa r kinder loyt yehoash, ed. Yudl Mark (New York:
Matones, 1940).
38. Shloyme Simon, “The History o f One Sholem Aleichem School," Der derech fun sholem
aleychem folk institute, 73-74. In the postwar years, the recitation o f kiddush (in Hebrew) was
introduced.
39. I. J. Schwartz, H. Novak, and J. Levin, comps., A naye hagode shel peysekh (New York:
Educational Committee o f the Workmen's Circle, 1946), 11 (not paginated).
40. A naye hagode shel peysekh, 12 -13,18 -19 , 24.
41. Mark, “Toward o f History," 19-20.
42. Z. Efroikin and Chaim Bez, Undzer vort, literarish-gezelshaftlekhe khrestomatye (New York:
Max N. Meisel, 1935).
43. Chaim Bez and Zalmen Efroikin, Dos yidishe vort: Leyenbukh far der yidisher shul (New
York: Educational Department o f the Workmen’s Circle, 1947). On Yiddish literature for chil­
dren and youth in America, see Kh. Sh. Kazhdan’s study and bibliography in Shul-pinkes,
335-379. The Peretz volume was Fun Peretz’s oytser (New York: Educational Department o f the
Workmen’s Circle, 1952).
44. See the essays cited in notes 34-35 and Lehrer's group portrait o f his generation in Di tsiln
fun kemp boiberik in licht Jun zayn geshichte (New York, 1962), 7.
 Beyond Assimilation
INTRODUCING SUBJECTIVITY
TO G E R M A N - J E W I S H HISTORY

SCOTT SPECTOR

In a famous lecture delivered at the World Jewish Congress in Brussels in 1966,

Gershom Scholem recalled the history of German Jewish assimilation.1 It is an
astonishing and elegant lecture—piercingly incisive, breathtaking in its synthesis. It
tracks the path from the relative autonomy and integrity o f a pre-emancipated
Jewish community in Germany through the ambitious, idealistic, but fatally
wrongheaded project of assimilation. This outline has come in the meantime to be
known as the orthodox view of German Jewish history. There are many brilliant
insights in Scholem’s lecture "Germans and Jews,” which also has its share of out­
rageous and untenable ones; but one of the former that has been little noted is his
early disclaimer that his own title forced him onto what he understood to be both
epistemologically and ontologically shaky ground. "For not all ‘Germans’ are
Germans and not all ‘Jews’ are Jews” is the elegant truth forgotten by those citing
the lecture, by the historiography it inspired, and, conveniently, by Scholem himself
through the rest of his address.2 To speak of “the Germans” and “the Jews” in this
period—the scare quotes are Scholem’s—is to descend into the unsustainable realm
of generalization worthy of the coarsest anti-Semites. The philosophically trained
Scholem did not bring himself to say that the embrace of such “questionable cate­
gories” is justified, but rather that one’s ability properly to differentiate rather than
to use gross categories has been hampered by the memory of a cataclysm executed,
after all, by people who saw no use of any such distinctions. This was a sympathetic
claim, perhaps, but not an intellectually persuasive one, and one has the sense that
Scholem, too, is embarrassed by the lack of rigor.
It seems that to remember assimilation in the way Scholem would like—a way,
that is, that would make sense o f the catastrophe of German Judaism as well as the
hope of the fledgling State of Israel—he had to forget the complex ways in which
individual consciousnesses brushed against the grain of abstract collectivities. The
poignancy of this gesture derives from the fact that Scholem was speaking not only
as an exponent of the first generation of the orthodox school o f German Jewish
historiography, but also as a member of the last generation of its objects of study
When he spoke of the “emotional confusion of the German Jews between 1820 and
1920”—a confusion, he argued, essential to understand if one is to grasp the fraught
 Beyond Assimilation 91

phenomenon of “German Jewishness”—the listeners were aware that Scholem was

one of those Jews.3 He was both subject and object of the analysis he offered, and
this is the key of a rhetoric which slipped easily from categories of identity at play
for assimilated Jews and those available to post-Holocaust historians.
As historian and historical object, Scholem offers an extreme case o f a tendency
I want to call attention to, and that is the way that histories of German Jewish cul­
ture suffer from an excess of empathy with their subjects. By an excess of empathy,
I am referring to the ways in which scholars have adopted an assumption of a prob­
lematic which might be called the "German Jewish identity crisis,” as well as the
categories of identity and culture that undergirded it. This empathy, and these
assumptions, have been the source of a scholarly production that by any relative
measure must be considered large in proportion to the size of the demographic
group it focuses upon; furthermore, it has been an interesting literature, and even
a critical one. But the limitations o f these approaches, I want to argue somewhat
polemically, have led to a kind of impasse.4 That impasse is in provocative ways par­
allel to the situation of German-speaking Jewish culture producers in the first third
of the twentieth century.
As a strategy to get beyond what has been described as a dead end in the histo­
riography, and to open up questions obscured by it so far, the suggestion of this
essay is that we begin by forgetting what Scholem chose to remember, and to
remember, and expand upon, that which he invoked only to forget. To do so, it will
be necessary to speak both of the historiography and of its subjects. “Assimilation”
is a problematic both have shared. It is one, however, that needs to be subjected to
critical analysis, whereas the categories and concepts sustaining it have with few
exceptions been taken for granted by historical subjects as well as historians. Chief
among these is a notion of identity inherent in the dominant image o f assimilation.
That model of identity is one that assumes a spectrum of possible identifica­
tions running from the imagined pole of absolute Jewish identification (what Franz
Rosenzweig called “dissimilation”) at one end to complete appropriation of
German identity at the other.5 This spectral model was always meant to be flexible
in particular ways, not least because the notions of German and Jewish identifica­
tion were open: “total" assimilation might mean baptism and intermarriage, or else
the retention but absolute privatization of Jewish religious adherence; the most
extreme pole of Jewish identification could likewise be understood in terms of reli­
gious orthodoxy, secular Jewish nationalism, Jewish spiritualism, or some other cul­
tural and intellectual engagement specifically and primarily identified as Jewish. It
is often (if not always) assumed that these poles are ideal types, and that actual indi­
viduals find themselves somewhere along the spectrum in various combinations.
The model hence does seem to offer room for some degree of complexity; it may
even have developed as a more nuanced alternative to a simple binary of assimi­
lated and nonassimilated.
Yet, even seen “ideal-typologically,” the spectrum of relative assimilation is an
inadequate model, and a deceptive one. As the late Amos Funkenstein showed in
his 1995 essay “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” the long-lived distinctions between
 92 SCOTT SPECTOR

"spontaneous” and "acquired" cultural character, accidental adaptation and essen­

tial adoption, or stable essence and assimilatory appearance, are all themselves
powerfully ideological instruments of segregation, rather than descriptors of a cul­
tural condition. While cultural adaptation has been uneven over time and space, it
has nonetheless been universal; what is taken as authentic or traditional is often
another example of dynamic interaction with external cultures.6
Scholem knew too much to deny this, but he justified his narrative by distin­
guishing the German influence on the pre-emancipated Jewish community
through a "barely conscious process of osmosis” from the indelicate, program­
matic force o f self-conscious assimilation.7 The latter process would come to pro­
duce a "sinister and dangerous dialectic” whereby Jews were both required to
surrender their group identity and despised for the willingness and ability to do so.®
This analysis o f the double-bind o f the émancipation-assimilation pact is standard
fare in the tradition of historiography represented by Scholem's talk. It is therefore
all the more surprising that it is Scholem who points out what in his words "is now
often forgotten”—that is, that "assimilating" Jews in practice wished to retain
Judaism in some form. While assimilation as an abstraction (or even as a social
process promoted by a minority of community leaders) theoretically moves with­
out equivocation toward the dissolution of Jewishness and total absorption of gen­
tile German culture, individuals held on to their Jewishness "as a kind o f heritage,
as a creed, as an element unknowable and undefinable, yet clearly present in their
consciousness.”9 On one level, we are confronted here with the paradox of the sec­
ular Jew, who, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reminds us, is both a stranger and a more
diverse sort of creature than the “blandly generic term” would seem to indicate.10
On another level, Scholem's observation brings into view what his own focus on
assimilation as a paradigm, a program, and a seemingly inexorable historical
process obscures. In their own lives and consciousnesses, actually existing Jews did
not experience their relationship to Jewishness (or to Germanness, for that matter)
in the zero-sum-game terms of the politics of assimilation. Yerushalmi, taking a
skeptical stance toward the uneven and inconsistent positions o f these men and
women who hovered in an "undefined yet somehow real Jewishness,” diagnoses
their Judaism/Jewishness as contentless, “pure subjectivity."11
Scholem's and Yerushalmi's critiques of the secular Jew, especially the assimi­
lated German Jew, follow familiar lines, identifying the surrender o f an integral
Judaism as the root of an insoluble confusion, neurosis, or malaise.12 What has
been lacking in the study of secular Judaism has been a sustained analysis o f these
"troubled subjectivities,” rather than the wholesale pathologization of the secular
condition. Such a turn to inferiority could help answer questions about modern
German Jewish cultural production that remain unasked by the paradigms o f
assimilation in use in the orthodox historiography, as well as by its most articulate
critics.
A prominent revision o f the orthodox school is represented by the provocative
work of David Sorkin, who in several influential contributions has also sought to
leave behind the governing concepts o f emancipation and assimilation.13 Working
 Beyond Assimilation 93

principally in the formative period of German Jewish assimilation, Sorkin has

argued that an internal "ideology o f emancipation" was the motor o f the creation
o f a German Jewish "subculture” that was by its nature invisible to its own adher­
ents, who only imagined the process they were undergoing as one of abandonment
o f community. This argument, as Samuel Moyn points out, “sublates" or histori-
cizes the orthodox view, rather than repudiating it—it lifts the veil that assimilation
held before its own eyes but preserves the integrity of the categories upon which
the ideology o f assimilation depended.14 Sorkin's explanation remains so pro­
foundly structuralist as to leave little room for any subjectivity, or indeed to allow
for self-consciousness at any level. As Anthony LaVopa points out, "the irony
Sorkin finds is structural, not 'subjective.' ”15Sorkin is explicit about this distinction
at several points, arguing that "the community's invisibility [to itself] thus resulted
from a disparity between ideology and social reality. Invisibility was a structural
and not a subjective problem.”16 In turning to the concept of ideology, Sorkin relies
on an assumption of totalized false consciousness. He recognizes that ideology
requires both “a coherent system o f ideas and symbols" and also an institutional
foundation, but perhaps understandably shies from what I have described else­
where as the difficult but all important third level of ideology: the contradictory
ways in which subjects understand themselves within ideological systems, or how
they are “given identity.”17

Post-Assimilationist Reflections
When the novelist Jakob Wassermann published his memoir, My Life as German and
Jew, he seemed to be making a new claim for the possibilities and impossibilities
contained within the categories "German” and "Jew.”18 Resisting the notion of
separate and even opposing racial, ethnic, or cultural identities, his own life story
and the aesthetic path o f his works was laid out so as to avoid even the term
"German Jewish,” and to offer an alternative to symbiosis. Instead, Wassermann
and his work were at one and the same time "German” and “Jewish,” at odds with
themselves, and this dialectical rather than dialogical relationship was central to the
production o f literature.19 Wassermann's struggle is depicted in his memoir not as
the highly individuated experience of an artist with a dual identity, but as a univer­
sal condition; his descriptions of German identity sound more like discussions of
the "Jewish question” ; just as the tangential existence of the struggling writer is
merely a sharpened reflection of everyday human existence.10
While this memoir is a remarkable document for all of these border crossings,
coming as they do just when famously essentialized notions of German Jewish dif­
ference were being solidified, it also participates in these discursive processes.
Identity in his book is forged by blood and by climate, by insuperable tradition and
by inassimilable foreign culture. Wassermann presents himself as German and Jew
because there are such things as Germans and Jews, collective identities that define
their members as similar to all others within and distinct from all those outside of
them. Like the anti-Semitic and Zionist challenges to the Jewish participation in
German-language culture, Wassermann takes for granted the status of his own self
 94 SCOTT SPECTOR

and work as question or problem. For all of its complexity, My Life as German and
Jew, by virtue of its very appearance, is at the crest of the tide, rather than riding
against it. While Gershom Scholem identified Wassermann's text as a "cry into the
emptiness, one which recognized itself as such,”21 calling Scholem to the substance
o f Palestine, it shares with Scholem's critiques a universe of terms.22 Within this
universe, one could champion or oppose “assimilation,” but doing either was a
silent concession to the existence o f a German Jewish "identity crisis.”
The generations I am focusing on in this essay are those that could be called
“post-assimilationist.” Steven Aschheim has used the term more narrowly to
denote those German Jews of the turn of the century, and forward, “second gener­
ation” Jewish nationalists and Zionists in particular.23 But the fact is that whether
Zionist or “liberal,” the Jews of the generation coming of age at the turn of the
century and those after it were all in some sense "post-assimilationist" in that the
classical liberal-assimilationist position, with its optimism about a potentially
unproblematic fusion of Jewish (private) identities and German public ones, was no
longer available. As anyone who has attended to primary sources o f the period will
testify, liberal and Zionist Jews as well as their non-Jewish counterparts from the
Socialists to the anti-Semites had all come to argue their different positions from a
shared universe of terms that suggested a different set of assumptions than those of
"official” assimilationist discourse.24

Post-Assim ilationist H istoriography

Post-assimilationism can also productively be applied to our historiographical
perspectives. Hence I hope that this essay's title, "Beyond Assimilation,” may be
taken to refer both to the object of study and to the historiography in question.
Like other "post-ist” labels (think of “post-structuralist” or “post-Marxist” ), post-
assimilationism ought not so much suggest a clearly antagonistic relationship to
the ideology of assimilation. To the contrary, it should suggest a position that
clearly follows from the failed logic of its predecessor; this succession takes place
with both an extreme uneasiness about the conclusions of its forerunner and yet
with a dependence on it. Hence, the passage from assimilation to post-assimilation
might be presumed to be dialectical rather than merely successive or progressive.
Recent historiographical reviews and debates that are relevant to these lines of
inquiry have sought to chart the course away from German Jewish historiography
from a literature more or less strictly formed along lines mirroring the ideological
alternatives of Jewish identity, namely “national" or Zionist and “liberal” (some­
times “cultural,” not to be confused with the designation “liberal” internal to
German Judaism).25 Through their sometime disagreement, a clear consensus
among these historian-observers is that the stark dichotomy between these histo­
ries, like the oppositional stances of Zionist, religious, and liberal figures, is
obsolete.
A serious concern of a particular species plagues modern German Jewish cul­
tural and intellectual history in particular. On the one hand, there is nowhere else
in modern history where Jews have contributed so massively and so significantly to
 Beyond Assimilation 95

the general culture. From Moses Mendelssohn to Marx and from Freud to Einstein,
Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in
scope and profound in impact. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what contemporary
civilization would look like had it not been for the cultural products o f these and a
striking number of other less celebrated but variously remarkable thinkers. On the
other hand, historians encounter a stumbling block when seeking to discuss these
products as manifestations of European Jewish culture. How is such a contribution
to be defined as "Jewish"? What relationship is to be drawn between the religious
or ethnic identity of the author and the content of his writing? These core ques­
tions, of course, immediately reproduce the debates of the post-assimilationist
period through the categories in which they are forced to work. Michael Brenner,
in his excellent study of Weimar Jewish culture, avoided this problem by focusing
on cultural manifestations that defined themselves specifically within a Jewish
cultural sphere.16 Yet, such a strategy necessarily fails to take into account precisely
those works produced by German-speakingjews that have wielded the greatest cul­
tural influence. Steven Beller's study Vienna and theJews displays the contrary ten­
dency, by surveying the landscape o f Viennese secular modernism and identifying
it as fundamentally "Jewish.”17 To do so, a historian like Beller must engage in the
precise diagnoses of those in the period who counted Jewish artists and writers,
broadly in spite of their own relationships to Jewish tradition, knowledge of Jewish
sources, or religious practice, and who designated their works as inexorably
"Jewish.” This logic (which I believe fully merits the generally overused label of
"essentialist”) marks even the thematically Christian aesthetic work of a Hugo von
Hofmannsthal or a Gustav Mahler as something apart from German Christian or
secular culture; Marx's universalism and his atheism are products of a Jewish back­
ground, and on and on. Scholem, in the "Jews and Germans” lecture, falls into this
trap when, once again forgetting his bracketed anti-essentialist remark opening the
lecture, he turns to the production of secular “Jews” from Marx and Lasalle to Karl
Kraus, Gustav Mahler, and Georg Simmel, arguing that "even in their complete
estrangement of their awareness from everything ‘Jewish,' something is evident in
many of them that was felt to be substantially Jewish by Jews as well as Germans—
by everyone except themselves!”1*
This only goes to show that in the post-assimilationist generation, these ques­
tions and the assumptions behind them were shared by many of the subjects in
question, not merely anti-Semites, although these were the first to bring the con­
nection of Jewish background and modern German cultural production to the
forefront of a sociopolitical discussion. Jewish nationalists and Zionists famously
shared many of these assumptions, but so in fact (if in a different way) did liberals
from the turn of the century through the Holocaust.19 Not just for Scholem, but
for many of the figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish central Europe
who would make powerful contributions to secular culture, there was a strong con­
sciousness of Jewishness in some sense, but this identification was troubled by deep
ambivalence. That is to say, Jewish identity was not a starting point inherited
by these figures, or a stable entity that could be taken for granted, but rather a
 96 SCOTT SPECTOR

problematic. In other words, the very same difficulty confronting the cultural historian
dealing with these figures haunted their own relationship to Jewishness. While the
historiography and its subjects share a certain number of common features, these
do not overlap precisely. As the example of Wassermann's memoir shows, many of
the questions we associate with the problem of “identity" were potentially familiar
to members of the post-assimilationist generation; for example, How can I be both
Jewish and German? What does it mean to me to be Jewish if I am not religiously
observant or believing? Are the products of my creative and intellectual activity
inflected by my Jewishness? The category of “identity" as such is another matter.
There was a "we," there was an “I," but the collective category was "our/my
Judaism” or "our/my Germanness," perhaps even nationality or religion, but not
the slate of “identity" to be filled in, discovered, or revealed.
What's more, while historians and contemporary actors share the spectral
model of assimilation to some degree, the actual experience or self-experience of
people in this period gives the lie to such models of self-identification. In society,
German-speaking Jews made judgments about the relative acculturation of them­
selves and others in the Jewish communities. Quite a different matter was the com­
plex way in which they imagined themselves in relation to Jewish, German, or
other collective identities. The German-speaking Jewish writer of this period with
whom I am most familiar, Franz Kafka, is arguably an exceptional case, but like
many exceptions his example may highlight a condition that is more shared than
commonly recognized.30 While his friend Max Brod argued for an understanding of
Kafka as someone who moved from a distant relationship to his own Judaism to
ever-increasing identification, and even Zionism, a careful reading o f his comments
on Jewish and German identity in his diaries and letters reveals above all a powerful
ambivalence throughout. Indeed, the most symptomatic comment of all may be
the diary entry of January 1914, which reads: "What have I in common with Jews?
I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a
corner, content that I can breathe."31
Indeed, the swift acceleration of political and social anti-Semitism in German­
speaking society from the first decade of the twentieth century through the Shoah
constricted the space for being a German and at the same time a Jew to such a point
that “German Jewish identity" became less plausibly a grounded subcultural loca­
tion than an occasion for the radical critique of identity itself. At any rate, that is
what Kafka’s reflection anticipates, attacking even the notion of self-identity at the
same time as it begs the question of whether this non-self-identical position is not
the human condition tout court. This is arguably an eccentric stand to take, but it
is worth noting that Kafka was not alone in taking advantage o f a situation of
"mutual impossibilities” to imagine a way “out” of identity.32 In the aftermath of
the Shoah, the explosive potential of German Jewish subjectivity would not dissi­
pate, but rather would be opened to full exposure. The recognition of the magni­
tude and existential significance of the holocaust would bring even a man like
Theodor Adorno—only “Jewish” by virtue of his somewhat distant father’s back­
ground, and never Jewish-identified in the boom years of the Frankfurt School—to
 Beyond Assimilation 97

increasing attention to the question of Jewishness. He found himself, like Kafka

before him, drawn ever more into thinking about (his) Jewish identity, but in a way
that offered an escape from identity as such. “Auschwitz confirmed the
philosopheme of pure identity as death,” he wrote in Negative Dialectics.33 In
Adorno’s conception, heterogeneity, difference, multiplicity—in his own jargon,
“non-identity”—was the principle o f life, and the cultural marker for nonidentity
was the Jew.34
Subjectivity, as I mentioned above, has escaped the sophisticated analyses of
those discussing the limitations of the concepts of emancipation and assimilation.
While these are classically understood to be twin figures, the former describing the
“external” conditions offered by the host society, the latter the Jews' “internal”
response to those conditions, in fact both describe abstracted structural and collec­
tive phenomena.35 Yet, post-assimilationist Jews such as those invested in the
“Jewish Renaissance” consistently identified the “internal” question as one taking
place within the consciousnesses o f individual German Jews. This is what Martin
Buber called “the personal Jewish Question, the root of all Jewish questions, the
question that we find in ourselves, and which we must decide within ourselves.”36
Wassermann, echoing Buber from the other side of the assimilation spectrum,
used the same language, translating the Jewish “question” to the implied but much
sharper term "problem,” and transmuting it to within the self: the “tragedy" of
each individual Jewish life is the dualism within himself, constituting “the most fun­
damental, most difficult and most important part of the Jewish problem.”37 All of
this points to a tension between an insistent post-assimilationist focus on individual
subjectivity and a recurrent translation of this issue into what is recurrently under­
stood as a failed dialogue between hypostatized collectives, “Jewish” and
“German.” The irony of Scholem's well-known position that the German Jewish
symbiosis was a myth was that he himself represented that symbiosis even as he
was questioning it; the dialogue that was imagined not to have taken place was in
fact the internal, ambivalent “dialogue” within the individual subject.38 The prob­
lem of German Jewishness was in this as in other senses a problem o f subjectivity.

Subjectivity as Problem
The chief problem historians have, or should have, with the notion o f subjectivity
is related to sources. Here, as elsewhere, the difference between identity and sub­
jectivity makes the latter more difficult to access, and requires the critic heavily to
rely on interpretation and subtle forms of analysis. Subjectivity refers to the intri­
cate, complex, and self-contradictory ways in which subjects experience their place
in the world, in contrast to how they are perceived by others, how they are ordered
within relatively rigid external systems.39 These systems (in large part discursive, as
we have seen) colonize the means we have of articulating our place in the world.
Thus, at the very moment that writers like Wassermann, Stein, or Scholem write a
memoir text (or indeed even a diary or letter) to address the “problem” of identity,
they conform to a set of rules that might as well have been laid down by the anti-
Semitic minority. Where are the sources for how these individuals might really have
 98 SCOTT SPECTOR

moved through German, German Jewish, Jewish, or other cultural identifications?

As has been noted, the decision to identify as German or as Jewish was obviously
one that no one really had to make, and that most never thought to make.40 What
is really required is a sociocultural history that traces practices as well as reflections,
an everyday history of interior life.
In other words, there may be a particular set of problems associated with the
very sources that have seemed most well suited to investigations of the German
Jewish identity crisis—that is, self-reflexive texts on the problem o f German Jewish
identity such as Wassermann's memoir or Karl Lowith's, Scholem’s essays on
Germans and Jews, or on the failure of the German Jewish symbiosis, the Kunstwart
debate, or Victor Klemperer's diaries.41 In each of these examples, the conditions
producing the need for writing about German Jewish identity have governed the
terms in which the problem can be articulated (as I said above, the conceptualiza­
tion of the existence of a problem in the first place already concedes to these dis­
cursive conditions). Yet, these all remain rich sources. If they cannot do what they
claim to do (illustrate how German Jews felt about their identities), they provide a
mass of material that, as in Wassermann's text above, often illustrates the inver­
sions, contradictions, and collusions that characterized German Jewish identities,
whether "assimilated” or Jewish-identified.
One admittedly extreme example is that of Edith Stein, the student of Edmund
Husserl who left the Jewish faith and then became a Carmelite nun, writing a
"Jewish memoir” in the late 1930s.42 Stein is most well known today because of her
controversial canonization as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross by Pope John
Paul II. The very complexity regarding German Jewish subjectivity we are now
exploring is closely linked to the difficulty of "assimilating” Stein’s life and work to
various other "canons," such as those of German Jewish and feminist studies in par­
ticular. The linear model of understanding identity along a simple spectrum is eas­
ier to comprehend than the dialectical one I am proposing, but Stein herself did not
see her embrace of Catholicism and entry into the convent as an abandonment of
her Jewishness, her philosophical thought, or her feminism. The historian who asks
"How assimilated to German culture was my subject?" could in Stein’s case, and in
many German-speaking Jewish exemplars, find a citation to support a historio­
graphical assertion of relative assimilation. Dialectical readings, such as those I am
suggesting are required by the subjectivity model, require more expansive analysis.
In brief, however, we could point out that Stein's memoir, translated as Life in a
Jewish Family, is a particularly complex document, working at one and the same time
to offer an antidote to the anti-Semitic caricature of the Jew while also reinforcing
Jewish stereotypes. The latter are reversed throughout the memoir, where, for
example, Jewish faith is portrayed as deep and primordial in opposition to modern
secular Christianity; Silesian Jews like Stein's mother are given as emblematic
German patriots; Edith herself appears, even in racial terms, as an "Aryan” double of
her stereotypically "Jewish” closest sister. In each of these cases (and others, as I have
argued), the structure of identification and dis-identification with the figure of
"Jewishness” is dialectical: instead of a model of assimilation to a German-Christian
 Beyond Assimilation 99

context, the memories of a Jewish family figure Jewishness as primordially

"Christian” and "German," and this incipient kernel of authenticity is rediscovered
in order to be worked through to a higher spiritual level of Christianity. Yet, in
order to subvert the stark dichotomies under which she was oppressed by her own
historical contexts (German/Jew, Christian/Jew, and also Male/Female), Stein's
texts, like Wassermann's, consistently resorted to a restoration of such
dichotomies. Her confession of Jewishness documents her own spiritual enlighten­
ment and presages her martyrdom and beatification/canonization.
At the other end of the presumed assimilatory spectrum, we find the case of
Martin Buber, raised in Lemberg/Lw6w/Lviv and making a career as philosopher,
publisher, translator, and popularizer of Hasidic culture in Berlin. Jewish identifica­
tion saturated all of these activities, certainly, but it is just as certain (and obvious)
that each of them represented a deep engagement with German culture. His philo­
sophical work, like Stein’s, was written in German and within a largely German
phenomenological tradition; his translations of sacred texts no less a German liter­
ary project than was Luther's; his journal Der Jude a typical exemplar of early-
twentieth-century urban German literary culture; the Tales of Rabbi Nachmann and
Legend of the Baal-Shem owe clearly more to a German neoromantic tradition than
they do to the font of lore from which they are “collected."
One particular series o f texts to offer food for thought in this area are the lec­
tures for the Bar-Kochba association in Prague (1909-1910), taken at the time and in
retrospect to be key sources of the Central European "Jewish Renaissance" captur­
ing the hearts and minds o f Jewish youth in the years leading up to World War I.43
These lectures are often cited as the place where Buber's notion of Jewishness
appears in its most essentialist form. Steven Aschheim, for example, cites Buber's
references to a "community of blood” (rather than an external community of
shared experience), "the deepest, most potent stratum of our being.”44 Yet, this
deepest, hidden layer o f being, evoked by the suspicious metaphor o f "blood," can­
not be seen as essentialist in any sense parallel to the contemporary volkish or oth­
erwise racialist uses of the term. For the central figure in the lectures is not "blood”
or Jewish essence, but "choice” : Buber exhorted his youthful Jewish audience to
choose the path of mining this invisible stratum, to elect Judaism. Clearly, any
notion of elective racial belonging would have been anathema to the essentialist
nationalist discourses surrounding the Prague lectures, including those of liberal
assimilationists who argued for private Jewish identities within a context of public
German cultural participation. Yet, it is through a literal invocation of the language
o f blood that this shared language o f essences is ironically subverted.
These far too abbreviated examples are not offered as a solution to the problem
o f German Jewish subjectivity, but as an incipient outline of its dimensions. Deeper
and more extensive readings are required to bring out the dialectical structure that
reappears in a multitude of individual forms, differing as much from one another as
the examples of Wassermann, Buber, Stein, Kafka, and Scholem diverge among
themselves. Getting beyond the assimilation paradigm does not entail dropping the
categories subjects used to define their sense of belonging, but it does require a
 100 SCOTT SPECTOR

historian's skepticism toward these categories, a sensitivity to the conditions under

which they were produced, and painstaking care in following how they were actu­
ally lived. There are many examples of textual analysis of German Jewish figures
that are compatible with these principles without directly abandoning categories
such as identity and assimilation, or focusing explicitly on subjectivity. In
Aschheim’s 1999 study of Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer, in light
o f the publication of ego-documents by each of these, he presents three thinkers
whose place along the "assimilation spectrum'' seems clearly differentiated (with
Scholem and Klemperer at the poles and Arendt somewhere near the middle). Yet,
each of the readings suggests at best a twisted path to these positions.45 A careful
reading of Aschheim’s essay on the thinker with whom we began reveals how
Scholem's "Jewish self-certitude" emerges out of a deep engagement with German
culture, especially Nietzsche (Scholem wishes at one point to write a
"Judenzarathustra”), the panoply of German vitalism (Lebensphilosophie), and pro­
nounced strains of volkish nationalism. Thus is woven an intricate braid of "Jewish”
readings of these German sources, along with “German" readings of Jewish ones,
producing the staunch position Scholem disavowed in the "Germans and Jews”
lecture and then set free into History: an ironclad binary of two incompatible and
hostile principles—two “essences” as he called them, the integration of which
was “evil” and “impure”—“German” and "Jewish.”
The delicately self-contradictory and nonetheless self-affirming subjective expe­
riences of modern German-speaking Jews may have tended to articulate them­
selves in terms of essential identities, of binary and exclusive oppositionality, and of
processes like assimilation, but these vulgar formulas betrayed the subtle chemistry
that gave them substance. They were, to put it in Buberian terms, ruined by speech,
forced by the process of language to rend those fibers which could not be unraveled
from one another. Does it make sense to think of this rarefied position of German
Jewish subjects in the early twentieth century as somehow illegitimate or unau-
thentic? Must (or can) a radically complex subjectivity be equated with false con­
sciousness? Scholem conflated this complexity with a "destructive dialectic,” a
"liquidation of the Jewish substance by the Jews themselves,” and he notoriously
linked this process to their ultimate fate.46 Yet, the dialectics of German Jewish sub­
jectivities might be more justifiably, more productively, and more honestly linked to
the cultural contributions that emerged from them than to their catastrophic
destruction.

NOTES
1. The lecture was held on August 2,1966, as part o f the plenary session o f the World Jewish
Congress. Gershom Scholem, "Juden und Deutsche,” Neue Rundschau 77 (1966): 547-6».
reprinted in Gershom Scholem, Judaica II (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970). 20-46 (page cita­
tions below are to this version or, when quoted, the following translation). Translations taken
from Gershom Scholem, ed., On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, trans. Werner J.
Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 71-92.
2. Scholem, "Germans and Jew s," see 20-21.
3. Scholem, "Juden und Deutsche,” 28.
 Beyond Assimilation 101

4. In 1996, Shulamit Volkov suggested that German-Jewish historiography had reached a

"dead end," due to the persistence o f two tendencies that should now be overcome or synthe­
sized. Both the "National-Zionist" and “ Liberal-ethnic" approaches to Jewish history limit the
connection o f Jewish history/ies to European history more generally. See "Reflections on
German-Jewish Historiography. A Dead End or a New Beginning?" Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
[LBIY] 41 (1996): 309-20. The impasse I refer to here precedes the liberal or Zionist ideological
moment in that it refers to assumptions about identity shared by both historiographical
schools, as they were by historical actors o f both ideological tendencies.
5. On the concept o f dissimilation in this sense, see Franz Rosenzweig, Gesammelte Schriften
I. Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. 2, 1918-1929, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig, Edith Rosenzweig-
Scheinmann, and Bernhard Casper (Den Haag: 1979), 770. The more recent revival o f the term
has yielded inconsistent definitions, but each o f these tends to bring out Rosenzweig’s intended
dialectical tension between the terms "assimilation" and "dissimilation” in more explicit ways,
implicitly subverting the spectral paradigm. See especially Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of
Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jew s,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the
Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover,
NH: Dartmouth University Press, 1985), 195-211, and Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland,
1780-1918 (Munich, 1994), see esp. pp. 53-56; David Sorkin, "Emancipation and Assimilation:
Tw o Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History," LBIY 35(1990), pp. 17-33; and
Jonathan Skolnik, “ Dissimilation and the Historical Novel: Hermann Sinsheimer's Maña
Numiez,” LBIY 43 (1998): 225-237.
6. Amos Funkenstein, "The Dialectics o f Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1.2 (Winter
1995): 1-14.
7. Scholem, "Germans and Jew s," 73-74.
8. Ibid., 76-77.
9. Scholem, “Germans and Jew s," 83; “ Deutsche und Juden," 35: “Sehr breite Schichten der
deutschen Juden waren zwar bereit, ihr Volkstum zu liquidieren, wollten aber, in freilich sehr
verschiedenen Ausmaßen, ihr Judentum, als Erbe, als Konfession, als ein Ichweißnichtwas, ein
undefinierbares und doch im Bewußtsein deutlich vorhandenes Element bewahren.”
10. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven:
Yale, 1991), 9-10. Steven Aschheim speaks o f the "insistence on a Jewishness that resists defini­
tion" as a "prevailing ideology o f our own times, a way in which countless contemporary secu­
lar Jew s approach articulating their own persistent but difficult to locate sense o f a ‘Jewish self.' ”
See Steven E. Aschheim, "(Con)Fusions o f Identity—Germans and Jew s,” in In Times of Crisis:
Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 2001), 72.
11. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 10.
12. The locus classicus o f this critique from the culture-historical perspective is Ahad H a'am ’s
essay “ Slavery within Freedom," where the paradoxical position o f the emancipated Jew who
must justify his own Jewishness and find meaning in it is laid out. Ahad Ha’am, “Slavery in
Freedom," in Leon Simon (ed.), Selected Essays o f Ahad Ha-Am (New York and Philadelphia,
1962), 171-194- See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Zionism’s Image o f the Educated Jew:
Reflections on Creating a Secular Jewish Culture," Modern Judaism 18 (1998): 227-239, esp. 228.
13. David Sorkin, The Transformation o f German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987); idem, "Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and
Their Application to German-Jewish History," LBIY 35 (1990): 17-33; and idem, “The Impact of
Emancipation on German Jewry: A Reconsideration,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews
in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 177-198.
14. Samuel Moyn, "German Jew ry and the Question o f Identity: Historiography and Theory,”
LBIY 41 (1996): 298.
15. Anthony J. La Vopa, "Jews and Germans: Old Quarrels, New Departures, "Journal o f the
History o f Ideas 54, no. 4 (1993): 688.
16. Sorkin, Transformation, 7.
 102 SCOTT SPECTOR

17. Sorkin, “ Impact o f Emancipation," 187-192, see esp. 187-188. Cf. the discussions o f ideol­
ogy and subjectivity by Zizek and Althusser in Scott Spector, "Was the Third Reich Movie-
Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing o f 'Ideology,’ " American Historical Review 106, no.
2 (2001): 4xx.
18. Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1921), s.a.
English translations Jacob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew , trans. S. N. Brainin (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1933) and the revised translation by the British publisher (London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1934).
19. Cf. Amos Funkenstein, "Dialectics o f Assimilation," Jewish Social Studies 1.2 (Winter 1995):
1-14.
20. See Wassermann, Mein Weg, 69. The description here o f a "German essence" consisting o f
“ fragmentation," transition and mobility, and lack o f center in relation to European cultures
proper might be described as a novel form o f (Jewish) "German self-hatred."
21. Gershom Scholem, “Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-jüdischen 'Gespräch,' ’’ inJudaica 2:10.
22. Cf. Scholem, Judaica 2:7-46. Needless to say, the differences o f opinion within the shared
universe o f terms described here were significant and remain o f historical importance; focus­
ing on where spokesmen like Wasserman and Scholem silendy agreed reveals a different history
than focusing on where they obviously differed does.
23. Steven E. Aschheim, “Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case o f Moritz
Goldstein," in Times of Crisis, 65.
24. LaVopa, "Old Quarrels, New Departures,” see esp. 693-94.
25. Besides the Volkov essay cited above, see Evyatar Friesel, “The German-Jewish
Encounter: A Reconsideration," LBIY 41 (1996): 263-275 and Evyatar Friesel, “Jewish and
German-Jewish Historical Views: Problems o f a New Synthesis,” LBIY 43 (1998): 323-336.
26. See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance o f Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996).
27. See Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
28. Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 82.
29. Steven E. Aschheim has eloquently and persuasively tracked the liberal-assimilationist
adoption o f essentialist terms in his essay "Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The
Case o f Moritz Goldstein,” in Times o f Crisis, 64-72.
30. The example o f Kafka is useful as a reminder that the problematics o f German-Jewish
assimilation as they unfolded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included Germ an­
speaking Jewish Austrians who had no hesitation in identifying themselves as “ German-Jews”
(Deutschjuden), or in some cases simply "Germans," even as they felt themselves in a different
situation from Germans from the Reich to the North.
31. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael
Müller, and Malcolm Pasley (New York and Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1992), 622.
32. In a letter to Max Brod in reference to the writing o f Karl Kraus, Kafka writes that the
German-Jewish writers o f his generation “lived between three impossibilities . . . The impossi­
bility o f not writing, the impossibility o f writing German, the impossibility o f writing differ­
ently." This literature, “impossible from all sides," is in fact the only possibility left for literature.
Franz Kafka, Briefe, 337-338; see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural
Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 2000), 89-92.
33. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), 362.
34. The prime source for Adorno’s discussion o f nonidentity and the privileged example o f
modern Jewish subjectivity is the Negative Dialectics. Cf. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
35. See Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 2:153-197, see esp. 178-185;
Sorkin, "Emancipation and Assimilation,” 17-21.
 Beyond Assimilation 103

36. Martin Buber, Drei Reden über dasJudentum (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1916), 27.
37. Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew, 75. The dualism here is the coexistence o f twin
senses o f superiority and inferiority; Buber elsewhere identifies dualism as the essential nature
o f the Jew.
38. Paul Mendes-Flohr would appear to share this view. Citing Gustav Landauer, Hermann
Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig, he argues that the imagined symbiosis or cultural dialogue
between Germans and Jew s was less at issue than "an inner Jewish dialogue— o f a dialogue
within the souls o f individual Jews as well as between themselves." See Paul Mendes-Flohr,
German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 89-95.
39. There is no room here for a discussion o f theories o f subjectivity that would be expansive
enough to be satisfactory, and the shorthand o f identity as more fixed and perceptual in con­
trast to a more open, complex, and experiential subjectivity is overly schematic, if also useful
for us in this context. Nick Mansfield's concise statement is useful here: "Subjectivity is prima­
rily an experience, and remains permanently open to inconsistency, contradiction and unself­
consciousness. Our experience o f ourselves remains forever prone to surprising disjunctions
that only the fierce light o f ideology or theoretical dogma convinces us can be homogenized
into a single thing." Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories o f the Self from Freud to Haraway
(St. Leonards NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 6-7. Mansfield usefully reviews twentieth-
century theoretical models o f subjectivity.
40. Samuel Moyn, "German Jew ry and Identity,” 301.
41. These examples are drawn from very different, if tellingly linked, moments o f perceived
crisis o f German-Jewish relations. The "Kunstwart debate” about Jewish integration into
German culture began in 1912 with Moritz Goldstein's provocative essay "Deutsch-jüdischer
Parnaß” ("German-Jewish Parnassus"), which challenged the German Jewish assimilationist
ideal and suggested that the overwhelming contribution to German culture by Jewish writers
was not made by these writers as Germans, but as Jews; see Der Kunstwart und Kulturwart 25
(March 1912): 281-294. Assertion and/or questioning o f the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis
in Wasserman’s and Scholem's texts cited earlier is also traceable in Karl Löwith's memoir Mein
Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1986), trans. Elizabeth
King, My Life in Germany Before and Afier 1933: A Report (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press,
1994), as well as in the recently celebrated diaries o f Victor Klemperer, especially Ich will Zeugnis
oblegen bis zum letzten, ed. Walter Nowojski (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996), trans. Martin Chalmers, I
Will Bear Witness: A Diary o f the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (New York: Random House, 1999).
42. Elsewhere I have offered a detailed reading o f this extraordinary life and work and the
complex relations o f these to each other, and to surrounding historical contexts. Scott Spector,
"Edith Stein's Passing Gestures: Intimate Histories, Empathie Portraits,” New German Critique
75 (Fall 1998): 28-56, reprinted in Joyce Berkman et al., eds., Contemplating Edith Stein (South
Bend, IN: University o f Notre Dame Press, 2005).
43. See the published, albeit reworked, version o f the lectures cited earlier. I offer a more
detailed discussion o f the texts in Spector, Prague Territories, 147-151.
44. Aschheim, "Assimilation and Its Discontents," 70.
45. Steven E. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
46. Scholem, “Once More: The German-Jewish Dialogue," in On Jews and Judaism, 68-69.
 Jewish Self-Identijication and
West European Categories of
Belonging
FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO
WORLD W A R II

TODD ENDELMAN

It is an article of faith in much of the academy that “identity"—everywhere—is

fluid, fragmented, and contingent. Whatever the value of this insight with regard
to modem Jewish history, it is not helpful in understanding the experience of Jews
before the Enlightenment. In medieval and early modern Europe, Jews constituted
a well-defined collective unit for whom questions of self-identification—Who are
we and what is our place here?—rarely arose. Premodern European Jews differed
from their neighbors by virtue o f their religion, nationality/ethnicity, legal status,
and, in most cases, language, costume, employment, and social and cultural habits.
Most lived in quasi-autonomous, self-regulating corporations (kehillot), chartered
bodies with well-defined privileges and obligations. With the frequent exception of
late-medieval Italian and Spanish Jews and those in small isolated communities else­
where, their contacts with Christians were largely instrumental. Religious tradi­
tions (Jewish and Christian alike), social structures, and legal categories defined the
borders of the Jewish world, which remained more or less stable throughout the
medieval and early modem periods. “Jewishness” was not endlessly constructed
and renegotiated. The line between Christian and Jew was clear and stable—not
fuzzy and indeterminate—for over one thousand years. Within the Jewish world,
the nature o f correct belief and practice (what Judaism required) was much dis­
puted, o f course. The rabbis clashed over how best to know and serve God and how
best to interpret the Law. These were not, however, debates about the boundaries
between Jews and non-Jews or about the fundamentals of Jewish self-definition
such as origins, chosenness, exile, redemption, and the like.
The one exception to this generalization—the case of former New Christians
or conversos—is the proverbial exception that proves the proverbial rule.
Descendants of Iberian Jews who had converted to Catholicism in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries under duress, the conversos lived as nominal Christians
before resettling in tolerated Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Britain,
southwestern France, northern Germany, and the New World. Regardless of the
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 105

extent to which they harbored a sense of Jewish descent and to which they main­
tained remnants of Jewish observance, they were educated and socialized as
Christians. In Yosef Yerushalmi’s now classic formulation, they were “the first con­
siderable group o f European Jews to have had their most extensive and direct per­
sonal experiences completely outside the organic Jewish community and the
spiritual universe of normative Jewish tradition.” Before leaving the Iberian
Peninsula, and especially afterward, they experienced the tensions that later
became characteristic of Jews whose identities were multiple and fragmented as
the result of living simultaneously in two or more overlapping worlds. Ex-converso
communities confronted the task of collective self-definition, requiring them to
balance, reconcile, or negotiate two clusters of traditions: one associated with the
normative, rabbinic Judaism of professing Jewish communities; the other with the
values, norms, and behavioral traits of Spain and Portugal.1
Former conversos, however, were unrepresentative of the European Jewish
population, with its roots in Northern and Central Europe (Ashkenaz). The
Jewishness of the Ashkenazim (by which I mean both their subjective self-
understanding and their objective behavioral and situational distinctiveness, rather
than any essential spiritual or biological quality) remained undisturbed until the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It became problematic for them—a matter of
reflection and debate—only when the structure of state and society that had sup­
ported it weakened and then dissolved. When the ancien régime gave way, when
states ceased to be constituted as clusters of legally structured corporate ranks and
orders, and Jews—like others whose civil status previously derived from the collec­
tive unit to which they belonged—were incorporated into the emerging liberal
order as individuals, only then did Jews turn to forging new self-definitions.

From Emancipation to Integration

The transformation o f the Jews, their movement “out of the ghetto” (to use the
title o f Jacob Katz's well-known account), did not follow a well-defined linear
trajectory. It was a complex, multidimensional, messy process with at least four dis­
tinct components—emancipation, acculturation, secularization, and integration—
which, while interdependent, were also distinct from each other both conceptually
and in practice. In Western and Central Europe, the transformation of the Jews
entailed the acquisition o f citizenship and the rights it bestowed (emancipation);
the adoption o f new social and cultural values and new modes o f deportment,
dress, and speech (acculturation); the rejection or neglect of time-honored reli­
gious beliefs and practices, including both those sanctioned by custom and those by
law (secularization); and the struggle for social acceptance in non-Jewish circles
(integration).2 Their transformation also included far-reaching changes in self­
perception, for as Jews moved from exclusion to inclusion, from periphery to main­
stream, they found themselves reconsidering and redefining how they saw them­
selves—and how they wanted others to see them. Formerly, they had viewed
themselves—and were viewed by others—as a discrete people, different in kind
from other peoples. In the words o f the aleinu prayer, God had made them different
 106 TODD ENDELMAN

from the other nations of the world and assigned to them a distinct fate. Moreover,
they were a people whose national and religious identities were indissolubly linked
and whose ties to the Christian peoples among whom they lived were more instru­
mental than affective. Religion and ethnicity were omnipresent and inseparable,
filling the whole of their existence. The integration of Jews into states increasingly
built around individual rights rather than collective privileges made the survival of
this undifferentiated sense of self-identification difficult if not impossible.3
The states that took shape in the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­
turies eliminated or weakened the estates, corporations, chapters, guilds, chartered
bodies, and other intermediate units that previously determined the legal status of
their members. In particular, they eroded the unity between ecclesiastical commu­
nity and national identity, replacing it with categories of universal citizenship and
individual rights. Religion, in theory, ceased to be a criterion for membership in the
nation and became little more than “one feature among others in the diversity of a
people, neither more nor less than having different jobs or coming from this or that
region.” It was reduced to “no more than one of the numerous variables that dis­
tinguished between subjects or citizens.”4This process of civil leveling and homog­
enizing aimed to impose order, coherence, rationality, and uniformity. Even if Jews
had wanted to remain a people apart, with their own distinctive legal niche, the
states in which they lived would have been unwilling to tolerate such separatism.
There was no room for the anomaly of a legally privileged Jewish corporation exer­
cising authority over its members. As Salo Baron recognized decades ago, "emanci­
pation was an even greater necessity for the modern state than it was for the Jew.”
Once corporate distinctions were abolished, it would have been “an outright
anachronism” to allow the Jews to remain a separate body, with privileges and obli­
gations that were different from those of other citizens.5
Both Jewish and Christian supporters o f the entry of the Jews into the modern
nation-state acknowledged that an undifferentiated sense of Jewishness was an
anachronism, a vestige of intolerant epochs when Jews were legally and socially
marginalized. In the words of an 1889 editorial in a liberal Hungarian publication,
if Jews “want to be regarded as completely equal, they must not differ in any detail
from the other inhabitants of the nation.” They had to alter “their external appear­
ance, their clothing, their way o f life, their occupations.”6 The Jewish component
o f their identity was to shrink and become compartmentalized as their civil status
improved. They reasoned that if Jews continued to consider themselves a separate
nation with their own distinct allegiances and hopes, they could not be incorpo­
rated into nation-states that no longer recognized corporate or collective member­
ship. (Further to the east, in the multinational Romanov Empire, the survival of a
dynastic regime into the early twentieth century allowed an undifferentiated, non­
compartmentalized Jewish identity to endure longer.) Jewish peoplehood was to be
abandoned, Jewish particularism muted. Judaism was to be transformed into a
religion like other religions, adherence to which was to be one among several
strands in the identity of emancipated, modern Jews. Inclusion in state and society
could occur on no other basis. In the oft-cited declaration o f the count of
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 107

Clermont-Tonnerre in the debate on Jewish emancipation in France in December

1789: "II faut refuser tout aux Juifs comme nation et accorder tout aux Juifs comme
individus . . . il faut qu’ils ne fassent dans l’Etat ni un corps politique, ni un Ordre;
il faut qu’ils soient individuellement citoyens." Jews who refused emancipation on
these terms, Clermont-Tonnerre continued, were to be expelled.7
While Jewish notables and publicists did not dwell on the consequences of fail­
ing to accept the terms of emancipation, they were as adamant as their Christian
counterparts that emancipation called for a fundamental shift in Jewish self-
identification. Following the emancipation of the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine in
September 1791, Berr Isaac Berr, a wealthy maskil from Nancy, wrote an open letter
to his newly emancipated "co-religionists” reminding them "how absolutely neces­
sary it is for us to divest ourselves entirely of that narrow spirit, of Corporation and
Congregation, in all civil and political matters, not immediately connected with our
spiritual laws; in these things we must absolutely appear simply as individuals, as
Frenchmen," rather than as "a distinct body o f people and a separate community."8
In the German states, where public debate about the transformation of the Jews
was more protracted and charged, maskilim and reformers were just as adamant.
From the perspective of the early-twenty-first century academy, with its valida­
tion of ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism, the linkage between emancipation
and transformation—the demand that Jews refashion their self-definition and
behavior—seems harsh, even unreasonable. However, in the context o f the period,
it represented an advance, a sharp break with the premodern past, when the source
of the Jew’s defect was a matter o f faith, and baptism the sole remedy, the only
avenue to integration and acceptance. Moreover, while those Christians who cham­
pioned emancipation also believed that Jewish morals and customs were in a sorry
state and in need of reform, they did not trace this to the basic teachings of Judaism
or to any essential trait, spiritual or corporeal, of the Jews. Disciples of the
Enlightenment, they rejected the traditional Christian claims of God's eternal
damnation and punishment of the Jews and of their ineradicable malevolence. In
their view, there was no unchanging Jewish essence. As the English deist John
Toland wrote in 1707 (in what may be the earliest statement of this position), what­
ever “genius” or "bent of mind” reigned among the Jews, it proceeded “from acci­
dent and not from nature.” He continued: “The different methods o f government
and education are the true springs and causes of such different inclinations all over
the world.”9 If Jews were unsocial, unproductive, devious, and immoral (which was
the common Enlightenment view), the reason was that circumstances—bad meas­
ures and bad treatment—had made them that way. The Whig historian and essay­
ist Thomas Babington Macaulay was explicit about this in calling for the removal of
Jewish disabilities in Britain. If English Jews lacked “patriotic feeling” and viewed
Dutch Jews rather than English Christians as their compatriots, it was because an
oppressive state had failed to protect them. “If the Jews have not felt towards
England like children,” he wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1831, “it is because she
has treated them like a step-mother." Once treated as equals, they would “know
that they owe all their comforts and pleasures to the bond which united them in
 108 TODD ENDELMAN

one community” and would be overcome with feelings of patriotism. In short, the
Jews of his day were “precisely what our government has made them/'10
This belief in the power of environmental influence was central to all
Enlightenment and liberal proposals to ameliorate the condition of the Jews. In
France, the three prizewinners in the Metz essay contest of 1785-1787 ("Are there
means of making the Jews happy and more useful in France?") accepted the prem­
ise that persecution was the major cause of Jewish degeneration. In this, they fol­
lowed the lead of the Prussian civil servant Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, whose
Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Ju d en (1781-1783) was the classic Enlightenment
statement of this position. Dohm, for example, traced the concentration of Jews in
low-status trades (money-lending, peddling and hawking, trading in secondhand
goods) to government measures to regulate their economic activity. For the unfor­
tunate Jew, he wrote, “whose activity is restricted on all sides, whose talents have
no scope for free utterance, in whose virtue nobody believes, for whom honor is
almost non-existent, to him no other way but commerce is open to acquire means
for improving his lot for earning a living.” Central to Dohm’s argument and that of
other reformers was the conviction that human character was universal and plastic
and thus subject to environmental influence. Enlightenment and liberal supporters
of emancipation were buoyant optimists, firm believers in the oneness of human
nature and the perfectibility of human character, confident that toleration would
make the Jews more productive and honest and less tribal and superstitious. “A life
of normal civil happiness in a well ordered state,” wrote Dohm, “would do away
with their ‘clannish religious opinions.’ ” Dohm continued by asking, “How would
it be possible for [the Jew] not to love a state where he could freely acquire property
and freely enjoy it, where his taxes would be no heavier than those of other citi­
zens, where he could reach positions of honor and enjoy general esteem?"11

The Meaning o f Jewish Emancipation for Jew s and Non-Jews

While Jewish reformers and their Christian friends agreed that emancipation and
integration required an overhaul of Jewish behavior and identity, they did not
agree—nor even discuss—the scope of this transformation. In retrospect, the
vagueness of the discussion—its fuzziness, lack of rigor, reliance on catchwords—
is striking. What, after all, did those who urged the transformation of the Jews
mean when they called for their régénération, assimilation, rapprochement, or Jusion
sodale; their bürgerliche Verbesserung, Veredelung, or Reformezirung; their "complete
fusion . . . with their fellow subjects of every other denomination”?12 At a mini­
mum, they meant that Jews should speak and dress like other citizens, that they
should embrace secular education and culture, that they should identify with their
country of residence, becoming law-abiding, patriotic, and productive citizens.
About these, there was little confusion or disagreement. But more than this was
expected. Jewish reformers and Christian critics also targeted the "clannishness” of
the Jews (that is, their preference for mixing and marrying among themselves),
their concentration in commerce and finance, and their attachment to "backward”
or "superstitious” religious customs, including dietary laws that hindered social
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 109

intercourse. However, while reformers and critics saw these matters as ripe for
reform, they failed to specify what constituted sufficient change or to establish cri­
teria to measure it. For example, did the progression of Jews from peddling to shop­
keeping meet their expectations? Were Jews expected only to abandon low-status
street trades, or were they expected to forsake trade altogether, becoming farm and
factory workers, hewers of wood and drawers of water, so that their occupational
profile resembled that of the non-Jewish population? They also failed to indicate
what they considered a reasonable time for this and other changes to occur. Was
the transformation of the Jews a long-term project, stretching over many genera­
tions, or was it a change that would occur swiftly in the immediate wake of their
emancipation from the restraints of the past?
Expectations about Jewish acculturation and integration—how much and how
far—were as fuzzy as those regarding Jewish productivization. Jews and non-Jews
alike assumed that Jewish particularism and marginality would diminish following
emancipation. Jews would be found in universities, lodges, fraternities, literary and
philosophical societies, concert halls, casinos, and clubs. They would drink,
carouse, whore, and gamble in pubs, cafes, beer halls, and wine cellars in non-
Jewish company. This vision of integration, even if never articulated in these terms,
would not have met with opposition from either Jewish or Christian emancipation­
ists. But the problem was more complex than this. Little was said about whether
Jews were expected as well to stop choosing their closest friends and marriage part­
ners from among their own community. If the ideal was "a random pattern of
interaction, where Jews [were] no more likely to interact with each other than with
non-Jews"13 and the expectation that in time they would seek husbands and wives
outside the tribal pond, then the eventual outcome of their integration would be
their demographic decline, if not disappearance, as an identifiable or cohesive
social unit. Similarly, while even Orthodox Jews in Western countries endorsed the
idea of acculturation, there was a point at which the process threatened to erase
the most distinctive marks of Jewishness. To what extent were Jews to identify with
the dominant culture? Were they to be inconspicuous and even unrecognizable as
Jews outside their homes and synagogues? Were they to pursue acculturation to the
extent that they embraced the religion of the dominant culture as well and disap­
peared from the scene by the path o f total fusion?
Although those who wanted to reform the Jews were vague about their expec­
tations, some, it is clear, hoped that emancipation and integration would end in the
full absorption of the Jews and their disappearance as a collective unit. In Britain,
Christian defenders of the Jew Bill o f 1753 argued that allowing foreign-born Jews to
become naturalized citizens would encourage their conformity to English customs
and accelerate their integration into English society, in time preparing the way for
their conversion to the Anglican faith. For example, in a sermon to a fashionable
London congregation, the Reverend Thomas Winstanley predicted that naturaliza­
tion would incline the Jews "to cultivate a friendship and familiarity with us; which,
of course, must bring them in due season, to a conformity of manners, and an imi­
tation of our ways and customs.” Social contact would engender more favorable
 110 TODD ENDELMAN

feelings regarding Christians, and “these more favourable sentiments concerning

us maybe improved, e'er long, into a more favourable opinion of our religion."14 In
France, the Abbé Grégoire, one o f the three co-winners of the Metz essay contest,
urged improvements in the socioeconomic status of the Ashkenazim of Alsace and
Lorraine for the same reason. The state, he believed, should scatter Jews through­
out rural France, thus undermining the influence of their rabbis, while compelling
their children to attend state schools, thus exposing them to French culture. This
would lead to more interaction between Jews and Christians and in time bring the
former to Christianity.15
There were Jews as well (not many, of course) who envisioned a future in which
Jews qua Jews would disappear and be absorbed into some larger unit o f
humankind. Baptized Jews presumably held such views—to the extent that they
thought about the collective fate o f the Jews at all, as distinct from their own per­
sonal fortunes. More unusual were those Jewish secularists and deists who dreamed
of a future that was neither Jewish nor Christian, who envisioned a world in which
divisions among religions, nations, and, in some cases, ranks and classes as well,
were effaced. David Friedlander's well-known “dry baptism” letter on behalf of
Berlin Jews to Provost Wilhelm Teller in 1799, in which he proposed that Jews who
had given up their ancestral rituals be admitted to Protestantism without having to
accept its dogmas and mysteries, rested on the premise that there was one rational,
natural religion that was the essence of both enlightened Christianity and enlight­
ened Judaism.16
A generation later, Jewish Saint-Simonians—Gustave d'Eichthal, Léon Halévy,
the Rodrigues and Pereire brothers—spun dreams of a new universal order of one
religion, one dogma, one cult, in which Judaism and Jews were to be absorbed. In
their vision of the future, which belonged to a larger movement o f utopian system-
building in the wake of the social upheaval and intellectual confusion engendered
by the French Revolution, nations disappeared, religion and politics merged, and
universal harmony reigned.17 In his Lettres sur la religion et la politique (1829), for
example, the young Eugène Rodrigues, son of a Paris stockbroker, confidently
asserted that humanity was advancing toward an immense unity—la société
universelle—in which nations would disappear, the spiritual and temporal realms of
life would merge, and the new religion would include both Christians and Jews
within its temples. Church and state would become identical, for religion would
absorb all of society within its bosom. The reign of Caesar would cease, the reign
of God commence. Although not a Saint-Simonian, their contemporary Joseph
Salvador worked out a similar scheme of religious development, culminating in an
imminent messianic era in which Mosaism (in effect, ethical monotheism), pre­
served by the Jews for centuries, provided a foundation for universal organization.18
In the German-language cultural orbit, Karl Marx and his Jewish disciples also
looked forward to a future in which the categories “Jew" and “Christian” would dis­
appear.19 The Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer, for example, taught that the
Jews were fated to disappear among the nations of Europe because they no longer
performed a historical task. Before the rise of capitalism, they pioneered trade and
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 111

commerce, but with its advent and the “Judaization” of Christianity, they lost their
historical role and were condemned to assimilate socially and economically. In
imperial Germany, most Jewish advocates of Jewish dissolution saw the future in
terms of absorption into the German nation rather than a universalistic utopia
transcending particularistic identities. Writing in Maximilian Harden's journal
Die Zukunft in 1904, the semiticist Jakob Fromer advised Germany’s Jews, “Dive
under, disappear! Disappear with your oriental physiognomy, with your ways that
contrast with your surroundings, with your ‘mission,’ and, above all, with your
exclusively ethical worldview. Take the customs, the values, and the religion of
your host people, seek to mix in with them and see to it that you are consumed
in them without a trace.”20 The notary and jurist Adolph Weissler, writing in
the arch-conservative Preussische Jahrbiicher in 1900, urged the dissolution of
German Jewry through child baptism. Although he believed that Judaism was
morally stagnant and inferior to Christianity, he knew that even Jews who agreed
with him were unable to believe in the divinity of Jesus and accept baptism.
Because he also regarded conversions of convenience as unprincipled but nonethe­
less wished to see German Jewry disappear, he urged Jewish parents to baptize their
children, who, not having been raised as Jews, could not be accused of insincerity
and opportunism.21

Acculturation and Integration versus Secularization

Views such as these were exceptional by virtue of their radicalism. In addition, they
were exceptional—along with all prescriptive statements about theJewish future, what­
ever their tone—by virtue of their very existence. Few Jews bothered to tell the
world what being Jewish meant and what the future of the Jews would or should
be. Those who did were public figures (notables, publicists, rabbis) seeking to influ­
ence the outcome of Jewish modernization. Their views did not necessarily reflect
the sentiments of “ordinary” Jews (traders, clerks, market men, shopkeepers,
wholesale merchants, brokers, and their wives and children), who, in the nature of
things, were neither pamphleteers nor editorialists. In the absence of survey
research for earlier centuries, one o f the few ways to know what the “silent major­
ity” felt is to examine what they did and then infer from their behavior, to the
extent possible, the sentiments and hopes that motivated them. Doing so makes
clear that most emancipated Jews did not imagine a future in which they would
renounce or transcend their Jewish attachments. While willing, even eager, to rede­
fine what it meant to be Jewish and to tailor their behavior and views accordingly,
there is no evidence, as we will see, that they viewed their disappearance as desir­
able, necessary, or inevitable, as the final outcome of their integration and accultur­
ation. Nor is there evidence that they even believed that they must shed their
collective social attachments and become invisible outside their synagogues and
homes. In this regard, their understanding of what was required of them differed
from that of Christian emancipationists, who, however vague their expectations,
clearly envisioned a more radical and ruthless break with the Jewish past.
 112 TODD ENDELMAN

Any analysis of changes in Western Jewish behavior between the mid­

eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries must begin with the recognition that while
these changes were far-reaching and ubiquitous, they were not uniformly so in all
spheres of life or even within the same sphere. Thus, while the practice of many
religious traditions declined, key lifecycle rituals continued to be observed even in
families otherwise distant from the world of tradition. In Amsterdam, for example,
the circumcision of male sons remained almost universal into the twentieth
century—though some parents claimed they were doing it for hygienic reasons or
for the sake of the grandparents. In 1932,1933, and 1934, the proportion of boys born
to Jewish mothers who were not circumcised was 4 percent, 8 percent, and 10 per­
cent respectively. (Most of those who were not circumcised were from mixed mar­
riages.) Similarly, most marriages between Jews in Amsterdam continued to be
solemnized in religious ceremonies: the number between 1901 and 1933 fell only
from 97.3 percent to 91.9 percent.“ Jewish economic activity showed similar pat­
terns of continuity. To take another example: while most Jewish families in the
West experienced embourgeoisement over two or three generations following the
removal of disabilities, their overall occupational profile remained skewed. Most
heads of families worked in commerce rather than in heavy industry, agriculture,
or the liberal professions. Buying and selling continued to be the chief pillar on
which Jewish life rested. The transformation of the Jews, in short, was incomplete,
uneven, and irregular.
How irregular becomes clear when one ceases to speak of the transformation
o f the Jews as an undifferentiated process of “assimilation" and views it in terms o f
its four constitutive elements—emancipation, acculturation, secularization, and
integration. Breaking down the analysis in this way brings into focus the uneven­
ness of the changes that Jews experienced and the problems that this created for
them when they needed to define their Jewishness in public debate. For the purpose
o f this essay, I want to focus in particular on distinguishing secularization from
acculturation, and then acculturation from integration.
Curiously, the analytical category of secularization is absent from the standard
histories of the entry of the Jews into state and society in Western Europe (in con­
trast to its prominence in the history of Christianity in modem Europe, where
what is known as the secularization thesis functioned as the master narrative for
decades after World War II.)23 Neither Michael A. Meyer's The Origins of the Modem
Jew (1967) nor Jacob Katz's Out of the Ghetto (1973) discusses the secularization of
Jewish life as such. Of course, they chart the abandonment of traditional rituals
and beliefs, but they do so in the context of acculturation and integration, the
changes in belief and behavior that Jews embraced in order to make a place for
themselves in European life. Even the later, more conceptually nuanced account of
Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, their introduction to the collection Paths of
Emancipation (1995), fails to bring secularization into the equation as a transforma­
tive category in its own right. The word itself is also absent from the index to the
volume, so presumably its contributors also do not consider secularization qua sec­
ularization as a critical part of the story. The most recent surveys o f modern Jewish
 Jew ish SelfldentiJication and Belonging 113

history also take no notice of secularization. David Vital’s A People Apart (1999)
views emancipation as the great agent of change, while Lloyd P. Gartner's History
of the Jews in Modern Times (2001) speaks more broadly of capitalism, the
Enlightenment, and the modern state undermining traditional Jewish life.24
The conceptual distinction between secularization and acculturation is not
pedantic. Much of the decline in Jewish practice (kashrut, family purity, synagogue
attendance, festival customs) was the result of currents and influences that were
not specific to the historical experience of the Jews. In the eighteenth and nine­
teenth centuries, religious indifference, anticlericalism, impiety, skepticism, and
ignorance of Scripture and doctrine were to be found in all Western societies,
among poor and rich alike. Religious doctrine and sentiment guided fewer areas of
behavior among Jews and Christians alike (although there is some evidence that
this occurred earlier among Jews than among Christians).25 Historians of European
Christianity attribute the growth of irreligion to the economic and intellectual rev­
olutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (urbanization, industrializa­
tion, technological innovation, materialistic theories of the universe, the scientific
critique of religion, Darwinism, etc.), and to the political, social, and intellectual
conservatism of state churches, which repelled businessmen, intellectuals, and
workers alike, depending on the national context. Max Weber set the rise of irreli­
gion in an even longer time frame. He posited a gradual, millennia-long process of
disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world, of increasing rationalization and
intellectualization, beginning with the rationalization stimulated by Israelite reli­
gious prophecy and continuing, during the Reformation, with the elimination of
magical ritual. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science, science-oriented
technologies, bureaucratization, capitalism, and political centralization accelerated
the process, according to Weber, while technical means and calculations banished
supernatural, incalculable forces.26
Granted, secularization is an elusive concept, the process difficult to describe
and, even more, to explain with precision.27 As the master narrative of modern
European religious history (the “big story” into which historians fit their own “small
stories” and with which they make sense of their own research), it no longer enjoys
the prominence it once did. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Jews were not
immune to the impact of the broad, impersonal currents that fueled the decline in
Christian belief, affiliation, and worship. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
for example, Western Jewish communities became urban communities. It is an
axiom that when West Europeans moved from the country to the city they encoun­
tered conditions that “militate[d] against the roots of the familiar and the familial”
with which religious beliefs and practices were associated, and that religious institu­
tions were “adversely affected by the increasing size of urban concentrations . . . and
corroded by geographical and social mobility,” especially when they led to “a rela-
tivization of perspectives on the world.”28 Was Judaism exempt from the impact of
urbanization? Hardly. It is no coincidence that impiety and indifference were hall­
marks of the London and Amsterdam communities, the two largest communities in
the West, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
 114 TODD ENDELMAN

Of course, it is impossible to know how much the decline of Jewish observance

was the result of a general cause (the disenchantment of the world) and how much
the result of a particular cause (the flight from Jewishness). It is hard even to imag­
ine how to disentangle their respective influence. Nonetheless, it is important to
separate them conceptually. Leaving secularization out of the picture suggests that
the Jews were immune to general forces of social change and, at the same time,
inflates the transformative power of the haskalah and other programs of regenera­
tion, leaving the false impression that reason, natural law, and other novel ideas
convinced Jews that it was meaningless or unprofitable to separate meat and milk
(for example). Owen Chadwick has warned against explaining secularization “by
seizing only upon what was expressed in formal propositions, articulately." There
are shifts in sentiment and consciousness that run deeper. “That is why the problem
of secularization is not the problem of enlightenment. Enlightenment was of the
few. Secularization is of the many."29 Ignoring the impact of broad impersonal cur­
rents simply reinforces the old Germano-centric view of the origins o f Jewish
modernity, in which new ideologies restructured Jewish lives.30 There is another
reason as well to bring in the analytical category of secularization. If one attributes
the decline of religious observance solely to the desire to efface Jewish distinctive­
ness, it is then impossible to explain the survival of Jewish social bonds after this
decline, for, if the flight from Jewishness were the key, social cohesion would have
declined at the same time as religious observance. But this was not the case.
Secularization and integration did not advance in tandem. Social acceptance and
mixing lagged behind the decline of belief and practice.

Social Interaction as Evidence o f Uneven Transformation

The unevenness of the transformation of the Jews was most pronounced at the
level of social relations between Jews and Christians. At first glance, middle-class
Jews in Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Budapest were externally
indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts. They wore the same clothes,
spoke the same language, visited the same cafés, museums, and concert halls, edu­
cated their children at the same schools, enjoyed the same leisure-time activities.
To be sure there were subtle differences between the "intimate" culture of the Jews
and that of their neighbors. In Imperial Germany, for example, urban, middle-class
Jews read different books and newspapers, voted for different parties, responded to
“Jewish" jokes in a different manner, and raised their children according to different
norms.31 They clung to the humanistic ideal of Bildung, to which the age o f
Enlightenment and emancipation first gave birth, long after irrationalism and
nationalism had weakened its hold among educated Germans. They also killed
themselves more frequently per capita than either Protestants or Catholics—which
certainly suggests a distinctive sensibility.32 But, on the surface, to the casual
observer, little distinguished Jews from non-Jews in the broad externals o f life.
However, while acculturation was well advanced by the turn of the century,
integration into non-Jewish social circles and voluntary associations was not.
During the nineteenth century, Jews in Western and Central Europe gained access
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 115

to institutions and organizations that had excluded them in the past: legislatures,
municipal councils, the military, the professions, fraternal groups, elite secondary
schools, universities, clubs and casinos, charities, athletic and recreational associa­
tions. As a rule, English, French, Italian, and Dutch Jews were more successful in
doing so than German, Austrian, and Hungarian Jews, although even the latter
made their way, however haltingly, into the associational life of middle class society.
Yet, despite these advances in institutional integration and social mixing in public
forums, Jews remained a people apart in terms of their most fundamental social
ties. Most married Jews, formed their closest friendships with other Jews, and
relaxed and felt most comfortable in the homes of Jewish friends and relatives. In
recalling his upper-middle-class youth in late Imperial Berlin, the fashion photogra­
pher Erwin Blumenfeld recalled that his freethinking, atheist parents contentedly
lived within “invisible walls,” associating exclusively with other Jews, and “were
probably not even aware of it themselves." Very rarely “a stray goy happened to
find his way into our house,” and when one did, “we had no idea how to behave.”
The absence of social integration also characterized the home of Gershom
Scholem. Despite his father's allegiance to liberal integrationism, "no Christian
ever set foot in our home,” not even Christians who were members of organiza­
tions in which his father was active (with the one telling exception of a formal fifti­
eth birthday visit). The oft-cited autobiographies of famous Jews (musicians,
writers, scientists, intellectuals, bohemians), Scholem warned in another context,
present a misleading picture. In “an ordinary middle-class bourgeois home, neither
rich nor poor," like his, there was no social mixing between Jews and Christians.
Richard Lichtheim underlined the awkwardness that arose when these barriers
were transgressed. In the 1890s, when he visited the home of a non-Jewish school
friend who lived with his uncle, a general, or when his friend visited him, each was
aware of entering "enemy territory." No Jew had ever before appeared in the gen­
eral’s house or Christian in the Lichtheim house—although the Lichtheims were
unobservant and most of his father’s relatives converts to Christianity.33 Reciprocal
home visits, Marion Kaplan has aptly commented, “raised the stakes, announcing
an intimacy with which most did not feel comfortable."34
The situation was not radically different among the very wealthiest Jewish fam­
ilies. In his exhaustive study of the German Jewish economic elite before World
War I, Werner Mosse has concluded that from the late 1870s “unselfconscious and
more or less spontaneous social relations between Jew and Gentile virtually
ceased.’’35 While government ministers, upper civil servants, army officers, and
diplomats accepted invitations to lavish entertainments in the homes of Berlin’s
Jewish bankers and industrialists, they rarely reciprocated. Moreover, while social
ambition and "feudalization” (capitulation to aristocratic values) fueled the cultiva­
tion of the high born, a very bourgeois motive was at work as well: the Berlin busi­
ness and financial elite, Jews and Gentiles alike, courted the preindustrial elite for
pragmatic reasons. They wanted the government business and privileged informa­
tion that high office-holders and powerbrokers dispensed while hoping to influence
economic and diplomatic policy. Contrary to popular belief, then and now, the
 116 TODD ENDBLMAN

highest goal of wealthy Jews was not social acceptance by and intermarriage with
the Prussian nobility. Yes, their patterns of sociability were a defensive response to
anti-Semitism, but they also reflected "the fact that most Jews of the upper bour­
geoisie wanted to associate with Jews.”36 As Marion Kaplan has concluded, "Their
starting point was a deep, primary loyalty to their families and a steady allegiance
to their religious and ethnic community,” both o f which "restrained” social interac­
tion with non-Jews.37
Outside Berlin, the social lines between wealthy Jews and Gentiles were often
firmer. In Hamburg, for example, Jews lived entirely in a private sphere of their own.
They did business with non-Jews during the day but at night went their own way.
A similar pattern characterized Jewish-Christian interaction in Imperial Königsberg.
Jews were welcome in all spheres of public life, including the city council and most
voluntary associations, but their social contacts with non-Jews were limited to for­
mal civic occasions and business-related dinners and Kaffeekränzchen. Informal, pri­
vate life "mainly took place in the frame of one's own extended family or within a
circle of other Jewish families, with the exception of a small group of Christian and
Jewish music-loving families that met regularly.” In Breslau, where friendships
between Jews and Christians were perhaps more common, Till von Rahden has
found it remarkable, in light of the numerous possibilities there were for interaction,
"that there were not even more and that in many of these friendships a residue of
social distance remained much in evidence.”38 In Prague, Jewish merchants and pro­
fessionals were well integrated into the institutional life of the German community
(largely in response to Czech nationalism). In the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, their role as members and officers in the Deutsches Casino and the
Deutscher Verein actually increased. But in the most intimate areas of family life
Prague Jews remained a group apart. Few married non-Jews before World War I.39
From the 1870s on in Central Europe, even baptized Jews remained immersed
in Jewish kinship and friendship networks, in which Jews, convertedjews, intermar­
ried Jews, and Jews without religion (those who had formally withdrawn from the
Gemeinde without converting to another faith) mixed. As social discrimination
mounted, converts and those without religion were often forced (or preferred) to
choose former Jews like themselves as friends and marriage partners. The close
male friends of Gustav Mahler, Maximilian Harden, and countless other celebrated
Central European converts were almost entirely Jews and convertedjews. In fin-de-
siècle Vienna, the poet André Spire wrote, little changed in the lives of converts
after their conversion. “They continued to live apart, in a separate world, among
the Jews. . . . Their sons were able to marry only Jews or the daughters of con­
verts.” And in Weimar Germany, Hannah Arendt recalled, the convert "only rarely
left his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether.”40
In more liberal states, France and Britain in particular, there was greater social
intimacy between Jews and non-Jews, just as there was greater integration at an
institutional level.41 But even in these states, Jewish social solidarity remained more
or less firm. Like their German counterparts, French and English Jews kept Jewish
company more often than not. The novelist Julia Frankau, a radical assimilationist
 Jew ish Self-Idenlijication and Belonging 117

who raised her children as Christians, noted the same absence of mixing as the
German memoirists above. In her novel Dr. Phillips (1887), middle-class London
Jews live in social isolation, cut off from intimate contact with Christians. In “the
heart of a great and cosmopolitan city,” she wrote, they constituted “a whole
nation dwelling apart in an inviolable seclusion." She continued: “There are houses
upon houses in the West Central districts, in Maida Vale, in the City, which are
barred to Christians, to which the very name of Jew is an open sesame." To their
most common form of social intercourse—card playing in each others homes—“it
was decidedly unusual to invite any but Jews."42 In seeking to explain the preva­
lence o f marriages between first cousins in late Victorian Anglo-Jewry, the pioneer
social scientist Joseph Jacobs dted, inter alia, what he termed “shoolism"—the
inclination of London Jews to limit their circle of friends and acquaintances to the
members of their own synagogue (shul).43 In France, even those high-ranking judi­
cial and administrative officials whom Pierre Birnbaum has dubbed “lesJuifs d’état,”
graduates of the universities and the grandes écoles who zealously served the Third
Republic as prefects, subprefects, and as members of the Conseil d’État, the Cour
de Cassation, and the Cours d’Appel, tended to marry within the fold, retain mem­
bership in Jewish organizations, and establish close social ties with other Jewish
state functionaries and politicians. If they had become servants of the universal, lai­
cized state in the public arena, they remained Jewish in their private lives. Marcel
Proust captured this kind of social cohesion in describing the Jews who vacationed
at the seaside resort Balbec. When they visited the casino, “they formed a solid
troop, homogeneous within itself, and utterly dissimilar to the people who
watched them go by and found them there again every year without ever exchang­
ing a word or greeting.” They presented "a bold front in a compact and closed pha­
lanx into which, as it happened, no one dreamed of trying to force his way."44
While distinguishing the secular from the religious in Jewish culture is always
risky, it would appear that the bonds linking Western Jews in the half century
before the First World War were more secular than religious in character. What
made them Jewish was their similar background and descent, common memories
and intimate culture, intragroup sociability, and endogamy rather than their reli­
gious faith, synagogue attendance, ritual observance, or Hebrew learning. Their
Jewishness manifested itself in shared social and cultural practices that were rooted
more in the immediate circumstances of their recent history than in the religious
culture of traditional belief and practice. In this sense, their Jewishness resembled
the ethnicity of the Russian Jews in Zvi Gitelman’s chapter in this volume, an eth­
nicity based on biology and sentiment and defined more by boundaries than by
content. Their Jewishness was symbolic ethnicity, a “thin" rather than “thick” cul­
ture, which was becoming progressively more “thin” with each generation because
high levels of acculturation and secularization weakened its transferability. Unlike
secular forms of Jewishness in Eastern Europe and the Yishuv, that of Central
European Jews was not expressed in a distinctive and exclusively Jewish language
(Yiddish or Hebrew) nor buttressed by a nationalist ideology (Yiddishism or
Zionism) or territorial concentration (the Pale of Settlement or the Land of Israel).
 118 TODD ENDELMAN

Jacob Katz attributed the persistence of Jewish cohesion after the decline o f
Jewish observance to “the fact—the existential fact, as it were—of Jewish commu­
nity, which, out of its own inner necessities and traditions, resisted the higher blan­
dishments of emancipation." For him and other nationalist historians, “Jewish
existence was a fact, a stubborn fact defying regnant ideology and philosophy.”45 In
the early twentieth century, Jewish ethnologists and scientists attributed the persist­
ence of Jewishness to the biological ties of race. The Anglo-Jewish geneticist
Redcliffe N. Salaman wrote his fiancée in 1901 that it seemed to him almost self-
evident, given the low level of “religious feeling amongst a large majority of the
Jews,” that “racial feeling” was the chief ingredient in Jewish cohesion: “When I am
amongst Christians ÔCthe question at all arises of defending one’s position as a Jew
it is always the racial element that at once appeals—and in that way I feel that the
Polish Jew is a brother though we may differ considerably in religion.”46 For the
purpose of this essay, knowing the source of Jewish consciousness and cohesion in
the aftermath of emancipation is less important than recognizing that it was mani­
fested more frequently in secular than religious ways.

Jfewish and Non-Jewish Perceptions o f Emancipation

That said, it would be misleading to suggest that Jewish social cohesion in the nine­
teenth and early twentieth centuries remained rock solid, unshaken by drift and
defection. The stigmatization of Jewishness in social and cultural life and the per­
sistence of legal and social barriers to integration took their toll, leading tens of
thousands of Jews (especially in Central Europe) to cut their ties to Judaism,
through baptism, intermarriage, and other forms of radical disengagement. In
Vienna alone, 9,000 Jews formally severed their ties to Judaism (withdrew from the
Gemeinde, with or without baptism) between 1868 and 1903—a figure that does not
include an unknown but considerable number of children who were baptized by
their parents, either at birth or later. In Germany between 1880 and 1919, about
25,000 Jews chose either Protestant or Catholic baptism.47 The German census of
1939 and the Hungarian census o f 1941, both of which defined Jews in racial terms,
provide evidence about the cumulative effect of communal secessions over several
generations. In Berlin, 8.5 percent of the Jews were not members o f the Gemeinde;
in Vienna, 12 percent; in Budapest, 17 percent.48
Secession figures alone do not express the extent to which the stigmatization
of Jewishness eroded its public expression. Among Jews who rejected conversion or
secession, for reasons of conscience or otherwise, efforts to mute markers of
Jewish difference became increasingly common from the 1870s. The Viennese nov­
elist and satirist Robert Neumann recalled in his memoirs an incident about his
mother that encapsulates these efforts. “To be a Jew [in pre-World War I Vienna]
was one thing,” he wrote, “but to discuss it was as much bad form as it was to
swear, and almost as bad as mentioning anything with the functioning of the diges­
tive or sexual organs.” Once when his mother had to introduce to her guests a visi­
tor “with the un-gentile name o f Cohen . . . she pronounced his name again and
again so unrecognizably and so much as if it were some painful infirmity from
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 119

which he suffered that in the end he withdrew, red-faced."49 To escape the stigma
attached to Jewish family names, German Jews tried to change theirs—a move that
officials fought tooth and nail. Some changed even their noses, following the devel­
opment of cosmetic rhinoplasty by the Berlin Jewish orthopedic surgeon Jacques
Joseph in 1898.50 The pejorative meaning of the word Jude caused some to avoid
using the word in conversation with other Jews, especially in public. Robert
Weltsch, longtime editor of the Jiidische Rundschau, recalled that in the bourgeois
circles of his youth in pre-World War I Prague it was considered tactless for anyone
to say that he was a Jew and that "every Jew of good bourgeois standing avoided
doing so," for the word had been “emptied of all positive content” and "shriveled
up into a mere name of derision.” Ernst Lissauer, author of the World War I “Hate
Song against England,” recalled that in his parents’ Berlin house they would not use
the word Jude if young girls were present and instead would replace it with
“Armenian" or “Abyssinian.”51
Stigmatization and exclusion were not so pervasive, however, that they stifled
all informal social mixing. Social relations between Jews and non-Jews—the young
above all—increased gradually, especially in the early twentieth century, weaken­
ing, though not dissolving, Jewish social cohesion. The increase in intermarriage
from the 1870s through the 1930s indicates that Jews were not confined entirely to
their own social ghetto. Intermarriage, then and now, presupposes sustained and
more-or-less intimate social contact. In the case of West and Central European
Jews, the sites of this social intercourse were the workplace, the university, the vol­
untary association, the political arena, the dance hall, and the promenade—sites
where parents could not monitor their children’s friendships and sexual relations.
In the Netherlands, the percentage o f Jews marrying who took non -Jewish spouses
rose from 6.02 percent from 1901 to 1905 to 16.68 percent from 1931 to 1934. In
German cities, intermarriage was even more common. In Berlin, from 1905 to 1906,
there were 43.8 mixed marriages per 100 pure Jewish marriages; in Hamburg, from
1903 to 1905, 49.5; in Frankfurt, from 1905 to 1909, 24.7. In Breslau, the number
jumped from 22.8 during 1874 to 1894, to 64.5 from 1905 to 1920. In Prussia, the rate
of intermarriage almost doubled in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ris­
ing from 9.8 intermarriages per 100 all-Jewish marriages from 1875 to 1879 to 18.6
from 1900 to 1903.52 On the eve of World War I, there were perhaps as many as ten
thousand intermarried couples in Prussia. Defection from Judaism in Imperial
Germany, whether through intermarriage, conversion, or formal withdrawal from
the Gemeinde without baptism, was common enough to lead some observers to
prophesy that German Jewry was fated to disappear of its own accord. The best-
known exposition of this theme was Felix Theilhaber’s Der Untergang der deutschen
Juden, first published in 1911.
Yet, even while informal social contacts were rising, Jews retained a collective
social identity wherever they lived, an identity, as we have seen, defined less by their
religious practice than by their social behavior. What struck Gentile contempo­
raries was the persistence of Jewish social separatism (“tribalism"), not its break­
down and decay. Despite their seemingly rapid progress in becoming Germans,
 120 TODD ENDELMAN

Englishmen, Frenchmen, etc., Jews, the argument went, refused to abandon their
cultural and social distinctiveness. In the eyes of their critics, their transformation
was stalled and incomplete. They still constituted a well-defined, high-profile social
group. Heinrich Treitschke complained that despite their emancipation German
Jews rejected “the blood mixing" (intermarriage) that was “the most effective way
to equalize tribal differences."53 To both conservative and liberal critics, this was
scandalous: was not the purpose of emancipation to eradicate Jewish tribalism? To
remove social and cultural barriers? Moreover, the upward mobility of the Jews,
their unparalleled economic and cultural achievements after the removal of old
regime restraints—along with their refusal to intermarry en masse or abandon
their social cohesion—was an affront to Christian sensibility and pride, fueling fears
of Jewish domination and further compounding the scandal. The contrast between
their economic and cultural prominence and their marginal demographic status
also contributed to Gentile anxiety. In rebutting Treitschke's antisemitic articles in
the Preussische Jahrbiicher in the winter of 1879-1880, the liberal historian Theodor
Mommsen scolded Jews for failing to disappear into German society. Just as they
had served as a universal element in the Roman Empire, “a force for cohesion shat­
tering particularistic tribal elements, so now they must as ‘ein Element der
Composition der Stamme.’ ” To enable them to carry out their historical task of aid­
ing in German unification, Mommsen instructed them to dissolve their own associ­
ations with the same goals as nondenominational integrated ones. In his view, the
preservation of Jewish identity for secular reasons was an affront to the Christian
character of modern civilization. In the following decade, the Verein zur Abwehr
des Antisemitismus, established by Christian liberals and progressives in 1891 to
combat the new racial anti-Semitism, denounced the formation o f Jewish fraterni­
ties and sports clubs because they encouraged Jewish continuity and survival.54
While the German case represents an extreme manifestation of liberal intoler­
ance for Jewish continuity, it embodies nonetheless a broader split in Jewish and
non-Jewish understandings of the meaning and scope of the transformation of the
Jews. In Victorian Britain, where the revocation of Jewish emancipation was not on
the table as it was in Central Europe, liberals and radicals still complained about the
persistence of Jewish “tribalism." The radical crusader Henry Labouchere, editor
of the pro-Gladstonian Truth, attacked Jews, beginning in 1878, for resisting
“fusion" with Christians. Their endogamy and “clannishness" and their willingness
to employ their resources collectively gave them an unfair economic advantage. “It
would be desirable,” he concluded, “that the state should allow no Jew to marry a
Jewess.” If the state failed to act and Anglo-Jewry refused to engineer its own vol­
untary dissolution, then the latter would be responsible for whatever prejudice they
faced.55 In the outburst of Liberal anti-Semitism sparked by Disraeli’s Eastern pol­
icy, the historian Goldwin Smith attributed the persistence of anti-Jewish hostility
to a fundamental misunderstanding in the midcentury emancipation debate. Those
Christians who supported emancipation saw Jews as simply another dissenting sect,
as persons no different than other citizens, except for their theological opinions,
and they assumed that when toleration was extended to them they would become
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 121

“like other citizens in every respect." The problem was that Jewry was “not a reli­
gious sect, but a vast relic of primaeval tribalism, with its tribal mark [circumci­
sion], its tribal separation, and its tribal God." “The affinity of Judaism” was "not to
nonconformity but to caste.” It was not Jewish beliefs that were “the root of the
mischief” but the Jews’ “peculiar character, habits, and position,” which their
endogamy preserved.56

The Source o f Jewish Cohesion

Gentile criticism of the tribalism of the Jews (that is, their failure to intermarry and
fade away) created a dilemma for Jewish spokesmen and apologists in the West.
Needing to define the character o f post-emancipation Jewish cohesion in public
debate, they had few options (unless they were Zionists). Once again they restated
the conceptual framework for emancipation articulated by Jewish and Christian
emancipationists a century before. The Jews were to be integrated into state and
society as members of a religious sect who differed from their fellow citizens only
in their manner of worship. Their inclusion on this basis meshed with the liberal
principle of religious toleration, which first emerged in the wake of early modern
Protestant-Catholic violence and then gradually encompassed the toleration of
non-Christian faiths as well. Jewish apologists and spokesmen told themselves,
their fellow Jews, and the world at large that they were similar to everyone else,
except for their religious beliefs and practices. The problem with this strategy was
its failure to represent the character of post-emancipation Jewish life accurately.
First, Judaism, even after emancipation, was not a religion in the same way that
Christianity was. It retained a collective social dimension and encompassed cus­
toms and laws that in Christian eyes were no longer matters of conscience. It regu­
lated behavior in which Christianity took little interest, such as questions of diet
and holy day rest. Jewish claims to toleration on the basis of religious difference
extended into realms that went beyond conventional Christian understandings of
the nature of religion. For example, in Victorian England, university entrance and
scholarship examinations were administered on Saturdays, causing considerable
distress to those who observed the laws of Sabbath rest. The Board o f Deputies of
British Jews repeatedly intervened to make alternative arrangements for Jewish
candidates.57 These met with success in most cases, but communal bodies else­
where did not seek similar exemptions, knowing full well that officials neither
understood nor felt sympathetic toward Jewish religious concerns. In the words of
David Landes: “If you want a lively debate, try to explain to a group of French
people, Jewish or non-Jewish, that the institution of Saturday classes is objectively
anti-Jewish. Most Frenchmen cannot even understand the issue.’’58
Second, presenting the Jews as a religious minority misrepresented social real­
ity. When Jewish publicists made religion the basis of Jewish difference, they did so
as much from necessity as conviction. They were not blind to the social dimension
of Jewish group life, as we will see. They knew full well that emancipation had not
dissolved the social ties that bound Jews together and that what united most Jews
was the synagogue they did not attend. Their problem was that European states
 122 TODD ENDELMAN

(with the exception of the two multinational empires) endorsed the toleration of
religious, not ethnic or national, difference. They conflated citizenship and nation­
ality, leaving no conceptual space for Jewish social cohesion and distinctiveness. For
them, citizenship required more than faithful observance of the laws of the land. It
expected that those who enjoyed its blessings share the same fundamental ethnic or
national identity and the habits, values, and tastes that went along with that iden­
tity. This meant that Jews were expected to experience an inner transformation that
would reorient their sentiments and affections. Of course, states and societies var­
ied in the degree to which cultural heterogeneity preoccupied them. The more
secure they were about their own national greatness, the more content with their
place in the world, the less obsessive they were about Jewish distinctiveness.
German officialdom, for example, worried more about making Jews German than
its British counterpart. But, in general, notions of multiculturalism, ethnic diver­
sity, cultural pluralism, and the like were in the future. Political leaders, social the­
orists, and cultural spokesmen dreamed o f national homogeneity, unity, solidarity,
fusion, and integration, leaving religion as the sole basis for defining Jewish differ­
ence. As a result, in the face of cries to revoke emancipation and circumscribe their
freedoms (which became widespread from the 1870s), Jews insisted ever more zeal­
ously in public debate that they were Germans (or whatever), reducing their
Jewishness to a mere matter of confessional difference. What they could not do was
acknowledge publicly their social cohesion and ethnic distinctiveness. That would
have seemed a dangerous move, an invitation to disaster—aside from the question
of whether they possessed the conceptual wherewithal to do so. And, when spokes­
men for the nascent Zionist movement began to do just that—to define Jews in
national terms—communal leaders in the West reacted with alarm, fearing that
this endangered their hard-won legal and social achievements.59 In his presidential
address to the Anglo-Jewish Association in 1898, for example, Claude Goldsmid
Montefiore warned that in the long run Zionism would be "prejudicial and delete­
rious to the best interests and truest welfare of the Jews themselves/'60
It is not clear how conscious Jews (Zionists aside) were of the tension between
how they defined themselves in public and how they actually lived their lives in pri­
vate. To the best of my knowledge, there was no public conversation about this
tension, not even an acknowledgement that it existed. And with the advent of
Zionism, there was little likelihood that integrationist Jews would pursue the mat­
ter. Nonetheless, there is evidence that even those who opposed Zionism were
aware that there was a nonreligious collective dimension to their Jewishness. This
can be inferred from the willingness of Jews across the political and social spec-
trums to employ the language o f race to describe their collective bonds. John Efron
and Mitchell Hart have explained how the pioneers of Jewish social science used
the terms and concepts of “race science" to study the sociology, anthropology,
demography, and medical pathology o f the Jews.61 However, I have in mind a
broader, less ideologically driven phenomenon—the widespread, casual, everyday
use of racial language to describe the Jews as a social unit. (Most Jewish "race scien­
tists" were Zionists for whom the racial and national character o f the Jews were
 Jew ish Self-Identijication and Belonging 123

fused and perhaps inseparable.) Unable to describe their collective ties as national
because of the terms o f emancipation, emancipated Jews, observant and unobser­
vant alike, borrowed the notion o f race, which was ubiquitous from at least the
1870s through the 1940s.
French Jews, perhaps the least observant in Western and Central Europe, com­
monly and freely spoke of la race juive. The radical politician Alfred Naquet, non­
practicing and married to a Catholic, declared in the Univers Israélite in 1886 that he
was “a Jew by race” but no longer a Jew "by religion.”62 Proust repeatedly ascribed
the behavior, looks, and health of his Jewish characters to their racial background.
Charles Swann, for example, the son (or grandson—it is not clear) of converted
Jews, suffers from “ethnic eczema" and "the constipation of the prophets.” When
Swann aligned himself with the Dreyfusards, Proust attributed his move to a deep,
ineluctable force—“Jewish blood"—that was at work in Swann and others who
thought of themselves as emancipated.63 Although these terms were explicitly bio­
logical, those who used them were not biological determinists in the main. Their
use of the word race was imprecise and often contradictory. By using the word, they
wanted to suggest a feeling of community with other Jews, a sense o f common his­
torical fate, and a deep emotional bond that transcended religious faith and obser­
vance. As Michael Marrus has written in his analysis of French Jewry at the time of
the Dreyfus Affair, “the biological terminology of race provided a semantic frame­
work within which all Jews could express these feelings of Jewish identity.”
Although French culture did not sanction this form of belonging and allegiance, it
worked well for Jews, especially unobservant ones. “Only race offered the excuse
for a lingering Jewishness among men who had renounced their religion.”64
In Britain, communal notables, including those who opposed Zionism, freely
used the term to describe the nonreligious foundations of Jewish cohesion. In 1871,
the founders of the Anglo-Jewish Association, in setting forth the motives for creat­
ing an organization to aid unemancipated Jews in other lands, stressed the interna­
tional, cosmopolitan character of Jewishness, using the language o f race. Their
aim, they wrote, was “to knit more closely together the bond o f brotherhood
which united Jew with Jew throughout the world, and which should make its mem­
bers and fellow-workers sensible o f the grand fact that the race of Israel belongs
not to England or France alone, but to all the countries of the globe." The Jewish
notables and scientists who supported Jewish participation in the Universal Races
Congress in London in July 1911 were not Jewish nationalists (with the exception of
Israel Zangwill). The only public objection to participation came from the
American-born, Cambridge archaeologist and art historian Charles Waldstein, who
deplored any manifestation of Jewish separatism and wrote to the Times protesting
the classification of the Jews as an oriental race in the Congress program. When a
reviewer of the memoirs of Lady Battersea (née Constance de Rothschild) implied
that she had converted to Christianity, she angrily responded that it was not true,
that she was "a Jewess by religion as well as by race.”65 Again, as in France, it was
possible for Jewish apologists to both emphasize the ability of Jews to adapt to their
surroundings and acknowledge simultaneously the ethnic basis of Jewish solidarity.
 124 TODD ENDELMAN

For example, in the opening pages of his apologetic volume Jews As They Are (1882),
the composer and pianist Charles Kensington Salaman repeated the old integra-
tionist chestnut that Jews differed from country to country since they took on the
coloration of their surroundings, even quoting Isaac D'Israeli's words to this effect
in his Genius of Judaism: "After a few generations the Hebrews assimilate with the
character, and are actuated by the feelings of the nation of which they become
part." But two pages later Salaman asked his readers to reflect on the near-
miraculous post-biblical history o f the Jewish "nation" and, in particular, on how
modern Jews triumphed over “so terrible a state of racial adversity and degrada­
tion." He concluded: “None but a divinely-protected people could have done so."66
Thus, in a mere few lines, Salaman managed to describe Jews as a race, a nation,
and a people under divine protection.
In Germany, where defining Jewishness was a more pressing issue, Jews were
much less likely to use the language of race in this ambiguous and unfocussed way.
Nonetheless, by the Weimar period, there is evidence that even the staunchest lib­
erals were dissatisfied with the old definition of the Jews as a religious group pure
and simple. The leaders of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen
Glaubens, a liberal, integrationist defense agency dating from 1893, used various
neologisms that departed from the strictly religious definition of Jewishness that an
earlier generation had invoked in the struggle for emancipation. Recognizing that
this definition did not encompass the tens of thousands of non-observant Jews who
still felt attached to other Jews (and who supported the work o f the Centralverein),
Ludwig Holländer, who headed the organization from 1921 to 1933, spoke increas­
ingly of the Jews' Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate). Words like Stamm
(tribe) and Abstammung (descent) were invoked in sermons, apologia, and
Centralverein publications. In seeking to define what was uniquely Jewish, Rabbi
Cesar Seligmann told his Frankfurt congregants: “It is not Jewish conviction, not
Jewish doctrine, not the Jewish creed that is the leading, the primary, the inspira­
tional; rather, it is Jewish sentiment, the instinctive, call it what you will, call it the
community of blood, call it tribal consciousness [Stammesgefühl], call it the ethnic
soul [Volksseele], but best of all call it: the Jewish heart."67

Conclusion
The willingness of German Jews to coin new terms to describe the basis o f their
ties and of Jews in more liberal settings to define them in ambiguous and contradic­
tory ways is symptomatic of a European-wide problem: Jews did not fit in the slot
that classical liberalism created for them. Their Jewishness overflowed the narrow
framework of religious doctrine and practice to which emancipation theoretically
confined it. Liberal and other supporters of emancipation in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries envisioned the integration of Jews on the basis o f their
status as individuals without historical or cultural baggage. During the course of
the emancipation debate, Jews agreed with their allies that their integration into
state and society required their transformation, especially the differentiation of
dimensions of Jewish life that earlier were part of a seamless web o f behavior and
 Jew ish Self-Identijication and Belonging 125

consciousness. In hindsight, it is clear that both sides were vague, even naive, about
what this entailed. It is also clear that, however vague the expectations of Jewish
transformation were, Gentile friends of the Jews expected a more radical transfor­
mation than occurred following the removal of legal disabilities. Traditional faith
and practice eroded; cultural distinctiveness shrunk; but social cohesion remained
strong (though not intact). To the extent that Gentile supporters of emancipation
thought in concrete terms, this was not an outcome that they foresaw. Their vision
was blinded by a naive faith in human perfectibility and plasticity, in the power of
laws, institutions, and circumstances to uproot and replace well-entrenched social
and cultural traits. Their understanding of the visceral ties—memories, fears, affec­
tions, loathings—that bind historical minorities together was equally shallow. The
persistence of Jewish ethnicity long after the weakening of Jewish religion frus­
trated, irritated, and, in some cases, enraged them. For their part, Jews had little
ideological space in which to respond to this frustration and anger. Emancipation
allowed them to define themselves, at least in public debate, only as a religious
minority. What other choice was available? Racial discourse was available before
the rise of Nazism, at least in those states where Jews avoided constant scrutiny and
were able to talk about themselves in contradictory and ambiguous ways. The inad­
equacy of defining themselves solely in terms of faith and observance was obvious.
Even hard-pressed German Jews struggled to find new terms and expressions to
describe the reality of what bound them together. In any case, we can be confident
that the construction "German [French, English, Hungarian, etc.] citizens of the
Jewish faith" neither exhausted their self-understanding nor captured the social tex­
ture of their lives.

NOTES
1. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto-Isaac Cardoso: A Study in
Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1971), 44. The most nuanced treatment o f this negotiation is Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the
Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modem Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997). See also David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia
and theJewish Diaspora, 1580-1700 (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
2. On the transformation o f the Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Jacob
Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England,
1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1979)' Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Books, 1987); Paula E. Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation
and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Jonathan
Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Steven M. Lowenstein, The
Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770-1830 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994); Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews,
States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
3. Some social scientists employ the term assimilation to describe the combined process of
changing one's culture (what I am calling acculturation) and changing one's subjective identity.
For several reasons, I prefer to avoid the term. First, historically, the term was partisan and pre­
scriptive, used to describe a political program for Jewish social and cultural transformation.
 126 TODD ENDELMAN

The political uses to which it was put in the past still hinder its employment as a value-free,
descriptive concept. Second, when used in historical scholarship, it is often deployed without
precision or rigor. Historians who write about Jewish modernization frequently fail to distin­
guish between assimilation as a complex o f processes and assimilation as a cultural and political
program. They often fail as well to distinguish between acculturation and integration. Third,
assimilation, when used to describe subjective identity transformation (becoming Jewish and
something else), refers to a state o f mind rather than concrete practices. While social scientists,
armed with the tools o f quantitative survey research, can sample the thinking o f entire popu­
lations, historians must make do with the ideologically driven programmatic statements o f
elites. The behavior o f “average" Jew s in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (their accultur­
ation, integration, and secularization) is more accessible than their sense o f self-identification.
4. René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modem Europe, trans. Antonia Nevell (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 119.
5. Salo W. Baron, “The Modern Age," in Great Ages and Ideas o f theJewish People, ed. Leo W.
Schwarz (New York: Modern Library, 1956), 317. Baron first advanced this view in the interwar
period. See his "Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?" Menorah
Journal 14 (June 1928): 515-526; and his Social and Religious History of theJews, 1st ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1937), vol. 2, chap. n , "Emancipation.”
6. “ Ujabb tanacs” (More Advice), Egyenlôseg (Equality), February 10, 1889, quoted in Mary
Gluck, “The Budapest Flâneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture, and the 'Jewish Question’
in Hungary," Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 10, no. 3 (2004): 7.
7. Opinion de M. le comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, député de Paris, le 23 décembre 1789
(Paris, 1789), 13, quoted in Patrick Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à i860 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy,
1976), 51-
8. Berr Isaac Berr, Lettre d ’un citoyen . . . à ses confrères (Nancy, 1791), in Diogene Tama, éd.,
Transactions of the Parisian Sanhédrin (London: C. Taylor, 1807), 15-17.
9. John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland on the Same Foot
with All Other Nations (London, 1714), 18.
10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols. (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854), 1:142-144.
11. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of theJews, trans.
Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College; Jewish Institute o f Religion, 1957), 3,14-
12. The Voice of Jacob, January 31, 1845.
13. Calvin Goldscheider and Alan S. Zuckerman, The Transformation o f the Jews (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 1984), 7.
14. Thomas Winstanley, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of St. George, Hanover Square,
Sunday, October 28, 1753 (London, 1753), 12-14.
15. Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787-1831: The Odyssey o f an Egalitarian (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1971).
16. Ellen Littmann, "David Friedlânders Sendschreiben an Probst Teller und sein Echo,”
Zeitschrift fu r Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 6 (1935): 92-112. Also helpful is Richard Cohen's
introduction to the 1975 reprint o f the original German text, along with a Hebrew translation,
that the Zalman Shazar Center and the Hebrew University published in their Kuntresim series,
no. 44.
17. On the Jewish Saint-Simonians, see Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Some Jewish Problems in the
Early Careers o f Emile and Isaac Pereirc,” Jewish Social Studies 34, 3 (1972): 189-206; Michael
Graetz, Ha-periferyah haytah la-merkaz: Perakim be-toldot yahadut tsorfat ba-meah ha-shmonah esreh
mi-Saint-Simon ad li-yessud “ kol Yisrael haverim’’ (The Periphery Became the Center: Chapters in
the History o f French Jew ry in the Nineteenth Century from Saint Simon to the Founding o f
the Alliance Israélite Universelle) (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1982), chap. 4; Perrine Simon
Nahum, La Cité investie: La “Science du judaïsme’’français et la République (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1991), 25- 39 .
 Jew ish Self-Identijication and Belonging 127

18. Graetz, Ha-periferyah haytah la-merkaz, chap. 6; Paula E. Hyman, "Joseph Salvador: Proto-
Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?" Jewish Social Studies 34, no. 1 (1972): 1-22.
19. The literature on this topic is enormous. See in particular Edmund Silberner, Sozialisten
zur Judenfrage (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1962); Robert S. Wistrich, Socialism and theJews: The
Dilemmas o f Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1982); Isaiah Berlin, “ Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for
Identity," in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Clarendon Paperback (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
20. Quoted in Alan Levenson, “Jewish Reactions to Intermarriage in Nineteenth-Century
Germ any" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1990), 136. Levenson discusses a number o f advo­
cates o f Jewish dissolution in chapter 4 and in “The Conversionary Impulse in Fin-de-Siecle
Germany," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 40 (1995): 107-122.
21. Levenson, “ The Conversionary Impulse,” 112; Alan Levenson, "Radical Assimilation and
Radical Assimilationists in Imperial Germany," in What Is Modern about the Modem Jewish
Experiencei ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: Department o f Religion, College of
William and Mary, 1997), 40.
22. J. C. H. Blom and J. J. Cahen, "Jewish N etherlander, Netherlands Jews, and Jews in the
Netherlands, 1870-1940," in The History o f the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J. C. H. Blom et al.,
trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (Oxford: Littman Library o f Jewish Civilization,
2002), 249.
23. Callum G. Brown, "The Secularisation Decade: What the 1960s Have Done to the Study
o f Religious History," and Jeffrey Cox, "Master Narratives o f Long-Term Religious Change," in
The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750-2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24. Michael Meyer has briefly discussed the relationship between modernization and secular­
ization in his contribution to the Yosef Yerushalmi Festschrift. While acknowledging that Jews
expanded "the secular spheres o f their existence" and devoted "less time and concentration to
specifically religious matters,” he has preferred to describe this change as “ a displacement o f
the sacred rather than its abandonment.” Thus, when Jews performed tasks to further "univer­
sal progress," he believes that those activities were cloaked in "the mande o f sanctity." Perhaps.
But this interpretive move may also express an unwillingness to confront the decline o f Jewish
belief and practice in the modern period. See "Reflections on Jewish Modernization,” in Jewish
History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach
et al. (Hanover, NH: University Press o f New England, 1998), 372-373.
25. Steven Lowenstein found that in nineteenth-century Germany, small-town Jews often
embraced a secular outlook before moving to the city. See his collection The Mechanics of
Change: Essays in the Social History o f German Jewry (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).
26. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed.
H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139.
27. The best working definition o f secularization with which I am familiar is that o f David
Ellenson: "If the attitude o f the premodern traditionalist is captured in the words o f the
Psalmist, ‘ I have placed the Eternal before me always,’ the paraphrase uttered even by the reli­
gious traditionalist in a secularized world is, ‘I place the Eternal before me, but not all the
time’ Ajter Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union
College Press, 2004), 239.
28. David Martin, A General Theory o f Secularization, ed. Harper Colophon (New York:
Harper & Row, 1979), 83,160.
29. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 8-9.
30. This is the central theme o f Goldscheider and Zuckerman, The Transformation of theJews.
For example: “ Religious decline resulted neither from the inability o f old ideas to adapt to new
conditions nor from the less demanding nature o f some o f the new religious ideologies, but
 128 TODD BNDELMAN

from transformations in sodal conditions" (64). More broadly, they argue that "most—but not
all—o f the transformations that have occurred among Jews during the processes o f moderniza­
tion relate to general forces o f social change” (ix). The problem with their account is that in
seeking to undermine explanations that emphasize the unique and the particular in the trans­
formation o f the Jews they take an equally unbalanced view and throw out the baby with the
bathwater—that is, they fail to give due recognition as well to the transformative pressures that
Jews qua Jew s experienced as Christendom's quintessential outsiders.
31. Henry Wassermann, "Tarbutam ha-intimit shel yehudei-germanyah" (The Intimate
Culture o f German Jewry), in Crises o f German National Consciousness in the 19th and 20th
Centuries, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1983),
187-198; Shulamit Volkov, "Yihud u-temiyah: Paradoks ha-zehut ha-yehudit ba-reich
ha-sheni" (Unity and Assimilation: The Paradox o f Jewish Identity in the Second Empire), in
Crises of German National Consciousness, 169-185; Shulamit Volkov, "Yehudai germanyah
ba-meah ha-tesha-esrei: Sheaftanut, hatslakhah, temiyah" (The Jews o f Germany in the
Nineteenth Century: Ambition, Success, Assimilation), in Hitbolelut u-temiyah: Hemshekhiyyut
u-temurah be-tarbut ha-amim u-ve-yisrael (Acculturation and Assimilation: Continuity and Change in
Jewish and Non-Jewish Culture), ed. Yosef Kaplan and Menahem Stern (Jerusalem: Zalman
Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1989), 173-188; Jacob Katz, "German Culture and the Jew s,” in
TheJewish Response to German Culture from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda
Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, NH: University Press o f New England, 1985), 58-99-
32. Konrad Kwiet, "The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis,”
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 140, table 1. On the ideal o f Bildung in German Jewish cul­
ture, see George L. Mosse, German Jews beyondJudaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985).
33. Erwin Blumenfeld, Eye to I: The Autobiography of a Photographer, trans. Mike Mitchell and
Brian Murdoch (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 52; Gershom Scholem, “With Gershom
Scholem: An Interview,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner
J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 4-6; Gershom Scholem, “On the Social Psychology
o f the Jew s in Germany, 1900-1933," in Jews and Germans from i860 to 1933: The Problematic
Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 18-19; Richard Lichtheim, She’ar
yashuv: Zichronot tsiyoni mi-germanyah (A Remnant Shall Return: Memoirs of a Zionist from
Germany) (Jerusalem: Ha-Histadrut Ha-Tsiyonit, 1953), 37-
34. Marion Kaplan, “Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial
Germany," Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 481. Georg Simmel's distinction between
friends and acquaintances is helpful in understanding the character o f German-Jewish social rela­
tions. Ties between friends are rooted in the total personality, while mutual acquaintance, such
as we find in the German-Jewish case, "involves no actual insight into the individual nature o f
the personality." Acquaintance "depends upon the knowledge o f the that o f the personality, not
o f its what. After all, by saying that one is acquainted, even well acquainted, with a particular
person, one characterizes quite clearly the lack o f really intimate relations. Under the rubric o f
acquaintance, one knows o f the other only what he is toward the outside. . . . The degree o f
knowledge covered. . . refers not to the other per se; not to what is essential in him, intrinsically,
but only to what is significant for that aspect o f him which is turned towards others and the
world." The Sociology o f Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. W olff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
1950), 320. Simmel's own fate—baptized at birth, he, as well as his work, was labeled and
scorned as Jewish—may have contributed to his thinking.
35. Werner E. Mosse, The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820-1935-. A Socio-Cultural Profile
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 93,95-
36. Dolores L. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus: Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine
Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 240.
37. Kaplan, "Friendship on the Margins," 274.
38. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus, 194-195; Stefanie Schtiler-Springorum, "Assimilation
and Community Reconsidered: The Jewish Community in Königsberg, 1871-1914," Jewish Social
 Jew ish Self-Identification and Belonging 129

Studies, n.s., 5, no. 3 (1999): 105-106, no; Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die
Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von i860 bis
1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck ÔC Ruprecht, 2000), 132.
39. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnie Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 136,177-179.
40. Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), xix-xx, n. 53;
Mosse, The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 130; André Spire, Quelques Juifs, 2nd ed. (Paris: Société
du Mercure de France, 1913), 195; Hannah Arendt, The Origins o f Totalitarianism, part 1, Anti-
Semitism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 64 n. 23.
41. Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), chaps. 3-4. There is no parallel work on Jewish social integra­
tion in other liberal, western states in the nineteenth century.
42. Julia Frankau [Frank Danby], Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (London: Vizetelly, 1887), 55,
168. See also Todd M. Endelman, "The Frankaus o f London: A Study in Radical Assimilation,
1837-1967," Jewish History 8, nos. 1-2 (1994): 117-154.
43. Joseph Jacobs, Studies in Jewish Statistics: Social, Vital and Anthropometric (London: D. Nutt,
1891), 6.
44. Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: Histoire politique des Juifs d ’état de Gambetta à
Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Random House, 1992-1993), 2:434-435.
45. Jacob Katz, "Emancipation and Jewish Studies,” in Jewish Emancipation and Self-
Emancipation, 81-82.
46. Redcliffe N. Salaman to Nina Davis, July 16, 1901, MS 8171/97, Redcliffe Nathan Salaman
Papers, Cambridge University Library.
47. Jakob Thon, Die Juden in Oesterreich (Berlin: L. Lamm, 1908), 69-70; Monika Richarz,
“ Demographic Developments," in Germanjewish History in Modem Times, ed. Michael
A. Meyer, vol. 3, Integration in Dispute, 1871-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),
15-16.
48. Peter Honigmann, "Jewish Conversions—A Measure o f Assimilation? A Discussion o f the
Berlin Secession Statistics o f 1770-1941," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 5. Honigmann
acknowledges that these figures are not precise and "at best give no more than the order o f
magnitude" o f formal defection. This is because the considerable emigration that occurred
after 1933 might have changed the balance between the two groups (Jews by virtue o f their for­
mal communal membership and Jews by virtue o f their racial background).
49. Robert Neumann, The Plague House Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 85-86.
50. Dietz Bering, The Stigma o f Names: Anti-Semitism in German Daily Life, 1812-1933, trans.
Neville Plaice (Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 1992); Sander Gilman, The Je w ’s Body
(London: Routledge, 1991), 181-188.
51. Robert Weltsch, introduction to Martin Buber, Der Jude under sein Judentum: Gesammelte
Aufsätze und Reden, 2nd ed. (Gerlingen: L. Schneider, 1993), xv; Ernst Lissauer, "Bemerkungen
über mein Leben," Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 20 (December 1962): 297.
52. E. Boekman, Demographie van deJoden in Nederland (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1936), 59;
Arthur Ruppin, TheJews o f To-Day, trans. Margery Bentwich (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 163;
Yaakov Lestschinsky, "Ha-shemad be aratsot shonot” (Apostasy in Different Lands), Ha-olam 5,
no. 9 (1911): 4; Van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 149, table 27.
53. Quoted in Walter Boehlich, ed., Der Berliner Anti-Semitismusstreit (Frankfurt a. Main: Insel-
Verlag, 1965), 79-
54. Uriel Tal, Yahadut ve-natsrut ba-“reich ha-sheni” (1870-1914) (Jews and Christians in the
"Second Reich") (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1969), 26-27; Ismar Schorsch,
Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1972), 63, 95~97- Earlier in the century the abbé Grégoire expressed his frustration with French
Jew s for refusing to regenerate themselves, like their "enlightened brethren" in Germany, in the
 130 TODD ENDELMAN

wake o f emancipation. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Strategic Friendships: Jewish Intellectuals,

the Abbé Grégoire, and the French Revolution,” in Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish
Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskalah, ed. Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe (Philadelphia:
University o f Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 192.
55. Claire Hirshfield, "The Tenacity o f Tradition: Truth and the Jews, 1877-1957," Patterns o f
Prejudice 28, nos. 3-4 (1994): 69.
56. Goldwin Smith, "The Jewish Question,” The Nineteenth Century 10 (1881): 495, 497, 499.
57. Charles H. L. Emanuel, A Century and a Half of Jewish History Extracted from the Minute
Books of the London Committee of Deputies o f the British Jews (London: George Routledge ÔCSons,
1910); David C. Itzkowitz, "Cultural Pluralism and the Board o f Deputies o f British Jew s,” in
Religion and Irréligion in Victorian Society: Essays in Honor o f R. K. Webb, ed. R. W. Davis and
R. J. Helmstadter (London: Routledge, 1992)» 85-101.
58. David S. Landes, "Tw o Cheers for Emancipation,” in The Jews in Modem France, ed.
Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: University Press o f New England,
1985), 291 n. 4.
59. Stuart A. Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics o f Anglo-Jewry,
1895-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), chaps. 5-8; Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland
or Promised Land: The Dilemma o f the German Jew, 1893-1914 (Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan
Press, 1975), chap. 5; Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of FrenchJewry, 1906-1939
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 155-169-
60. Jewish Chronicle, July 8,1898.
61. John M. Efron, Defenders o f the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of
Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
62. Quoted in Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study o f the French Jewish
Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 20.
63. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 1:571, 2:643-644.
64. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation, 26.
65. Report of the Anglo Jewish Association, 1871-1872 (London, 1872), 8; Jewish Chronicle, May 12,
1911; Jewish Guardian, December 1,1922.
66. Charles Kensington Salaman.Jewi As They Are (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882), 7, 9.
67. Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: University o f Louisiana
Press, 1980), 103-106; Ruth Louise Pierson, "German Jewish Identity in the Weimar Republic”
(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), chap. 1.
 People of the (Secular) Book
LITERARY ANTHOLOGIES AND THE
MAKING OF J E W I S H IDENTITY IN
POSTWAR AMERICA

JULIAN LEVINSON

Reb Hersh, you say that I have forsaken a fountain of

living waters for a broken cistern. I must tell you you’re
wrong. I draw water from the same pure fountain as
you, only I use a different vessel.
—Chaim Grade, “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner”

If secular Jewish culture exists, then it would seem to possess identifiable content.
It should be possible, that is, to find practices, ideas, or texts that might be defined
at once as Jewish and nonreligious. This is obvious, perhaps, and yet little agree­
ment exists on how to define the content of secular Jewish culture. One possibility,
suggested over the years by various scholars and intellectuals, has been through
literature—not in the sense of rabbinic commentary, ethical literature (e.g., musar),
or any other genre sanctioned by religious tradition—but rather in the sense of
Jewish belles lettres.1 If the religious Jew reads the rabbinic Pirke Avot on Shabbat
afternoon, the argument goes, his or her secular counterpart would spend the same
time with a novel by Saul Bellow. Jewish literature conceived along these lines is
notoriously difficult to define, but it is generally understood to include novels,
stories, plays, or poems by Jews on Jewish themes or possessing an identifiable rela­
tion to ideas, images, or values associated with Judaism.2 Unlike religious texts,
however, these texts do not derive sanction for their views or values from divine
revelation or any communally sanctioned tradition of commentary. They are con­
sidered to be solely products of human creativity, expressing the subjective opin­
ions, outlook, or “vision” of the author. According to this definition, a novel by an
American Jew about a man struggling to understand his place in the modern world
(such as Bellow's Herzog) might well qualify as secular Jewish culture. Part of the
appeal of this notion of secular Jewish literature, we might add, is that it preserves
the traditional image of Jews as the “people of the book," while broadening the
definition of “the book."
 132 JULIAN LEVINSON

No sooner are such propositions put forth, however, than a host of definitional
problems appear. What qualities must a work include before it is accepted as
“Jewish"? Must it be written by a Jew? Must it be explicitly about Jews? How might
one demonstrate that a work derives from a specifically Jewish sensibility rather
than some other source? (To return to the above example, Saul Bellow has humor­
ously disparaged those who would pin him with the label “Jewish writer” : "I am
well aware of being Jewish and also of being American and also o f being a writer.
But I’m also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions."3) Moreover, to get
to the heart of our concerns here, even if a given work seems close enough to
Jewish life to qualify as Jewish literature, how can we confidently place it under the
secular rubric? Allen Ginsberg’s autobiographical poem about his mother,
"Kaddish,” includes transliterated passages from the Aramaic prayer. But its pri­
mary theme is his mother's descent into schizophrenia and his personal develop­
ment as a poet. Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep features a protagonist obsessed with the
Book of Isaiah, and yet the text continually reminds the reader that he is but a
young, vulnerable boy. The novel’s style and overall aims share much more with
the High Modernism of James Joyce than any Jewish source. E. L. Doctorow’s The
Book of Daniel also pivots around allusions to biblical prophets, even though
Doctorow’s main point is to retell the story of the Rosenbergs’ trial and execution.
None of these works would generally be classified among Judaism’s religious texts.
If they contain some religious sentiments or yearnings, these are more properly
associated with “religiosity” (vague feelings connected with the supernatural) than
with Judaism proper. Thus their Judaic motifs seem only to function metaphori­
cally: the Kaddish becomes a type of lament, and the figure of the prophet stands
for the defiant critic of the status quo.
And yet this seems too easy. A religious allusion does not get automatically
separated from the traditions of Judaism simply because of the ostensibly (secular)
purpose of the work. After all, the meaning of any metaphor derives from its orig­
inal context, which remains present even in the new context as a tacit frame of ref­
erence (a “trace,” in the language of deconstruction. At the very least, the use of a
motif borrowed from Judaism would complicate any simple assignation of a text to
the realm of the secular. Nor are the avowed attitudes of authors sufficient as a final
arbiter of a text’s meaning. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, “Trust the tale, not the
teller.” ) And, finally, were one to argue that, allusions and motifs notwithstanding,
a form like the novel is somehow inherently secular, one would have to contend
with the fact that for every theory of the novel as a secular or at least agnostic form
(recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that the novel “denies the absolutism of a single and
unitary language”),4 countless readers have found religious teachings encoded
within novels (consider, for example, Gershom Scholem's argument that Kafka’s
The Trial allegorically recapitulates key insights of the Kabbalah).5 Thus one would
be hard pressed to determine the status of a given work as secular or religious
solely on the basis of its internal, formal characteristics.
A further complication is introduced when we consider the institutional con­
texts in which works are presented. Countless examples abound of texts being
 People o f the (Secular) Book 133

brought into liturgical or other sacral contexts even though their religious content
is debatable. A classic case is the Song of Songs, which is considered appropriate for
the biblical canon only when its erotic motif is read allegorically to recount the love
affair between Israel and God. Similarly, poems or other kinds o f writing that
might be read as secular in one context can be introduced into religious services,
where they are suddenly read with an eye toward their religious significance. One
example is a liturgy recently compiled for Yom Hashoah by the literary scholar
David Roskies. The liturgy Nightwords is comprised of a number of radically differ­
ent sources, ranging from the Hebrew Bible to the Talmud and the Midrash to
modern literary texts, most (but not all) by Jewish writers. What makes this
example particularly complex is that one impulse behind the liturgy is to bear wit­
ness to the experience of the eclipse of God. One of the included poems is Yehuda
Amichai’s "El Male Rachamim” (God Full of Compassion), which evokes the tradi­
tional prayer only to subvert its meaning. In the lines "I . . . Who brought fallen
bodies down from the hills/Can swear that the world is devoid of compassion,”
Amichai challenges the idea of a God who intervenes mercifully in human affairs.
Here, then, is a poem written in defiance of religious tradition but inserted into a
liturgical context.6
On the other hand, texts generally used in religious contexts may be brought
into secular contexts, where once again they take on different meanings. Perhaps
the most unambiguously religious Jewish text is the Pentateuch, traditionally
ascribed to Moses’ authorship under God’s direction. Indeed, to bolster its status as
divine scripture, the Talmud provides lengthy explanations o f the ontological divi­
sion separating words of Torah from mere works of poetry.7 And yet, beginning as
early as Longinus’s first century treatise On the Sublime, we observe an approach to
the Bible “as literature,” namely as a body of writing studied primarily for its sty­
listic devices and patterns of imagery.8 Erich Auerbach's "Ulysses' scar" (1946)
reflects a similar approach. Auerbach contrasted the story of the binding of Isaac
from Genesis to the account of Odysseus’s homecoming in The Odyssey to illumi­
nate two “basic types” of narrative style. Auerbach argued that these types serve as
"a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in
European literature” (19; emphasis added).9 In addition to the creation of a subfield
within biblical research, the idea of the Bible as literature has flourished in
American universities since the mid twentieth century, where the Bible is routinely
taught as world literature.10 When the Bible is introduced in the context of a non­
sectarian classroom, its traditional significance for religious Jews is defined as but
one aspect to be considered.
These problems are abrogated, perhaps, if the discussion is limited to works
written in a Jewish language, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ladino. In "Secularity and
the Tradition of Hebrew Verse,” Robert Alter has argued that religious and secular
elements have existed side by side in Hebrew poetry, beginning with medieval
poets like Judah Halevi and Solomon Ibn Gvirol. Juxtaposing liturgical poems
(piyyutim) with works focusing on this-worldly themes such as nature, erotic love,
and drinking, Alter pointed to "the vigor with which a secular sensibility could
 134 JULIAN LEVINSON

flourish in the heart of an officially religious culture."11 For Alter, the Jewishness of
these latter works is guaranteed by virtue of being written in Hebrew; their secu-
larity derives from their this-worldly focus. This would seem a plausible argument.
But when we turn to writers who use non-Jewish languages, Alter’s argument pro­
vides little help, because it is more problematic to insist that a given work maintain
a close focus on things Jewish as well as a sufficient distance from things religious
to qualify as both Jewish and secular.
It would appear, then, that the search for secular Jewish literature as a sui
generis discourse is doomed to an arbitrary process of abstract definition and
imprecise measurement. The lines separating the secular from the religious are
hazy at best, and in any case, the context in which a work is read seems to trump
any formal criteria in determining its status as secular or religious. Moreover, indi­
vidual readers are inevitably affected by their own backgrounds and interests as
they read, once again introducing an element of indeterminacy. But if these con­
siderations lead us away from the study of individual works (i.e., away from asking
whether the work is secular or religious), they also introduce secondary questions
about when and how literature has been used to promote the agenda of secular
Jewish culture. For the fact remains that many who have supported the idea o f sec­
ular Jewishness have looked to literature as a touchstone for this form o f identity.
Thus secularism need not be looked for in the literary work itself; it can be seen
instead as a project that might use literature in defining Jewish identity.
To proceed along these lines, we can examine different anthologies of Jewish
literature that have been compiled with some view of Jewish secularity in mind. A
literary anthology typically leads to the construction of a “canon,” a list of works
proffered as the embodiment or metonymic representation (i.e., a part standing for
the whole) o f a tradition. In Jewish history, we might add, anthologies have played
an especially prominent role in redefining textual tradition at various historical
junctures (for example, medieval anthologies such as Yalqut shim’oni, the Mayse-
bukh, and the Tsena u’re’tta, or modem collections such as Sefer ha’agadah or Mimkor
yisrael).12 Behind every anthology it is possible to find some premise, implicitly or
explicitly stated, about the meaning of Jewishness.13 Different forms of Jewish iden­
tity, including secular forms, can thus be tracked by analyzing literary
anthologies.
In the following discussion, I will consider three anthologies published since
the end of World War II. The period in question has witnessed an increase in the
production of anthologies of Jewish writing, prompted, among other reasons, by
an impulse to reconstitute some sort of Jewish culture in the wake of the
Holocaust. The anthologies I will examine include Jewish Short Stories (1945), edited
by Ludwig Lewisohn; A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), edited by Irving Howe and
Eliezer Greenberg; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001), edited
by Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein.
Broadly speaking, these anthologies may be linked respectively with the agendas o f
Cultural Zionism, Yiddishism and/or Bundism, and American multiculturalism. To
understand how these anthologies construct versions of Jewish identity, we must
 People o f the (Secular) Book 13 5

consider the specific contexts in which they were produced, their targeted audi­
ences, and the vocabularies available for defining individual and group identities.

Jewish Short Stories (1945)

This anthology was commissioned in 1945, just as World War II was ending, by the
National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) for distribution through the United Service
Organization (USO). Formed in 1941, the mandate of the USO was and continues to
be to "provide morale, welfare, and recreation-type services to military
personnel. .. extending a touch o f home to the military." Their activities include
organizing concerts, providing cafes and other meeting places, and distributing
reading materials such as novels, popular magazines, and religious books for mili­
tary personnel. The JWB was known primarily as a religious organization, as were
five of the other six service agencies that formed the USO: the YMCA, the YWCA,
the National Catholic Community Service, and the Salvation Army. Yet their man­
date clearly extended beyond any narrowly defined religious function, as is evident
in Jewish Short Stories. This anthology is geared toward an audience, both non-Jews
and Jews, espousing any number of perspectives. The iconography displayed on the
cover evokes religious practice—an open book with a tassel, suggesting a prayer
book—and yet the volume itself, which contains works of fiction, could hardly be
confused with liturgy. Nevertheless, the implication is that this too is a "Jewish
book," and that short stories might embody the essence of Jewishness as well, if
not better, than a prayer book.
The editor o f Jewish Short Stories, Ludwig Lewisohn, was the most prominent
Jewish novelist and all around “man of letters” in America from the 1920s through
the 1940s. He became widely known after the publication of Up Stream (1922), in
which he railed against the incipient anti-Semitism spreading throughout the
country. He also became one o f America's most outspoken proponents of
Zionism. After being encouraged by Chaim Weizmann to visit the Yishuv in
Palestine, he published a series of glowing reports in The Nation (ultimately col­
lected in the volume Israel [1925]). His recurrent message to his American Jewish
readers was that assimilation was neither possible, given the intractable anti-
Semitism of Christian societies, nor desirable, given the violence it inflicts on the
Jewish psyche. He looked to Zionism as a therapeutic antidote to the misguided
impulse among modem Western Jews to be “just like everybody else.” However,
joining the pioneers in Palestine was not as crucial for him as the sheer act of assert­
ing one’s Jewishness, which he insisted one could do even in the Diaspora.
In his introduction to Jewish Short Stories, the polemical tone of most of
Lewisohn's writing is muted. He seems to have had in mind a readership not only
consisting o f Jewish GIs but also non-Jews, presumably American soldiers who may
have known nothing about the Jews with whom they served or about those whom
they had just liberated from concentration camps. He cast the Jewish people as a
personable bunch whose stories reflect their internal nature: “No people has been
more inveterate in the telling o f tales than the Jewish people,” he asserted. "And it
is known to all Jews and to all who have had friendly dealings with Jews that it has
 136 JULIAN LEVINSON

always been and is to this day their habit to relate stories and to ‘swap’ anecdotes in
all the languages which they speak.”14 Here the Jews are not so much the people of
“The Book” as a people o f multiple stories, some oral, some written. Lewisohn has
described the works in the anthology as products of this basic storytelling impulse.
He has also linked the stories in the anthology, all written in the modern period, to
the “tales concerning the prophets and heroes and kings of ancient Israel” (i). This
mimics the idea of the "Bible as literature” we have already explored. By connect­
ing modern stories written by Jewish authors to the Bible, Lewisohn has suggested
that the sensibility of modern Jews can be traced back to that of their antecedents
in the biblical period. All are moved by "tales” about the heroism of their people.
Incidentally, no explicit concept from Judaism, such as chosenness, commandment,
or covenant, is mentioned. "Tales,” not Torah, comprise Judaism.
Lewisohn explained that these stories are Jewish “in quite the same sense in
which stories written by Swedes are Swedish or, to use a better example, the sense
in which a story written by a Frenchman is a French story, whether the story was
written in Montreal or in Paris or in Algiers or in Indo*China” (4). His equivocation
here suggests the difficulty in finding a perfect analogy, but it is evident that
Lewisohn's purpose is to place the Jews amongst other nationalities. But while Jews
comprise a distinct national culture, Lewisohn suggested that this should make
them familiar rather than foreign in the eyes of other Americans. Moreover, he
insisted that loyalty to nation and love of freedom are equally Jewish and American
values. This view is echoed in the prefatory note byJW B president Frank Weil, who
asserted that while the stories come from different historical periods “their signifi­
cance is the same—men and women must be eternally vigilant in defense of free­
dom” (i). This familiar American rhetoric thus linked the essence of Jewish
literature directly to American self-understanding.
The stories included in the anthology bear out the assertion that Jewish culture
spans multiple languages. Three o f the stories were originally written in Yiddish
(I. L. Peretz’s “Bontche Shweig” [.sic], Sholem Aleichem's “Fishel the Teacher,” and
Sholem Asch’s “A Peculiar Gift” ); two in German (Arnold Zweig's "Jerusalem
Delivered” and Karl Emil Franzos's "The Savior of Barnow” ); one in Hebrew
(Moshe Smilansky’s "Latifa”); and four in English (Israel Zangwill’s “Tug of Love,”
Edna Ferber's “No Room at the Inn,” Ben Hecht’s “God Is Good to a Jew,” and
Howard Fast’s “The Price of Liberty”). The theme of freedom is most prevalent
in the stories by Hecht and Fast, which epitomize Lewisohn’s intentions for the
collection.
In Hecht’s “God Is Good to a Jew,” a Jewish survivor of the Lublin ghetto,
Aaron Sholomas, has made his way as a broken and traumatized man to an
unnamed American city, where he boards with distant family members. In this new
context, he becomes a mysterious figure, a symbol of the Jewish world of Europe
which now lies in ruins. Walking in a daze through the streets one night, he
encounters a building on fire, which he imagines to be a Nazi attack that will finally
take his life: "This was death, the homeland of the Jew s.. . . Where fire burned
there Jews died” (136). Much to his surprise, the benevolent American crowd comes
 People o f the (Secular) Book 137

to his rescue just as he is collapsing in agony. His life cannot be saved, but the benev­
olence shown to him at the scene o f his death becomes a redemptive closure to a
life of suffering. “Here was the street he had never found in the history of the Jews,
the shining street in which faces smiled on the tribe of Abraham. .. . After many
years and after a long journey, I have found goodness that does not vanish where
the Jew stands. I have found a home. God is good!" (138). Hecht's story connects the
Holocaust to a familiar motif from immigrant Jewish writing, namely that of
America as the true home for the Jews (consider, for example, Mary Antin's 1912
autobiography, The Promised Land). What is striking here (in both Hecht's and
Antin's work) is that America appears to displace the Jewish God as the force of sal­
vation. Sholomas sees his fate as controlled by God, but in the story it is the
American crowd that comes to his aid. While this leaves open the possibility that
the American crowd may be an agent of God, the point of the story, at least as pre­
sented in Lewisohn’s anthology, seems to be that America has provided the first real
home for the Jews in their two thousand years of wandering. The implication is
that the dying Orthodox Jew will be superceded by a new kind of Jew, at once loyal
to Jewish tradition and to American civic culture.
As if to answer this story about Jewish vulnerability, the anthology ends with an
assertion of Jewish military might. Howard Fast's "The Price o f Liberty" features a
figure who stands outside of the tradition of the “schlemiel” that has been a com­
mon feature of Jewish American literature since the war: Johnny Ordonaux is an
American Jew of French descent who becomes a naval hero in the War of 1812.
Ordonaux descends from a line of rabbis (“And all Cohanim,” the narrator adds),
yet he exchanges the role of religious leader for that of a naval captain. He assem­
bles a preternaturally brave, multiethnic crew with an ad that reads: “ I sail for lib­
erty, equality, independence, I offer shares or wages, I will take Irish, Jews, Negroes,
Germans, Portuguese, Frenchmen: Any who own the name American" (152). After
an epic battle in which Ordonaux's outnumbered crew overpowers a British war­
ship, Ordonaux and his Negro officer are the only men left standing. The story ends
with Ordonaux delivering a triumphant quasi-sermon in a synagogue: “The price of
liberty is in the blood of brave men, and it was never bought otherwise. That
should be written down by the scribe in the record-book of the synagogue" (157).
Courage in battle emerges as the highest virtue, displacing more traditional
notions of religious piety. Like Hecht’s piece, Fast's story forces a rethinking of the
idea of a providential God, suggesting that human powers take precedence over
God. Ordonaux's orders are written down in the synagogue record book as if to
symbolize the notion of a new kind of scripture, one that offers testimony to
human tenacity and courage.
In the introduction, Lewisohn evoked the question of Zionism, noting that
“significant stories are again being written in Hebrew by the older and younger
writers who live in Jewish Palestine" (4). Literary creativity is thus seen as an index
of national vitality. Zionism emerges in Sholem Asch's story, which traces a por­
trait of an East European Jew who has become a farmer in Palestine. The hero of
the story, Reb Noah (a survivor of the "flood” of European anti-Semitism), attributes
 138 JULIAN LEVINSON

his self-transformation to the fact that he is "gifted for Palestine,” a quality that one
would have hardly expected from an East European Jew. The unnamed narrator
concludes by speculating: "Perhaps that gift belongs not only to some Jews, but to
all. Perhaps the gift for Palestine slumbers in the whole Jewish people” (53). Jews
possess an inchoate identity waiting for the proper time and, by implication, the
very message contained in these stories.
Considered together, the collection presents an image of Jews as simultane­
ously loyal to basic American principles as well as committed to a surging national
movement. In the hands of non-Jewish GIs, these stories offered reassurance of the
patriotism of Jewish GIs, as well as preparation for the eventuality of a Jewish State.
For Jewish GIs, the stories may have generated pride and a renewed impulse to
identify as a Jew. Raising the flag o f Jewish nationality, Lewisohn has drawn a con­
nection between modern Jewish culture and biblical literature. The quintessential
expression of Jewishness, he argued, remains loyalty to the nation. In Lewisohn's
own words and in the stories themselves, the role of God recedes from view.

A Treasury o f Yiddish Stories (1954)

An anthology of an entirely different sort, published less than ten years later by
Viking Press, is A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. Viking Press was known at this time as
the publisher of highbrow works, ranging from The Portable William Blake (1946) to
Lionel Trilling's essay novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947). To bring out a selec­
tion of Yiddish stories in this context was to assert that these works had something
to offer the serious, “intellectual” reader. Edited by the American literary critic and
socialist writer Irving Howe along with the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenbei^, the col­
lection contains fifty-two stories by writers such as Mendele Mocher Sforim
(1836-1917) and Chaim Grade (1910-1982). It provides a broad sampling of works by
I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem and includes first-time translated works by writ­
ers such as Lamed Shapiro and Abraham Reisen. Howe and Greenberg anticipated
a readership that knew no Yiddish other than a few expressions and that had little if
any familiarity with Yiddish writers. One premise behind the volume is that given
the distinctiveness of the East European Jewish experience, Yiddish literature
emerges most clearly when viewed alone, not alongside writings by American,
French, German, or Israeli Jews. Another premise, which remains largely tacit, is
that Yiddish literature distills out a worldview that is more authentically and
uncompromisingly Jewish than what one finds elsewhere, particularly in postwar
American Jewish life. In this sense, the anthology questions the idea expressed in
Lewisohn's work of a single Jewish nation capable of preserving its identity in dif­
ferent eras, different places, and different languages. To ensure that readers will
properly register what he calls the “qualitatively unique . .. cultural aura of
Yiddish,” 15 Howe has provided an extensive ninety-three-page introduction, pre­
senting the social and intellectual life of East European Jewry. The anthology also
contains a glossary, in which a number of Yiddish terms are translated into English.
Both aspects of the anthology help code the stories as an expression of a foreign
world, a world populated, so to speak, by “real Jews” who have yet to compromise
 People o f the (Secular) Book 139

their identities. The introduction begins with a broad description o f the shtetl,
which thanks to works such as Marc Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog's ethnogra­
phy Life Is with People (1954) and Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's
(1949), was being mythologized at this time as the essential geography of prewar
Jewish life, the site of what Heschel called “the golden period in Jewish history, in
the history of the Jewish soul.''16 Howe agreed with this view, celebrating the shtetl
for its religious intensity, typified by a feeling of relatedness to the transcendent
God: “God was a living force, a Presence, something more than a name or
desire. . . . Toward Him the Jews could feel a peculiar sense o f intimacy” (8).
But unlike Zborowski and Heschel, Howe was not chiefly concerned with
delineating the religious life of East European Jews. Instead, he was most interested
in what happened when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the combined
pressures of anti-Semitism, urbanization, and the spread of secular ideologies
began to erode the foundations of shtetl life. He has argued that as the traditional
structures of East European Jewish life came apart, a uniquely productive and
dynamic period in Jewish history emerged, a period in which a secular culture
began to take shape. The distinctive mark of this culture was its "precarious bal­
ance” (28) between the folk world and the modern world, its familiarity with shtetl
life, and its ability to reflect critically on that life. One characteristic dimension of
this new culture is socialism, as well as other types of political radicalism; another
is formal—that is, secular—literature. “Formal Yiddish literature,” he asserted,
emerged during a “wonderful interregnum” when East European Jews were no
longer within the grip of the traditional religious order, but had yet to lose their
distinctiveness through acculturation to non-Jewish norms. Thus he has character­
ized Yiddish literature as a necessary temporary cultural form, improvised under
duress, to negotiate the crisis of modernity. “Yiddish reaches its climax of expres­
sive power,” he asserted, "as the world it portrays begins to fall apart” (28). Howe
calls this culture “Yiddishkeit,” a misleading term, perhaps, since contemporary
Orthodox Jews use it as synonymous with religious Judaism, but one that has also
gained broad currency with Howe's definition.17
Howe's account of the birth of Yiddish literature at a moment of social
upheaval echoes Hegel's dictum that "the Owl of Minerva flies at twilight,” mean­
ing that true insight becomes available when the structures of society break down
and their inner nature is laid bare. Indeed, Howe was most drawn to stories that
dealt with the conflict between an older order and some new way o f life yet to be
fully articulated. Unlike the stories in Lewisohn’s collection, the stories in Howe
and Greenberg's Treasury emphasize conflict and alienation. The pieces that frame
the collection—Mendele's "The Calf” and Chaim Grade’s "My Quarrel with Hersh
Rasseyner"—address this conflict with particular clarity and poignancy. “The Calf,”
at once humorous and tragic, is about a boy whose affections and imaginative life
can no longer be contained by the traditional contours of religious life. Instead he
is drawn to the natural world, specifically to a single calf that has been born to the
family cow. The calf becomes the center of his affective life: "The Talmud lay open
before me, but all I could see was the calf: small chin, tiny perked-up ears, delicate
 140 JULIAN LEVINSON

neck.” (99). Although the boy is sent away to yeshiva, an “Evil Spirit” continues to
beckon him, pointing him toward the beauties of nature. The story itself would
appear to side with this Evil Spirit and with the boy who cannot tolerate yeshiva
life. Nevertheless, tradition remains too powerful. At the story's end, the boy learns
that his calf has died, symbolically crushing the boy's bid for self-liberation. He
then collapses in misery. Positioned as the first story in the anthology, Mendele's
tale reinforces Howe's point that Yiddish literature arises as a critique of traditional
forms o f piety.
The final story in the anthology, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” revisits
the conflict between Jewish tradition and the impulse to escape in the context of
the post-Holocaust world. Grade’s story takes the form of a philosophical dialogue
between Chaim Vilner, a former Yeshiva student who has become a secular
(veltlekh) Yiddish writer, and Hersh Rasseyner, his former classmate from the
Novaredok Yeshiva of the Musar movement. The dialogue begins on the streets of
Bialystok on the eve of World War II and resumes after the war in Paris, where they
meet as if drawn by destiny to deliberate on the status o f their attitudes in the wake
o f the Holocaust. Rasseyner attacks Vilner, and by extension all secularists, for hav­
ing betrayed the only true path for a Jew: strict observance of mitsvot. He sees
Jewish belles lettres as an oxymoron; he calls Vilner's poetry “godless verses.”
Secularism, he maintains, necessarily equals assimilationism. And if any further
evidence was ever required to testify to the bankruptcy of a life without God, he
finds it in the Holocaust, which he attributes to the moral anarchy of the world at
large. As for his own faith, the Holocaust has made him more, not less, resolute.
"How could I stand it,” he asks, "without Him in this murderous world?” (629).
In his riposte, Vilner questions Rasseyner's tidily constructed opposition
between Jewish tradition and secular thought. He sees greatness not in blind sub­
mission to a readymade worldview, but in tolerating doubt and seeking to uncover
"the hidden root of the human race” (632). He has not abandoned the Jews so much
as he has accepted a double responsibility, toward Jewish tradition and toward sec­
ular culture. He adds that Jewish secularists have been at the forefront of the
struggle against tyranny, testifying to their moral seriousness. But finally, Vilner's
prime concern now that a third o f the Jewish people have been killed is to make a
truce with Rasseyner and everything he stands for:

That's what has changed for me, and for all Jewish writers. Our love for Jews
has become deeper and more sensitive. I don't renounce the world, but in all
honesty I must tell you we want to incorporate into ourselves the hidden
inheritance of our people's strength, so that we can continue to live (650).

Having rejected the premises of Orthodoxy, Vilner refuses to abandon his

ambiguous position between worlds. Yet he has found a renewed inclination to
identify himself as a Jew, not by performing mitsvot, but by laying claim to a cultural
memory, what he calls the "hidden inheritance of our people's strength.” It is mem­
ory, instead of commandments, which he embraces as the essence of Jewishness.
 People o f the (Secular) Book 141

Here Vilner articulates a new mandate for Jewish literary culture after the
Holocaust, namely to shore up a form of Jewish identity by redoubling the effort to
understand oneself in relation to Judaism and the Jewish past. Literature becomes
a forum for precisely this operation. Indeed, the attitude he expresses resonates
powerfully with Howe’s own, and by extension Vilner's speech may be read as a
motto for Howe’s anthology as a whole. To be sure, there is an awareness of the dif­
ficulty inherent in seeking to embrace a tradition he cannot believe in. “We have
not silenced our doubts," he insists, "and perhaps we will never be able to silence
them” (650). But the emphasis lies on reestablishing a relation to Judaism, even if it
is one of struggle and antagonism. That this seems to be Grade's view as well is evi­
dent from the fact that he uses the form of dialogue in this work not only to express
his ideas, but also as a metaphor for Jewish identity itself. Finally, the view of Jewish
secularism that emerges here is not of some stable worldview, but a shuttling
between positions, an effort to honor the life of faith while remaining committed
to doubt.
A Treasury of Yiddish Stones proved enormously successful. After its original
appearance in 1954, it was reprinted a total of six times, and five additional volumes
o f Yiddish writing translated into English followed: A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry
(1969), Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1972), Selected Stories: I. L.
Peretz (1974), Yiddish Stories Old and New (1974), and Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by
Soviet-Yiddish Writers (1977). It seems that Howe and Greenberg’s vision of "literary
Judaism” offered at least a semblance of a “usable past” for postwar American Jews
searching for their bearings. At the same time, Howe himself was less than con­
vinced that the troubled path of Jewish secularism outlined in Grade’s story could
really be an option for Jews who did not come from the same intensely religious
background as Vilner. A few months before his death in 1994, Howe delivered a
speech at Hunter College titled “The End of Jewish Secularism.” He argued that
Jewish secularism is bound up with a specific period in Jewish history and with the
Yiddish language itself, which preserves in its nature the dialogue with tradition
that Grade valued. Howe despaired of the possibility of transferring a vital Jewish
secularism into English. The period of the "wonderful interregnum,” he feared,
was over: the traditions of the past no longer figured prominently enough to lend
any meaning to rebellion. Seen from this standpoint, Howe and Greenberg’s
Treasury may be read not as a project of sustaining a model of Jewishness, as in
Lewisohn's case, but as one of commemoration. We are left, in Howe's view, with
a memory of Jewish secularism much less than a vibrant way of life.

Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001)

The recent Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, edited by four literature
professors at American universities (Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene
Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein), builds on Howe and Greenberg’s work,
reprinting several of its works, including "Gimpel the Fool” and “My Quarrel with
Hersh Rasseyner.” But it embraces the much more hopeful vision that a Jewish lit­
erary culture, including pronounced secular currents, can sustain itself in English
 142 JULIAN LEVINSON

in modern America. Unlike Howe, who perceived American society as a leveling

force, the editors of the Norton anthology have described America as a vibrant
pluralistic society in which multiple ethnic identities and cultures can sustain
themselves.
Published primarily for use in college literature classes, the Norton anthologies
are typically lengthy volumes with generous annotations by noted specialists.
Among the many anthologies in print, at least two—the Norton Anthology of
Women’s Literature (edited by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert) and the Norton
Anthology of African American Literature (edited by Henry Louis Gates)—have been
instrumental in codifying subtraditions defined according to specific group identi­
ties. These volumes have justified and enabled the inclusion of classes on women's
and African American literature in college curricula. While courses o f study on
Jewish American literature are, for a variety of reasons, less common on college
campuses than other courses, the Norton volume suggests—explicitly in its intro­
duction and implicitly by its sheer presence—that Jewish American literature
deserves the same consideration as other fields. The significance of the Norton
anthology, then, lies in its claim that Jewish culture deserves to be welcomed under
the banner of academic multiculturalism.18
The introduction's thesis is that American Jews constitute an ethnic group, one
of many structurally analogous groups that constitute the pluralistic society of the
United States. To explain the formulation "Jewish American literature" (as opposed
to, say, American Jewish literature), the editors have emphasized that " ‘Jewish
American literature' sounds nicely congruent with 'African American literature,’
‘Mexican American literature,' ‘Asian American literature,' and ‘Native American
literature,' filling a multiethnic and multicultural paradigm for what America has
come to be."19 The term “ethnicity” tends to have a positive valence in American
academic discourse; it has offered an alternative to the suspect category of “race”—
downplaying the role of biology and emphasizing the role of culture. In discus­
sions of Jews, “ethnicity” tends to designate a category that includes religion but is
not reducible to it. For the editors of the Norton anthology, ethnicity is shaped in
dialogue with Judaism and Jewish collective memory within the larger cauldron of
surrounding non-Jewish culture. Thus they deemphasize the question of common
features that might link Jewish American literature with, for example, Australian
Jewish literature or German Jewish literature. If the USO edition o f Jewish stories
defines Jews as a transnational, multilingual peoplehood, and if A Treasury of
Yiddish Stories emphasizes the uniqueness of modern Yiddish culture, the Norton
anthology assumes that the American experience has produced a self-contained
Jewish American cultural heritage, crossing linguistic boundaries (by including
entries from English, Yiddish, and Hebrew language writers) and generic bound­
aries (including fiction, autobiography, drama, poetry, criticism, and even sermons)
but remaining in one geographical space.
To be sure, this notion of ethnicity does not translate into some unchanging
essence. The editors have shied away from making the sort o f broad claims about a
Jewish temperament or a Jewish sensibility that Lewisohn seemed happy to make.
 People o f the (Secular) Book 143

Instead, they have understood Jewish identity as a product of ongoing, dynamic

interaction with changing historical circumstances. As in Grade's story, the opera­
tive concept is dialogue and debate, though the debate is often with America as
much as with Judaism. The anthology is organized chronologically into five sec­
tions, telling the story o f Jewish life in America: "Literature of Arrival, 1654-1880” ;
"The Great Tide, 1881-1924” ; "From Margin to Mainstream in Difficult Times,
1924-1945” ; "Achievement and Ambivalence, 1945-1973” ; and "Wandering and
Return: Literature since 1973.” These headings invite us to imagine two poles: a
Jewish margin and an American mainstream. In the movement between these two
poles of experience, Jewish American ethnicity develops. As the editors have noted
in an instructive formulation: "Despite the pressures to ‘make it' in a relatively tol­
erant American society and to divest themselves of 'foreign' or ‘ethnic’ qualities,
Jews as a whole did not ‘melt.’ Traditional values held out (to some degree) against
or alongside Americanization and modernization. Yet most Jewish Americans
adapted to the new culture—not necessarily abandoning tradition, but transform­
ing it, learning to live as Jews and Americans (11).” The motif of a journey between
some prior Jewish sphere and America is symbolized by the image on the cover, a
painting by the immigrant artist Raphael Soyer titled “The Bridge.” It depicts fig­
ures moving across what seems to be the Williamsburg Bridge, shuttling between
Brooklyn and Manhattan as if embodying the movement between Jewish tradition
and American society. Just as the Yiddish writers in Howe and Greenberg’s collec­
tion are said to exist in a space between the disintegrating shtetl and the greater
world, the writers in this collection are portrayed as figures in transition. The cru­
cial difference is that the transition is now imagined as a continual process, indeed
as the essence of an ongoingjewish American identity. While there has been talk of
American Jews having entered a “post-ethnic” stage, given the dispersal of Jews
from recognizable urban enclaves and the decline of Yiddish, the Norton editors
have asserted that a distinctive Jewish culture has persisted.
When the editors assert that the texts in the volume contain a vital connection
to ‘‘traditional values,” they do not understand this tradition in a limited religious
sense. Rather, they have included the traditions of leftist political activism that
Howe linked with Yiddishkeit. The two longest works printed in their entirety—
Clifford Odets's play Arise and Sing! and Tillie Olsen's novella Tell Me a Riddle—
make negligible references to Jewish themes, and yet are called emblematic Jewish
American works by virtue of their connection to the world of political radicalism.
Both writers associated with socialist circles, particularly in the 1930s, and both
texts explore the problem of transmitting a radical political outlook between gen­
erations in America. As the editors have written about Olsen: “Although her writ­
ing is not marked overtly by Jewishness as such, [her] radical background shapes
her whole outlook. And Yiddishkeit permeates Tell Me a Riddle, her finest story, in
both spirit and language.” Thus the editors have suggested that a dedication to
political radicalism can be a sufficient basis for Jewish identity.
Interestingly, Arise and Sing! and Tell Me a Riddle follow similar narrative pat­
terns. Both feature immigrant grandparents who embody the political idealism of
 144 JULIAN LEVINSON

turn-of-the-century East European radicalism, and both show how upon their
deaths the grandparents transfer their idealism to their American-born grandchil­
dren. In Odets’s play, the patriarch Jacob, described in the notes as "an old Jew with
living eyes in his tired face,” inspires his grandson Ralph to fight so that “life won't
be printed on dollar bills” (493). In Olsen's novella, the dying Eva, active as a youth
in the 1905 revolution, passes on her iconoclasm to her granddaughter Jeannie, who
resolves at the conclusion of the story to leave her job as a nurse and start over as
an art student in San Francisco. The resolution of these narratives reinforces the
premise of the anthology itself: a cultural sensibility, linked to the Jewish past, can
be translated into an American context.

Jewish Culture and Jewish Anthologies

Each of these anthologies is premised on the idea that a definable Jewish culture,
not reducible to religion, exists. Each works with a master category that displaces
religion as the primary definition of Jewish identity: Lewisohn described
Jewishness as a nationality; Howe introduced the idea of a “culture of Yiddishkeit” ;
and the Norton editors have characterized Jewishness in America as “ethnicity,”
wrought in the interchange between the Jewish margins and the American center.
For Howe, the possibilities of a form of Jewish identity expressed in and centered
on literature are dim, but for Lewisohn and the Norton editors prospects appear
brighter. As for the question of secularism proper, we might note that in each of
these models religion figures prominently, though generally as historical back­
ground, as a frame of reference, or even a force of antagonism. In other words, reli­
gion is not absent, but neither is it regarded as normative in any way.
It also appears that the different perspectives embodied in these three antholo­
gies represent a progression of prevailing understandings of Jewish identity. The
idea expressed by the Norton anthology that Jewish identity exists within an
exchange between a (variously defined) Jewish sphere and a local, non-Jewish cul­
ture appears to be gaining ascendancy. This view may be seen in a variety of other
recently published anthologies, all devoted to localized manifestations of Jewish cul­
ture: Argentine Jewish Theater: A Critical Anthology (1996, edited by Nora Glickman
and Gloria Waldman), Enough Already: An Anthology of Australian-Jewish Writing
(1999, edited by Alan Jacobs), and King David's Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Latin
American Jewish Writers (1999, edited by Stephen Sadow). Even more striking, in 2001
the University of Nebraska Press initiated a series called Jewish Writing in the
Contemporary World, which already includes volumes devoted to Jewish
writing in Germany, Austria, Hungary, South Africa, and Canada. As in the Norton
collection, these definitions depend upon the idea of a bridge that connects Jews
to a broader national culture without permanently wrestling them away from
their Jewish base. This turn toward highly localized versions of Jewish identity sug­
gests that we have seen the dilution of the grand ideological projects formerly
aligned with models of secular Jewish identity. Zionism, Bundism, and
Territorialism each announced broad programs for social and political change when
they first emerged. The model endorsed by the Norton anthology points instead to
 People o f the (Secular) Book 145

the idea of maintaining a balance between two spheres: a national culture (which
provides a language and context for daily life) and a Jewish culture (which provides a
range of references and what the Norton editors have called "traditional values”).
Why, we might ask, does imaginative literature figure so centrally in this model
o f Jewishness as "ethnicity” or "culture”? What do stories and poems offer that
other kinds of Jewish texts do not? The answer may lie in the association of litera­
ture with individual subjectivity. If the central metaphors for Jewishness are the
debate, the struggle, and the bridge, and if the authority of the normative religious
tradition has been unseated, the only remaining mediating force becomes human
consciousness, which itself becomes the final arbiter of meaning. And imaginative
literature, we might say, specializes in the representation of individual conscious­
ness and subjective response. Grade’s "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” stages a
confrontation between conflicting voices, but it possesses no authority to adjudi­
cate between them. The reader may be tacitly enjoined to submit his or her vote,
but this, once again, is but another response. Finally, it appears that a Jewish iden­
tity supported by literature may not be necessarily secular, but neither can it ever
be truly religious, since its proposals will be inevitably mutable.

NOTES
I would like to thank Jerem y Dauber, Jerem y Shere, Alvin Rosenfeld, and Lisa Makman for
their thoughtful responses to previous drafts o f this chapter.
1. See Ruth Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making o f Modem Jewish Culture (Seattle: University o f
Washington Press, 1991).
2. The problem o f defining Jewish literature has long preoccupied scholars, and it seems
unlikely that any consensus on a solution will soon emerge. For the purposes o f this essay, I
begin with the premise that “Jewish literature” exists, at least as an operational category, and I
explore distinct meanings that have been linked to this term. For a review o f the dominant
views o f this question, see Hana Wirth-Nesher, ed., What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1994).
3. Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University o f
Mississippi Press, 1994), V -
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed.
Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Texas University Press,
1981), 366.
5. To Scholem, the celebrated historian o f Jewish mysticism, Kafka was a "Jewish writer” in
a purely religious sense—that is, because he grappled with the problem o f revelation and the
meaning o f revealed law. In Kafka's depictions o f an agonized quest to understand the hidden
bureaucratic workings o f modern society, Scholem perceived "[certain] mystical theses which
walked the fine line between religion and nihilism." Quoted in David Biale, Gershom Scholem:
Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 31. In his book Walter
Benjamin, The Story o f a Friendship (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1982), Scholem
noted the pedagogic uses to which Kafka’s writings can be put: "I said then . . . that one would
have to read the works o f Franz Kafka before one could understand the Kabbalah today, and
particularly The Trial” (158).
6. The Nightwords liturgy (copyright David Roskies) has been used in many synagogues,
including the Conservative Anshe Chesed synagogue in New York City.
7. See, for example, the following discussion from Sotah 35b: "Raba expounded: 'W hy was
David punished? Because he called the words o f Torah songs, as it is said: ‘Thy statutes have
been my songs in the house o f my pilgrimage (Ps. 119:54). The Holy One, blessed be He, said
 146 JULIAN LEVINSON

to him: ‘Words o f Torah, o f which it is written (Prov. 23:6): When your eyes light upon it, it is
gone [the Torah is beyond human comprehension], you call songs!' ” For an extended discus­
sion o f the relationship between poetry and prophecy in rabbinic, Christian, and philosophical
thought, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 468-497.
8. In a discussion o f literary style, Longinus compared the book o f Genesis to Homer, judg­
ing the former superior to the latter in certain aspects. See W. R. Roberts, Longinus on Style
(Cambridge, 1899), 209.
9. Auerbach's approach should be distinguished not only from a reading from the stand­
point o f religious faith but also from modern German biblical scholarship, with its emphasis on
the multiple sources behind the biblical text.
10. A case in point is the Literature Humanities curriculum at Columbia College. When it
was first conceived and instituted in the 1920s, the only ancient works students read were Greek
and Latin literature. Gradually, instructors began to incorporate biblical literature as well,
prompted by an impulse toward inclusion. If Western civilization can be said to derive from
Jerusalem as well as Athens, the argument went, why not consider representative works from
both cultures in a survey course on literature? For a useful anthology o f essays on the Bible as
literature, see Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 1987).
ix. Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
12. See the double special issue o f Proofiexts devoted to "The Jewish Anthological
Imagination," Proofiexts 17, nos. 1, 2 (1997).
13. The phenomenon I am considering—the effort to define groups via their literary
expressions—is not restricted to Jew s, o f course. The process o f nation building or ethnic
self-assertion has commonly involved the recovery and celebration o f certain writers, who
become viewed as "classics" and whose work is meant to stand metonymically for the qualities
o f the group as a whole (e.g., Goethe for Germans, Pushkin for Russians, Shevchenko for
Ukrainians, etc.). There are several factors, however, which make the Jewish case somewhat
more complex than these examples. First, because Jews have been spread out geographically
and have written literature in different languages, the effort to define a unified and coherent lit­
erary tradition has presented singular challenges. Second, given the variability o f definitions o f
Jewishness, any effort to nominate a literary canon in support o f one identity will involve a
process o f exclusion that is more dramatic than in the case o f other literatures. Finally, there is
the problem we have already noted o f distinguishing between secular and religious works: is
there a place for "religious" texts in a canon that purports to underwrite a version o f secular
identity? How are such texts accounted for, framed, or reinterpreted?
14. Ludwig Lewisohn, introduction to Jewish Short Stories (New York: Berman House, 1945), 5.
Subsequent references will be dted in the text.
15. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking Press,
1954), 3. Subsequent references will be dted in the text.
16. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
1949), 18.
17. Howe used the spelling "Yiddishkeit,” adhering to the rules o f German orthography,
while YIVO dictates the spelling, "yidishkayt.” However, I will keep Howe’s spelling, since I use
his specific meaning o f the term.
18. The relationship between Jew s and multiculturalism is a vexed topic. In brief, it might be
said that Jews in America have been seen as a privileged, white group rather than among the
unprivileged minorities whom multiculturalism was meant to address. Seen in this light, the
Norton anthology is making a more polemical statement than might seem apparent. See
Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The
Return o f the Exiled (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
19. Jules Chametzky, et al., Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton,
200X), 1. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
PART III
SECULAR JEWISHNESS
IN ISRAEL TODAY
In Israel the relationship of ethnicity and religion is even more complex. It is
different from that in diaspora situations such as those described by Spector,
Endelman, and Fishman, partly because the relationship is played out in a self­
described “Jewish state.” Israelis do not have to be even nominally religious in order
to be Jewish—as citizens of a Jewish state, their ethnicity is bound up with their cit­
izenship. The late Charles Liebman and his colleague, Yaacov Yadgar, explore the
outlooks and behavior of secular Jews in Israel. Using survey data, their own obser­
vations, and a series of in-depth interviews, the authors differentiate between those
who are nonobservant (secular by default) and those who are committed antireli­
gionists. The authors ask whether secular Jewishness has a future in the Jewish
state. They point to the “enormous dependence o f secular Judaism on the public
arena, of the inability of the secular to generate private structures o f life that are
Jewish, or to compete with the consumer culture that does create such structures.”
Secular Jewishness has failed outside of Israel, but its viability in Israel is still an
open question.
Liebman and Yadgar then show that Israeli society cannot be divided simply
into “religious" and “secular,” as is often done. As much as a third of the Jewish
population defines itself as Masorti, or “traditional,” meaning partly observant reli­
giously. As with "religious" and “secular," the identity of Masorti is not absolute
but dependent on context, time, and place. It continually evolves as it confronts
competing mosaics of identities and changing social and political conditions.
Masorti is a distinctly modern identity because, whereas the traditionalist does not
consciously choose his or her identity, Masorti identity is not forced upon a person.
The authors conclude that “the traditionalist option may yet reveal itself as a solu­
tion to the continuing tension inherent in the Jewish national enterprise—the ten­
sion between a universal and a particularistic identity, between a state which is
‘democratic' and one which is 'Jewish.'"
As an officially Jewish state, Israel is challenged to define the roles of religion
and Jewish ethnicity in its multireligious and multiethnic society. Mark Tessler
examines Israeli attitudes toward the role of Judaism in Israel and sentiments about
Jewishness and how they affect Israel's non-Jewish (mainly Arab) citizenry. Tessler
then makes some comparison to the issues Islam raises in the very different polities
o f the Arab world, using survey data from Jordan and Egypt to illustrate his points.
Shachar Pinsker turns to Hebrew literature, observing that the lines between
religious and secular in literature are highly imprecise. He analyzes attempts by
 148 SECULAR J E W I S H N E S S IN I S R A E L TODAY

leading Hebrew writers o f the early twentieth century (Chaim Nachman Bialik and
Michah Yosef Berdichevsky) to transform rabbinic texts into secular modern Jewish
texts. The struggle to do so became a hallmark of modern Hebrew culture. The
relationship between religion, tradition, and modernity continues to occupy Israeli
literature.
 Secular-Jewish Identity and the
Condition of SecularJudaism
in Israel

CHARLES S. L I E B M A N
A N D Y AA C OV Y A D G A R

The term h iloni1 (secular) is commonplace in Israel as a means of identifying a type

o f Jew, a type o f Jewish identity, and a type of Judaism. It carries different meanings
to different people depending on the context. This chapter is devoted to seeking to
understand the different meanings, or at least the major meanings, that the term
secular carries in Israel. We will look at this from the perspective of those who use
the term in a positive or a neutral fashion. We refer only by indirection to the mean­
ing of the term in hostile circles. Very often, especially but not exclusively in
extreme religious circles, the term evokes an image of libertinism (prikat ol), at the
moral, especially sexual level, and an absence of any commitment to Judaism or the
Jewish people or to family values. Many traditionalists (m asortim ) whom we
describe in an accompanying essay associate the term hiloni with emptiness, a vac­
uum (reykanut ). The leaders of secular organizations dedicated to a Jewish renais­
sance (there are probably close to one hundred such organizations in Israel), find
that among their potential audience the term secular bears negative connotations,
although evidence presented in this essay points in the opposite direction.2 The
term certainly bears negative connotations among many secular intellectuals,
which may point to the intellectuals' idiosyncratic nature. More on this below.
We are concerned with secular Judaism in Israel. Our topic is the secular Jew,
not the secularization of Judaism. By secularization we mean the rationalization and
the differentiation of the nonreligious realm from the religious realm.
Secularization has taken place in the transformation of the Hebrew language (for­
merly “the holy tongue") of Jewish culture, Jewish politics, in the thought
processes of Jewish leaders, and, indeed, to a varying extent within the Jewish reli­
gion itself. Secularization has affected Orthodoxy from the modern-Orthodox and
religious-Zionist camp to the haredi camp.3 It is a topic that has engaged scholars,
complicated as it is fascinating, but it is not the topic of this essay.4
We will use the terms secular or hiloni (plural hilonim ) and secularism or hiloniut
interchangeably. After a brief historical excursus, we turn to a description of the
Jewish practices and beliefs of Israelis who define themselves as secular (hiloni), as
distinct from Israeli Jews who define themselves as “religious” (dati ) or “traditional”
 150 C H A R L E S S. LI E B M AN A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

(masorti). This section relies primarily on survey data, but it is informed, as are the
remaining sections, by our own interviews and impressions and by the transcripts of
eleven interviews of secular students in Rupin College conducted by Hadas Franco.
We distinguish two meanings of the term secular. Defining oneself as secular
may simply be the way one who observes little or nothing of the Jewish tradition
defines oneself, but it may also be a way of distancing oneself from the rabbis or
the religious establishment. When such Jews define themselves as secular (or "non-
religious," in the terminology o f the Guttman study), they are saying, at least in
part, that they reject that establishment or its demands. We call such Jews “secular
by default.” There are also those who, as a matter of ideology, define themselves as
secular. Among those who define themselves as secular by ideology we can distin­
guish two groups at end points on a hypothetical continuum. At one extreme are
those who consciously observe some rituals and some Jewish traditions and even
seek to enhance them even though they themselves are not religious (dad), and/or
do not believe in God, and/or believe that Judaism is a culture and not a religion,
and/or believe that religion is a constraint on the ideal society they envision. We
call them secular Judaists and distinguish them from secular Universalists. The lat­
ter adhere exclusively to a Universalist humanist vision. Although born Jewish,
Judaism and Jewishness are irrelevant to their lives. At the extreme, they believe
that Judaism is an impediment to the creation of a society in which no political dis­
tinctions are drawn between Jews and Arabs. Most of those who fall into this cate­
gory are post- or anti-Zionists about whom much has been written.5 Although they
are not a subject for this essay, we believe that some of what they say merits the
attention of the other camp of ideologists.6 Since our topic is secular Jewish iden­
tity in Israel, we are not concerned with the Universalists who are hostile to the
Jewish nature of the state and are generally indifferent to Judaism itself. Between
the two groups of secular intellectuals, one finds others of different stripes. Some
are antagonistic to religion and indifferent to Judaism. As Israeli nationalists they
favor a Jewish state, but one in which Judaism and Jewishness do not interfere with
their lives. One also finds, as one does in the public at large, those who are enraged
by what they perceive as religious coercion, by the behavior of the religious parties
and the ultra-Orthodox public whom they view as parasites on the public coffers.
This is the public that comprises the core of the Shinui electorate, which sent
fifteen representatives (about 13 percent of the total votes) to the 2003 Knesset. But
they continue to affirm their commitment to aspects of the Jewish tradition, argu­
ing that it is the religious establishment that has misappropriated it.

A Historical Note
There is an important historical dimension to our discussion. Until the late
19 40 S-19 50S the Hebrew term for a nonreligious Jew was hofshi, literally “free.” The
term developed during the nineteenth century with the advent of the haskalah
(Jewish enlightenment), when the classical term for a nonreligious Jew, kofer or
apikores —that is, a heretic—was no longer appropriate. According to Zvi Zameret,
hofshi was the standard appellation in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 151

before the creation of the state), but it carried a far more positive meaning there
than it had amongst the maskilim (enlighteners) who first used the term. To the
maskilim it meant "free from religion.” But to the Zionist settlers it meant “free to
choose”—to choose not to observe the halacha but also free to attend synagogue, or
light candles on Friday night, etc. Hofshi, as used by the Zionist settlers, did not
mean the denial of religion and tradition.7
The term hiloni, or huloni, according to Zameret, was used as early as the nine­
teenth century. It appears among other places in the writing of Micha Joseph
Berdichevsky. It implied materialism (homranut) and this-worldliness, a term which
at that time had very positive connotations. In the eyes of the maskilim and the
early Zionists, Jews were obliged to embrace the material rather than just the spir­
itual. This was essential in the creation of the "new” Jew, distinguished from the
"old” Jew, who was dissociated from the real world. (The early Zionists used the
term ivry (Hebrew) to distinguish the “new Jew” from the "old Jew.” ) Only later
was the term hiloni transformed into meaning nonreligious. Hofshi, as a synonym
for nonreligious, gradually disappeared around the time of the creation of the
state. But by then it had also lost its positive valence. Zameret explains this as part
of the general loss of a specific hiloni identity amongst the early settlers.
The relatively recent usage of the term hiloni as a synonym for nonreligious or
nonobservant is further attested to by the late Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, the promi­
nent linguist who conducted a weekly language column on the pages o f the daily
newspaper Ha’aretz.s The author introduced a column in June 1965 with a quote
concerning a young girl who is hiloni. Goshen-Gottstein wonders if the term hiloni
would have been so readily understood ten years earlier. Until recently, he says, the
term used was either hofshi or lo-dati (not-religious). He goes on to explore the
classical meaning of the term hiloni, noting that in the Targum Onkelos, the semi-
canonical translation of the Pentateuch, hiloni is a rendition of the Hebrew word
zar (stranger). Goshen-Gottstein finds the term hiloni objectionable but has no sug­
gestions for a substitute.
Dissatisfaction with the term remains. The Shenhar commission created in 1991
to offer recommendations to the Ministry of Education on the teaching of Jewish
subjects in the state (nonreligious) schools expressed its discomfort with the term
hiloni, but absent an alternative term it used the word hiloni to identify students in
nonreligious schools.9 The chair o f the commission, Aliza Shenhar, told us that in
her public appearances she has returned to the term hofshi.10 The problem is not so
much a matter of appropriate usage. Goshen-Gottstein already noted that the term
hiloni is properly translated as profane and one can speak of a profane literature, of
profane professions, of profane values, but not of a profane person. The problem is
that because the term has come to mean nonreligious, it carries a negative, not a
positive, resonance. It tells you what somebody is not, rather than what somebody
is. As the reader will note, many of the authors cited below use the term hofshi (plu­
ral hofshiim) to refer to secular Jews, and we are at a loss of how to translate the
term. Hence, we retain the original Hebrew in order to provide an appreciation of
the large number of Israeli intellectuals who shun the term hiloni.
 152 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

The second historical point to be noted is that a thriving form of secular

Judaism existed in the recent past. The secular Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe is
well known, but it is easy to foiget that a strong positive secular Jewish culture
existed in the Yishuv and in the early years of statehood. Among the pioneer set-
ders who came to Palestine in the first decades of the last century there was, gen­
erally speaking, a positive attitude toward Jewish ethnicity—that is, membership in
the Jewish people and concern for Jews throughout the world, a nostalgia for many
traditional Jewish practices, but a principled objection to "religion” and hence to
the observance of Jewish ritual in its traditional form. The Yishuv, therefore,
adapted traditional ritual, transforming and transvaluing it in secular terms at the
national level as well as at the local and private level.11 Intensive efforts in this direc­
tion took place within the kibbutz movement.12 However, the historical record is
heavily skewed in favor o f the ideology, practices, and beliefs o f the working class
and intellectuals within the labor movement. We suspect that among the urban
middle and lower middle classes many aspects of traditional Judaism were simply
incorporated into their lives without ideological passion, without misgivings, and
with less of a need to transform and transvalue them.
The creation of the state o f Israel, along with the influx of new immigrants
breathed new life into secular Judaism. Jewish symbols were now adapted to build
and to strengthen national identity and loyalty and to zionize the new immigrants,
many of whom were tied to traditional religious practice. Israel's civil religion,
however manipulative and distorting it might have been, was built upon traditional
Jewish symbols and still is. The problem is that the civil religion itself no longer
evokes the allegiance and the emotion that it did in the past, and the older secular
rituals have been largely forgotten. Furthermore, in most cases, as is true o f other
innovative rituals, they lose relevance very rapidly, especially in a changing society.
What is important to note, a point to which we return in subsequent sections, is
that the Zionist enterprise, Zionist ideology, and Zionist commitment were inex­
tricably tied to Jewish ethnicity and a sensitivity to Jewish history and Jewish sym­
bols. It is fair to say that Zionism sought to nationalize Judaism. It succeeded to a
great extent, but this, we will suggest, has also been the undoing of secular Judaism
in Israel.

Practices and Beliefs o f Hilonim

According to the 1999 survey o f the Jewish population of Israel by the Guttman
Institute,13 43 percent of Israeli Jews (N = 1,272, out o f a total of 2,717 respondents)
define themselves as nonreligious, and an additional 5 percent define themselves as
antireligious (N=ii5). The Guttman Report uses the term nonreligious rather than
secular. This is unfortunate since a traditionalist (masorti) Jew is also nonreligious—
that is, does not define him- or herself as dati (a religious Jew). Perhaps to remedy
this confusion the report lists the term secular in parenthesis following the label
"nonreligious." The Guttman Report is also misleading by distinguishing those
who define themselves as "antireligious” from the "nonreligious (secular),” despite
the fact that almost all the antireligious report that they are totally nonobservant o f
 Secular-Je wish Identity in Israel 153

the tradition. We have chosen to label both those w hom the G uttm an Report calls
n onreligious and those w hom they call antireligious and observe no part o f the tra­
dition as secular.14 Together these tw o groups constitute 48 percent o f the G uttm an
sam ple. A ssum ing this is a representative sam ple, it m eans that secular Jew s co m ­
prise alm ost h alf o f the Jew ish population o f Israel. Respondents w ere also asked
about their observance o f the tradition. L ookin g only at the secular, and recalcu­
lating the G uttm an Report data, w e find that 57 percent o f the secular report they
o bserve a small part o f the tradition; 34 percent o f the secular report they do not
o bserve any part o f the tradition (as we shall see, this is questionable), and 8 per­
cent o f the secular report they are antireligious and did not observe any part o f the
tradition.15 T hese three groups are the subject o f o ur essay.
Ethnicity played a m ajor role in our study o f m asortim , and its im pact is equally
evident am on g the secular. Based on G uttm an Report data, w e find that 17 percent
o f the total sam ple w as Israeli born with fathers also born in Israel. T h ey are not
identified by ethnic origin. T he rem ainder is com posed o f M izrahim (those born in
M oslem countries o r those w hose fathers w ere born there), w ho constitute 46 per­
cent o f the total sam ple, o r Ashkenazim (those born in Christian countries o r those
w hose fathers w ere born in Christian countries), w ho constitute 36 percent o f the
total sam ple. L oo k in g only at the secular portion o f the population, we find that
M izrahim constitute 28 percent o f the secular w ho observe som ething, 15 percent o f
the secular w ho observe nothing, and 12 percent o f the antireligious w ho observe
nothing. By contrast, Ashkenazim constitute 56 percent o f the secular w ho observe
som ething, 65 percent o f the secular w ho observe nothing, and 60 percent o f the
antireligious. (The rem ainder, those born in Israel whose fathers w ere also born in
Israel, constitute 16 percent o f those secular w ho observe som ething, 20 percent o f
those secular w ho observe nothing, and 28 percent o f the antireligious who
observe nothing.)16
In other words, M izrahim are dram atically underrepresented am on g secular
Je w s in Israel. In addition, the less traditional the secular group is, the few er
M izrahim are to be found in it. In figure 9.1, we report on observance and b e lief by
secular groups.

■ Ashkenazim
& Mizrahim
□ Born to an Israeli
father

Antireligious: Not religious: Not religious:

Do not observe Do not observe Observe a
tradition at all tradition at all small part of
tradition
Fig. 9.1 Ethnicity among Secular Israeli Jews
Source: Levy, Levinson, and Katz, Israeli Jews.
 154 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N AND YAACOV YADGAR

We must bear in mind that these figures include the data for recent Russian
Jewish immigrants—those who have arrived since 1989. Seventy-three percent of
the Russians describe themselves as either secular or antireligious, and they consti­
tute 19 percent of the total sample of secular Jews (21 percent of the antireligious).
Everything we know about them suggests that their religious practice and belief is
lower than that of the remainder of the Jewish population in Israel. This is con­
firmed in a study by Daphna Canetti who sampled over 2,200 college and university
students from most institutions o f higher education in Israel. We may assume that
even if the proportion of students from the Former Soviet Union among them is
the same as the proportion of Israelis who immigrated from the Former Soviet
Union in the general population, these students are more highly socialized to pat­
terns of Israeli Jewish behavior than other immigrants from the Former Soviet
Union. Eighty percent of Canetti’s sample reported they were secular.17 But she
found an even higher incidence of traditional observance and belief among her
sample of secular Jews than did the Guttman report. For example, 43 percent
reported that they believed in God, and 36 percent believed that the soul continues
to exist after death.18 Over a quarter believed that the Jews were a chosen people,
that the Torah was given at Sinai, and that Jewish history is guided by a supernatural
force. Forty-three percent refrained from eating bread on Passover, and 35 percent
lit Sabbath candles with a blessing.
The conclusion from the Guttman study, the Canetti study, and other studies to
be mentioned below, is that a sizable minority of Israeli secular Jews observe at
least some Jewish traditions, share to some extent the basic beliefs o f the religiously
observant, and feel strong ties to the Jewish people. Thus, we wonder why so many
Israelis define themselves as secular when they might instead have defined them­
selves as traditional (masorti) and why so many secular Jews report that they do not
observe any aspects of the tradition when this is clearly contrary to their own
reported behavior. Perhaps this stems from negative feelings about the rabbinic
establishment and/or the religious tradition, but we suspect that much o f it has to
do with the fact that when many secular Jews report their observance or their belief
they are not thinking in terms o f Judaism but in terms of Israeliness. In other
words, when some secular Jews light Sabbath candles, even with a blessing, or fast
on Yom Kippur, they think of themselves as performing an Israeli as much as a
Jewish act. A sense of Jewishness is very weak among many secular. Indeed, as we
see from the last two items in table 9.1, the less traditionally observant the group,
the more tenuous their ties to the Jewish people. This finding is consistent with the
larger finding of the Guttman study and with every other study that looks at the
ties of different groups of Israeli Jews with the Jewish people. Therefore, it ought
not to surprise us if, indeed, the secular Israeli has incorporated his Jewishness into
his Israeli identity and hardly distinguishes between them.
Elsewhere we have written about other recent studies of Israeli Jewish iden­
tity.19 All of them yield similar if not identical conclusions and two points serve us
here as a convenient review.20 First, although there are significant differences
between groups of Israeli Jews in their Israeli identity and their Jewish identity, the
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 155

T able 9.1 Percentage o f Secular Je w s A ffirm in g Traditional Ju d aism and Jew ish T ies

Partially
Observing Nonobserving Antireligious Total of All
Seculars Seculars Seculars Seculars
N = 793 N = 479 N = 113 N = 1387

Special meal 29 16 8 23
on Sabbath

Lighting Sabbath 25 7 4 17
candles w ith a
blessing

Avoiding nonkosher 38 15 8 28
m eat

Participating or 50 26 12 38
leading a Seder in
accordance w ith
halacha

Fasting on Yom 55 19 4 38
K ippur

U sing special dishes 30 11 8 22

on Passover

H as a m ezuzah in 65 44 39 56
every room in the
house

Believes there 45 20 9 33
is a G od

W ants a state that 88 80 79 84

is Jew ish , not
necessarily
halachic

W ants m ore Jew ish 47 24 10 36

study in state
(nonreligious)
schools

W ants m ore Jew ish 48 29 22 39

content on Israeli
television

Feels part o f w orldw ide 57 43 34 50

Jew ish people

If reborn w ould want 45 29 22 38

very m uch to be
reborn as a Je w

Source: Levy, Levinson, and Katz, Israeli Jew s.

 156 CHARLES S. L 1 E B M A N A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

two identities are positively related except in the case of the ultra-Orthodox
(haredim). But, as Yair Auron found, the attitudes of the secular toward the Jewish
people and the self image of the secular as part of the Jewish people is much less
meaningful to them than other identity components, such as their attitudes toward
the State of Israel or to the Land of Israel.11
The correlation between the strength of the Israeli and Jewish identities sug­
gests the second major finding. Respondents who define themselves as religious
(dati) have stronger Jewish and Israeli identities than respondents who define them­
selves as traditional (masorti), and they, in turn, have stronger Jewish and Israeli
identities than those who define themselves as secular. And all the studies report on
a minority of young secular Jews who express negative attitudes toward religion
and the Jewish tradition and alienation from Diaspora Jews.
When we try to get behind the labels and ask what they really mean to the
respondents themselves, the survey data is less helpful. Yair Auron, whose studies
of students in teachers’ seminaries is most instructive, feels that for his secular
respondents, the Holocaust is the central element in their Jewish identity. Attitudes
toward the Jewish people, he says, are mediated by way of the Holocaust, and the
tie to the Jewish people is a tie to a dead people.“ His analysis recalls that of Amos
Elon, who, in the 1970s stressed the importance of suffering and victimhood in the
Jewish identity of Israelis.23 Laura Zarembski describes this crisis in terms of a lost
sense of defining characteristics—what it means to be an Israeli. She contrasts the
insecurity of the secular community to the self-confidence of the religious com­
munity.24 This reinforces our suspicion that weakened ties to a sense of Jewish peo-
plehood may not stem from the dissociation from religion or from tradition but
from a loss of belief, by significant numbers of secular Israelis, in the values of sec­
ular Zionism—an ideology that until now had nourished their sense of identity
with Judaism and the Jewish people.

Types o f Secular Jew s

What does it mean to be a secular Jew in Israel? As we suggested at the outset, some
distinctions should be made in trying to fathom the meaning o f secularism (hilo-
niut) in Israel. First, the distinction between those who are ideologically secular—
that is, those to whom their secularism is a matter of conviction and a way of
life—and those whose secularism is a kind of default position. By "secular by
default” we refer to persons who label themselves secular because they are neither
dati nor masorti, they keep few if any of traditional observances, the vast majority
if not all their friends consider themselves secular, and they probably do not like the
rabbinical establishment. We suspect that these are individuals whose identity is
primarily Israeli and who observe some Jewish traditions because they have
become Israeli-Jewish traditions. All this makes them secular by default. The term
secular, or hilorti, bears no positive meaning; it is not an ideology or a belief system.
Secularism is not part of the identity of the Jew who is secular by default in contrast
to the ideologically secular Jew—and certainly in contrast to the religious (dati) Jew
for whom the fact of his being dati is basic to his identity. The line distinguishing
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 157

ideologically secular Jews from secular Jews by default is not always sharp, and
there are surely those who fall very close to either side of the line. But in our judg­
ment it is a fair and important distinction because it reminds us that when we turn
to hearing how secular intellectuals describe their secularism, we are hearing the
voices of a group who constitute only a small part of the secular public.
Those who are ideologically secular are in turn divided into those whom we
call secular Judaists and those whom we call secular Universalists. The former feel
strongly Jewish; their secular identity is tied to their Jewishness, and they are anx­
ious to retain and even strengthen the Jewish components of the state and society
of Israel. On the other side of the divide is a smaller group of ideologically secular
to whom Judaism is at best trivial and at worst a barrier to their aspirations for a
state based on liberal universalistic principles in which distinctions between Jews
and non-Jews have no bearing. The lines distinguishing these two groups are also
not hermetic. There are some who find themselves on one side of the line in terms
of their political preferences and on the other side of the line in terms o f their neg­
ative attitudes toward the religious tradition. Some have shifted back and forth
between the two orientations. But we believe that most o f those who are ideologi­
cally secular can be categorized as being closer to either the Jewish or Universalist
positions. As noted earlier, the latter fall outside the purview of our essay.

Jew s Who Are Secular by Default

The majority of Israeli seculars fall into the category of secular by default. A state­
ment of the organization Ma’agal Tov is instructive in this regard. Ma’agal Tov iden­
tifies itself as a secular institution addressing students, parents, youth group leaders,
and young teachers in the spirit of the labor movement. Its concern is that secular
Israeli society is turning its back on its Jewish heritage.25 The leaders o f Ma'agal Tov
are quoted as follows: “In the present reality, the overwhelming majority of the sec­
ular public is not aware of what it does not have. For most young secular people in
Israel, the word ‘Judaism' generally produces a feeling of repulsion."16
This may be overstated, and that which is true of young people is not necessar­
ily true of an older generation. But the point is not without validity. The secular by
default, most of whom observe a bare minimum of Jewish tradition, are not embar­
rassed by the fact of their Jewishness. Although most of them do not feel strongly
that they are a part of the Jewish people and do not feel strong ties to the Diaspora,
they do have some sense of their Jewishness; they do have some feeling, weak as it
may be, that they are part of the Jewish people. As table 9.1 shows, the vast majority
do want a state that is Jewish, though not one governed by Jewish law. In a more
speculative vein, as noted, we suspect that the Jewish orientations these Jews do pos­
sess, however weak they may be, stem primarily from the fact that in the minds of
most Israelis, being Israeli and being Jewish are inseparable. In a more specific sense,
this is attributable to the culture of Israel and the folk customs of the society; to his­
torical memories, of which the memory of the Holocaust is the most powerful; and
to the educational system, where Jewish content is severely diluted, but the notion
that one ought to honor the tradition and Jewish peoplehood is present.
 158 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N AND YAACOV YADGAR

We believe that a significant portion of the secular by default think of their

Jewishness, probably unconsciously, as an accident of birth. Judaism, in their view,
seems to be a biological-ethnic fact. To be Jewish in Israel has traditionally meant
that one was not an Arab. The sense of Jewishness is tied to the notion that Israel
should be a Jewish state. Jewish and Arab were mirror images of one another.
A Jewish state was a state where Jews outnumbered Arabs. Beginning in the 1990s,
as the percentage of non-Jewish non-Arab immigrants and foreign workers rose
dramatically, the prevalent notion in Israeli secular society was to think o f the
immigrants as part of the non-Arab majority, which in some sense made them part
of the Jewish collective.27 This was especially true of those immigrants who served
in the army. In other words, one's contribution and display of loyalty to the state
incorporated one into the Jewish people. Hence, it is not surprising that secular
Jewish society never encouraged the Russian non-Jews to convert. Today, as the
proportion of those who are non-Jewish and non-Arab grows dramatically, older
conceptions are under challenge, and it is too early to tell where they will lead.
The secular by default are also influenced by currents prevalent in Western cul­
ture. Consumerism maybe the strongest of such currents. Guy Ben-Porat suggests
that secular Jews who spend Shabbat with their families at shopping malls may bear
no animus to religion, no radical opinion on issues of religion-state relations, and
may even cherish the Shabbat.28 But Shabbat at a shopping mall is their choice o f
leisure-time activity. The atrophying of Jewish and Judaic commitment, a process
that has been taking place for at least two decades, seems to proceed from the nat­
ural rhythms of life. It is too early to determine what long-term effect the second
intifada has had on secular Israelis, but it is our impression that the immediate
result has been the strengthening of the sense of Israeliness and its identification
with Jewishness. The perception of being engaged in a national conflict between
Arabs and Israeli Jews has, we believe, strengthened Jewishness in its national,
Zionist, some might say neo-Zionist, sense. The perception o f the Arab as the
"other" was strengthened, but this did little to strengthen Jewishness in its reli­
gious, or halakhic, sense.

The Ideologically Secular Judaists

The ideological Jewish-seculars, like the secular organizations concerned with
Jewish identity, are troubled by the state of Judaism among the secular public. Dedi
Zucker edited a book published in 1999 titled We theJewish Seculars: What Is Secular
Jewish Identity? Written and edited against the background of what has been called
“the culture war between religious and secular,” this book is a kind of self-conscious
effort by prominent representatives of the Israeli cultural elite to identify for them­
selves and their readers the significance and meaning of an identity that was, in the
recent past, simply taken for granted, in no need of any kind o f textual support.29
The lack of clarity in the meaning of a secular identity, or indeed in the meaning o f
the term "secular Jew,” that led to the writing of the book was also behind the deci­
sion of those who conducted the Guttman Report to substitute the term "not reli­
gious” for the term "secular."30 At the time Zucker edited the book he was a
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 159

member o f the Knesset representing Meretz, the most left wing and—along with
the Shinui party—the most outspokenly secular of the Zionist parties. Zucker,
however, was uneasy with the absence of a Jewish component in his party’s secu­
larism. He writes of the secular public:

[This public] has been pulling in a universalistic direction in order to express its
secularism. Expressions of empathy and identification with traditional Jewish
concepts and with the Jewish history of the various diasporas has less­
ened........ The non-religious Israeli knows only a banal Judaism or a fanatical
Judaism enclosed in its own world. Against this he sees an Israel almost totally
cleansed of any Jewish concepts. . .. Too many Israeli seculars are left stam­
mering when asked to define their Judaism. Secular identity has based itself far
too much on hostility to religion and the religious. A secular humanist identity
must gather its courage and enter the Jewish (Judaic) territory without aban­
doning an iota of the universalistic tradition. . .. Only such a Jew can enter into
a real dialogue with the other Jewish tribes. Only such Jews can prevent a cleav­
age from the traditional-mtzraht tribe. The alternative is to stand on the fringes
of Israeliness.3'

The volume is comprised of contributions from twenty Israeli intellectuals—

some of them, like A. B. Yehoshua, are quite well known, others less so. A wide
variety of opinions found expression, and all that really united the contributors was
the fact that to be a secular Jew meant that one was not a religiously observant Jew.
A few of the contributions were primarily expressions of hostility toward the reli­
gious establishment, especially its stance on political issues. A few, at the opposite
extreme, were concerned with the secular-religious divide and the need to find a
basis for unity and consensus. Many, like Zucker in his introduction, bemoaned the
ignorance and indifference of secular Jews toward Jewish history and the Jewish
heritage and noted that secular Jews are often confused about Judaism. Indeed, a
few contributors dissociated themselves from secular Judaism for that very reason.
A number of them preferred to identify themselves as hofshiim (see our historical
excurses) rather than seculars (hilonim). One contributor noted that, whereas the
real secular Jews sought the normalization of the Jewish people, he feared that nor­
malization would lead to assimilation. He sought instead the construction of a soci­
ety built on the vision of the prophets.32 Another contributor, expressing what we
earlier called a biological-ethnic perception of Jewishness, thought that “there are
Jews but no Judaism," but he was one of the few who expressed the notion.33 A few
years earlier it was more common to hear from secular Jewish intellectuals that
whatever Jews (presumably Israeli Jews) do, is Judaism.34 In contrast, another con­
tributor suggested the equation of religion and Judaism.35
Two points about the volume were especially striking to us. First, whereas the
title and subtide of the volume make no mention of Israel and speak only of secular
Judaism, the authors all write as though the topic was secular Judaism in Israel.
A. B. Yehoshua is only the most extreme in this respect. He writes, “If asked to pres­
ent my identity card as a secular Jew I would answer that I don’t employ the concept
 160 C H A R L E S S. LI EB M AN A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

‘secular Jew' at all but the concept ‘Israeli.’ I suggest . . . a return to the simple
concept ‘Israeli’ as the primary concept of identity, without any unnecessary addi­
tions. I am an Israeli. And if the religious Israeli wants to identify as a religious per­
son, let him say, ‘I am a religious Israeli.’ I don't ask him to do that."36
We attribute great significance to this statement. On its face it is nonsensical.
The statement would make sense if Yehoshua, instead of saying that he identifies
himself as an Israeli had said that he identifies himself as a “Jew,” not a "secular-
Jew," and that if religious Jews choose to identify themselves as religious, it is their
choice to hyphenate their Jewish identity. But this is not what Yehoshua said. He
simply confused the term Jewish with the term Israeli. This confusion, we have
already suggested, goes to the heart of Israeli secularism. It also ignores the fact that
over 20 percent of the population is non-Jewish and that there are non-observant
Jews outside of Israel. We are arguing here for a subconscious interpretation that
extends to many of those who are secular by default as well. At least until recently,
to be a Jew in Israel meant, for many secular Jews, not to be an Arab. For many sec­
ular Jews, being Jewish had little content other than pointing to the fact that they
were not Arab. But since Arabs, at the conscious level were never present as part of
the “us” collective, the confusion between Jew and Israeli was natural.
In many of the other essays, the seeds of the equation, Israeli equals Jew, are to
be found. The most prominent academic among the contributors, Professor (and
sometimes minister of education) Yael Tamir, notes that only in Israel can one be a
secular Jew because only in Israel do the Jewish tradition and the Jewish heritage
exist in education, the media, literature, museums, etc.37 The assumption here is
that there are no private structures for secular Judaism, an assumption with which
others agree. Professor Ruth Gavison, outspoken and secular, makes a similar
point. She often notes in her public lectures that, whereas the religious public does
not need the state and society to express their Judaism, the secular public, in the
absence of the public acknowledgment of the Jewish tradition, would be hard
pressed to find ways to express their Jewishness. "Israel," she writes, “is the only
place where the public culture is Hebrew-Jewish. From this point of view, Israel
allows people like me—Jews who are not at all religious—to lead a Jewish life in
which our Jewish identity has a central place. It is possible that it is the only place
where Jews can survive without the observance of commandments for more than
two generations."38
Gavison and Tamir's points, we believe, are well taken. We agree with them.
But they also suggest how dependent the Jewish identity of these seculars is on
their Israeliness.
The second striking aspect of the Zucker volume is how few of the contributors
defined, even in broad outline, what they meant by secular Judaism in other than
negative terms (i.e., it is not religion, it is not authoritative, it is not ritual). Those
who did so—for example, Yael Tamir, Yaron London, and Ruth Calderon—viewed
secularism as embedded in the Jewish tradition but offering a new interpretation and
model in which the tradition is transmitted.39 But this, as all the contributors pointed
out, was yet to be done. Indeed, Tamir is unsure if the secular public can meet the
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 161

challenge of constructing “a new prayer book, a new reading of the sources, and a
new interpretation of Jewish holidays.”40 The overwhelming conclusion with which
the reader is left, a conclusion with which the majority of contributors would surely
concur, is that secular Judaism in Israel, when defined in a positive way rather than
simply as a negation of religion, is pretty thin both in practice and in intellectual
content. It appears to us that none of the contributors, with the exception of Yair
Tzaban,41 believe that the ideology of Israeli secularism, at the present time,
amounts to much. It has little to offer and has few advocates. Under the circum­
stances, one can resort to one of two strategies. Either concede the point, as most of
the authors do, and point to the direction in which things might get better (i.e.,
renewed interest in and a new interpretation of the Jewish tradition) or argue that
whatever Israeli Jews do is by definition secular Judaism. Our own opinion is that the
pessimism most of the contributors exhibit is premature.

The Meanings o f Secular Judaism

It would seem that secular Judaism has at least three meanings in the minds of most
Israelis. The most common meaning, one that survey researchers simply assume to
be the meaning, is a Jewish person who is not observant of religious command­
ments. As already suggested, many if not most Israeli Jews who call themselves sec­
ular do observe quite a few commandments, and the question (in that case) is why
they call themselves secular rather than masorti.42 The differences are very basic.
The secular who do observe some religious commandments do not think of them­
selves as observing religious commandments. They are acting out Jewish or Israeli
folk customs or performing acts out of deference to parents, other family mem­
bers, or friends. Furthermore, even if they do recognize that a few o f the rituals
that they perform are religious acts— for example, kissing a mezuzah or fasting on
Yom Kippur—the basis may well be a superstitious placating of spirits. We have
also heard secular Jews rationalizing their behavior in New Age terminology (that
is, fasting is good for the soul).
A second definition of secular, one that many intellectuals seem to favor, is the
absence of a belief in God.43 As we have seen, many Israeli Jews who define them­
selves as secular report that they believe in God. (Forty-three percent o f secular col­
lege students, according to Daphna Canetti's survey). While it seems to us that this
is the least useful or accurate way of describing a secular Jew, the fact remains that
it is the definition used by a few secular and is a central tenet of secularism in
Yaakov Malkin's What Do SecularJews Believe?44
A third definition of secular Jew refers to one who has a nonreligious concep­
tion of Judaism—the notion that Judaism is a culture or a civilization o f which reli­
gious practice and belief is a only a part. This would contrast to a religious
conception of Judaism that argues Judaism is constituted by Jewish law. This notion
of secular Judaism was basic to the Jewish enlightenment of Eastern Europe in the
nineteenth century and a critical component in the thinking of such luminaries as
Ahad Ha'am and Mordecai Kaplan.45 This basic notion, however, is shared by vir­
tually every student of Judaism, including many religiously observant Jews.
 162 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

The problem, therefore, with defining a secular Jew in this manner is that all it does
is distinguish between those who are familiar with Judaism and Jewish history and
those who are not. Our own preference is the definition offered by the Moroccan-
born Israeli musician Shlomo Bar. Judaism, he feels, "isn’t a religion but ‘a way to
live,”’46 but not many of those whom we studied echo this sentiment.

Prospects for Secular Judaism

What are the prospects for secular Judaism in Israel? Will secular Jews in Israel suc­
ceed in developing a meaningful Jewish culture? We have discussed this problem
elsewhere and have concluded, as we do now, that the verdict is not yet in.47 The
evidence is mixed. The ideologically Secular-Judaists, as we have seen, fear the
growing ignorance of and indifference toward the Jewish tradition. It is easy to
blame the religious establishment itself for this state of affairs, and to their credit
most of the secular intellectuals in the Zucker volume refrain from doing so. It
would have been easy for them to argue, as only a few did, that the erosion of tra­
dition in the lives of so many Israelis is a consequence of the Orthodox elite appro­
priating Judaism and interpreting the traditional text and traditional values in a
xenophobic, sexist manner overlooking or rejecting values within the Jewish tradi­
tion, which could have provided a vision and a model of moral behavior for all
Israelis. But even if the religious house of Israel is morally rotten, most o f the
secular-Jewish ideologists whom we read do not find this sufficient in explaining the
feeble character of secular Judaism in Israel. And we agree with them. Because
blaming the religious establishment would not account for the easy manner in
which seculars surrendered the battle over defining the nature of Judaism. That we
suspect, stems from the lack of passion and commitment secular Judaism engen­
ders. This passion and commitment once existed not because of the nature o f sec­
ular Judaism, but rather because it was anchored in a Zionist vision and ideology.
As that vision diminishes in importance, so does the Jewish tradition. The Guttman
Report is instructive in this regard as well. On all the measures of Zionist-Israeli
loyalty and identity, the seculars score lower than the masortim, and indeed lower
than non-haredi religious. For example, in response to the question “Would you
want very much to be born again as an Israeli?” 85 percent of the non-haredi reli­
gious responded “yes” ; 73 percent of the masortim said “yes” ; but among the secu­
lar, 42 percent of those who kept something of the tradition, 31 percent of those
who kept none of the tradition, and 30 percent of the antireligious who kept none
of the tradition answered “yes.” Similar proportions are found in response to the
question “ Do you feel yourself Israeli?”48 Respondents were asked about compo­
nents that were very influential in shaping their Jewish identity. Some of these com­
ponents were of a religious nature (i.e., lighting Shabbat candles), some o f them
were of a general Jewish nature (i.e., the Holocaust or the Warsaw ghetto uprising),
and some were of an Israeli nature (i.e., the establishment of the state or the wars
that Israel underwent). In all cases these components, even the Israeli components,
were weaker among the secular than among the masortim or religious.49 This
finding makes sense only if we assume that as far as many (not all) secular Jews
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 163

are concerned, both the Jewish and Israeli identity are so weak that respondents are
reluctant to credit any factor as being "very influential” in the shaping of their
Jewish identity.50
On the other hand, the situation is not as bleak as some would have it. And here
we must distinguish between secular Judaism as an interpretation of the tradition
and secular Judaism as a Jewish way of life.

Secular Judaism as Interpretation

The interpretive or homiletic enterprise that authors such as Yaron London, Yael
Tamir, and Ruth Calderon called for has been taking place for a number of decades
in Israel with great urgency and intensity since the beginning of the nineties. This
takes place in various secular institutions of learning (Oranim and Alma are out­
standing examples) but also among the modern Orthodox. There are scores of
study groups all over Israel where both secular and modern Orthodox Jews study
together and undertake the interpretation of text together.51 It may well be that
little of what they produce is of lasting importance, but the most significant aspect
of the enterprise is that Israelis are making the interpretive effort. What do we
mean by interpretation? We mean looking anew at traditional Jewish texts to see
how they can relate to one's own life, to the joys, to the tragedies, to the journeys
and the passages from one status to another. Secondly, how they can be understood
as illustrating and explaining such values as human reason, acting justly to non-
Jews as well as Jews, tolerance o f a variety of opinions, eschewing violence, respon­
sibility to society, and the requirements and parameters of ethical behavior. In
other words, values that are likely to make a liberal humanist proud to be a Jew
rather than cringe at the mention of Judaism; values which demonstrate the com­
patibility of Judaism and humanism and only in that context project the value of
Jewish particularism.52 Interestingly, one of the lessons of all or at least most of the
groups where secular and Orthodox Jews study together is that the secular need the
help of religious Jews in accessing the text.
The non-Orthodox, even the best educated among them, are generally igno­
rant of the Jewish sources. They have much to contribute once they understand the
simple meaning of the texts, but they need the Orthodox to serve as their basic
guides. Once the simple meaning of the text is uncovered, differences between
Orthodox and secular, so we are told, tend to disappear. And the differences that
remain provide sources of stimulation for both sides. But how much better off sec­
ular Judaism would be if seculars were knowledgeable and secure enough to
engage in the study of Jewish texts on their own.
If, as the evidence suggests, such groups are emerging all over Israel, how do
we explain the negative assessments of secular intellectuals regarding the state of
Jewish understanding and Jewish study? The answer is that one can judge the same
cup as half full or half empty. It is also a matter o f judgments by insiders versus
those by outsiders. For example, for those who look at the status of Jewish study
from the inside, one finds that "in the last few decades, the secular population of
Israel has been undergoing a revival of interest in all matters related to Hebrew
 164 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N A N D T A A C O V T A D C A R

culture and Jewish identity. The organizations and societies which have arisen as a
reflection of this revival have . . . exchanged the academic-disciplinary approach for
a holistic approach which perceives the engagement in and study of Judaism as a
doctrine, a source of inspiration and a way of life for secular Israelis Jews as well."53
The symbolic expression of this renewal is the term “a return to the Jewish
bookshelf," a play on words taken from a poem by Israel’s great national poet
H. N. Bialik. One can find evidence in other areas as well. In a most illuminating
article, basic we think to understanding contemporary Israeli art, David Sperber
writes about the emergence of Jewish themes, a process that he dates to the eight­
ies of the last century.54 Sperber notes other manifestations of this Jewish renais­
sance. He writes the following:

In this spiritual climate the "Jewish" artists of today, who in the past were
pushed to the margins of the Israeli art world, are warmly embraced. The great
change with regard to Judaism that began more than two decades ago, is not
unique to the world of art but is influenced, of course, by the dominant current
among the Israeli cultural elite and by the transformation of the "Jewish book­
shelf” to a dominant topic of discourse. Even a movement as singularly secular
as Hashomer Hatzair participates in this. .. . The goals of that movement have
been revised to include "educating a person to be involved in Jewish culture."55

He goes on to say that when twenty thousand members of Hashomer Hatzair

meet at the end of July 2003 for the Shomria, a gathering held once every ten years,
they will be treated to an event unimaginable in the past, a dramatic presentation
o f portions of the Talmud.56
As we said, if one follows development in Israeli culture closely, one finds evi­
dence for a renewed interest in Judaism.57 But to an outsider with no stake in
demonstrating a renewed interest in Jewish matters or in exploring the margins of
mainstream Israeli culture (margins that may, of course, become mainstream
themselves at some future time), the condition of secular Jewish culture is not as
rosy. Sperber himself assesses the Jewish content of the art upon which he reports
as shallow and simplistic with an overemphasis on anti-Semitism and the
Holocaust. Secondly, he suggests that much of the renewed interest in Jewish mat­
ters in art is related to sense of post-Zionist ennui, if not hostility toward the Israeli
past and the manner in which it was portrayed in mainstream Israeli culture. This,
in turn, leads to the search for new foci of identity. Jewish renewal among Israeli
seculars, the study groups, and the interpretive effort described above, is funded in
good part by private foundations, mostly in the United States and the United
Kingdom, and a few Jewish Federations in the United States. Israeli government
funding has been severely cut in recent years. The Jewish renewal itself receives
little attention in the media and, most significantly, relatively little encouragement
or reinforcement in Israeli schools despite the demands of the Shenhar Report. It
does not seem to touch the day-to-day lives of the vast majority of secular Israeli
Jews, although according to the Guttman Report, most Israelis would like more
Jewish emphasis in both the media and the schools.
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 165

Conclusion: Secular Judaism and the Rhythms o f Life

The confusion in the minds of many Israeli seculars between Jew and Israeli is
understandable, and where it exists it is obviously at the subconscious level. The
notion that only Israel affords an opportunity for the secular Jew to live a life in
which Judaism and Jewish identity are central to one’s identity is not without foun­
dation. But if living in Israel is a necessary condition, it is by no means a sufficient
one. One cannot ignore the impact of Western consumer culture and assume that
the present level of Jewish practice and commitment guarantees the survival of a
substantive rather than a nominal Jewish culture in Israel. The possibility exists
because, as both Yael Tamir and Ruth Gavison pointed out, only in Israel is the pub­
lic arena Jewish, and this Jewishness is reflected in the minds and lives of at least
some seculars. When Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, embarked into space
on the ill-fated Columbia shuttle, he brought aboard a Hebrew Bible; a Kiddush cup
for the blessing over sacramental wine; a mezuzah, which he borrowed from the
Israeli air force; and a picture drawn by a child during the Holocaust. Ramon,
according to family members with whom we spoke, did not observe any of the
laws o f kashrut, but he requested and was provided with kosher meals by NASA.
Ramon saw himself as a representative of Israel (not o f the Jewish people), and
these were the symbols he chose to represent his nation. It tells us a great deal
about the power of Jewish secularism in Israel. But it also suggests its weakness.
At the risk of generalizing and oversimplifying—for countertendencies, as we
have noted, are present—what is suggested here is the enormous dependence of
secular Judaism on the public arena, of the inability o f the secular to generate pri­
vate structures of life that are Jewish, or to compete with the consumer culture that
does create such structures. Does secular Judaism succeed in doing so elsewhere? It
does not. This is the great problem that confronts the vast majority of European
Jewry, Jews of both Western but especially Eastern Europe. Has it ever done so?
The example of the nineteenth-century Jewish enlightenment, especially in
Eastern Europe, and the early Zionist settlers in Palestine offers a ray of hope. But
in many respects the rich presence of Jewish tradition in the lives of the early mask-
ilim and the Zionist settlers was a debt to their own childhood—a taken-for-granted
way of life that was inconsistent with their own ideological emphases and was not
successfully transmitted to future generations.
For most Jews, ritual is the central aspect of Judaism. It is what comes to mind
when they think of what it means to be a Jew It is that which makes Judaism dis­
tinctive. It is interesting that in What Do SecularJews Believe? Yaakov Malkin is also
concerned with what the ritual and ceremonial implications of being secular are.
Perhaps all that God demands of the Jew is to do justice, love mercy, and walk
humbly in his path, but that is not what sets the Jew apart from non-Jews. Can
Judaism in Israel be lived exclusively at the public level and/or by incorporating
Jewish folk customs (a Passover Seder, Shabbat meals, even a blessing over candles)
into one’s private life? According to Table 9.1, roughly a quarter of secular Israeli
Jews do incorporate religious commandments into their private lives, although
they do not think of them as commandments. Are they likely to be retained if the
 166 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

performance of the "commandment" or ritual lacks the mantle of authority, if one

does not feel obligated to perform them? We do not know. What is clear, however, is
that secular Judaism does not generate the commitment, the passion, and the con­
fidence that religion generates in the hearts of its adherents. Perhaps if more Israeli
Jews thought of Judaism as "a way of life," as the masortim do, it would generate
the kind of commitment that is required if Judaism is to survive in the face of the
challenge of Western culture. Jewish practice would then become authoritative,
not because God commanded it, but because that is what it means to be Jewish. As
it now stands, the passivity of secular Jews with regard to issues of Judaic meaning
and Jewish commitment coupled with their antagonism to the rabbis and religious
parties, who are perceived as coercive and intolerant, and the assimilatory pressures
of a global postmodern culture are difficult hurdles to overcome.58
There is another alternative. Perhaps secular Jews in Israel can generate new rit­
uals or transform older ones so that they become more meaningful than traditional
ones. There has been a lot of activity in this regard, and a number o f organizations
have developed in the last few years to help secular Jews think through and perform
rituals and rites de passage in a "secular" manner. Needless to say there is a Web site
as well. The interesting questions are to what extent the new secular rituals incor­
porate traditional ritual and how widespread have they become. We have no
answer to the first question. We believe secular ritual in Israel incorporates a good
deal of traditional ritual. (For example, we interviewed a number of rabbis who
perform marriages for secular couples, laypeople who facilitate or conduct secular
marriages, and the author of a doctoral dissertation on the topic. All of them
report that in every instance the secular couple wants a bridal canopy and the cere­
monial breaking of a glass. The variation from tradition is that in many cases the
bride as well as the groom will smash the glass.) The differences between secular
and religious ritual might in many cases be the interpretation given to the ritual
rather than the ritual itself. The subject merits study. As to the second question, we
are skeptical about the prospects for secular ritual. The kibbutz movement invested
energy and resources in devising secular rituals, and they have all but vanished
today. This topic also merits careful investigation. In many instances the secular
have not replaced one ritual with another but have incorporated tradition into their
lives by changing the rhythm or pattern of their lives in conformity with tradition.
The Sabbath and the Jewish holidays are set apart by special meals, reading special
books, listening to special music.
In Israel, unlike the Diaspora, the opportunity for recovery of the tradition and
of secular Judaism is always close at hand. But it is also possible that Jewish renewal
in Israel will come only with some dissociation from Zionism and Israeli national­
ism. In a period where national and even ethnic loyalties are increasingly frayed
among the Westernized middle-class Jews of Israel, Judaism must represent some­
thing beyond an expression of national identity. Israel, as we have seen in the case
of intellectuals, serves too readily as a synonym for Judaism. The decline of
national allegiance, which is far more pronounced amongst the secular than
amongst the traditional or the religious, bodes ill for secular Judaism as well.
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 167

NOTES
We are grateful to Riv-Ellen Prell for her comments on an earlier draft.
1. The Hebrew letter "khet" is variously transliterated as “kh" or “h.” The first variant is
used in most chapters in this volume; however, the other variant is used in this chapter.
2. Interview with Meir Yoffe, September 27, 2002. Yoffe is the Director o f Panim, an
umbrella and service organization for a variety o f Israeli groups dedicated to strengthening
Jewish identity and knowledge among Israelis. Many, if not most, o f the organizations are de
facto secular. They cooperate with one another regardless o f their religious orientations so
that, whereas some o f the organizations define themselves as Orthodox, they are o f a decidedly
moderate variety that acknowledges the Jewish legitimacy o f non-Orthodox groups. Yoffe was
basing himself on his own observations and on remarks in the text o f the Shenhar Report.
3. A dramatic example o f the secularization o f modern Orthodox and religious Zionist
thought is found in Yoske Achituv, "Towards an Illusion-free Religious Zionism," A Hundred
Years o f Religious Zionism, vol. 3, "Philosophical Aspects" (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University
Press, 2002), 7-30. Achituv, in our opinion the most brilliant and creative Orthodox-Zionist
thinker, says that religious Zionism must rid itself o f four illusions. They are a meta-historical
and metaphysical conception o f history; incorporating mystical foundations in the term
"beginning o f redemption"; incorporating promises o f the prophets and the sages in cultural,
historical, and social projections; and, finally, the vision o f a renewal o f ancient times and the
possibility o f a state conducted in accordance with Jewish law.
A forthcoming study by Kimmy Kaplan is devoted to the topic o f the Israelization, by
which he means the secularization o f the haredim.
4. See, for example, Yaacov Shavit, "The Status o f Culture in the Process o f Creating a
National Society in Eretz-Israel: Basic Attitudes and Concepts," in Zohar Shavit, ed., The
Construction of Hebrew Culture in Eretz-Israel in the series The History of the Jewish Community in
Eretz-Israel Since 1882 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy for Sciences and Humanities and Bialik
Institute, 1998), 9-29 (in Hebrew), and the extensive literature cited therein. In our opinion,
however, the topic has not been exhausted.
5. On post-Zionism and its relation to radical secularism, see Bernard Susser and Charles
S. Liebman, Choosing Survival: Strategies fo ra Jewish Future (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 127-134, and Charles S. Liebman, "Reconceptualizing the Culture Conflict among Israeli
Jew s," Israel Studies 2 (Fall 1997): 172-189. Reprinted with some revision in Anita Shapira, ed., A
State in the Making: Israeli Society in the First Decades (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for
Jewish History, 2001), 249-264 (in Hebrew).
6. We are thinking particularly o f an article by Zvi Bekerman and Marc Silverman, “The
Corruption o f Culture and Education by the Nation State: The Case o f Liberal Jew s' Discourse
on Jewish Continuity," Journal of Modem Jewish Studies 2 (2003): 1-18. The authors strike us as
benign post-Zionists, a label they themselves might reject. While we demur from their conclu­
sions, we find their critique o f the ideological foundation o f secular Judaism in Israel and o f the
inconsistency between liberalism and national identity o f much merit.
7. Interview, November 4, 2002.
8. Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, "Society, Culture and Language: Secular and Religious,”
Ha’aretz, June 11, 1965, and "Secular and Religious," Ha’aretz, June 18, 1965. We are indebted to
Anita Shapira for bringing these columns to our attention.
9. People and World: Jewish Culture in a Changing World: Recommendations of the Committee to
Examine Jewish Studies in the General Educational System (Jerusalem: Ministry o f Education,
2002). The report itself was submitted in December 1993.
10. Interview, October 31, 2002.
n. On the role o f religion and the use o f traditional symbols in the Yishuv, and on the role of
religious symbols in the strengthening o f national identity, see Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer
Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Anita Shapira, "Religious Notions o f the Labor
 168 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N AND YAACOV Y ADGAR

Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira
(Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1994), 301-327 (in Hebrew); Shmuel Almog, “ Religious
Values in the Second Aliyah,” in Almog, Zionism and Religion, 285-300; Moti Zeira, Rural
Collective Settlement and Jewish Culture in Eretz Israel during the 1920's (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben
Zvi, 2000) (in Hebrew); and Nili Aryeh-Sapir, Shaping an Urban Culture: Rituals and Celebrations
in Tel-Aviv in Its Early Years (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2000) (in Hebrew).
12. Shalom Lilker, Kibbutz Judaism: A New Tradition in the Making (New York: Herzl Press,
1982).
13. Shlomit Levy, Hanna Levinsohn, and Elihu Katz, Beliefs, Observance of the Traditions and
the Values of Israeli Jews—2000 (Jerusalem: Avi Chai Foundation and the Israel Democracy
Institute, 2002).
14. There are a handful of antireligious who do report that they observe some of the tradi­
tion. The Guttman Report eliminated them from their analyses. As we shall see in Table 9.1,
even a few of those who report that they are antireligious and observe no part of the tradition
do indeed observe some traditional practices.
15. The antireligious category includes not only those who are hostile to the religious estab­
lishment, but those who really are opposed to religious practice. For example, in our own inter­
views we spoke to a kindergarten teacher in a secular school. The curriculum in such schools
includes a ceremony, each Friday, o f lighting candles and welcoming the Shabbat. Our respon­
dent reported that some parents objected to any religious ceremony.
16. Levy, Levinsohn, and Katz, Israeli Jews, 14.
17. Daphna Canetti, Democracy and Religious and Parareligious Beliefs in Israel: Theoretical and
Empirical Perspectives (Ph.D. diss., University o f Haifa, 2002) (in Hebrew). We are grateful to
Dr. Canetti for providing us with a breakdown o f her data.
18. Riv-Ellen Prell has suggested to us that the high proportion of believers among secular
Jews, and the especially high proportion among college students, may be due to the influence
of Eastern religion that has penetrated Israeli youth culture. This is a postmodern phenomena
strengthened by the few months or longer that so many Israelis spend in India and other
Eastern countries following completion of their army service. Daphna Canetti finds confirma­
tion for this in her interviews, adding that it is not only trips to the East but also participation
in periodic "spiritual festivals” that have become popular among young Israeli Jews.
19. Charles S. Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar, "Israeli Identity: The Jewish Component,” in
Israeli Identity in Transition ed. Anita Shapira (Connecticut: Praeger Press, 2004).
20. In addition to the Guttman Report 2000, the studies include Shlomit Levy, Hanna
Levinsohn, and Elihu Katz, Beliefs, Observances and Social Interaction among Israeli Jews
(Jerusalem: Louis Guttman Institute o f Applied Social Research, 1993) [the highlights o f that
report are reprinted in Charles Liebman and Elihu Katz, eds., The Jewishness o f Israelis (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1997), which also includes an analysis o f the 1993 Report]; Yair Auron, Jewish-Israeli
Identity (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim Publishing House, 1993); Michal Shamir and Asher Arian,
"Collective Identity and Electoral Competition in Israel,” American Political Science Review 93
(June 1999): 265-277; Uri Farago, "The Jewish Identity o f Israeli Youth, 1965-1985,” Yahadut
Zmanenu 5 (1989): 259-285; Uri Farago, "National Identity and Regional Identity in Israel,” in
Between I and We, ed. Azmi Bashara (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and the Kibbutz Hameuchad,
1999). 153-168; Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Stephen Sharot, Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in Israeli
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Yochanan Peres and Ephraim
Yuchtman-Yaar, Between Consent and Dissent: Democracy and Peace in the Israeli Mind (Jerusalem:
Israel Democracy Institute, 1998); an unpublished study by Ezra Kopelowitz and Hadas Franco
o f 160 students in Rupin college in 2001 (for a report o f the study with a summary o f the find­
ings see Ha’aretz, September 12, 2002, p. 3B); Jacob Shamir and Michal Shamir, The Anatomy of
Public Opinion (Ann Arbor: University o f Michigan Press, 2000); Stephen Sharot, "Jewish and
Other National and Ethnic Identities o f Israeli Jew s,” in National Variations in Jewish Identity, ed.
Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 299-316; Eliezer Leshem,
“ The Aliyah from the Former Soviet Union and the Religious-Secular Cleavage in Israeli
 Secular-Jewish Identity in Israel 169

Society," in From Russia to Israel: Identity and Culture In Transition, ed. Moshe Lisak and Eliezer
Leshem (Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2001), 125-148; and Alec Epstein, “Continuity and
Change in the Characteristics o f the Identity o f Russian Speaking Jew s in Israel,” Gesher 147
(Summer 2003): 19-33.
21. Yair Auron, Jewish-Israeli Identity (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim Publishing House, 1993).
22. Ibid.
23. Amos Elon, The Israelis (London: Penguin, 1971).
24. Laura Zarembski, The Religious-Secular Divide in the Eyes of Israel's Leaders and Opinion
Makers (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 2002).
25. This description o f Ma'agal Tov, provided by the institution itself, is found in Meir Yoffe's
report Mapping Programs That Promote Tolerance and Unity in the Israeli Jewish Public (Jerusalem:
Jewish Agency for Israel, June 2001), 105 (in Hebrew).
26. Alma College, Center for Secular Judaism: Submitted by the Think Tank on the Issue o f the
Jewish People (Tel Aviv: Alma College, December 2001), 26.
27. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics records the Jewish population as those living in Israel
less Arabs. In fact, the "Jews" as they appear in the Bureau's publications includes non-Jews who
are not Arab.
28. Guy Ben-Porat, “ Between Consumerism and Tradition, Israelis and Saturday Shopping
Centers," forthcoming. On the association between Western values in general and con­
sumerism in particular, and Israeli secularism, see Uebman, “ Reconceptualizing the Culture
Conflict."
29. The book appeared as part o f the series Judaism Here and Now, published by Yediot
Aharonot, Israeli’s largest selling newspaper. The series is an interesting test case o f the effort
to provide contemporary texts whose purpose is the creation (strengthening) o f a secular
Israeli Jewish identity.
30. This was confirmed in private correspondence.
31. Dedi Zucker, ed., We the Secular Jews: What Is Secular Jewish Identity? (Tel-Aviv: Yediot
Aharonot, 1999), 9-12 Another edited volume o f importance is Yehoshua Rash, ed., Regard and
Revere—Renew without Fear: The SecularJew and His Heritage (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1987). This
is the English title o f the volume. The Hebrew title uses the term hofshi rather than hiloni for
secular. Another relevant volume is Yaakov Malkin, What Do Secular Jews Believef Belirfs and
Values o f Hofshiim (Tel-Aviv: Poalim, 2000).
32. Eli Ben Gal, "Between Hofshiim and Hilonim," in Zucker, We the Secular Jews, 167-173.
33. Nissim Calderon, "The Bells of the Jubilee," in Zucker, We the SecularJews, 74.
34. This notion has its origins among the more antireligious (antitradition) Zionist thinkers
in the late nineteenth century, continuing through the work o f Y. H. Brenner, a literary figure
o f enormous significance to radical Zionists.
35. Amnon Denkner, "To Live with Internal Contradiction,” in Zucker, We the Secular Jews,
esp. p. 82.
36. A. B. Yehoshua, "Life as Paradox," in Zucker, We the SecularJews, 19.
37. Yael Tamir, “ Revolution and Tradition," in Zucker, We the SecularJews, 174-183.
38. See her personal statement in the document prepared by Gavison and Rabbi Yaacov
Amidan, Foundation for a New Social Contract between Those Who Observe Commandments and
Hofshiim in Israel (n.p.: Shalom Hartman Institute and the Yitzhak Rabin Center, 2001), 39.
39. Yaron London, Datiim v ’hofshiim," in Zucker, We the Secular Jews, 23-39; Ruth Calderon,
“A Time for Homiletics," in Zucker, We the SecularJews, 194-198.
40. Tamir, "Revolution and Tradition,” 183.
41. Yair Tzaban, "An Unashamed Secularist," in Zucker, We the Secular Jews, 111-131. This
article was translated into English and appears under the tide "An Unabashed Secular Jew,”
in the annual Contemplate: The International Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought 2 (2003): 5-14
(continued in the following issue).
 170 C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N A N D Y A A C O V Y A D G A R

42. See Yaacov Yadgar and Charles Liebman, "Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomoy:
Masortim in Israel," this volume.
43. For example, Tom Segev writes that "anyone who says that he believes in God cannot be
considered totally secular"; Tom Segev, "W ho Is Secular?” Ha’aretz, September 25,1996.
44. Yaakov Malkin, What Do Secular Jews Believe? (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, in Hebrew, 2000).
Although his book is o f little intellectual value, what Malkin says is important for our purposes
because he is probably the best-known “professional" secularist in Israel. Malkin edits the
Hebrew language quarterly SecularJudaism and is the academic director o f Meitar, the College
o f Judaism as Culture. He is co-dean o f the International Institute for Secular Humanistic
Judaism, which ordains Humanistic rabbis.
45. Immanuel Etkes, ed., The East European Jewish Enlightenment (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar
Center for Jewish History, 1993), and the extensive bibliography listed in the appendix.
46. Tamara Novis, "Raising the Bar,” Jerusalem Post, City Lights, August 1, 2002,10.
47. Liebman, “ Secular Judaism and Its Prospects.”
48. Levy, Levinson and Katz, Israeli Jews, 82.
49. Ibid., 85.
50. The reader must bear in mind that this figure, like all others, includes Jews from the
Former Soviet Union. As noted, they constitute 19 percent o f the secular sample and may have
skewed the results somewhat by weakening the Jewish identity o f the secular sample as well as
weakening the Israeli components o f that identity. We were unable to obtain the information
that would have allowed us to do a secondary analysis o f the Guttman data and corroborate if
and to what extent this is the case.
51. For a detailed description o f these institutions and organizations, see the report by Meir
Yoffe, Mapping Programs That Promote Tolerance and Unity.
52. Bekerman and Silverman, "The Corruption of Culture," would argue that this is impos­
sible as long as Judaism is associated with the national state.
53. Alma College, Centerfor SecularJudaism, 1.
54. David Sperber, "Yiddishkeit: Oil on Canvass, 2002," De’ot (June 2003): 30-33.
55. Ibid., 30.
56. For more detail on what one might call the Judaization o f Hashomer Hatzair and its
effort to attract religiously traditional youth, see Ha’aretz, "Hashomer Hatzair Observes the
Sabbath,” March 17, 2003.
57. But it is important to note that Israeli culture and identity in the last few decades has
swung back and forth between two extremes o f national identity: a particularistic-Jewish
extreme on the one the hand and a universalistic-secular extreme on the other.
58. On the other hand, a number o f factors moderate this tendency The violent struggle
against Israel in the second intifada is the most important. But another factor o f great impor­
tance is the postmodernist orientation that encourages the individual to explore and identify
his- or herself and the particular groups through which one is defined. This, the postmod­
ernists believe, is necessary in the context o f globalization. This may encourage the effort to
rediscover aspects o f Judaism viewed through a contemporary prism—first and foremost
among them, aspects which are identified as spiritual or mystical.
 Beyond the Religious-Secular
Dichotomy
MASORTI M IN I S R A E L

YAACOV YADGAR AND

C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

In this chapter, our concern is Israeli Jews who, when asked to categorize their reli­
gious behavior, define themselves as '‘traditional'’ (masorti, plural masortim).1 Their
religious behavior is defined as ‘‘traditionalism” (masortiut), and they constitute
about one-third of the Israeli Jewish population. By comparison, less than 20 per­
cent of Israeli Jews define themselves as either "religious” (dati, a synonym for
Orthodox in the Israeli context) or ultra-Orthodox (haredi). The remaining Jews
define themselves as secular (hiloni).2
The meaning of and differences between these categories are not entirely clear.
The ‘‘traditional” category is the most enigmatic. Even among those who have
stressed its demographic importance, many dismiss this category as no more than an
inconsistent cocktail of beliefs and practices characterized by lack of clarity. Academic
analyses and popular discussion of religious identity among Israeli Jews often refer to
this category. Both academic and popular discourse draw a distinction between "secu­
lar” and "religious,” and the category "traditional” is often applied to a very different
typology, one that was so popular among social scientists until recently—that between
"traditional,” meaning one who had not undergone modernization, and "modern,”
referring to one who had.3 Indeed, the very birth of the category "traditional” to mark
a kind of intermediate category between the "completely secular" and the “really reli­
gious” marks it as a problematic form of identity. It renders traditionalism or tradi­
tional identity as a kind of artificial category located between two ideal types and
lacking any meaning independently of the two other categories. Nonetheless, with all
our reservations about these terms, we will continue to employ them (or the Hebrew
equivalents, masorti and masortiut), as we attempt to establish the foundations for fur­
ther research that will explore the content and sociopolitical implications of a masorti
identity We will use the terms traditionalist or traditionalism to refer to the general phe­
nomenon. We will most often use the Hebrew terms masorti and masortiut when refer­
ring to the specific Israeli manifestation. We will sometimes revert to English
terminology for the sake of linguistic niceties where the meaning is clear. As we shall
see, masortiut is actually a special form of traditionalism.
 172 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

As in every form of individual identity, including hiloni and dati identities, the
identity of masortim is not absolute but dependent on context, time, and place. It
continually evolves as it confronts competing mosaics of identities and changing
social and political conditions. We also believe that it is possible to distinguish a
variety of masorti identities that range from a positive and independent definition
of masorti (i.e., one that is not substantially dependent on other types o f identity to
define itself), to a negative understanding of one’s own traditional identity (i.e.,
one that does indeed see itself as straddling the secular-religious dichotomy and
locates itself in between them). Ethnicity and age also play a role in the choice of
religious identity. Gender, as far as we can tell, does not.

Research on Traditionalism: The Dominance

o f the Modernization-Secularism Paradigm
In 1984 the distinguished anthropologist Moshe Shokeid summarized the relation­
ship of academic research to traditionalism in Israel as developing in three stages.
In the first stage, masortiut was met with dismissal by the academy as "part of the
general category of characteristics comprising traditional culture that never gar­
nered much esteem in veteran Israel society—in its secular as in its Orthodox [vari­
ety].”4 This contempt has deep roots. Yaacov Shavit has noted that the cultural elite
of the early Zionist movement was both contemptuous o f and bitterly hostile
toward the Jewish folk culture of Eastern Europe. Incredibly, the elite thought they
could prevent the emergence of folk culture, except under their tutelage, in the
Yishuv.5 The second stage, according to Shokeid, was characterized by ignoring
masorti Jews whose behavior was now viewed as an expression of folklore and
unworthy o f serious academic interest. The third stage, in which Shokeid together
with his research partner Shlomo Deshen were outstanding exemplars, was char­
acterized by a renewed interest in masortiut, an interest that was primarily anthro­
pological and sociological.6
Much of the research on and discussions about traditionalists and traditionalism
took place within the framework of the modernization-secularization paradigm.
Within this framework, science is posed as an alternative to religion, and religion is
moved from the public arena to the arena of private practice and belief. At its
extreme, this theory suggests that the modernized and secularized human is freed
from theological and metaphysical discourse. It is the only route whereby the indi­
vidual can free himself from the constraints imposed by religious modes of thought.
As a consequence of being secularized, people become self-conscious actors who
create their own history. There is no longer a space for religion as an overarching
system of meaning. The central theme in the secularization discourse argues that in
the modern world, religion is so weakened that it must choose between rejection of
modernity and acceptance of a reduced role in the dominant secular order. The
implications of this are the abandonment of the public arena (cultural, social, and
political) for the private arena, if not for an eventual disappearance.7
In this general frame of mind (though not always in this extreme form), the
terms tradition or traditionalism (masoret and masortiut) were discussed in studies of
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 173

Israeli society. These studies provided evidence of the presence of traditionalism

among Israeli Jews, especially among Mizrahim (Jews who originate or whose fam­
ilies originated in Muslim societies), whose religion was thought to be virtually
synonymous with traditionalism. The distinction between a modern and a tradi­
tional society served the authors as a kind of paradigm through which the studies
of the religion of Mizrahim as an expression of “pre-modern Judaism” were
undertaken.8
As a consequence, they found little prospect for the survival of traditionalism in
the context of a modern, secular, Westernized Israel. Masortim will have to choose
between one of two mutually exclusive alternatives: secularism (i.e., completing
the process of modernization and integration into the modern-Western-secular
culture), or the strengthening of religion, of what we will describe below as "scrip-
turalism,” which includes at least the partial rejection of modernity and a strong
measure of isolation within the confines of the community and the culture of the
religious. Thus, Mizrahi traditionalism was portrayed as a temporary phenome­
non, though it served the Mizrahim in their competition for public resources.9
Some of these studies also pointed to factors slowing the process of moderniza-
tion-secularization. Two factors—the central role of the family and the special
place accorded rabbis in traditional Mizrahi society—are mentioned in this
regard.10
Much of the description of masortiut was located in the context of a discussion
of ethnicity and ethnic identification in Israel.” Special attention was devoted to
some of the prominent expressions of religious traditionalism among Mizrahim,
first and foremost among them being the pilgrimages to the graves of saints.12
Another direction this research has taken is the role of gender in the process of
modernization and secularization. Susan Sered, for example, has observed that
even though modernization opens up new possibilities for the religious participa­
tion of women, “the religion of women” is most vulnerable to the forces of mod­
ernization. This vulnerability stems from the personal, somewhat hidden, home
nature of women's religion.13
We are not prepared to dismiss the secular/modern versus the traditional/reli­
gious paradigm as wrong, although we are not comfortable with it intuitively, and
contemporary scholarship rejects it.14 But we are also anxious to pursue an alterna­
tive line of inquiry, which Shokeid himself has suggested. He has recognized that a
third alternative besides secularization or integration into the established
Orthodoxy of Israel also exists. This is the transformation of Mizrahi traditional­
ism into a form of ethnic identification in which traditionalism would play a more
important role than is otherwise accorded to it. Shokeid has noted that “the masoret
religiosity adopted and proclaimed by Middle Eastern Jews . . . may under certain
circumstances develop into a symbolic linkage with the more dominant cultural
stream. With the growing disparity between the expanding Ashkenazi orthodoxy
and the dominant secular sector, on the one hand, and the growing notion of cul­
tural need concerning the symbolic realm of Jewish identity in the secular sector,
on the other hand, masoret religiosity may be more than an ethnic peculiarity.” 15
 174 YAACOV Y A D G A R AND C H A R L E S S. LI E BM AN

In line with this observation, we wish to propose the possibility that tradition­
alism is in fact a modern response—a method of coping with modernization rather
than simply rejecting or accepting it. Following this reasoning, it may be more
accurate to see masortiut as an expression of multiple modernities—an expression
born of a discomfort with the older modernization discourse that instead empha­
sizes the simultaneous existence of a variety of modernity models that influence
one another. Modernization in the Western sense is understood in this context as
one expression of a variety of modernities.16 Which of these paradigms is better
suited to the condition of Israel and especially Mizrahi traditionalism is a key ques­
tion of our larger study, one that remains unanswered for the moment.

Traditionalism Defined
We understand the term traditionalism to refer to a life lived, at least in part, in
accordance with tradition—for example, conduct learned from the immediate
environment, particularly the extended family. It is religious because so much of it
refers to matters of religious concern. The term traditionalism is best understood
by its mirror concept—scripturalism. Clifford Geertz has applied the label scrip-
turalism to religious developments in two Muslim societies, Indonesia and
Morocco.17 Haym Soloveitchik has expanded Geertz’s theoretical insight to a
description of scripturalism in Orthodox Judaism (though he did not use the
term).18Among traditionalists, religious conduct is the product of social custom. In
the scripturalist form of religion, conduct is the product of conscious, reflective
behavior. Among traditionalists, religious life is governed by habit and by what
“seems” right; among scripturalists, by rules. Authority in the world of traditional­
ists is rooted in customs in the home, in the culture; it is transmitted mimetically.
Authority in the world of religious scripturalism is rooted in texts as they are inter­
preted by the learned masters of the texts (in Judaism: talmidei hakhamim), and the
heads o f the advanced religious academies (in Judaism: roshei yeshivot). In the world
of traditional religion and among traditionalists, the division between the masses
and the elite is fixed. In the world of religious scripturalism, to use a Weberian con­
cept, all should strive to become religious virtuosi. The last point is crucial because
characteristics centered on the primacy of text are by no means modern.19
Both Geertz and Soloveitchik are sympathetic to what we call traditionalism, but
for both authors, traditionalism emerges as a thing of the past. Both authors explain,
most convincingly, why scripturalism has become the religious norm, at least in
Indonesia and Morocco (which Geertz studied), and within American Orthodox
Judaism (to which Soloveitchik devoted his attention). We are less certain that this is
true of our case. Masortiut faces challenges from both the religious right and the
secular left; its future is problematical, but by no means certain. We will argue that
it has not disappeared because it is tied to other sources of legitimacy.
Some of the explanations that Geertz and Soloveitchik have offered for the rise
of scripturalism and the decline of traditionalism are particular to the societies
they studied; some of them are applicable to a variety of societies, indeed to the
modern world in general. Although the authors do not say so, their analysis hints
 Beyond the Religions-Secular Dichotomy 175

at one general reason for the decline of traditionalism: the dissociation of religion
and culture. We believe that traditionalism continues to feed upon another
source—its tie to ethnic or national identity. But masortiut is, as we shall see, a
peculiarly modern phenomenon in other respects.
Traditionalism flourished when religion and culture were united. The dissocia­
tion of religion and culture rendered religion “unnatural,” artificial, its practices no
longer part of the normal rhythms of life. Haym Soloveitchik has provided the
telling example of an undergarment, which Jewish law commands the Jew to wear.
But, Soloveitchik has emphasized, today when it is “worn not as a matter of course
but as a matter of belief then it becomes a ritual object. A ritual can no more be
approximated than an incantation can be summarized. Its essence lies in its accu­
racy. It is that accuracy the haredim are seeking. The flood o f works on halachic
prerequisites and correct religious performance accurately reflects the ritualization
of what have previously been simply components of the given world and parts of
the repertoire of daily living."20
Scripturalist religion faces the challenge of living in a culture that is no longer
conducive to, indeed which may even threaten, its religious mandates. It meets this
challenge through a number of strategies.21 One is by withdrawal from the culture
and, insofar as possible, the creation of a new culture. Another is one in which reli­
gion conquers the culture and imposes its mandates. A third strategy is to seek
some accommodation with the culture through the reinterpretation of the reli­
gious tradition. Among Orthodox Jews in Israel, as elsewhere, one finds accommo-
dationist rabbis. They will accept the norms and values of modern culture where
their interpretation of Scripture permits them to do so. But even these “modern"
rabbis and their followers accept the basic spirit of scripturalism—the supreme
authority of the text. They differ from other rabbis only in their more lenient and
permissive interpretations of the text. There is a fourth strategy that is most com­
mon among the religious laity—compartmentalization (the notion that certain
forms of behavior or behavior in certain areas of life are subject to religious
demands, whereas others areas o f behavior are religiously irrelevant).
Traditionalism falls outside this paradigm (although it does adopt a form of com­
partmentalization) perhaps because it is a sense or &feeling rather than an ideology.
It includes a sense that the choices described above are unnecessary because the
religious observance that one incorporates into one's life is perfectly natural.
However masortiut, as we describe it, is not at all premodern. The masorti is
thoroughly modern in the sense that he is self-conscious o f his masortiut. As a con­
sequence, two important differences distinguish the masorti from the classical tra­
ditionalist: first, the recognition that what he or she finds natural may not be
natural for others, and, second, an acknowledgment that scripturalism is synony­
mous with the proper observance o f religious commands. Hence, the masorti does
not reject scripturalism, so much as he or she chooses what to observe and not
observe. This choice, however, is strongly influenced by the tradition to which the
masorti has been socialized. Does this make masortiut a variety of popular religion
or, more likely, to use David Hall’s felicitous term, “lived religion”?22
 176 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

The traditionalist's recognition of the religious authority of the scripturalist

necessarily renders him or her conscious o f the complexity of his or her values and
behavior and to what appears as the absence o f consistency. In everything touching
upon ideology, it would appear that the traditionalist is unable to project a coher­
ent and consistent ideology. As Moshe Shokeid summarized the ethnographic
description o f Moroccan immigrants to Israel, these traditional Jews "never devel­
oped a consistent set of behavioral rules or philosophical justifications to their
mixed secularist-religious style. In retrospect they view themselves as continuing
the tradition of their father, adapted to their present condition.”23 This absence o f
ideology is expressed in their stubborn refusal to impose the traditional way of life,
or for that matter the religious scripturalist way of life, on others or on the envi­
ronment.24 (It is important to note that in Judaism, the demand that the public
arena be conducted in a certain manner is an integral part of one’s religious obli­
gation.) The difficulty or the conscious refusal to articulate a traditionalist ideology
stems from the acceptance of the scripturalists' religious authority. In other words,
traditionalists accept the scripturalist point that the latter represent the ideal and
have exclusive claim to a religious ideology. The traditionalist chooses, therefore,
not to intervene in this arena.
Therefore, traditionalism is intimately related to scripturalism. Traditionalists
are aware o f their own ignorance of the scriptural tradition and are sometimes pre­
pared to amend some of their practices when informed by those more knowledge­
able than themselves that they are not practicing this or that rule properly. They
accept the organizational structure and are relatively indifferent to the belief struc­
ture of the elite religion. Of course, the rituals and symbols that are important to
them imply a belief system, but one tending to be mythical rather than rational and
ideational, and hence not in opposition to the more complex theological or legalis­
tic elaboration of the elite religion. (Of course, the mythical dimensions of ritual
also play a central role among the religious scripturalists.) Therefore, in the eyes o f
the elite religion, folk religion or, in our case, traditionalism, is not a movement but
at best an error, or set of errors, shared by many people. At worst, it is understood
as avoiding basic decisions, as a kind of halfway house to heresy.
Masortiut, the modem Israeli variety of traditionalism, is a coalescence of
different traditions under the impact of a similar environment and of similar
pressures—both the pressure from the religious elite who adamantly insist on tra­
ditionalism's lack of religious legitimacy and from the pressures of modern culture
and the secularist camp. The big differences that remain are those between
Ashkenazim (those who originate or whose families originate from predominantly
Christian societies) and Mizrahim (those, as we noted, who originate or whose
families originate from predominantly Muslim societies). The latter constitute a
much higher proportion o f traditionalists. Only a minority of Ashkenazim define
themselves as traditionalists rather than as religious or nonreligious (secular).
According to the most comprehensive survey on the subject (the Guttman
Center Survey) 50 percent of all Israeli Mizrahim identified themselves as masor-
tim, whereas only 19 percent of Ashkenazim so identified themselves. In general
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 177

the survey found that whereas Mizrahim in Israel were far more observant of the
tradition than Ashkenazim, their religious identity was more moderate. Israeli
scripturalists are, by and large, Ashkenazi. The same is true at the other extreme.
Only 9 percent of the Mizrahim identify themselves as either nonreligious (i.e., do
not maintain any traditional observances) or antireligious, whereas 34 percent of
the Ashkenazim define themselves in this manner.25 Moreover, both the Gunman
survey and our own interviews suggest that the gap between Mizrahim and
Ashkenazim is also expressed in the manner in which traditional rituals are
observed. As a rule, Mizrahim are far more careful in observing the tradition in
accordance with Jewish law than are Ashkenazim. Among the Ashkenazi tradition­
alists, not only is the observance of religious practices less intense, but we suspect
that unlike their parents, they have a fairly weak sense of traditionalism. Much of
their religious observance is trivial in their own minds and abandoned with relative
ease. The remainder of our discussion focuses primarily on Mizrahim, since they
not only constitute the bulk of masortim, but we know a good deal more about
them. However, our interviews that included Ashkenazim allow us to introduce a
comparative dimension as well.

The Phenomenology o f Mizrahi Traditionalism

There is a rich secondary literature on Mizrahim, but few scholars have analyzed
Mizrahi traditionalism as a self-conscious alternative to strict observance.16 The
most common explanation for what is viewed as religious laxity in the behavior of
many Mizrahim is to tie this laxity to the religious traditions o f the Mizrahim that,
as Z vi Zohar has demonstrated, are more pragmatic and in that sense more relaxed
than those of the Ashkenazim.27 But this would not explain why some traditions
that are retained are rather difficult to observe (for example, fasting on Yom Kippur
or not smoking on Shabbat), whereas some traditions that are easier to observe
(such as males covering their head at meal times) have been abandoned.28
The image o f the Mizrahi traditionalist that more than any other symbolizes
his or her anomalous behavior is o f one who "prays in the synagogue on Shabbat
and then travels by car to the beach” or to a soccer game.29 This religious-secular
compromise generates both unease and a measure of contempt among both datiim
and hilonim. Ethnographic studies and our interviews provide a series of similar,
ostensibly anomalous examples, including wearing a yarmulke during prayer in the
synagogue or during the reciting of Kiddush at the Sabbath table and punctiliously
removing it afterward; participating in a family meal on Friday evening that
includes reciting Kiddush but ignoring almost all the remaining Sabbath injunc­
tions; or the punctilious observance of dietary laws, including two sets of dishes in
the home, but exercising much greater leniency outside the home.30 We were espe­
cially interested to find a great gap between observance within and outside
the home. Many of our female respondents reported on their rigid observance of
the laws o f family purity while ignoring laws pertaining to modesty o f dress out­
side the home. A number of male respondents reported that whereas they put on
t’J ilin (phylacteries) every day (Jewish men are commanded to don phylacteries
 178 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

prior to reciting the morning prayers), they did not recite morning prayers. They
neither attended synagogue on a daily basis nor even prayed in their own home.
Many of our respondents reported that they regularly read chapters from the bibli­
cal Book of Psalms or at least carried the book around with them. Many also
reported that they not only fast on Yom Kippur but on the ninth of Av as well,
although they do not attend synagogue on that day. Some even reported that they
washed their hands ritually before every meal, generally without saying the bless­
ing that Jewish law prescribes. All our respondents carefully refrain from eating for­
bidden foods on Pesach and are very strict in observing all the prohibitions in
addition to fasting that are associated with Yom Kippur.
A distinguishing characteristic of traditionalists seems to be their solution to
the tension between religion and modernity. Unlike the scripturalists who insist
that all of life is governed by Jewish law (among the most extreme is the governing
of bodily movement),31 in a sense sacralizing every aspect of life, masortim incor­
porate that which they consider religious or holy into the regular pattern of their
otherwise modern lives. There are holy days, holy people, and holy events.
Holiness demands very special behavior and makes very special demands. For some
masortim, if one cannot meet these demands, then he "exits” or leaves the realm of
the sacred or holy. If on a particular Sabbath one cannot or chooses not to meet the
demands for Sabbath observance, then the Sabbath loses its holiness for that per­
son. Perhaps it is more correct to say that the masorti loses the merit of Shabbat
and its sanctity. The masorti chooses to violate the Sabbath, and therefore has no
right to enjoy its sanctity. The sanctity of the Sabbath is always present, and the
masorti must choose whether to enter into this world or remain outside.
Religious demands are sometimes weighed against personal considerations of
comfort, convenience, and the doable and are chosen accordingly. The "comfort”
to which our respondents referred was often the ability to observe a modern style
of life. In other words, in many cases the choice takes place in the effort to resolve
the tension between the world of religious observance and modernity. The deci­
sion is made by weighing reality against what is desirable.
Religious demands are deemed absolute, but "not for me.” That is, the masorti
accepts the principle—the same principle according to which the scripturalist con­
ducts his life—but the principle remains at the level of the abstract and the general,
whereas life takes place in the real world of the individual. And here the demands
of religion lose their absolute status and compete with other values, notions, and
customs with which they are not always compatible.
The religious laws that come closest to being absolute in practice are those laws
concerned with proper respect for a dead family member, a parent in particular.
What distinguishes masortim from datiim is not the manner in which these laws are
observed, but in the hierarchical importance given to these laws. For example,
Mizrahi traditionalists will observe the laws and customs of mourning quite punctil­
iously, although they may be quite lackadaisical in their observance of laws such as
Sabbath observance, laws to which religious authorities accord greater importance.
Indeed, the custom among Mizrahim is that when observing laws of mourning
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 179

in this intense manner, the male signals himself as dati by wearing a yarmulke not
only for the week of shiva but for the full thirty days of mourning.
The attitude of the Mizrahi-masorti to the yarmulke is of special interest
because it symbolizes the complex attitude of the masorti to the whole world of
religion. From our interviews we understand that the wearing of a yarmulke is a
symbolic act signaling the division between the world o f holiness and religion, and
the world of the secular and mundane.32 In donning the yarmulke the masorti iden­
tifies himself as one who has entered temporarily the arena of religion, of the holy.
Removal of the yarmulke signals his return to the everyday, where holiness is
absent. By wearing the yarmulke and removing it (or not wearing it), the masorti
signals to himself the boundaries o f the holy and the different set of rules
demanded of him. This symbolic meaning of the yarmulke constitutes a central
component in the tendency of the masorti to compartmentalize the Jewish reli­
gion, to limit its sanctity, and to draw the distinction between holy and profane.
This symbolism is reinforced in the context of Israeli society, where the wearing of
a yarmulke denotes membership in the community of the religious. In this context,
not wearing a yarmulke is of great significance for the masorti because it distin­
guishes him from the dati. Amongst our respondents, there was general agreement
that one who always wears a yarmulke and does not maintain a religious life is a
charlatan.
In Israel, the yarmulke’s style (whether it is knitted, black, velvet, colored,
large, or small), alludes to the religio-political group with which the wearer is iden­
tified. Hence we asked ourselves whether the choice of yarmulke style among
masortim also expressed some kind of group identity. To the best of our under­
standing, it does not. In synagogues in which the majority of the worshipers are
masortim, one is struck by the range of yarmulke styles. Our general impression is
that the masorti chooses his yarmulke according to subjective notions of aesthetics
and what is or is not available, not in accordance with "political” criteria. However,
our observations also suggest that on those occasions when the masorti did switch
his yarmulke style, it was done self-consciously. The switch reflected the type of
scripturalist authority that he now accepted. In other words, the masorti chooses
the yarmulke that marks the rabbinic stream that he, the masorti, sees as his reli­
gious model of emulation.
Holy people, or saints, play a major role among some but not all Mizrahi tradi­
tionalists. Mizrahi traditionalists are not the only group to believe that certain per­
sons (alive or dead) are endowed with special relations toward God. Such beliefs are
found to a greater or lesser degree among all religious Jews, find special emphasis
among one brand of Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox, and are rooted in the Jewish tradi­
tion. Nevertheless, the veneration of saints, the special festivities that mark the day
of their death, the magical power accorded to the blessings of the living saints, and
the "excesses” that accompany all this find some resistance and a desire to restrict its
expansion among the Mizrahi scripturalist leaders. They take exception (albeit with
care) to what they consider to be the excessive adoration of holy people. Tension
between the leaders of the official or elite religion and the practice of popular
 180 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L 1 E B M A N

religion in Islam and in the Catholic Church is well documented. Likewise, studying
how this tension plays itself out among the religious elite and the traditionalist
masses of Mizrahim may suggest new theoretical insights. We must also explore
whether traditionalists observe customs that are totally foreign to the Jewish tradi­
tion and which, for example, find their origin in Islamic custom. Much research
remains to be undertaken.
Our attention was also engaged by the question of how masortim viewed
"morality” and its relationship to religion. We phrased our questions in terms o f
"who is a good Jew?” The vast majority of our respondents denied emphatically
that a Jew who observed religious law punctiliously was a better Jew or a better
person. Instead, they defined morality, ethics, and humanitarianism as the criteria
by which to judge a good Jew. In other words, our respondents refused to identify
religiosity with morality.
It is instructive to compare the masortim we studied with those whom Nancy
Ammerman has called “Golden Rule Christians.”33 Ammerman has distinguished
Golden Rule Christians from "Evangelical Christians” and "Activist Christians.”
The evangelicals and activists emphasize social action and working for justice. For
Golden Rule Christians, " ‘meaning’ is not found in cognitive or ideological struc­
tures, not in answers to life's great questions, but in practices that cohere into
something the person calls a ‘good life.’ ”34 Ammerman quotes one church member
as saying, "I think all He [God] stands for makes you hope that you could be a bet­
ter person." Another, when asked to describe the essence of God, answered that it's
"the way you live your life. By that I mean, what good is it to know God if—you can
study, you can be an excellent Bible student but if you don't practice what you have
learned, then you aren’t making a better world for yourself or for anyone."35
Our masortim have also described what they call "a good person," which is
comparable to the good person as described by Golden Rule Christians. It is a per­
son who cares for and helps others without regard to who those other persons are.
Our respondents claim that they strive to be such people, that such people rank
very highly in their eyes. But—and here is the big difference with what Ammerman
found—our respondents deny that there is a connection between being such a good
person and being a religious Jew or fulfilling one’s religious obligations. Were we to
press our respondents we probably could have elicited agreement that Judaism
does demand one of the qualities that make for a good person. But that is not their
intuitive sense, which is that religion has to do with punctiliously fulfilling ritual
demands and acquiring knowledge of sacred text. They know too many rabbis and
have too many acquaintances that meet the requirements necessary to call oneself
dati, yet they are not good people. On the other hand, they have acquaintances who
are good people, but they clearly are not datiim. Indeed, in one interview the
respondent hinted at the fact that although she was "only” masorti, she was a bet­
ter person than religious women of her acquaintance. Her husband, sitting in the
room while the interview took place, then related a story in greater detail that
demonstrated that his wife behaved, in a specific situation, in a more ethical and
honorable manner than religious women.
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 181

Nevertheless, we suspect that what our respondents told us is not the whole
story. In the course of many of our interviews we "heard” our respondents iden­
tifying religiosity and morality. Indeed, on a number o f occasions the passion
with which our respondents insisted that there was no relationship between how
religious a person was and whether he was a good person reflected an opposite
position. They expressed disappointment when they found fully observing Jews
wanting from a moral point of view. In other words, we suspect that in many cases
one could deduce (indirectly and not openly), that our respondents anticipated that
the religious Jew would act in a more ethical and humane manner than others. But
the expectation that the religious Jew would serve as a kind o f exemplary model for
Judaism, for the Jewish way o f life, was often met with disappointment.
The identification between Judaism or a Jewish way of life, and ethics and
morality, is also evident in the attitudes of masortim toward hilonim. Our respon­
dents tended to identify hiloniut (a secular way of life) with reykanut (literarily
emptiness, an absence o f values) and a kind of absence of humanity. The absence
of belief in God (which is the mark of the hiloni in their eyes) is understood by
Mizrahi (though not by Ashkenazi) masortim we interviewed as signaling egoism
and unbridled hedonism. The hiloni was described by some as concerned only with
him- or herself at the expense of others and at the expense of national as well as
universal values and principles. If we think in terms of mirror images, hiloniut is
the mirror image of datiut (being religious), but hiloniut is also the mirror image of
principled, altruistic, moral behavior. By extension, therefore, religiosity does sig­
nal moral and ethical principles.

Conflicting Pressures on M asortim

Amongst the three categories o f Israeli Jews grouped by religious identity (dati,
hiloni, and masorti), only the percentage of masortim declined (by 7 percent)
between 1990 and 1999. The proportion of the other two groups within the Jewish
population either remained constant or grew.36 The influx of Russian immigrants is
a partial explanation for the decline in the proportion o f masortim, but we believe
that the major explanation is the absence of socializing agents, in addition to the
family circle and close friends, that reinforce masortiut. There are no schools or
voluntary organizations that encourage traditional behavior. In addition, as we
argued elsewhere, the Israeli media ignore the masorti as distinct from the hiloni or
the dati way of life and hardly offer it any form of representation.37 As a result,
masortim live under constant cross pressures with no reinforcement outside their
family or immediate circle of friends and the complexity of traditionalist practice—a
complexity stemming from its idiosyncratic solution to the tension between
modernity and religion—which hinders its growth.
The masorti's identity problems are compounded by the sense of many masor­
tim that the manner in which they conduct their religious life is almost unique.
Some of our respondents believed that most Israeli Jews behaved like them. But
most believed they were a small minority. One of the problems in sustaining a
masorti identity is the sense that one is "peculiar” and different. The dati Jew easily
 182 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

identifies other datiim. Since datiim tend to live in dati neighborhoods, their reli­
gious identity is reinforced by those they see around them. The same is true o f
hiloni Jews. Religious and secular readily recognize one another by their public
mannerisms but especially by their dress. Masortim, however, who dress like secu­
lar Jews and who practice their Judaism in the confines o f the home and family do
not readily identify one another. Many of our respondents were shocked when told
that masortim constituted over 30 percent of Israel's Jewish population. They live
with the sense that they are alone, making the temptations to join the ranks of
either the secular or the religious that much more pronounced.
The major source of pressures on masortim is the demand for coherence and
consistency. In the eyes o f datiim and hilonim the behavior of the masorti seems
inconsistent if not hypocritical. This pressure comes not only from datiim.
Hilonim, at least by implication but sometimes explicitly, demand that the masorti
decide to which side he or she belongs and act accordingly.
The cultural context of Israeli life plays an important role in this regard. The
demand of both sides that the masorti choose where he or she belongs is a demand
to leave that liminal state o f "neither here nor there.” Choosing one of the two
sides requires the masorti to identify the other side as "other” and to structure his
or her behavior in opposition to the other. We will begin by describing some o f the
pressures that arise from the religious side.

Religious Pressures
As noted, scripturalists see masorti behavior as flawed, because it reflects a weak­
ness of character, if not a choice of sin, rather than religious compliance. Masortiut
is seen as partial heresy. Rabbis play a word game with the etymology of the term
masorti to deny its legitimacy. "Masorti,” they say, comes from the word masor (saw)
and nisur (sawing) and not from the words masoret (tradition) and mesira (handing
over). The masorti saws off a piece o f Judaism for himself, chooses what is easy for
him, and throws away that which denies him the pleasures that secular culture
offers. Rav Yosef Azran, a former Knesset representative from Shas (the bulk of
Shas voters are Mizrahi masortim), expressed this idea in a television panel that was
discussing the last Guttman Report. Azran reserved his criticism for the bulk of
masortim, those who, in his opinion, were distancing themselves from the world of
religion. (He excluded those who were originally secular and were now becoming
more religious). In his words: "Why masortim? Because it was hard for them to
bear the yoke of religion, so they created an easy Judaism, whatever was easy for
them. They keep cutting off more and more until all will be gone.”3* From the
point o f view of Azran and his fellow scripturalists, masortiut is not an error stem­
ming, for example, from ignorance, but rather a self-conscious transgression stem­
ming from a weak spirit, from a search for personal comfort at the expense of
halachic truth.
This critical stance toward the masortim is not confined to haredim. It can be
found in the camp of religious Zionism, a more open and modern camp than that
of the haredim. A new television channel, one devoted entirely to the interests of
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 183

the religious, was scheduled to begin airing in the spring of 2003. One of the stars
o f this channel spoke to the press about the nature of the satiric program he was
preparing. “I intend to devote a lot o f time to the religiosity of the non-religious
Israeli. They wear yarmulkes at funerals, seek counsel from mystics, and don't
observe the Sabbath but fast on Yom Kippur. The hiloni-dati [a secularist who
adopts some religious practices] is pathetic in my eyes. He wants very much to be
politically correct—both an Israeli and progressive and a little bit of a Jew . . . this
is an internal contradiction.''39
This attitude is found in most religious schools, whether they are run by
haredim or religious Zionists. The journalist Daniel Ben Simon came to Israel from
Morocco at the age of sixteen.40 The traditionalist style of Jewish life is all he
knew—that is, riding to the beach or swimming pool in summer after attending
Shabbat services. He came to Israel through the Youth Aliyah Department of the
Jewish Agency and was placed in a religious-Zionist boarding school, where the
principal explained that he would have to wear a kippah and pray three times a day.
When the youngster explained that in Morocco he was accustomed to praying only
on Shabbat and holidays, the principal interrupted him and said he must decide if
he was dati or hiloni. Ben Simon replied that he knew what dati was, but he did not
understand hiloni. The principal explained that a hiloni is someone who does not
believe in God and does not see the Torah as the supreme heritage of the Jewish
people. “Either you are dati or you are hiloni,” he added. “I'm a Jew,” Ben Simon
stammered. After some more prodding, Ben Simon said, “I think I am both dati and
hiloni." "There is no such thing" the principal said, “You are either dati or hiloni.
There is nothing in the middle."41
This delegitimation of the masorti contrasts with the attitude of Sephardic
(Mizrahi) rabbis in the past. Their attitude was characterized by relative tolerance
through a lenient interpretation of the halacha, aimed at preventing the exclusion
of masortim from the community of the faithful, an exclusion that was the fate of
the totally secular. The attitude of Ovadia Yosef, the most important halachic
decisor and unquestioned religious leader of Mizrahi Jews in our generation, is a
model for this type o f tolerance. Studies of his halachic decisions point to his
manipulation o f the law to preserve a place for masortim within the community. As
one example of many, Yosef distinguished between the two separate command­
ments to observe the Sabbath. One insists that the Jew "observe the Sabbath day,”
the other that he “remember the Sabbath day.” According to Yosef, if the Jew
"remembers” (e.g., by reciting Kiddush), even if he does not “observe,” he has ful­
filled the basic commandment and is not subject to the sanctions imposed on a
Sabbath violator (for example, not being given any ritual honor in the syna­
gogue).42 Meir Buzaglo has concurred by citing other examples to illustrate the
same point that older Mizrahi rabbis were lenient with regard to masortim. But he
has noted that these halachic solutions are not answers to the masorti's dilemma.
The basic tensions between the halachic demands, which the masorti recognizes as
legitimate, and the masorti's own behavior remain core tensions in the rhythms of
the masorti's life.43 Furthermore, we sense that as the strength of the scripturalists
 184 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. LIEBMAN

within the camp of Israeli Mizrahim has grown, attitudes toward masortim have
become less accepting.
A central component in these tensions is the conception of the hiloni in the
eyes of the rabbis and the attraction o f the modem-secular way of life for the
masorti. Scripturalist spokesmen portray the hiloni as the opposite o f all that is
good and proper. The hiloni is vacuous, irresponsible, and immoral. Even when
they show an understanding toward the masorti and try to draw him closer to
them, the Mizrahi scripturalists continue to voice their total rejection of "modem”
life, which they often identify with democracy. Even when he escapes this criticism,
the masorti is, as it were, infected with the disease of secularism.
Finally, we must recall that as a rule, even the positive attitude o f the older gen­
eration of Mizrahi rabbis toward the masortim was based on the expectation that
in the end, perhaps as a consequence o f the rabbis' lenient and open attitude, the
masorti would adopt an Orthodox way of life. In other words, the masorti is
accepted, but under the condition that the masorti recognize the flaw in his behav­
ior and inconsistency, and admit that he is mistaken.
In the last three decades, with the emergence of Shas, a haredi-scripturalist
movement, the pressures on the masorti have become more institutionalized.
Nissim Leon has described it as "the reorganization o f Mizrahi religion under the
hegemony of Sephardic masters o f learning,”44 which is expressed in the appoint­
ment of haredi-Mizrahi rabbis to head synagogues whose congregants are prima­
rily masortim. This leads to a kind of religious extremism or, in our terms,
scripturalist values replacing traditional ones. Leon has described this as "a move
from a lenient religious culture to a strict religious culture expressed in strict adher­
ence to the halachic text, at whose center stands the local rabbi transformed from a
community leader to an halachic leader whose charisma doesn't stem from his
image as a mystic but as one learned in sacred text.”45

Secular Pressures
The secular side also demands consistency. However, in this case the rhetoric is less
one-sided. The hiloni demands that the masorti "make himself dear,” that he
choose one of two coherent paths: secularism (hiloniut) or religion (datiut). The
hiloni acknowledges the right o f the individual to live as he or she chooses. But
sometimes without realizing it, the hiloni confines the choice to the two end points
of the continuum. The dominance of this end-point discourse finds expression in
the demand for choosing a pure model. This is a discourse that confirms itself in its
very presentation. When political, social, and cultural discussion concentrates on
the differences and tensions between datiim and hilonim, everyone is naturally
expected to identify themselves with one of the two sides, leaving no room for an
intermediate position. This, at least, is how it appears in the eyes of the masorti.
It is also worth recalling the distinction, at least within academic circles,
between traditional and modem. One o f the characteristics of the non-modem
("primitive” in the pre-politically correct era) is religion. This distinction between
the modern and traditional, which also guided social and educational policy,
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 185

demanded that the masorti modernize himself or herself. The need was felt to de-
socialize the Mizrahim (undermine traditional society) and then resocialize them
into modern Israeli society.46 A major component in modernization was the aban­
donment of religion. That demand was implied in the political and academic estab­
lishment’s insistence on consistency and coherence for locating oneself in one of
the two dichotomous categories and abandoning “primitive" traditionalism for the
sake of modernity.47
Masortiut threatens both extreme positions—secularism, on the one hand, and
religion, on the other. Masortim provide a living example of the possibility that
there is an alternative to rejecting either modernity or religion. This is true of
Reform and Conservative Judaism as well, but their presence in Israel is too weak
to constitute a threat. The dichotomy of religious-secular builds the identity of
each side. Each benefits from this binary image. The religious camp is crowned
with a monopoly on the definition o f the Jewish religion; the secular, on the defini­
tion of freedom and progress. Recognition o f the presence of the traditionalist
undermines all this. We do not really believe that more than a few of the protago­
nists are conscious of this. But we suspect that it is nonetheless a factor in their
resistance and even more so in their ignoring the phenomenon of masortiut.
One o f the fields where cross pressures on the masorti are most pronounced is
in education. There are very few schools that provide a place for the expression and
reinforcement of a child’s identity as a masorti (primarily a result of a sympathetic
principal and/or teachers), and there is no school system that does so. Most chil­
dren from masorti homes attend state schools with a hiloni environment, or state-
religious schools with a dati environment. In both types of schools, even when
masortim constitute a majority of the student population, masortiut, if it receives
any attention at all, is treated as a peripheral phenomenon. Curricula in both types
of schools have no place for the system of beliefs and rituals or the hierarchical
structure of masorti practices. The attitude of both school systems reflects the
same discomfort with the hybrid nature of masortiut noted above. By implication,
if not design, they press students to adjust themselves to the way of life the school
itself projects.48

Internal Pressures
Up to this point we have described some of the external pressures on masortim to
conform to either the secular or the religious way of life. But there are pressures,
no less strong, generated by masortim themselves. These are naturally more com­
plex, not as straightforward, and generally functioning at the subconscious level.
They result from the internalization of external pressures; the masorti internalizes
the demand for consistency, and these demands become part of his or her internal
world. From a psychological point of view, we suspect that these are the most
important pressures.
These pressures emerged in our discussions with respondents, especially
Mizrahi respondents. Some painted a religious way of life as the ideal and their
own religious life as falling short, as flawed, as something they hoped to correct.
 186 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. LIEBMAN

Other respondents did not express themselves so directly, some even denied
that their behavior was religiously flawed, but nevertheless expressed the basic
hope that they would become “stronger” religiously. Many reported that they
expected that they would be more observant in the future, although in some cases
the expectations were for a slow process of “strengthening." Not a single Mizrahi
respondent expected to be less religious in the future. We interpreted this as an
affirmation of the conception that the religious way o f life was a better life.
However, this was not true of our Ashkenazi respondents.
The internal pressures stem from a sense of guilt the Mizrahi masorti bears.
The scripturalist demand for “religious perfection” has been internalized by the
masorti. He accepts the notion that the religious Jew represents authentic Judaism
and the desirable way of living a Jewish life. When asked to explain why the respon­
dent’s own behavior falls short of the ideal, we were offered a variety of reasons—
but the feeling of guilt remained. Nevertheless, as we indicate in the concluding
section, this sense of guilt is concomitant to a consciously chosen way of life.
Hiloni pressure also leads to self-denigration. In this respect, too, the masorti
views himself as flawed, not from a religious but from a modernizing point of view.
The negative self-image of the masorti, the association of masorti and primitivi
(primitive) is in some cases so pronounced that, as the Guttman Reports shows,
many who live a masorti life choose not to identify themselves as such and identify
themselves as hilonim.49 It is also important to recall the identification of masortiut
with Mizrahim in the minds of many Israelis. The cultural and socioeconomic sta­
tus of the Mizrahi renders Mizrahi identity peripheral. Considering the generally
peripheral image of a religious identity in Israeli society, masortiut combines two
stigmatized identities: Mizrahi and quasi-religious. No wonder that some masortim
prefer to be identified as something other than masorti.
Another sort of pressure the masorti confronts is the temptation that the
liberal-hiloni style of life accords. It is viewed as a liberated life in which the indi­
vidual’s basic responsibility is to oneself, a life relatively free of strong communal
and collective constraints and free from the responsibility to history and the archaic
demands of religion. These responsibilities are often described in terms of coer­
cion, as coercing or imposing themselves on the individual, whereas the secular-
liberal life frees one from these constraints. One manner of confronting these
temptations is for the masorti to privatize his or her own conceptions of what is
Judaically proper. Thus, as we indicated above, the masortim, regardless of how
observant they may be in their own lives, refuse to impose religious observance on
the Israeli public,50 although many express the hope that the Israeli "street” will
bear a religiously distinctive character.

M asortiut and Multiple Modernities

In rereading the interviews we conducted (a continuing process) and in reconsider­
ing what we have-learned, we feel that the concept multiple modernities is most
appropriate in seeking to fit the phenomenon of Israeli masortiut into some wider
framework. The most important respect in which masortiut is a decidedly modern
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 187

phenomenon is that the traditionalist consciously chooses his identity. It is not

forced upon him; nor, in light of the pressures from both the secularists and the
scripturalists, can it by any stretch of the imagination be taken for granted. The
masorti is quite familiar with the other, culturally dominant alternatives. He hears
their demands, is aware of their system of values, and conscious of the fact that
both secularism and scripturalism offer a consistent way of life that imbues the fol­
lower with a sense of confidence in his or her own identity—a quality that many of
the traditionalists with whom we speak admit they lack. Nonetheless, the masorti
chooses to be masorti. He is conscious of his identity, of its special character, of its
advantages (as he or she sees them, of course), and of its unique place on the map
of sociopolitical identities in Israel.
The element of choice, the importance of which we cannot overemphasize in
any discussion of the modern face of traditionalism, arose in our interviews in a
most direct manner, most often at the initiative of the respondents themselves. All
our Mizrahi respondents noted that they had learned traditionalist behavior from
their homes. They all recognize the importance of the manner in which they were
raised, but they also reported that at a certain stage in their lives, generally between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, while performing compulsory army service,
they consciously chose to adopt the masorti identity they had learned at home.
Most often they mentioned that an important factor was their own commitment to
the state o f Israel, to the Jewish people, to religion, to Jewish history, to their fami­
lies, or to some combination of these factors. Here, for example, is how one female
respondent phrased it: "You can say that it is a commitment to family, to parents,
and also a commitment of a larger nature (Vgadol), to all of Judaism. .. . The
tradition is like an umbilical cord. This is where you come from. It’s rational as well
as emotional.” Our respondent told us about the moment when she became con­
scious of this rational choice while recognizing the social cost involved: "After
matriculation, in the army, after leaving home I was stationed in a base far from
home . . . you don't live in the circle of parents, so you set the rules for yourself.
You decide what you are going to do on Shabbat, you decide what you will eat and
not eat, you go out with friends and decide on your behavior, and I decided to
isolate myself from my surroundings."
We do not doubt that many secular and religious Israeli Jews see their identity
as a matter of choice. But a comparison of the choice of masortiut with that o f sec­
ularism on the one hand and scripturalism on the other demonstrates the greater
complexity of the first. We argue that the masorti identity is based on a choice that
is of greater significance than the alternative choices, because in most cases the sec­
ular and the religious Jew never really have the identity options of the masortim.
In many respects the scripturalist and the secularist identities, to the extent that
they are matters of choice and not simply givens from the home and the cultural
environment, are formed as mirror images of their polar opposites.
It is our sense that the dominant alternatives from which most of those born
into scripturalist and secularist homes can choose is to either remain as they are or
totally transform their identities. Not surprisingly, they tend to become extreme in
 188 T A A C O V T A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

these new identities (at least so we are told anecdotally). The masorti identity, on
the other hand, is always o f a mixed, hesitant, tempered nature. It must always, so
it seems, justify itself and, as we have noted, is often accompanied by feelings o f
guilt. The possibility o f alternate choices is always present because the options are
always present and fairly easy to adopt.
In conclusion, the notion o f "multiple modernities”—the idea that modernity
is arrived at in a variety o f ways—seems to provide a more useful theoretical para­
digm than the secular modernization paradigm. Multiple modernities and our
example of masortiut provides far richer opportunities to explore the relationships
between modernization and religious, ethnic, national, and collective identity.5' In
the Israeli context, in the context o f the discourse concerning a "Jewish State" or a
“State for the Jews," the relationship o f religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and moder­
nity is complex. The relationship between national symbols, ceremonies, and val­
ues (the civil religion), and the system of Jewish-religious values, beliefs, and
ceremonies troubled the Zionist enterprise from its very outset, underwent many
changes, and has been the topic of research in recent years.52 But the modernity-
secularism discourse renders masortiut and masortim into something of an anom­
aly, requiring a solution rather than an identity expression that sheds light on new
ways to view Israeli society. In the context of a Jewish national state, the tradition­
alist option may yet reveal itself as a solution to the continuing tension inherent in
the Jewish national enterprise—the tension between a universal and a particularis­
tic identity, between a state that is "democratic" and one that is "Jewish."

NOTES
Our thanks to Carol Liebman for a critical reading of an early draft and some poignant
criticisms.
1. We chose to use here the noun form of masortim—which should be translated as "tradi­
tionalists"—instead o f the adjective masortiyim (which in English would be translated as "tradi­
tional"). As will be elaborated below, we believe that this is a small step in the direction of
stressing that the label "masorti" signifies an identity category rather than a sociological prop­
erty o f being "premodem."
2. In the latest Guttman Report (see note 3), not one respondent who identified him- or her­
self as Conservative or Reform also identified him- or herself as dati. Most categorized them­
selves as either "masorti" or as "not dati." A few Reform identified themselves as "anti-dati.”
3. Meir Buzaglo, "The New Traditionalist: A Phenomenology,” in Collected Essays on the
Heritage o f North AfricanJewry, ed. Ephraim Hazan and Haym Saadon (in Hebrew) (Ramat-Gan:
Bar-Ilan University, in press). For a summary presentation of the distinction between modern
and traditional societies, see Yaacov Katz, "Traditional Society and Modern Society,” in Jews o f
the Middle East: Anthropological Perspectives on Past and Present, ed. Shlomo Deshen and Moshe
Shokeid (in Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1984), 27-34.
4. Moshe Shokeid, "New Directions in the Religiosity of Middle Eastern Jews," in Jews o f
the Middle East, 78-91, quote from 79.
5. Yaacov Shavit, "Supplying a Missing System—Between Official and Unofficial Popular
Culture in the Hebrew National Culture in Eretz-Israel,” in The Folk Culture, ed. Benjamin Z.
Kedar (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996), 327-345.
6. Shokeid, "New Directions," 79-80.
7. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehman, introduction to Nation and Religion: Perspectives
of Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 189

University Press, 1999), 1-14; Talal Asad, "Religion, Nation-State, and Secularism,” in van der
Veer and Lehman, Nation and Religion, 178-196; Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and
Religion (London; Routledge, 1992).
8. The term premodem appears in an introduction by Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shokeid
to an article by Yaakov Katz, "Traditional Society and Modern Society,” reprinted in a collec­
tion edited by Deshen and Shokeid. The choice by the editors o f this article, which is a sum­
mary o f modernization, o f an introduction to a volume dealing with Mizrahi Judaism with
special emphasis on the religion o f Mizrahim, is instructive as to the theoretical framework in
which traditionalism was studied. See also Shlomo Deshen, "The Religiosity of Middle
Easterners in the Crises o f Immigration," in Jews o f the Middle East, 71-77.
9. See Moshe Shokeid, "The Religiosity o f Middle Eastern Jew s,” in Israeli Judaism: The
Sociology o f Religion in Israel, ed. Shlomo Deshen, Charles S. Liebman, and Moshe Shokeid
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 236-237.
10. See Shlomo Deshen, "The Religiosity o f the Mizrahim: Public, Rabbis, and Belief,"
Alpayim 9 (1994): 44-58 (in Hebrew); Shokeid, "New Directions"; Stephen Sharot, "Judaism in
Pre-modern Societies," in Jews o f the Middle East, 35-50; Mordechai Bar-Lev and Peri Kedem,
"Ethnicity and Religiosity o f Students: Does College Education Necessarily Cause the
Abandoning o f Religious Tradition?” Megamot 28, nos. 2-3 (1984): 265-279 (in Hebrew);
Shokeid, "The Religiosity o f Middle Eastern Jew s," 213-237; Hannah Ayalon, Eliezer Ben-
Rafael, and Stephen Sharot, “ The Costs and Benefits o f Ethnic Identification,” British Journal of
Sociology 37 (December 1986): 550-568; Shlomo Deshen, "On Religious Change: The Situational
Analysis o f Symbolic Action,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (July 1970): 260-274;
Shlomo Deshen, "Israeli Judaism: Introduction to the Major Patterns,” International Journal of
Middle East Studies 9 (April 1978): 141-169; Harvey Goldberg and Claudio G. Segre, "Holding on
to Both Ends: Religious Continuity and Changes in the Libyan Jewish Community, 1860-1949,"
Maghreb Review 14, nos. 3-4 (1989): 161-186; Harvey Goldberg, "Religious Responses among
North African Jew s in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish
Continuity in the Modem Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary and
Harvard University Press, 1993), 119-144; Harvey Goldberg, "Religious Responses to Modernity
among the Jew s o f Jerba and o f Tripoli: A Comparative Study," Journal of Mediterranean Studies
4 (1994): 276-299; Harvey Goldberg, “A Tradition o f Invention: Family and Educational
Institutions among Contemporary Traditionalizing Jew s," Conservative Judaism 47, no. 2 (1995):
69-84-
11. See, for example, Harvey Goldberg, "Historical and Cultural Dimensions of Ethnic
Phenomena in Israel,” in Studies in Israeli Ethnicity, ed. Alex Weingrod (New York: Gordon and
Breach, 1985), 179-200; Eliezer Ben-Rafael, The Emergence of Ethnicity: Cultural Groups and Social
Conflict in Israel (London: Greenwood Press, 1982); Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Stephen Sharot,
Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in Israeli Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
Harvey Goldberg, "The Changing Meaning o f Ethnic Affiliation," Jerusalem Quarterly 44 (1987):
39-50; Harvey Goldberg, "Ethnic and Religious Dilemmas o f a Jewish State: A Cultural and
Historical Perspective,” in State Formation and Ethnic Relations in the Middle East, ed. Akira Usuki
(Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies, 2001), 47-64.
12. Yoram Bilu and Eyal Ben-Ari, “The Making o f Modern Saints: Manufactured Charisma
and the Abu-Hatseiras o f Israel,” American Ethnologist 19 (February 1992): 29-44; Yoram Bilu,
“Moroccan Jew s and the Shaping o f Israel’s Sacred Geography," in Divergent Jewish Cultures:
Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), 72-86; Yoram Bilu, "Dreams and the Wishes o f the Saint,” in Judaism Viewed from
Within and from Without: Anthropological Studies, ed. Harvey Goldberg (Albany: State University
o f New York Press, 1987), 285-313; Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, "Saint Sanctuaries in Israeli
Development Towns: On a Mechanism o f Urban Transformation,” Urban Anthropology 16
(1987): 234-272; Harvey Goldberg, "Potential Polities: Jewish Saints in the Moroccan
Countryside and in Israel,” in Faith and Polity: Essays on Religion and Politics, ed. M. Bax, P. Kloos,
and A. Koster (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit University Press, 1984), 235-250; Alex Weingrod,
The Saint o f Beersheba (Albany: State University o f New York Press, 1990).
 190 YA A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. L I E B M A N

13. Susan Sered, "Women, Religion, and Modernization: Tradition and Transformation
among Elderly Jews in Israel," American Anthropologist 92 (June 1990): 306-318; see also idem,
"Women and Religious Change in Israel: Rebellion or Revolution," Sociology of Religion 58
(Spring 1997): 1-24.
14. See, for example, Bjorn Wittrock, "Rethinking Modernity," in Identity, Culture and
Globalization, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael with Yitzhak Sternberg, The Annals o f the International
Institute of Sociology 8 (2002): 51-73, and most o f the articles in Daedalus 129 (Winter 2000).
15. Shokeid, “The Religiosity o f Middle Eastern Jew s,” 237.
16. For a detailed presentation o f the idea o f multiple modernities, see Daedalus 129 (Winter
2000). See especially S. N. Eisenstadt, "Multiple Modernities,” 1-29.
17. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). Ernest Gellner,
addressing the same phenomenon (even using the term scripturalism), prefers to label it as "fun­
damentalism.” See Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion.
18. Haym Soloveitchik, "Migration, Acculturation, and the New Role o f Texts in the Haredi
World,” in Accounting for Fundamentalism, ed. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 1994), 197-235.
19. For example, the early historian o f Hasidism, Simon Dubnov, attributes the bitter conflict
from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century between Hasidism and its oppo­
nents to the former’s rejection o f the primacy o f text. S. M. Dubnov, Toldot Ha-Hasidut (Tel
Aviv: Dvir, 1975).
20. Ibid., 201.
21. For an extended discussion o f these options, see Charles S. Liebman, “ Religion and the
Chaos o f Modernity: The Case o f Contemporary Judaism," Take Judaism for Example: Studies
toward the Comparison of Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press,
1983), 147-164.
22. That is a question to which we hope to turn in a future essay. David Hall, ed., Lived
Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
23. Shokeid, “New Directions,” 88.
24. This characteristic recurs time and again in our interviews as well as in all the opinion
surveys o f Israelis on the topic o f religion and the public arena. Traditionalists are character­
ized by their moderation on the topic o f imposing Jewish law in the public arena. See, for
example, Shlomo Hasson and Amiram Gonen, The Cultural Tension within Jerusalem’s Jewish
Population (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 1997).
25. Levy, Levinsohn, and Katz, Jewish Israelis: A Portrait, 14-15.
26. One exception is Harvey Goldberg, "Ethnic and Religious Dilemmas o f a Jewish State.”
27. Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Change: Halachic Responses o f Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and
Technological Change (Egypt and Syria, 1880-1920) (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute,
1993)-
28. Buzaglo cites other examples in "The New Traditionalist: A Phenomenology"
29. Shokeid, "New Directions," 88.
30. See especially Shokeid, "N ew Directions"; Shokeid, "The Religiosity o f Middle Eastern
Jew s” ; and Deshen, “The Religiosity o f the Mizrahim.”
31. Gideon Aran, "The Haredi Body: Chapters from an Ethnography in Preparation,” in Text,
Rhetoric, and Behavior: Collected Articles on Haredi Society in Israel, ed. Emanuel Sivan and Kimmy
Kaplan (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute and the Kibbutz Hameuchad, forthcoming).
32. See also Shokeid, “ New Directions."
33. Nancy Ammerman, "Golden Rule Christianity," in Lived Religion in America, ed. David
Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 196-216.
34. Ibid., 202.
35. Ibid., 202-203.
 Beyond the Religious-Secular Dichotomy 191

36. Levi, Levinsohn, and Katz, Jewish Israelis, 5.

37. Yaacov Yadgar and Yeshayahu (Charles) Liebman, “Jewish Traditionalism and Popular
Culture in Israel," Iyunim 13 (in Hebrew) (forthcoming).
38. Rav Yosef Azran, interview by Aliza Lavi, Shavua Tov, Israeli T V Channel 1, May 4, 2002.
We are grateful to Dr. Aliza Lavi for securing this quotation for us.
39. Kobi Ariel's quotation cited in Aviv Lavi, "Rating's Judaism,” Haaretz-Musaf, November 1,
2002.
40. The story is related in Daniel Ben Simon, “ Dati or Hiloni,” We the Secular Jews: What Is
Secular Jewish Identity? ed. Dedi Zucker (in Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1999). 102-110.
41. The attitude o f the young Ben Simon is echoed in a recent interview with another
Moroccan, this one aged sixty Shlomo Bar, a popular vocalist and drummer, has become
“ observant—in his own style. . . . Often he mentions God and quotes from Jewish sources. . . .
But if you ask him whether he's observant, he says, simply ‘I’m a Je w .'” The treatment o f
masortiut and masortim in religious schools merits a separate study, although we discuss it
briefly below. Tamara Novis, “ Raising the Bar,” Jerusalem Post, City Lights, August 1, 2003.
42. Benny Lau, “ Defining the Masorti Jew ” (paper presented at Conference on Jewish
Approaches to Conflict Resolution, Bar Ilan University, November 11, 2002). See also Ariel
Picard, "Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and His Struggle with ‘the Generation o f Freedom' ” (in Hebrew)
(forthcoming).
43. Buzaglo, “The New Traditionalist: A Phemonology.”
44. Nissim Leon, “Sephardim and Haredim: An Ethnographic Inquiry o f Shas Movement's
Influence on the Identity Discourse in Israel” (master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1999), 1.
45. Ibid.
46. Rivka Bar Yoseph, "Desocialization and Resocialization: The Adjustment Process of
Immigrants" in Immigration, Ethnicity and Community, ed. Ernest Krausz (New Jersey:
Transaction Books, Studies o f Israeli Society, 1980), 19-17 •
47. Some o f the more brutal applications o f this philosophy to the area o f education are
found in Reuven Feuerstein, Children o f the Melah: Cultural Underdevelopment among Children of
Morocco and Its Educational Implications (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Machon Szold and the
Department o f Children's Immigration o f the Jewish Agency, 1965). For an analysis o f this
approach, see Meir Bozaglo, “ Mizrahiut, Tradition, and the Melting Pot: Toward an Alternate
Narrative,” in Zion and Zionism, ed. Z. Harvey, G. Hazon-Rokem, and Y. Shiloach (in Hebrew)
(Jerusalem: Misgav, forthcoming).
48. For a critical review o f educational ideologies and their attitudes toward Mizrahi tradi­
tionalism, see Meir Buzaglo, "Educational Ideologies: The Mizrahi Point o f View,” in
Crossroads: Values and Education in Israeli Society, ed. Yaacov Iram, et al. (Jerusalem: Israeli
Ministry o f Education, 2001), 480-521. Further evidence is found in the deliberations of a recent
conference published in the Zohar journal. Zohar consists o f a group o f young Orthodox rab­
bis at the liberal end of the religious continuum who made a mark for themselves in their will­
ingness to accommodate marriages o f non-Orthodox Jews within the broadest limits of Jewish
law. The Avi Chai Foundation invited Zohar rabbis to a meeting in which they were to assess
the desirability o f creating an educational system for masortim (Zohar 12 [September 2002]:
111-126). Many o f the participants, even as they expressed their basic support for such a move,
also expressed their fears about the creation o f the system. Among the fears they expressed
were that such a system would encourage absence o f knowledge and an unwillingness to be
observant, and that it would end up with "a bit o f yiddishkeit; but this is not enough." The rab­
bis all agreed, however, that there was a great opportunity to draw the masorti public closer to
full-fledged religion (i.e., Orthodoxy). See also Eldad Cohen, “ Religious Zionism-Between
National Haredism and Liberal Religion: The Socio-Religious Split within Religious Zionism in
the Educational System” (master’s thesis, Bar Ilan University, 2003).
49. There are additional reasons for this identification, some of which are discussed in our
chapter on secularism in Israel.
 192 Y A A C O V Y A D G A R A N D C H A R L E S S. LIEBMAN

50. In addition to the evidence from our own interviews, see Hasson and Gonen, The Cultural
Tension, and Levy, Levinsohn, and Katz, Jewish Israelis.
51. Van der Veer and Lehman, "Introduction"; Asad, "Religion, Nation-State, and
Secularism.” For a critical assessment o f the secularization thesis, see Rodney Stark,
“Secularization R.I.P.,” Sociobgyof Religion 60 (Fall 1999): 249-273.
52. See, for example, Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya. Civil Religion in Israel:
Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley: University o f California
Press, 1983).
 What Kind of Jewish State
Do Israelis Want?
I S R A E L I AND AR AB ATTI TUDE S TOWARD
RELIGION AND POLITICS

MARK TESSLER

What does it mean to be a Jewish state? Can the state of Israel be both Jewish and
secular? At least partly, of course, the answer to these questions depends on how
secularism is defined.1The most basic element in Zionist political thought and the
Zionist project is that there should be an independent and sovereign political com­
munity with a Jewish majority in some part of the historic Land of Israel. But
whether more than a Jewish majority is needed to make this political community
properly “Jewish” is not something on which there has been agreement among
Jews and Israelis, even today.
An obvious question with which to begin thinking about secularism concerns
the degree to which the State of Israel should be governed by Jewish law. While
there may be a need for civil law in some areas, Israelis have often clashed over
whether the state should enact and enforce legislation—for example, banning pub­
lic transportation on the Sabbath, requiring the observance o f kashrut in state
enterprises, disallowing civil marriage, and so forth. Similarly, what role, if any,
should rabbinical councils and men of religious learning play in the affairs of state?
To the extent one believes that Jewish laws and religious institutions should be
given preponderant or at least very significant influence in political affairs and pub­
lic life, he or she favors a model of governance that departs from secularism and
moves in the direction of theocracy. Alternatively, one who favors secularism
believes that religion should be a personal affair and should not guide the affairs of
state in any formal or institutionalized manner.
There is a second way in which questions about secularism are relevant, which
may be less self-evident, since it focuses on ethnicity and nationalism rather than
religion. If in any political community there exists a distinction—based on a crite­
rion other than citizenship—between who can and cannot identify fully with the
state, then it would seem that there is a limit on the degree to which the state can
be considered secular. A state may serve the interests of all o f its citizens to a mean­
ingful degree. Nevertheless, secularism is absent—or at least compromised—if that
state additionally defines its identity and mission with respect to a particular subset
 194 MARK TESS LER

o f its citizens, whether that subset is defined in terms of religion, race, ethnicity,
caste, or otherwise. The situation may be further complicated if some members o f
the group with a privileged claim on the identity and resources of the state are not
citizens of that state.
There is thus a sociological as well as a religious dimension to secularism,
and both dimensions apply to Israel, although not to Israel alone.2 Non-Jewish citi­
zens of Israel have full legal rights. Moreover, to the extent that a measure of
discrimination—state-sanctioned as well as private—exists nevertheless, some is a
by-product of the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than the result of Israel's Jewish iden­
tity. Some discrimination also results from divisions within the Israeli Arab com­
munity and from political weakness associated with minority status. Nevertheless,
these considerations are not the whole story, perhaps not even the most important
part of the story Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with a priority concern for the
needs, aspirations, and welfare o f the Jewish people, wherever its members may
reside and whatever the country of which they are citizens, is reflected in state pol­
icy in numerous symbolic, legal, and institutional ways. This unavoidably gives dis­
tinct and ultimately inferior political status to the country's non-Jewish citizens. In
this way, Israel willingly and self-consciously departs, to at least some degree, from
the secular ideal that, however imperfectly realized, guides polities like the United
States and France.
None of this is unfamiliar to students of politics and society in Israel. Nor is
there likely to be disagreement about the issues that are central to an inquiry into
the prospects for secularism in a country with an official Jewish identity. There have
been many important and instructive studies of the relationship between religion
and politics in Israel, with attention given to legislative battles, judicial decisions, the
role and influence of religious parties, and public policy in areas ranging from edu­
cation to military service.3 In all of these areas, there have also been clashes among
Israelis with differing views about the desired character of their state and society.
Arab and Jewish scholars have conducted valuable studies of the political cir­
cumstances of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens.4 Among the issues examined in
these works are the allocation o f state resources and benefits, local government,
the development and influence of Arab political institutions, including the partici­
pation of Arab parties in government coalitions, education, housing and land pol­
icy, and the ties to Israel of Jews who are citizens of other countries. From the
perspective of many and probably most of Israel's Arab citizens, favoritism toward
Jews is both institutionalized and legally sanctioned in these and other areas. This
compromises Israeli democracy, in their view, and makes the equality associated
with "true secularism” their overriding political demand.
Against this background, my analysis will use public opinion data to investigate
the following questions about Israeli attitudes and orientations pertaining to these
two dimensions of secularism:

i. What is the distribution of attitudes held by Israeli Jews about issues

associated with both the religious and sociological dimensions of secularism?
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 195

2. What is the relationship between attitudes toward these two dimensions of

secularism, and are certain normative orientations based on the two
dimensions taken together particularly common?
3. What factors and experiences account for individual level variance in attitudes
toward the religious and sociological dimension of secularism, both
separately and taken together?

To what extent, if any, do relevant attitudes appear to have changed during the
last ten to fifteen years, and what hypotheses may be advanced about the causes
and consequences of any discernible aggregate change?
To put these questions into comparative perspective, I also analyze public opin­
ion data from Jordan and Egypt to assess the nature and determinants o f Arab atti­
tudes pertaining to secularism. While the situation in the Arab world is not
identical to that in Israel, the relationship between religion and politics is an impor­
tant issue in many Arab societies. Islam is the official state religion in most Arab
countries, raising questions about whether Christian citizens, who are Arabs but
not Muslims, can identify with and be served by the state to the same degree as cit­
izens who are Muslim. Even more important, there are vigorous debates, as in
Israel, about the extent to which society should be governed by Islamic law and
about whether or not men o f religious learning should play an important role in
political affairs.5
These questions play out differently in different Arab societies, and attitudes
about them vary at the individual level of analysis. Christian Arabs are full citizens
in Jordan and Egypt, where in both instances the country is officially Arab as well
as Muslim. There is no officially sanctioned discrimination against Christians or in
favor o f Muslims. But while these religious minorities certainly identify with the
mission of the country and would probably also say that Islamic civilization is their
own civilization, Muslim extremists have attacked Christians in Egypt, Jordanians
who have emigrated from their country are disproportionately likely to be
Christian, and there have been debates in both countries about whether Christians
should have the same legal rights as Muslims. As a result, issues associated with the
sociological dimension of secularism are salient concerns in Jordan and Egypt,
though perhaps less so than in Israel.
Likewise, issues associated with the religious dimension of secularism are no
less salient in Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab countries than they are in Israel. If any­
thing, the political struggles and policy debates surrounding these issues are even
more intense than they are in the Jewish state. The most important questions con­
cern the degree to which society should be governed by Islamic law, particularly
but not exclusively in areas pertaining to women and the family. Issues pertaining
to the political status and role of Islamist movements and leaders are also discussed.
Noting that these questions are addressed and debated within a democratic context
in Israel, with religious parties and leaders active and influential but nonetheless
forced to compete for support with those who reject their conception of what it
means to be a Jewish state, there have occasionally been suggestions in the Arab
 196 MARK T E S S L E R

and Muslim world that Israel might offer a model for managing disagreements
about the relationship between Islam and politics.
In light of the salient issues in Jordan, Egypt, and some other Arab and Muslim
countries, and with the possibilities for instructive comparative analysis in mind,
the following question may be added to those listed above:

4. To what extent are the nature and demographic correlates of Israeli Jewish
attitudes toward the religious and sociological dimensions of secularism
similar to or different than those in Arab countries with an official Muslim
identity, specifically in Jordan and Egypt?

Answers to these questions will shed light on what it means to be a Jewish state in
the Jewish Israeli conception, and about the degree to which these conceptions
embrace or reject secular values. My analysis will also provide evidence about the
factors shaping relevant attitudes and about whether these orientations are or are
not changing. Finally, this research will lay a foundation for informed discussion
about whether the nature, distribution, and determinants of attitudes associated
with secularism in a state with an official Jewish identity are or are not similar to the
nature, distribution, and determinants of attitudes associated with secularism in
states with an official Muslim identity.

Survey Data and Analysis

The Israeli data analyzed for this report was gathered by the Israel National
Election Study (INES), directed by Professors Asher Arian and Michal Shamir.
Arian has been conducting election surveys and publishing the results since 1969;
Shamir has been codirector of the INES since 1984. The reports o f this research are
among the most prominent and thorough analyses o f Israeli electoral behavior.6
The INES data are based on representative national samples and thus provide
a meaningful basis for drawing general conclusions about the Israeli public.
This includes Arab as well as Jewish citizens of Israel, although only the latter are
considered in this study. The data also permit a comparison of Israeli attitudes and
values at different points in time. The only limitation is that the interview schedules
in various surveys are not entirely identical, and therefore in some instances it is
necessary to compare attitudes and values that are conceptually equivalent but
measured with different indicators. The present study uses the INES surveys from
2001,1999, and 1988.

The 2001 Survey

A sample of 1,237 Israeli Jews was interviewed for the 2001 survey, and among the
questions on the interview schedule are several that pertain to the dimensions o f
secularism discussed earlier. The two items that ask most directly about the reli­
gious dimension of secularism are (1) Should public life be guided by halacha? and
(2) Do you have a stronger preference for democracy, for halacha, or an equal pref­
erence for both? These two items are strongly intercorrelated. Both are also
strongly correlated with a ten-point "hate-love" scale that asks about attitudes
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 197

Table i i .i Attitudes of Israeli Jews About Secular Issues

Arab political Important
Public life Preference parties should political decisions
should not be for democracy participate in should be made
guided by over halacha governing by bothJews
halacha (%) (%) coalitions (%) and Arabs (%)

Strongly agree 26.2 55-6 6.5 8.8

(most secular)
Agree 24.9 29.5 28.0
Maybe/both 22.7 23.0
equal
Disagree 3i -3 26.3
Strongly 26.2 21.4 32.7 36.9
disagree
(least secular)
(N = 1,237) (N = 1,237) (N = 1,237) (N = 1,237)

toward “religious people.” The two items that ask most directly about the socio­
logical dimension of secularism are (i) Should Arab political parties participate in
government coalitions? and (2) Should important political decisions be made by
both Jews and Arabs or only by Jews? Again, the two items are strongly intercorre­
lated, and both also correlate strongly with a ten-point “hate-love” scale that asks
about attitudes toward “Arabs.” Although all of the questions possess “face valid­
ity” and are unlikely to be misunderstood by respondents, these inter-item correla­
tions offer additional evidence that the data provide valid and reliable measures.
Table 11.1 presents the distribution of responses by Jewish respondents to each
of the four questions listed above. With regard to both questions about halacha, it
shows that responses are skewed in the direction of secularism, but a significant
minority gives primacy to halacha. These findings, which will not be surprising to
those familiar with Israel, show that there is substantial division among Israelis
with regard to both religious and sociological dimensions of secularism. What may
be less well known is that while a slight majority favors secularism in the religious
domain, only a minority favors secularism in the sociological domain, at least as
this pertains to political equality for Jewish and Arab citizens.
Table 11.2 compares the attitudes of different subsets of the Israeli Jewish pop
ulation. More specifically, it contrasts the attitudes pertaining to religious and soci­
ological aspects of secularism of respondents who differ on five demographic
attributes: age, educational level, sex, ethnicity, and religious orientation. For pur­
poses of parsimony, only one of the two attitudinal items associated with each
dimension of secularism is included, and responses in each case are dichotomized.
 198 MARK T ES S L E R

Table 11.2 Demographic Attributes of Secular Israeli Jews, 2001

Believe public Believe Arab political parties
life should not be should participate in governing
guided by halacha (% coalitions (%)

Age
Under 30 47.6 34-3

30-44 46.0 316

46-59 51.4 38.8

60 and over 61.5 38.6

Education
Less than high school 46.7 25.9

High school 49-5 33.8

University 52.0 38.2

Postgraduate 61.9 48.6

Sex
Female 55-0 38.4

Male 47-3 33-6

Ethnicity
Ashkenazi 61.0 38.4
Sephardi 37-2 25-4
Religious Orientation
Secular 70.0 46.2

Traditional 41.8 25-7

Orthodox 14.5 236

Ultra-orthodox (haredi) 1-9 18.5

All Respondents 5 1.1 36.0

The table thus compares across the categories of each demographic attribute the
proportion of respondents who answered either “no" or “certainly not," as
opposed to either "definitely” or "maybe," when asked whether halacha should
guide public life; and the proportion who answered either “yes” or "certainly yes,”
as opposed to either "no” or “certainly not,” when asked whether Arab political
parties should participate in government coalitions.
Table 11.2 shows that secular attitudes in the religious domain are much more
common among Ashkenazim than Sephardim, and amongjews who describe their
 What Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 199

Table 11.3 Religious and sociological attitudes among Israeli Jews, 2001
Public life should not be guided by halacha
Y es No

Arab political parties Yes 23.6% secular on both 12.5% secular only on
should participate in dimensions sociological dimension
governing coalitions No 27.5% secular only on 36.4% not secular on
religious dimension either dimension

personal religious orientation as secular as opposed to orthodox, ultra-orthodox, or

traditional. Secular attitudes are also somewhat more likely among those who are
older, better educated, and female. Except that differences associated with age are
much less pronounced, the same pattern pertains with respect to attitudes about
whether Arab political parties should participate in governing coalitions. The view
that they should participate is much more common among Ashkenazim, less reli­
gious Jews, better educated individuals, and women.
The relationship between religious and sociological dimensions of secularism
is explored in table 11.3. There is a statistically significant correlation (r = .213,
p < .001) between attitudes toward halacha and attitudes toward Arab political
involvement. Thus, to a degree, attitudes and values relating to secularism may be
considered unidimensional. Israeli Jews who embrace (or reject) secular values
relating to the religious dimension of secularism also tend to embrace (or reject)
such values with respect to the sociological dimension o f secularism.
Table 11.3 shows that a unidimensional conceptualization of secularism is only
partially justified, that a significant proportion of respondents do not have the same
orientation toward both dimensions of secularism, and that in the Israeli case this
is more likely to involve the embrace of religious secularism than sociological sec­
ularism.
Table 11.4 completes the analysis of data from the 2001 survey. It compares
respondents in each of the four attitudinal categories shown in table 11.3 with
respect to the five demographic variables employed in table 11.2, when the religious
and sociological dimensions of secularism were considered separately rather than
in combination. As expected, given the findings in table 11.2, those who express sec­
ular values on both dimensions and those who express such values on neither
dimension differ with respect to age, sex, educational level, religious orientation,
and ethnicity. Specifically, the former are the most likely of all respondents and the
latter are the least likely of all respondents to be neither orthodox, ultra-orthodox,
nor traditional in religious orientation, to identify themselves as Ashkenazi, to be
older, and to be better educated. Respondents who reject secular values in both the
religious and the sociological domain are also more likely than all other respon­
dents to be male.
The pattern is somewhat different among respondents who express secular val­
ues in one domain but not the other. Those who reject secularism in the religious
 200 MARK TESS LER

xr-WNfc M&s&iiWt-fr.+s*

Table 11.4 Religious and Sociological Attitudes Among Israeli Jews,

by Demographic, 2001
Respondents (%) who express secular views on
R e l ig io u s R e l ig io u s S o c io l o g ic a l
AND SECULAR DIMENSIONS DIMENSION NEITHER A ll
DIMENSIONS ONLY ONLY DIMENSION RESPONDENTS

Age
Under 30 18.8 23.5 28.4 22.8 22.7
30-44 25.3 26.9 25-7 34-3 29.2
46-59 30.3 25.4 29.1 26.7 27.4
60 and over 25.6 24.2 16.9 16.1 2 0 .7

1 0 0 .0

Education
Less than 7.8 16.7 14.2 15.7 14.0
high school
High school 39.4 39.8 36.5 44.7 40.8
University 35.8 31.9 38.8 31.9 33.3

Postgraduate 17.0 11.6 13.5 76 11.9

100.0
Sex
Female 53 7 55-1 54-6 43-7 50.6
Male 46.3 44.9 45.4 56.3 49.4
100.0
Ethnicity
Ashkenazi 78.6 68.7 58.6 48.3 62.3
Sephardi 21.4 31-3 41-4 51-7 37-7
100.0
Religious
Orientation
Secular 79.3 70.2 51.3 26.6 54.2
Traditional 17.2 274 25.0 36.4 27.8
Orthodox 3.5 1.8 10.5 17.7 0.0
Ultra-orthodox 0.0 .6 13.2 19.3 8.8

100.0
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 201

domain alone are more likely than those who reject secularism in the sociological
domain alone to be older, Ashkenazi, and neither orthodox nor ultra-orthodox in
religious orientation. The two groups of respondents do not differ measurably
with respect to sex, educational level, or traditional religious orientation.
The results of this analysis of survey data collected in 2001 may be summarized
as follows:

• There is substantial division among Jewish Israelis with respect to both

religious and sociological dimensions of secularism. Those with a strong
preference for secularism in the religious domain constitute a very slight
majority. Well under half, 36 percent, favor secularism in the sociological
domain.
• A more secular orientation in either the religious domain, the sociological
domain, or both domains is, with few exceptions, more common among
Israeli Jews who are Ashkenazi, less personally religious, older, better
educated, and female.
• Despite a significant correlation between attitudes and values associated with
the religious dimension of secularism and those associated with the sociological
dimension, the concept of secularism does not appear to be unidimensional.
Roughly 40 percent of Israeli Jews express secular values in only one of the two
domains. Of these, two-thirds embrace secularism in the domain of religion and
one-third embrace secularism in the domain of sociology.
• Israeli Jews who embrace secularism in the religious domain and those who
embrace secularism in the sociological domain have slightly different
demographic profiles. The former are more likely to be older, Ashkenazi, and
neither orthodox nor ultra-orthodox in religious orientation. The two groups
differ little with respect to sex and educational level.

These findings lay a foundation for informed speculation about whether sup­
port for secularism is likely to increase or decrease in the years ahead. The contrast
between the views of Sephardim and Ashkenazim and between those of religious
and nonreligious Jews suggests that support may decrease, given that in each case
the former demographic category is growing more rapidly than the latter. A
decrease in the support for secularism is also suggested by the relationship between
older age and support for secularism, especially the religious dimension of secular­
ism. This means that distribution of Israeli Jewish attitudes toward issues associ­
ated with secularism may shift as older persons retire or pass away and as younger
individuals come into the mainstream of adult life.
If these projections are correct, it is likely that the country will become more
equally divided on issues pertaining to the religious dimension of secularism and
that these issues will steadily become more salient and a source of increasing ten­
sion. These demographic trends also have the potential to diminish the proportion
o f Jewish Israelis, already a minority, who embrace secular values in the sociologi­
cal domain. Should this occur, full equality for Israel’s Arab citizens would be
increasingly unlikely, intensifying their alienation from the state.
 202 MARK T E S S L E R

Table 11.5 Attitudes of Israeli Jews About Secular Issues, 1999

Arab political Important
Public life Preference parties should political decisions
should not be for democracy participate in should be made
guided by over halacha governing by bothJews
halacha (%) (%) coalitions (%) and Arabs (%)

Strongly agree 28.5 44-4 11.0 13-7

(most secular)
Agree 38.7 21.5 38.8 35-4
Maybe/unsure 17.8 16.8
Disagree 10.2 26.7 25.9
Strongly 14.9 7-1 23.5 25.0
disagree
(least secular)
(N= 1,075) (N = 1,075) (N = 1,075) (N = 1,075)

These projections, offered to stimulate reflection about the future of secular­

ism in Israel, should be considered with caution. Countervailing trends may also be
at work. The expansion of education, especially among Sephardim, could increase
support for secularism. Given the important role of mothers in early childhood
socialization, this may also be a possible consequence of the fact that women are
more likely than men to hold secular values. Beyond this, the distribution o f Israeli
Jewish attitudes relevant to secularism will almost certainly be shaped in the years
ahead not only by demographic trends but also by changing patterns of immigra­
tion, by developments associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by other
domestic, regional, and international factors. Nevertheless, the need for caution
notwithstanding, it seems reasonable at present to hypothesize that the course of
events is likely to intensify rather than offset societal dynamics that portend dimin­
ished support for secularism in both the religious and the sociological domains.

The 1999 Survey

This examination of Jewish Israeli attitudes and values pertaining to secularism
can also be informed by an analysis o f older survey data. One data set available
for this purpose was collected just prior to the 1999 elections and is based on a
sample of 1,075 Israeli Jews. The results of an analysis of these data, comparable
to that carried out with the 2001 data and using the same questions from the inter­
view schedule, are presented in tables 11.5-11.7. Table 11.5 shows the responses of
Jewish Israelis to the four questions considered earlier. Table 11.6 shows the rela­
tionship between items measuring the two different dimensions of secularism.
Table 11.7 compares, with respect to the demographic characteristics listed earlier,
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 203

Table n .6 Religious and Sociological Attitudes Among Israeli Jews, 1999

Public life should not be guided by halacha
Y es No

Arab political parties Yes 37.3 secular on both 12.7 secular only on
should participate in dimensions sociological dimension
governing coalitions No 30.4 secular only on 19.6 not secular on
religious dimension either dimension

respondents who express secular values in both domains, in the religious domain
alone, in the sociological domain alone, and in neither domain.
There is some variation in the aggregate demographic profiles of the 1999 and
2001 samples, perhaps resulting from the vagaries of probability sampling. A com­
parison of findings from the two surveys is nonetheless instructive. Given the rela­
tive proximity of the two surveys, similar findings will increase confidence in
observed patterns and suggest that these patterns are indeed a part of the Israeli
experience at the present historical moment. Different findings, by contrast, will
suggest that recent developments may have affected attitudes and values pertaining
to secularism and strengthen the foundation for informed speculation about the
future. Given the outbreak of the al*Aqsa intifada in 2000 and the collapse of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process more generally, a comparison of patterns observed
in 1999 and 2001 will shed light on whether, and if so how, the evolution of the con­
flict influences the views related to secularism held by Jewish Israelis.
Four conclusions are suggested by a comparison o f the 1999 and 2001 surveys.
First, table 11.5 shows that on all four items selected for analysis, support for secu­
larism declined significantly between 1999 and 2001. These findings are consistent
with projections about the direction of attitudinal change offered on the basis of
the 2001 data. They also suggest that deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations
tends to diminish support for secularism.
There are both similarities and differences in the demographic attributes that
correlate with attitudes toward secularism in 1999 and 2001. In both years, not sur­
prisingly, a more secular perspective in both the religious and sociological domains
is disproportionately likely among Ashkenazim and those whose religious orienta­
tion is neither orthodox, ultra-orthodox, nor traditional. What can be added is that
attitudinal differences associated with ethnicity and religious orientation are not
quite as strong in 1999, suggesting among Sephardim and more religious Jews sup­
port for secularism declined the most between 1999 and 2001. Attitudinal differences
associated with age, education, and sex, by contrast, were much less important in
1999 than they were in 2001. This suggests that the patterns observed in 2001 are not
necessarily enduring and, also, although some of the differences are not large, that a
secular perspective on political and social issues declined to the greatest degree
among younger individuals, less well-educated individuals, and men.
 204 MARK T E S S L E R

Table 11.7 R eligiou s and S o cio lo g ical A ttitud es A m o n g Israeli Je w s,

b y D em o grap h ic, 1999

Respondents (%) who express secular views on

R e l ig io u s R e l ig io u s S o c io l o g ic a l
AND SECULAR DIMENSION d im e n s io n s N e it h e r A ll
DIMENSION ONLY ONLY DIMENSION RESPONDENTS

Age

U nder 30 36.0 40.9 44.4 36.I 38.2

30-44 20.3 24.6 17.8 28.8 22.8
46-59 21.1 17.6 14.5 22.0 19.9
60 and over 22.6 16.9 23 4 131 191
1 0 0 .0

Education

Less than 12.0 13.0 9.8 7.8 II.2

high school

High school 50.5 63.2 69.I 69.3 59.8

University 29.0 19.8 17.8 19.8 23.5
Postgraduate 8.5 4.0 33 31 55
100.0
Sex

Fem ale 52.4 49.2 52.8 47.7 50.8

M ale 47.6 50.8 47-2 52.4 49-2
100.0
Ethnicity

Ashkenazi 63.5 47.7 45-5 37-7 50.8

Sephardi 36.5 52.3 54-5 62.3 49.2
100.0
Religious
Orientation

Secular 81.1 61.5 44-8 23.3 59.4

Traditional 17.6 35.1 44-0 37.3 29.9
O rthodox .8 3.0 9.6 32.2 8.8
Ultra-orthodox .5 .3 1.6 6.2 1.9
100.0
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 205

Table n .6 shows that the relationship between attitudes pertaining to the two
dimensions of secularism was no stronger in 1999 than it was in 2001. The propor­
tion of respondents who either embrace or reject both is roughly the same in both
years. All that has changed, as suggested by the preceding discussion, is that many
fewer respondents embrace secularism in both domains and many more reject it in
both domains. In addition, the ratio of those who embrace secularism only in the
religious domain to those who embrace it only in the sociological domain is also
about the same in 1999 and 2001.
The similarity of the distributions shown in table 11.7 to those shown in
table 11.3 thus provides additional support for the assessment offered earlier
about the dimensionality of the concept of secularism. The concept is at best only
somewhat unidimensional at the individual level of analysis and, accordingly, a
proper understanding requires attention to the sociological as well as the religious
dimension.
As seen in table 11.7, the demographic profiles of Israeli Jews who embrace sec­
ularism only on the religious dimension and those who embrace secularism only
on the sociological dimension are not very different. The former are more likely
than the latter to be secular in their personal religious orientation, which is not sur­
prising. Otherwise, the profiles of respondents in the two categories differ only in
minor respects. This departs somewhat from the pattern observed in 2001, as
shown in table 11.4, in that in 2001 those embracing secularism only on the religious
dimension were more likely than those embracing secularism only on the socio­
logical dimension to be Ashkenazi and older, as well as less personally religious.

The 1988 Survey

It is interesting to compare this picture of Jewish Israeli attitudes around the turn
of the present century to those of Israeli Jews a decade earlier, which can be
evaluated with data from the 1NES election survey of 1988. The survey is based on
a sample that contained 873 Jews. It would also have been instructive to examine
data from the 1984 election survey, which preceded the first Palestinian intifada;
however this survey did not ask the necessary questions. Indeed, although the 1988
survey asked questions pertaining to both the religious and sociological dimensions
of secularism, questions pertaining to the latter dimension were not the same as
those asked in later surveys. Caution must thus be exercised when comparing
aggregate distributions at different points in time.
Although it does specifically ask about halacha, the 1988 survey asks respon­
dents whether or not they agree that public life should be "run according to Jewish
tradition." The distribution of responses is shown in table 11.8. With respect to the
sociological dimension of secularism, there are many questions that ask about the
rights and status of Israel’s Arab citizens but none that is fully comparable to those
asked in 2001 and 1999. The most relevant questions from the 1988 survey ask
respondents whether or not they would “object to an Arab prime minister of
Israel," whether or not they think “Arabs should be allowed to hold political
demonstrations," and whether or not they agree that “Jews who hurt Arabs should
 206 MARK T E S S L E R

Table n .8 A ttitudes o f Israeli Jew s A bout Secular Issues, 1988

Public life Would not Arabs should Jews who hurt

should not be object to an be allowed to Arabs should not
run according Arab prime hold political receive lesser
toJewish minister of demonstrations punishments
tradition (%) Israel (%) (%) (%)

Strongly agree 26.9 3.2 9.6 12.7

(most secular)
Agree 29.3 6.9 34-0 28.0
Maybe/unsure 8.3 22.6 22.8
Disagree 24.6 27.6 21.9 23-4
Strongly 19.1 55.0 11.9 132
disagree
(least secular)
00
II

Z
(N = 873) 00

0R0
Z

II

II
â

receive lesser punishments.” Table 11.8 also presents the distribution of Jewish
Israeli responses to each of these questions.
This table shows that about 56 percent o f the Israeli Jews surveyed in 1988 agree
or agree strongly that public life should not be run according to Jewish tradition.
This is less than in 1999 but more than in 2001. The proportion that agrees strongly
and thus rejects secular principles is about the same as in 2001. Taken as a whole,
this pattern suggest much more continuity than change and indicates—recent
developments and projections about the future notwithstanding—that a division of
opinion on the religious dimension o f secularism has been fairly constant over the
last decade or so. This will be no surprise to those familiar with Israel.
Attitudes pertaining to the sociological dimension are more difficult to sum­
marize. Although the three items included in table 11.8 are highly intercorrelated,
they differ in terms of the kind of policy favoring Jews or disadvantaging Arabs
about which they ask, and they thus have different response distributions. A rea­
sonable assessment is that the level of support for Jewish-Arab equality in 1988 was
roughly similar to that observed in 2001, perhaps marginally higher. If this assess­
ment is correct, the data suggest that a solid majority of Jewish Israelis has histori­
cally been opposed to secularism in the sociological domain, that this opposition
lessened somewhat in the 1990s, presumably as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process, and that it has returned to its traditional and for the most part low
level following the collapse of the peace process.
Table 11.9, like tables 11.2 and 11.4, compares different subsets of the Israeli
Jewish population with respect to attitudes pertaining to secularism. Respondents
classified as having secular attitudes in the religious domain are, again, those who
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 207

Table 11.9 Israeli Jew s w ith Secular Values, by D em o grap h ic, 1988

Public life should not Jews who hurt Arabs

be run according to should not receive lesser
Jewish tradition (%) punishments (%)

Age
Under 30 52.8 36.5
30-44 56.3 45-8

46-59 58.5 36.8

60 and over 653 47-0

Education
Less than high school 54-8 33-6

High school 56.6 39-4

University 55-6 48.6
Postgraduate 63-3 56.0
Sex
Female 52.0 35 I
Male 59.8 45-7
Ethnicity1
Ashkenazi 65.6 56.3
Sephardi 49-9 31-7
Religious observance1
Not at all 82.4 53-2
A little 62.5 40.1
To a great extent 32.8 33-0

Fully 15.2 26.6

All respondents 56.2 40.7

1 Twenty-four percent responded “both" or “none" to the question about ethnicity and are
excluded from the calculations in the table.
1 The categories o f secular, traditional, orthodox, and ultra-orthodox were not used in the
1988 survey.

either agree or agree strongly that public life should not be run according to Jewish
tradition. Respondents classified as having secular attitudes in the sociological
domain are those who either disagree or disagree strongly that Jews who hurt
Arabs should receive lesser punishment.7 The table shows that secular attitudes in
Table i i .io Religious and Sociological Attitudes Among Israeli Jews, 1988
Public life should not be run according toJewish tradition
Yes No

Jews who hurt Arabs Yes 27.4% secular on both 13.3% secular only on
should not receive dimensions sociological dimension
lesser punishments No 28.6% secular only on 30.7% not secular on
religious dimension either dimension

the religious domain are more likely among respondents who are older, highly edu­
cated, male, Ashkenazi, and less personally religious. This is consistent with the
patterns observed in 2001 and 1999, indicating continuity with respect to the demo­
graphic correlates of secular attitudes. The only notable difference concerns sex.
Secular attitudes were more common among men in 1988, there was no difference
between men and women in 1999, and secular attitudes were more common
among women in 2001. The pattern is very similar with respect to secular attitudes
in the sociological domain, the only differences being that the correlation with edu­
cation is noticeably stronger and the correlation with age is somewhat weaker.
Table 11.10 shows that the relationship between attitudes pertaining to the two
dimensions is very similar to that observed in later years. As in 1999 and 2001,
approximately 60 percent of the respondents either embrace or reject secular val­
ues in both domains and about 40 percent embrace such attitudes in one domain
but not the other. The distribution across the four categories shown in table 11.10 is
different in one respect and similar in another respect to the patterns observed in
1999 and 2001. On the one hand, those who embrace secularism on both dimen­
sions are less numerous than in 1999 but more numerous than in 2001, and those
who reject secularism on both dimensions are more numerous than in 1999 but less
numerous than in 2001. This is consistent with the pattern noted above, when the
dimensions of secularism were considered separately. Support for secular norms
increased in the 1990s and then subsequently declined to a level lower than in the
past, due in part, perhaps, to the rise and fall of the peace process. On the other
hand, the 2:1 ratio of respondents who express secular attitudes only in the reli­
gious domain to those who express secular attitudes only in the sociological
domain is almost identical to the ratio in both 1999 and 2001. Accordingly, this
appears to be an enduring pattern.
In table 11.11 we compare respondents with respect to age, education, sex, eth­
nicity, and degree of religious orientation. Ethnicity excludes the 24 percent who
answered “both" or “none” and only compares respondents who identified them­
selves as either Ashkenazi or Sephardi. With respect to religious orientation, the
1988 survey did not use the categories of secular, traditional, orthodox, and ultra-
orthodox but instead asked about degree of religious observance. Consistent with
the findings shown in table 11.9, and as expected since the demographic correlates
 What Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 209

Table i i .ii Religious and Sociological Attitudes Among Israeli Jews,

by Demographic, 1988
Respondents (%) who express secular views on
R e l ig io u s R e l i g io u s S o c io l o g ic a l
AND SECULAR DIMENSION DIMENSION N e it h e r A ll
DIMENSIONS ONLY ONLY DIMENSION r e sp o n d e

Age
Under 30 33-3 42.4 42.3 44-1 40.4
30-44 35 5 30.5 40.5 30.3 33.2
46-59 15.4 15-9 9.0 15-7 14.6
60 and over 156 11.9 8.1 9.8 11.8
Education
Less than 24.0 32.6 23-9 32.5 29.0
high school
High school 35 I 42.2 39.4 37-8 38.5
University 31.6 20.9 31.2 24.9 26.5
Postgraduate 9-3 4.3 5-5 4.9 6.0
Sex
Female 37.0 51.1 49-5 53 i 47-7
Male 63.0 49-9 50.5 46.9 52.3
Ethnicity1
Ashkenazi 61.6 32.3 38.3 28.5 40.3
Sephardi 38.4 67.7 61.7 71.5 59-7
Religious
observance2
Not at all 40.1 29.0 12.0 8.7 23.6
A little 49-8 51-3 35-2 41.1 45-6

To a great extent 7-9 16.8 38.0 30.8 21.4

Fully 2.2 2.9 14.8 19.4 9-9

1 Twenty-four percent responded "both" or "none" to the question about ethnicity and are
excluded from the calculations in the table.
2 The categories o f secular, traditional, orthodox, and ultra-orthodox were not used in the
1988 survey.
 210 MARK T E S S L E R

of attitudes in the religious domain and the sociological domain were almost iden­
tical, Israeli Jews who embrace secularism in both domains are disproportionately
likely to be older, highly educated, male, Ashkenazi, and less personally religious,
and those who embrace secularism in neither domain are disproportionately likely
to be younger, less well-educated, female, Sephardi, and more personally religious.
So far as respondents who express support for secular principles on only one
dimension are concerned, those with secular attitudes in the religious domain are
more likely than those with secular attitudes in the sociological domain to be
younger than forty-five, less well-educated, and not religiously observant. Perhaps
the most interesting of these latter findings is that respondents who reject secular­
ism in the sociological domain but embrace it in the religious domain are dispro­
portionately unlikely to be either very poorly educated or to report that they are
not at all or only a little religiously observant.

Survey Data from Jiordan and Egypt

Although parallels between Israel and Arab countries should not be overstated,
almost all of the latter officially proclaim Islam to be the religion of state and have
institutions that give Islamic leaders a role in governance not found in more secular
polities. As one author has stated, “Islam plays a pivotal role in all aspects of
Muslim societies. . . . Even during periods of quietism, Islam has played a deter­
mining role in Arab politics.”8 Perhaps this puts the matter too strongly. At the very
least, however, Islam is an inevitable point of departure and ideological referent for
most Muslim Arabs when thinking about issues of governance and political iden­
tity. To this extent, at minimum, Arab countries, like Israel, are not secular political
communities.
Further, and also like Israel, the issues raised by a strong connection between
religion and politics are ones about which Muslims in the Arab world and else­
where often disagree, sometimes very strongly. The tension between “profane and
sacred politics" is described by a prominent scholar of Islam, who has written, “on
the one hand, most Muslim politicians are only politicians; on the other, Islam has
become almost an obsession in political debate for the past two decades."9 In this
connection, there are intense debates not only about the extent to which Islamic
law should be the law of the land, but also about how Muslim legal codes should be
interpreted and applied in a wide range of areas. Among these are the role and
authority of national assemblies, the political status of non-Muslim citizens, bank­
ing practices and regulations, criminal law and court proceedings, and matters of
personal status ranging from marriage and divorce to inheritance. In these and
other areas, there are questions about whether a more strict and narrow or a more
liberal and contextualized interpretation o f Islam should prevail.
All of this gives Islam not only an accepted and legitimate but indeed a neces­
sary and unavoidably central role in political life and the construction of political
identity, and this in turn makes it entirely relevant to ask what kind of “Islamic”
state is desired by the Muslim citizens of Arab countries. The parallels with Israel
need not be overstated. But those familiar with issues of religion and politics in the
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 2 11

Jewish state will probably recognize, notwithstanding differences on many

specifics, that Israeli Jews and Muslim Arabs are both addressing the same funda­
mental questions: to what extent, if at all, and in what way, should the political
character and identity of their countries be shaped by the religion of the majority
rather than by a political formula inspired by secularism?
Data for addressing questions about secularism are available from two Arab
countries, Jordan and Egypt. The Jordanian data are based on a representative
national sample of 1,000 adult citizens, 96.4 percent of whom are Muslim, carried
out in 2001 by scholars at the University of Jordan in Amman. The Egyptian data
are based on a representative national sample of 3,000 adult citizens, 94.3 percent of
whom are Muslim, carried out in 2000 as part of the University o f Michigan-based
World Values Survey. Both surveys ask about the role of Islam and Islamic leaders
in political affairs. The Jordanian survey also asks about the political rights of
Jordanian citizens who are Christian rather than Muslim. Only the responses of
Muslim respondents are examined in the present analysis.
The Jordanian survey contains a series of highly intercorrelated items that ask
about issues pertaining to the religious dimension of secularism. Two of these are
considered in the present analysis: “Should religious leaders be involved in political
decision-making or restrict themselves to providing religious guidance?" and
“Should political leaders be selected solely by Islamic clerics or elected solely by the
people?” The Jordanian survey also asks respondents whether or not they agree
that “Non-Muslims should have the same legal rights as Muslims in our country”
and that “Non-Muslims should be allowed to hold high government positions."
The Egyptian survey contains one question that pertains to the religious dimension
of secularism: “Should religious leaders exercise influence in political affairs?"
Table 11.12 presents the responses of Jordanian and Egyptian Muslims to the
five questions listed above. It shows there is considerable support for secularist prin­
ciples in both countries. In the case of Jordan, three-quarters of the Muslim respon­
dents express the view that political leaders should not be selected solely by Islamic
clerics, 30 percent believe Islamic leaders should not be involved in politics at all,
and a majority favors political equality for the country’s non-Muslim citizens. In
Egypt, a majority also states that religious leaders should not exercise political
influence. Since substantial numbers of respondents take the opposite position on
each of these issues, however, it may be concluded that, as in Israel, questions
about the relationship between religion and politics are contested in the Arab
world and divide citizens with different views about the kind of state in which they
want to live.
Comparisons with Israel must be advanced with caution since identical ques­
tions were not asked in the different surveys and, more generally, there are impor­
tant differences in political context. For example, views about the rights of Israel’s
non-Jewish citizens are shaped at least in part by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
something that is not the case with respect to non-Muslim citizens of Jordan and
Egypt. Nonetheless, with due caution, some observations based on a comparison
of the Israeli and Arab cases may be instructive. Moreover, differences among the
 212 MARK T E S S L E R

w * ” t « -y **4-iv»<ns~‘f tv..!**. . . w .***.-.«> v..... ............................

Table 11.12 Attitudes of Jordanian and Egyptian Muslims About Secular Issues
Jordan Egypt

R e l ig io u s P o l it ic a l
lead ers leaders N on- N on- R e l ig io u s
sh o u ld SHOULD M u s l im s M u sl im s LEADERS
NOT BE NOT BE sh o u ld SHOULD BE SHOULD
INVOLVED SBLBCTED HAVE THE ALLOWED TO NOT EXERCISE
IN POLITICAL SOLELY BY SAME LEGAL HOLD HIGH INFLUENCE IN
DECISION­ I s l a m ic RIGHTS AS GOVERNMENT POLITICAL
MAKING (% ) c l e r ic s (% ) M u s l im s (% ) OFFICE (% ) AFFAIRS (% )

Strongly agree 46.3 23.I 31-5

(most secular)
Agree 30.0 74-1 34-3 24.6 24.8

Maybe/unsure II.6 10.8 I I .9

Disagree 58.4 15.1 14.1 35-5 22.0

Strongly 4-3 16.8 9-7

disagree
(least secular)
( N = 964) ( N = 964) (N = 964) ( N = 964) (N = 2,830)
., ---------- ♦ V. -V

cases give this comparison the advantages of a "most different systems” research
design. Similarities will shed light on patterns and relationships that are not
country-specific and may thus apply to other countries with an official and institu­
tionalized connection between religion and politics. Differences will help to iden­
tify conditionalities, suggesting hypotheses about country-level attributes and
experiences that define the locus o f applicability of particular patterns and rela­
tionships.
There is considerable division o f opinion among ordinary citizens in all three
countries considered in the present study, meaning that the political and conceptual
divide flowing from Israel's identity as a Jewish state finds a counterpart in Arab
countries where Islam is tied to the state’s identity. Further, the proportions on
each side of the conceptual divide are fairly similar in Israel and the two Arab
countries. Findings pertaining to the religious dimension of secularism are in the
same general range, although support for secularist principles in this domain
appears to be somewhat higher in Israel. On the other hand, there appears to be a
higher level of support for the equality of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens in
Jordan than for the equality of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in Israel, although at
least some o f this difference, as noted, results from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
rather than Israel's Jewish character. Overall, differences and cautions notwith­
standing, the Israeli and Arab cases are more similar than might have been
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 213

Table 11.13 Demographic Attributes of Secular Jordanian and Egyptian Muslims,

2000

Jordan Egypt
BEUEVE RELIGIOUS BELIEVE NON- B e l i e v e r e l ig io u s
LEADERS SHOULD MUSLIMS SHOULD LEADERS SHOULD
NOT BE INVOLVED BE ALLOWED TO NOT EXERCISE
IN POLITICAL HOLD HIGH INFLUENCE IN
DECISION-MAKING GOVERNMENT POLITICAL AFFAIRS
(% ) OFFICE (% ) (%)

Age
Under 30 29.9 43-4 52.2

30-44 26.7 45.2 590

46-59 38.7 58.8 593

60 and over 28.4 56.9 55-4
Education
Less than high school 32.9 47-2 55-5
High school 28.2 47-4 57-1
University 26.2 47-2 54-7
Postgraduate 41.8 63.2 597
Sex
Female 35.0 54-3 593
Male 25.0 4 1.6 53-1
Religious observance
Not at all 33-9 52.4 58.3

A little 27.7 45-7 542

Some 55-9
Considerable 33-3 43-2 60.6

Fully 22.7 43-6 55.8

All respondents 30.0 47-7 56.3

expected, which suggests that there may be some common themes and attitudinal
patterns in countries where the religion of the majority is also the religion of state.
This last table compares attitudes pertaining to the religious and sociological
aspects o f secularism of Arab respondents who differ with respect to age, educa­
tional level, sex, and religious observance. It shows that in almost all cases, attitudes
consistent with secular principles are held most frequently by individuals who are
Table 11.14 Religious and Sociological Attitudes Among Jordanians, 2001
Religious leaders should not be involved in
political decision making
Yes No

Non-Muslims Yes 17.2% secular on both 30.4% secular only on

should be allowed to dimensions sociological dimension
hold high government No 13.4% secular only on 39.0% not secular on
office religious dimension either dimension

better educated, male, and not religiously observant. They are also held most fre­
quently by older individuals in the case of Jordanian attitudes toward the sociolog­
ical dimension of secularism. With the exception o f findings pertaining to sex, this
pattern is similar to that observed in Israel in 2001, which in turn suggests that find­
ings about the demographic correlates of secular attitudes in nonsecular societies
can be somewhat generalized. On the other hand, differences between the Arab
and Israeli cases are also significant. It is men in the former and women in the lat­
ter who were disproportionately likely to hold secular values in 2001. Further, the
relationships involving age and education are neither as strong nor as consistent as
in the Israeli case, although in that case, too, these relationships are not extremely
strong.
Most important, perhaps, the correlation with personal religiosity is much
weaker than in the Israeli case. This suggests that in the Arab world, or at least in
Jordan and Egypt, judgments pertaining to the relationship between religion and
politics are influenced by temporal considerations almost as often as by religious
conviction, something that appears to be much less true in Israel. This is consistent
with findings from other studies based on survey research in the Arab world. These
studies show that support for Islamic leaders and movements does not necessarily
indicate a rejection of secular values and a corresponding desire for an Islamic
state, but rather is frequently a statement of protest against governments judged to
be authoritarian, corrupt, and uninterested in the welfare of ordinary citizens.10
The comparison of Israel and the two Arab cases thus suggests the following
hypothesis: in states with an official connection between religion and politics, atti­
tudes toward secularism are shaped by religiosity to a much greater degree in
democratic and developed countries than in those that are less democratic and less
developed.
Table 11.14 examines the relationship between the religious and sociological
dimensions of secularism with data from the Jordanian survey. Questions pertain­
ing to the sociological dimension of secularism were not included in the Egyptian
survey. As in the Israeli case, the proportion of Jordanian respondents in each cell
of this table is affected by the choice of items and cutting points. The distribution
of percentages across the cells shows a pattern that is unlike that observed in Israel
 What Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 215

in any of the three years examined. It is probably unwise to compare the propor­
tion of respondents who either embrace or reject secularism in both the religious
and sociological domains. These percentages are affected directly by the items
selected for analysis. Also, they were not the same in Israel in the different years
examined, which suggests that combinations of attitudes, like individual attitudes,
vary considerably in response to circumstance and context. But the ratio of those
who embrace secularism in the religious domain alone to those who embrace sec­
ularism in the sociological domain alone may offer a more instructive comparison.
A 2:1 ratio, or slightly higher, was observed in Israel in all three years, and the ratio
was about the same in Jordan in 2001. The difference, however, is that support for
secularism in the religious domain alone is greater in the Israeli case, and support
for secularism in the sociological domain is greater in the Jordanian case. Is this a
pattern that holds true more generally, and if so, does it perhaps reflect the influ­
ence of the Arab-Israeli conflict? Or rather is it due to different understandings of
what it means to be a Jewish state and what it means to be an Islamic state? These
are questions for future research.
Table 11.15 examines the demographic correlates of attitudes toward the two
dimensions of secularism considered in combination. Jordanian Muslims who hold
attitudes consistent with secularism in both domains are disproportionately likely
to be older and male but differ little from other respondents with respect to educa­
tion and religious observance. Those who hold attitudes consistent with secularism
in the religious domain alone are disproportionately likely to be poorly educated
but otherwise have a demographic profile similar to that of other respondents.
Those who hold attitudes consistent with secularism in the sociological domain
alone do not differ noticeably from other respondents on any of the attributes
examined. Finally, respondents whose attitudes are not consistent with secularism
in either domain are slightly more likely to be younger, to be women, and to be
more religious. This differs from patterns observed in Israel in several respects, the
most important being the limited explanatory power of personal religiosity. As
noted earlier, this suggests that in states with an official connection between reli­
gion and politics, the degree to which personal religiosity accounts for variance in
attitudes toward secularism may depend on the country's level of democracy and
development. The most notable similarity between the Arab countries and Israel is
that support for secularism, in both the religious and the sociological domains, is
disproportionately high among older individuals. This suggests a pattern that may
be generalized to other nonsecular states. It also suggests, other things being equal,
that generational change may reduce support for secular values both in Israel and
in the Arab world, perhaps with implications for Arab-Israeli relations.

The Nature o f the Jew ish State

Most Jews in Israel, like most Jews elsewhere, want Israel to be a Jewish state. But
there is much less agreement about what this means. Can and should the state be
secular as well as Jewish? Can the country maintain a Jewish identity and mission
 216 MARK T E S S L E R

Table 11.15 Religious and Sociological Attitudes Amongjordanian Muslims,

by Demographic, 2001
Respondents (%) who express secular views on
R e l i g io u s R e l i g io u s S o c io l o g ic a l
AND SECULAR d im e n s io n d im e n s io n N e it h e r A ll
DIMENSIONS ONLY ONLY d im e n s io n RESPONDI

Age

Under 30 33-1 40.5 33-2 39-3 36.5

30-44 3 1 -3 34.8 40.0 42.8 38.9

46-59 24.7 17.2 I6.9 10.9 15.9

60 and over 11.0 7.5 10.0 7.0 8.6

Education

Less than 41.8 47-2 37.0 37.1 39-2

high school

High school 29.5 30.8 33-4 33.0 32.2

University 23.2 22.0 28.3 27.9 26.4

Postgraduate 5-5 1.3 2.0 2.1

Sex

Female 36.0 53-6 50.7 595 52.0

Male 64.0 46.4 49-3 40.5 48.0

Religious
observance

Not at all 23.8 23.3 21.7 14.9 19-5

A little 11.2 IO.4 12.0 11.9 I I .6

To a great 36.1 45-2 32.8 34-4 35-7

extent

Fully 29.0 21.1 335 38.8 33-2

without privileging Jewish citizens, Jewish institutions, and Jewish law? If not, must
it of necessity deviate from the principles of secularism to remain faithful to the
Zionist vocation? The debates to which this situation gives rise have been promi­
nent features of Israeli politics and society since the country became independent
in 1948. Particularly central have been questions about the place of Jewish law and
religious institutions in government and public life and about the rights to be
accorded to non-Jewish citizens.
As the data presented in this analysis demonstrate, these are questions about
which Israeli Jews are deeply divided. A majority supports secular principles in
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want r* 217

what has been termed the religious domain, in matters pertaining to the enactment
of legislation based on Jewish law and giving religious leaders and institutions a for­
mal and significant role in political affairs. But Israeli Jews who hold secular atti­
tudes in this domain may not be in the majority much longer. Support for the
positions they espouse has declined in recent years and is diminished by regional
developments and demographic trends that portend a further decline in the future.
In 200i, only 51 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that public life should not be guided
by halacha.
In matters involving the status and rights of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, almost
all of whom are Palestinian Arabs, support for secularism is even lower in what has
been termed the "sociological domain.” Survey data suggest that true and com­
plete equality for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens may never have been advocated by
more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, and the proportion that supports this
degree of equality has also declined in recent years and appears likely to decline
even further in the years ahead. Thus, if secularism means that the state represents
and serves all of its citizens in equal measure, with no group able to identify with
the mission of the state more than any other, then only about one-third of Israeli
Jews can be said to have a favorable attitude toward secularism.
Attitudes pertaining to the religious dimension of secularism and those
pertaining to the sociological dimension of secularism are not independent of
one another. In about 60 percent of the cases, respondents either embrace
secular principles in both domains or reject these principles in both domains. This
is the case in Israel for all three of the years examined, which is itself surprising
given time-related differences in other attitudinal distributions. Nevertheless, the
correlation between attitudes in the religious and sociological domains is not so
strong that the notion of secularism lends itself to a unidimensional conceptualiza­
tion in the Israeli case, and data from Jordan suggests that this may not be unique
to Israel.
It turns out to be important to consider the dimensions of secularism in com­
bination as well as separately. Support for secularism is at best incomplete if citi­
zens embrace it in one domain but not the other, and so "true” secularists are those
who express secular attitudes in both the religious and the sociological domain.
Many express such attitudes pertaining to only one dimension, however, and these
individuals might be described as partial, or perhaps "compromised” or "incom­
plete,” secularists. As noted, such individuals have been and remain about 40 per­
cent of Israel’s Jewish population. It is thus significant that the trends and
projections noted above apply when attitudes are considered in combinations as
well as separately. The proportion of Israeli Jews supporting secularism on both
dimensions, those who are “true” secularists, rose between 1988 and 1999 and
thereafter declined, just as the proportion opposing secularism on both dimensions
fell and then rose over the same period, apparently influenced by the political and
demographic factors noted earlier. This is important because it means that a
change in support for secularism in one domain is not balanced by continuity in the
other domain, making the impact of previously noted trends that much greater.
 218 MARK T E S S L E R

Whether one hopes that Israel's future will be guided by secular principles or
believes that secularism is not the right model for the Jewish state, certainly issues
and concerns raised by the question o f secularism will remain central and passion­
ately debated aspects of Israeli political life. The present study seeks to shed light
on the way that ordinary men and women in Israel think about these issues and
concerns. It presents and analyzes attitudinal data in an effort to respond to the
question, "What kind of Jewish state do Israelis want?" Additional research is
needed, of course, to determine whether current trends persist and whether pro­
jections about the influence of regional and demographic factors are correct.
Survey research is well developed in Israel, and future election and other surveys
will certainly provide the data needed for such investigations.
A final line of inquiry concerns the uniqueness of Israel with respect to issues
of secularism. Israel is not the only country with an official connection between
religion and politics. The Arab and Islamic world is full o f countries that proclaim
Islam to be the state religion. Many also have legal systems based at least partly on
Islamic law and political systems that give religious leaders and institutions an
influential role in political life. While these countries obviously differ from Israel
in important respects, they share with the Jewish state a rejection of Western-style
secularism. Moreover, data from Jordan, and to some extent Egypt, suggest that
there may be interesting similarities between the nature and distribution of atti­
tudes pertaining to secularism held by Muslim Arabs and Israeli Jews. More
research is needed to provide a fuller account of these similarities and differences.
Likewise, research that examines the attitudes of Christians in Arab countries and
o f Muslims and Christians in Israel would be instructive. Based on the Jordanian
and Egyptian data considered in this study, one can conclude that similarities in the
attitudes held by ordinary citizens in Israel and the Arab world may be greater than
might have been expected. Or, more generally, the weight of available evidence
shows that the Israeli situation is not unique in so far as the views of ordinary citi­
zens are concerned.
A related point, offered in conclusion, is that the way Israeli society evolves
with respect to the question of secularism may hold lessons for Muslim Arab soci­
eties, and developments in the latter may in some instances be instructive for Israel
as well. As noted, Israeli Jews and Muslim Arabs are asking and struggling to
answer the same basic question: to what extent should the political character and
identity of their countries be shaped by the religion of the majority rather than by
a political formula inspired by secularism? Israeli Jews are asking what kind of
Jewish state they want and what it means to be a Jewish state at the present histor­
ical moment. Muslim Arabs are similarly asking what it means to be a Muslim
state, and which among the various and competing answers to this question that
are regularly advanced is most appropriate. In neither the Israeli nor the Arab case
are these issues likely to become less salient in the years ahead. Accordingly, given
that each is dealing with the same underlying concerns, information about the
experiences of one may offer the other insights possessing explanatory power as
well as guides and cautions relating to public policy.
 W hat Kind o f Jew ish State Do Israelis Want? 219

NOTES
1. Tom Segev, "Who Is a Secularist?" Haaretz, September 25, 1996, quoted in Charles
Liebman and Bernard Susser, "Judaism and Jewishness in the Jewish State,” Annals 555 (January
1998): 20. The Summer 2003 issue o f Daedalus is devoted to the theme “ Religion Still Matters"
and contains many useful articles pertaining to secularism. See in particular Nikki Keddie,
"Secularism and Its Discontents.” Keddie, a Middle East specialist, has written that, “The
Western path to secularism, and indeed the Western definition o f secularism, may not be fully
applicable in all parts o f the world, because o f religious differences" (30). For a useful cross­
national overview of consensus and controversies regarding the place o f religion in political
and public affairs, with chapters on Israeli, Muslim, and many other societies, see Ted Jelen and
Clyde Wilcox, eds., Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
2. I have explored this issue from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective in several
earlier studies. See, for example, Mark Tessler, "Secularism in Israel: Religious and Sociological
Dimensions," Discourse 19 (Fall 1996): 160-178; Mark Tessler, “The Identity o f Religious
Minorities in Non-secular States: Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel," Comparative
Studies in Society and History 20 (July 1978): 359-373; Mark Tessler, “ Secularism in the Middle
East: Reflections on Recent Palestinian Proposals,” Ethnicity (July 1975): 178-203.
3. The following works provide a useful overview o f these issues: Naftali Rothenberg and
Eliezer Schweid, eds., Jewish Identity in Modem Israel: Proceedings on Secular Judaism and
Democracy (New York: Urim, 2002); Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1998), esp. chap. 8, "Religion and Politics"; Charles Liebman and
Bernard Susser, "Judaism and Jewishness in the Jewish State,” Annals 555 (January 1998): 15-25;
Charles Liebman, Religion, Democracy and Israeli Society (London: Routledge, 1997); Zvi Sobel
and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, eds., Tradition, Innovation, Conflict: Jewishness and Judaism in
Contemporary Israel (Albany: State University o f New York Press, 1991).
4. The following works provide a useful overview o f these issues: As'ad Ghanem, The
Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000: A Political Study (Albany: State University o f New
York Press, 2001); Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley: University o f
California Press, 1998), esp. chap. 9, "Arabs in Israel"; Mark Tessler and Audra Grant, "Israel's
Arab Citizens: The Continuing Struggle," Annab 555 (January 1998): 97-113; Nadim Rouhana,
Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven: Yale, 1997); Majid
A 1 Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case o f the Arabs in Israel (Albany: SUNY Press,
1995); Elie Rekhess, Binyamin Neuberger, and Boaz Shapira, eds., Arab Politics in Israel at a
Crossroads (Tel Aviv: Proceedings o f a Conference Held at Tel Aviv University, October 1994);
Jacob Landau, Arabs in Israel: A Political Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. For a useful discussion o f similarities between Judaism and Islam with respect to issues
o f secularism, see William Galston, "Jews, Muslims, and the Prospects for Pluralism," Daedalus
132 (Summer 2003): 73-77. Galston has noted, "Acceptance o f pluralism comes more easily to
religions that emphasize inner conviction. . . . By contrast, religions that take the form o f law,
as do traditional forms [and interpretations] o f Judaism and Islam, are forced to take seriously
the content o f public law" (73-74).
6. See, for example, Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, eds., The Elections in Israel: 1999
(Albany: State University o f New York Press, 2002); Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, eds., The
Elections in Israel 1996 (Albany: State University o f New York Press, 1999). See also Asher Arian
and Michal Shamir, eds., The Elections in Israel: 2003 (New Brunswick and Jerusalem:
Transaction Books and Israel Democracy Institute, 2004).
7. Had the item asking about Arab political demonstrations been used instead, the demo­
graphic profile o f those who express secular values would have been almost identical.
8. Mehran Tamadanfar, "Islamism in Contemporary Arab Politics," in Religion and Politics
in Comparative Perspective, ed. Ted Jelen and Clyde Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 141. Readers seeking a fuller exposition o f the relationship between Islam and pol­
itics are directed to Dale Eickelman and Jam es Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton
 220 MARK T E S S L E R

University Press, 1996); and John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997)-
9. R. Stephen Humphreys, Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age
(Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1999), 131-132.
10. See, for example, Mark Tessler, "The Origins o f Popular Support for Islamist Move­
ments: A Political Economy Analysis," in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa, ed. John
Entelis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Jodi Nachtwey and Mark Tessler,
"Explaining Women’s Support for Political Islam: Contributions from Feminist Theory," in Area
Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics, ed. Mark Tessler, Jodi
Nachtwey, and Anne Banda (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)- The finding that
support for political Islam in Arab countries is often motivated by temporal concerns rather
than the desire for an Islamic state is to some degree similar to the situation in Israel among
Shas supporters who are not ultra-orthodox.
 The Construction of Secular
and Religious in Modern
Hebrew Literature

SHACHAR PINSKER

How to define, or even recognize, modern Jewish literature is one of the most vex­
ing and contested questions that faces a scholar in this field.1 Yet naturally, and
almost automatically, nearly everyone seems to assume that everything written in
Hebrew over the last two centuries is Jewish, regardless of its content.2 This ten­
dency apparently derives from the view that modern Hebrew literature epitomizes
secular national Jewish culture. In fact, many Zionist writers and thinkers argue
that modern Hebrew literature is the single most important manifestation of
Jewish secular culture that stretches continuously from its origins in the nineteenth
century to contemporary Israel.3
The problematic term here may be secular. While scholars and critics freely use
the terms secular and religious, it is far from clear how they go about placing any
given Hebrew literary text in either category. One would be hard-pressed to define
a given text as secular or religious according to its formal literary characteristics.
What, after all, makes a poem, a story, or a novel religious or secular? Does a reli­
gious motif or traditional Jewish language cease to be of religious significance at
the moment it is used in a modern form, such as the novel?
If secular and religious cannot qualify as formal or purely literary categories, per­
haps then these are categories of representation in which a secular or religious lit­
erary text represents socially and politically distinct groups. If so, are these stable
categories? Do they change in different contexts, times, and locations? Are secular
literary texts written (presumably in Hebrew) in Israel similar in any way to secular
Jewish literature written in other languages around the world? Did the meaning of
these categories change from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the
twenty-first century? How did the changing sociopolitical environment in Jewish
and Israeli society affect the possibility that modern Hebrew literature could be the
scaffolding of a secular Jewish culture, a Hebrew literature that is “the watchman
of the house of Israel”?
Considering the central position of modern Hebrew literature in any
conception of Jewish secular culture, these problems are crucial to the larger ques­
tion of defining secularism, or more specifically, “Jewish secularism." Is this “Jewish
 222 SHACHAR PINSKER

secularism" merely a negation of religion, or is it a coherent system o f beliefs, val­

ues, and practices that is secular, yet Jewish?
These are difficult questions to answer, mainly because there is hardly agree­
ment on the meaning of the terms religious and secular in general, let alone what we
might consider a religious or secular poem or novel. The problem seems to be espe­
cially acute in the case of Hebrew, the “holy tongue." In a letter to Franz
Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem wrote, “The secularization of the [Hebrew] lan­
guage is only a figure of speech, no more than a slogan. It is impossible to empty
the words that are filled to the point of bursting with meaning, save at the expense
of the language itself."4 In contrast, Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote, “Let us not be
afraid to see Agadah as a secular literature like every other world literature.
Perhaps by doing so, we will enable Agadah to enter into a sphere of a different
sanctity, the sanctity of a national creation."5 These quotations demonstrate two
seemingly opposing views: one affirms and celebrates the transformation of tradi­
tional Jewish texts into a modern, national, and secular culture; the other questions
the very possibility of the secularization of Hebrew. The fact that these seemingly
conflicting views are expressed by two major writers and intellectuals who saw
themselves as Zionists, and the fact that they both use theological imagery in their
utterances, give important testimony to the complexity of these matters.
The history of modern Hebrew literature from the end of the eighteenth cen­
tury to contemporary Israel provides many fascinating examples of literary texts
and critical debates that touch upon these questions—from the literature of the
Haskalah in Germany and Eastern Europe, to the literature of the tehiya (revival)
period at the turn of the twentieth century, through the literature created in Israel
immediately after its establishment, and the recent resurgence of Shira Emunit (best
translated as "faith poetry" or “poetry of religiosity") in the last decade in Israel. In
this chapter, I focus on what might be the most complex test case to examine these
issues—the attempts by Bialik, Berdichevsky, and others at the turn of the twenti­
eth century to transform rabbinic and Midrashic texts into secular modern Jewish
texts. The ambiguities and internal struggles that characterized these creative
endeavors became the hallmark of modern Hebrew culture. They shaped and pre­
figured the ruptures that surfaced in the early 1950s and that have erupted again in
recent years in a totally different political and sociocultural context.

The Early Modern Revival o f Hebrew

Literature: Bialik and Berdichevsky
Some of the main figures of early modern Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe
were adherents of what was called “cultural Zionism,” the movement whose most
well-known spokesman was Ahad-Ha’am. These writers and intellectuals sought to
transform Judaism’s traditional symbols, values, and beliefs into a modern, national,
and essentially secular system. This is especially important in the context of the
tehiya, the “revival" of Hebrew language and literature that accompanied the birth
of the Jewish national movement. Perhaps because traditional Jewish culture in
Eastern Europe was defined by its relation to religious texts,6 the transformation
 Modern Hebrew Literature 223

was supposed to happen first in the textual domain. This transformation was to
occur as part of the creation o f original Hebrew poetry, prose, and essays, as well
as in the anthological and editorial projects (like Sefer Ha’agadah and Tzfunot va’
agadot), which sought to gather and rework rabbinic texts into a form befitting a
modern nation. These Zionist writers believed that this transformation required
nothing less than a total revolution. The revolution had to be double: a transfor­
mation of religious texts into secular literature, and then a transformation of secu­
lar literature back into the "sacred realm” of the national, where it would take on
the aura of being the product of the nation’s collective genius.
This is one of the most important components o f what Benjamin Harshav
described as "the modern Jewish revolution.” Harshav defined this revolution,
which began in the 1880s and lasted for several decades, as a multidirectional, cen­
trifugal movement away from an old and into a new existence, a move of immi­
gration and assimilation that negated the old nation and created a new Jewish
secular nation in its place. The concept of “Jew” itself shifted. It ceased to be a reli­
gious category and came to designate either a culture and nation, or a racial-ethnic
affiliation. This revolution was, according to Harshav, based on the force of nega­
tion ("not here, not like now, not as we are”), as well as on the positive force of cre­
ating a new modern "cultural cluster” of ideology, literature, and social network
that redefined the very notion of being Jewish.7
The main figures in the revival of Hebrew culture—Bialik, Ahad-Ha'am,
Berdichevsky, and Brenner—all attempted in their own, often conflicting ways to
redefine the notion of Jewishness and to transform the religious system of values,
beliefs, and canonical texts into a secular-national one. The producers and con­
sumers of Hebrew literature from the 1880s until at least the 1930s did not come
from the secular Jewish intelligentsia or the circle of the Maskilim. The Hebrew lit­
erary community of writers, readers, editors, and critics were almost exclusively
drawn from a reservoir of young people who had followed very similar paths: child­
hood schooling in the traditional heder, further studies as adolescents in a yeshiva,
and exposure to Haskalah through reading Hebrew and Yiddish literature.8 Even
the most committed Zionists among them took this path, and were only later influ­
enced by Jewish nationalism and by the various strands of Zionism.9
The Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik is probably the single most important
figure in this literary and intellectual movement. Bialik shared with Ahad-Ha’am
and many of his contemporaries a concern that if the primal spiritual sensibilities
of the Jews were not respected, the new Hebrew culture would stray from its goal.
To secure what Bialik called “the spirit o f the nation,” he sought to establish a new
canon, one that replaced the rabbinic curriculum of sacred texts while maintaining
some kind of continuity with it. Bialik, deeply influenced by nineteenth-century
European romanticism and nationalism, believed that the Hebrew renaissance
must be firmly rooted in works of the past that embodied "the holy spirit of the
nation.” He maintained that Hebrew writers and readers no longer had ready
access to this literature because it was "buried” in the "graveyards" of rabbinic
legalism and the convoluted rabbinic commentaries and homilies. Thus, Bialik
 224 SHACHAR PINSKBR

insisted that a radical process of selection must be made: “In order to build a new
synagogue the old one must be destroyed."10
Bialik's notion of canonization (hatima ve-genizah) is essentially linked to his
notion of ingathering (kinus). Kinus was the name that Bialik and other cultural
Zionists gave the enterprise of ingathering the most important works of the Jewish
past that appeared destined to be forgotten in the modem world.11 The works were
to be preserved by collecting them into modern anthologies in a new time and a new
place (Palestine). For Bialik, this mission was urgent, and he seemed at times very
confident that the practitioners of Zionist Hebrew culture could create a “new
Talmud" to replace the old one.12 Bialik devoted a remarkable amount of attention
and labor to this task, editing several ambitious anthologies of ancient and medieval
Jewish texts. The most impressive and well known of these projects is Sefer
HaAgadah, which he undertook together with Y. H. Ravnitzki from 1906 to 1910.
In this monumental work, Bialik sought to transform what he described as the
“messy," indiscernible Agadic material “buried" in the Babylonian and Palestinian
Talmuds and in various Midrashic works into a crystallized “folk literature of the
Jews,” a well-structured monument that would express “the spirit of the Nation."13
Agadah, the nonlegal part of rabbinic literature, has always been part of the tradi­
tional study of the Talmud and Midrash, but it was never the center of attention.
Bialik wanted to change this by focusing on Agadah, or what he considered the
"folk” element in rabbinic literature. The romantic and national elements in
Bialik's perspective clearly constituted his understanding of the rabbinic material.
Bialik’s most important and radical innovation was to regard these fragments of
rabbinic texts as belles-lettres—a literature in the secular, modern sense. In his
understanding, the Agadah was the Jewish people’s belletristic work during the
long period of Jewish history that followed the canonization of the Bible. Bialik was
well aware of the radical nature of this claim. He argued time and again that to rec­
ognize the aesthetic and literary qualities of Agadah, it had to be “redeemed” from
the religious, studious atmosphere of the traditional house of study, heder and
yeshiva. "There is a need to redeem the Agadah from its traditional limited domain
and open it to the public domain of secular belletristic literature."14
As Midrash scholars such as Yosef Heineman, Efraim Urbach, and David Stern
have shown, selection and rearrangement of Agadic material came at a price.15
Bialik was troubled by many elements of the Agadah as it had been preserved for
centuries in the Talmuds and various collections of Midrash. He was disturbed by
the fragmentation of Agadah and by the fact that the Talmud and Midrash contain
no large-scale epic narratives. In Bialik’s assessment, when compared with Homeric
epic, the Agadah in his time was nothing but “crumbs, a jumble of broken stones
and ruins." However, without giving much historical or philological evidence to
support his view, Bialik seemed to believe that in the distant past, the Agadah was
more epic in nature, and the process of fragmentation occurred due to the nature
o f its dissemination and the corruption of its materials. Bialik strove to correct
this "historical accident,” not by philological and academic study, but by what can
be called “a creative restoration.” Crucial for Bialik was the new structural and
 Modern Hebrew Literature 225

compositional arrangement: "fragments of stones, joined into layers, layers into

walls, a complete fortress in which everything is arranged and installed in its proper
place, restoring the ruined palace to its original glory."16
Another feature of the Agadah that disturbed Bialik’s aesthetic and ideological
sensibilities was that most o f the Agadic texts are written not in Hebrew but in
Aramaic. He and Ravnitzki translated all Aramaic texts into a homogeneous, syn­
thetic Hebrew of the type being used in modern Hebrew fiction of their time. Even
more significantly, Bialik and Ravnitzki edited and compiled the narratives so as to
divorce them from their original homiletical and exegetical setting. Instead they
created a new arrangement of the material, which is historical, thematic, and liter­
ary. This new arrangement produced unity and narrative closure, but this form was
entirely their own creation, aimed at molding Agadah into something like their
idea o f literature.
Anyone who reads Agadah in its original context in the Talmud and Midrash
knows that, to a large extent, the essence of this kind of literature is its relation to
the biblical text on which it comments. Most of the Agadah’s narratives and dicta
were not related for their own sake but rather as interpretation of the Bible. Bialik
thought that, “Agadah has a bad tendency . . . to employ the Biblical text as a proof-
text." He maintained that “the verse is a distraction; it stands between us and the
Agadah.”17
There are many Agadot that were part of homilies (whether real sermons or lit­
erary homilies). Moreover, the bulk of Agadah in the Talmud appears in the con­
text of debates and discussions that are legal in nature. The Agadic narratives often
comment upon a legal assertion, either supporting or disputing it. All these
elements—the essence o f rabbinic literature—invoked for Bialik the stifling envi­
ronment of the yeshiva or Beit Midrash (House of Study):

I would like to remove from the hearts of our people the notion that Agadah is
a specific phenomenon within the parochial context of the Beit-Midrash that
has nothing to do with literature as such. I would say that there is an urgent
need to secularize Agadah and remove it from the specific context and atmos­
phere, so it can be born into the world, society and our modern literature not
just as a religious literature. The problem is in the fact that the Agadah is within
the legal, halachic texts, annexed to it like an appendix. The other reason for our
doubts about the creative merit and literary value of the Agadah is its relation­
ship with the Biblical verse. The Biblical verse interrupts. . .. There is a need to
extract that verse from the Agadah the way one takes a bone out of one's
throat.18

Despite the dramatic changes he made in this literary form, Bialik did not seem
to recognize that something was being lost. On the contrary, he felt that he and
Ravnitzki were not only faithful to Agadah, but were actually restoring to it some­
thing o f its original glory.19
More or less contemporary with Bialik’s project, another prominent Hebrew
prose writer and intellectual, M. Y. Berdichevsky, was engaged in a similar yet
 226 SHACHAR PINSKER

different task of collecting rabbinic and Agadic materials. During his lifetime,
Berdichevsky collected and published (in Hebrew and in German) several such
anthologies, such as MeOtsar Ha’Agadah (1913) and MiMekor Yisrael (posthumously
published in 1939).
The main difference between the two compilers was that Berdichevsky was
mainly interested in recovering Agadah as folklore and limited himself to what he
considered folkloric material. Berdichevsky understood folklore in the same way as
most early-twentieth-century intellectuals and scholars (especially in Central
Europe and Germany, where he obtained his doctorate). The result was that
Berdichevsky included in his anthologies a large amount of material from texts
other than the Talmud, Midrash, or other canonical Jewish texts: some from late
antiquity, others from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. On the other hand,
Berdichevsky did not include in his anthologies Talmudic and Midrashic materials
that did not fall into the folkloric niche. Although Bialik also wanted to recover
Agadah as folkloric literature, he used the term folklore in a very different way,
because for him, folklore was the literary essence of what the spirit of the nation
created.20
In spite of these important differences, Berdichevsky's literary and intellectual
project was, like Bialik’s, driven by his romantic (or neo-romantic) and national
quest. He wished to explore what he perceived as the psychological and social
forces that generated the "national spirit,’’ before it became subjugated by the pres­
sures of normative religious Judaism. Berdichevsky viewed Jewish society and
thought not as a cohesive, integrated social and philosophical system, but rather as
an arena for conflicting forces and tendencies. He rejected what he considered to be
the religious synthesis that the rabbis constructed and sanctioned (and this caused
a bitter dispute with Ahad-Ha’am and his unified system o f cultural Zionism). This
diffusing rather than unifying approach also marked his conception of the antholo­
gies. In his introduction to the collection MeOtsar Ha’Agadah, Berdichevsky wrote
that his intention was to create "not a whole book, which was made according to
one mold or one overarching design is given here to the readers, but a certain col­
lection of Agadot, that were chosen and written in different times and different
contexts... . The redactor did not have a specific goal to create a unified book of
Agadah. . . . The Hebrews did not have one single literature, with one spirit that
was given by one Shepherd, but a variety o f fragments of literature, that were born
and developed in different periods, under different spiritual conditions.''21
Where Bialik was striving to achieve unity and harmony in his editing,
Berdichevsky was seeking diversity and heterogeneity. And yet, there is something
similar in their rebellious quest for a modern secular-national conception o f
Jewishness that these new books would enable or even generate. Bialik,
Berdichevsky, and others involved in kinus projects were well versed in the textual
world of rabbinic and other traditional Jewish texts. They knew very well that they
were making radical changes and creating something totally new. Nevertheless,
they thought they were not inventing but preserving, not breaking but building,
even restoring something that had been lost.
 Modern Hebrew Literature 227

How can we explain this seemingly contradictory impulse? Bialik, Berdichevsky,

and other cultural Zionists emphasized the overarching significance of the Hebrew
language in the kinus project—the ingathering of Jewish traditional texts in new,
modern, and secular forms. For Bialik, kinus was the act of rendering those works
touched by “the spirit of the people” in Hebrew because the Hebrew language had for
Bialik almost a mystical force. Therefore, the translation of Rabbinic and other works
into the synthetic Hebrew that Abramovitz and other writers in this period were cre­
ating was not just a technical issue—making the texts more accessible—but one of the
main goals. He believed that this act of translation would not only "nationalize” and
"secularize" the texts, but paradoxically would also make them “sacred” in a new way
and render their Jewishness manifest. Bialik and other Hebrew writers from his gen­
eration believed that speaking, reading, and, of course, writing Hebrew would bring
the Jew, no matter how secular or assimilated into Western culture, in tune with
Judaism. It is as if the very flow of the sacred language through the lips of the Jews
assured that their creative and spiritual sensibilities would have a distinctly Jewish
tonality and texture. One of the most important paradoxes in the creation of Hebrew
secularism is the fact that Bialik, like many figures of his generation, was a confirmed
secularist—yet he did not shy away from religious, even mystical, terminology.12
This can be seen very well in Bialik’s term Nusah. Bialik used it as both a
descriptive and prescriptive label for the synthetic style that his generation artifi­
cially created to produce flexible, realist fiction that was able to represent the world
o f East European Jewry in Hebrew. He first used it in 1910 in a well-known essay on
Abramovitz.23 For Bialik, the Nusah style was the perfect literary means for
mimetic representation (or a desire to create such a mimetic representation) of the
Jewish national collective.
Clearly, Bialik’s new usage of “Nusah" plays on the traditional meaning of the
term as a conventional melody for chanting prayers that anyone could follow and
emulate, as well as the notion of Ashkenazi and Sefardi Nusah (the traditional
order of prayers in the two major Jewish communities). Thus, Bialik understood
the Nusah as a collective resource that could and should be adapted and transmit­
ted. According to Bialik, Abramovitz “took, drop by drop, whatever he found in the
treasure-house of the people's creative spirit and gave it back, and in a refined form,
to the same treasure-house." In typically romantic fashion, Bialik saw the Nusah as
expressing “the essence of the national genius,” and Abramovitz as "the first
national artist in our literature."24
Similar issues and problems I have identified in the creation of a modern-
secular conception of Agaddah were also involved in the Nusah—both the
concept itself and the actual literary style that it attempted to describe. Despite its
stylistic richness, the modes of intertextuality in the Nusah style are limited and
create mainly mimetic and ironic effects.25 As a public intellectual committed to the
ideology of cultural Zionism, Bialik could not see these problems, because for him,
both the project of kinus and the creation of Nusah were tropes for the "ingather­
ing" of the scattered Jewish people who could recapture their glory by being
reassembled in their “palace"—the national territory."5
 228 SHACHAR PINSKER

Creativity and Ambivalence in Bialik’s Poetry

Bialik's tone in articulating the process of canonization and ingathering the Agadah
as well in the creation of the Nusah style was confident, even triumphant. But in
reading his poetry, one discovers deep doubts and painful, even tragic awareness of
the impossibility of achieving what he advocated.27 Over the course of his life,
Bialik wrote several poems that touch on the subject of the Agadah, the Talmud,
and the world of traditional yeshiva study: “El HaAgadah” (To the Agadah, 1882), “Al
saf beit HaMidrash” (On the Threshold of the House of Study, 1904), and "Lifnei aron
hasefarim” (Before the Bookcase, 1910).
"El HaAgadah" is one of the first poems that Bialik ever published. Bialik wrote
two different versions, one entitled "Ha'agadah" and the other “ El-Ha'agadah.”
The title of the second version (which was the one he chose to publish in all subse­
quent collections of his poetry) emphasizes the fact that the poem is written in the
tradition and genre of the ode—a lyric poem written in the form of rhetorical evo­
cation. In this case, the object of the apostrophe is the Talmud.
The poem begins with a description of a heavily conflicted subject-speaker. He
is described as someone who just returned after a period of absence and alienation
to the Talmud, which he studied in his youth. The return is not accidental—he
returns to the sacred book because of his harsh experiences during his attempt to
enter the world of European culture and enlightenment.
The speaker describes his attempt to escape from the “darkness” of Talmud
study in the traditional yeshiva to a new place of “light,” in which he moved like a
mouse or a worm.28 He endured blows and suffering and gave up, returning to the
same “hole” from which he originally fled. He now hopes it will be a refuge: “there
lived and found safety a worm.”29 The speaker opens a volume of Talmud, pores
over the old, rustling pages, and tries to find there some comfort for his weary soul.
He hopes to find solace not in the main legal part of the text, but rather in the
“ancient, kind Agadot” that are scattered throughout.
The speaker’s negative attitude toward the Talmud and its traditional study is
manifest not only in its description as “a hole in ground” and “a crack in the rock,”
but also in the metaphor for the pages of the Talmud—alim balim, which can mean
both “worn pages” and “withered leaves.” According to this metaphor, the Talmud
is like a plant that has not yet died, but which is wasted and dry.
The poem's two versions give different answers to the speaker's question: can
he find revitalization and consolation in the pages of the lifeless Talmud and espe­
cially in the Agadah? The early version of the poem (“H'agadah”—the one that
Bialik did not republish) gives a very pessimistic and doubtful answer. It ends with
a feeling of disappointment and failure at what seems to be an undesirable, even
forced, return of the speaker to the world o f the house of study from which he fled
to the domain of the secular, European enlightenment:

You exist, and like headstones on graves

You bear witness to the loss of our joy
You bear witness to the loss of all that is holy and dear
 Modern Hebrew Literature 229

That our enemies seized and robbed.

And I, the miserable, with head bowed to the ground
Will cry with the weeping of an owl in the ruins
I wail in my plaint until I am consumed by tears
I wail on the graves of the fathers.30

The second and more optimistic version suggests that although the consolation
that the speaker finds in the Talmud and the Agadah will not come fully and imme­
diately, it will surely arrive in the foreseeable future, and not just for the speaker as
an individual, but also as a representative of the experience of an entire generation.
Indeed, it is essential to understand that Bialik, even in his most intimate and per­
sonal poems, also represents a generation o f young people who studied at heder
and yeshiva and left them to find some kind of social and cultural renewal in the
world of liberal Europe. Since the 1880s, a large part o f this generation in Eastern
Europe was totally disillusioned with the attempt to assimilate into a non-Jewish
society and culture, which rejected the “enlightened” Jew just as it had previously
rejected the “primitive” Jew. The traumatic realization that came in the early 1880s
finds a clear expression in Bialik’s poem, which reaches far beyond Bialik’s own
experience in Volozhin, Zhitomir, and Odessa.
As the poem progresses, the reader discovers that Bialik’s speaker does not rep­
resent himself or even his generation. Rather, his individual story parallels a
national historical narrative of the Jewish people. The speaker’s present situation
metonymically stands for the Jewish nation in the state of exile. In this scheme
Bialik presents us with a grand unfolding historical narrative:

I had a harp too, and hung it on the willows

Of a stream where I once sat;
And I wept much weeping and in the rivers of my tears the harp I let go from
my hand.
O harp of Yeshurun, sweetest of the songs of Israel,
This was the harp of Solomon and David; in you David saw God,
and Solomon in holiness Saw in you a dream of Shulamit.
And from then till now there is no king in Yeshurun
No king-no harp and no music.
My lyre is the sound of weeping,
My harp like a dove sighs on the riverbeds of Babylon.31

Building upon the familiar Psalm 137, Bialik recites the story of the tragic fall
from the grand and glorious biblical days, which are associated with the poetry of
King David and Solomon, to the lowly, limited writings of the rabbis o f the
Babylonian exile, where the Talmud was composed. In the narrative Bialik con­
structs in this poem, there is clearly a direct link between national and political sov­
ereignty and the possibility of creating a genuine national literature and culture.
The state of exile of the Jewish people does not allow the creation of either a
national or personal literature. This was true in the Talmudic period and is equally
 230 SHACHAR PINSKER

true at the end of the nineteenth century. The attempt of the Jewish enlightenment
to assimilate and participate in European culture failed. In 1882, the only partial
solution Bialik's speaker puts forth is to use the Agadah as a sort of limited substi­
tute. Particularly in lieu of a living national literature, the Agadah can serve as a lin­
guistic and poetic source for creating poetry:

And from then till now when I think sad thoughts

The Agadah as a harp I raise up—
In it I weep the lowliness of my people, in it I sing consolations—
I play and I have relief.32

For Bialik, both the problem and its partial solution lie at all three levels: the
personal, the poetic, and the national. Only by being a poet can the speaker find
consolation in the lifeless Talmud, and only using the Talmud as a source for a new
poetic expression conveys the sorrows of the nation that there can be personal and
national regeneration. This poetic and ideological solution is the reason for the
triumphal ending of the second version:

I understand, finally, that though this people is worms

It will yet cope with and bring down giants.

This defiant ending to the poem is not the conclusion of Bialik’s struggle
with these questions; rather it is the earliest expression of one of the main prob­
lems with which Bialik grappled his entire life. In 1894, Bialik returned to the topic
of the Talmud and the traditional house o f study in a poem entitled "On the
Threshold o f the House of Study.'' Like "To the Agadah,” this poem is also an ode,
but the differences between this and the earlier poem are striking. Instead of the
ambivalent position o f the speaker in the earlier poem, here the speaker puts for­
ward a clear and certain poetic and ideological position. In this poem too, the house
of study and the rabbinic texts are described as "ruins” without much hope of
revival in even stronger terms than the earlier poem. The speaker constructs the
house of study as an old institution o f his lost youth. In a romantic manner, the
speaker and the house of study of his youth mirror each other, and the destruction
of the house of study is also the downfall of the poet. Therefore, he mourns both
of them:

Once more, my House of Study, with head downcast and bent,

I tread your threshold, desolate like you.
Shall I lament your ruin or mine,
Or mourn the twain?33

Because of this total identification, in this poem the speaker does not bitterly
accuse the house o f study or the Talmud of being a lifeless entity, as he did in the
earlier poem, nor does he attempt to find consolation in “the old ruins.” He recog­
nizes that there is neither good reason nor real ability to return to the religious tra­
ditions that the speaker abandoned. However, perhaps because of this realization,
 M odem Hebrew Literature 231

the speaker finds within himself the confidence that he can bring something from
the “light" o f modernity and enlightenment to cure and rebuild the ruins of reli­
gious traditions, by turning it into a secular modern Hebrew culture:

The sanctuary of God will not collapse! I will yet build you and it will be built
From the heaps of your dust I will restore your walls;
Temples will yet crumble, as you crumbled
On a day of great destruction, when towers fell,
And in my healing of the destroyed Temple of God—
I will widen its walls and tear open a window
And the light will drive out the broad darkness of its shadow.34

One can easily connect this idea of restoration and optimistic mood about the
future of Jewish culture in its modern national form with Bialik's notion of kinus.
Indeed, a few years after writing this poem, Bialik began to contemplate the idea of
devoting his own time and creative energies to this project of restoration and
rebuilding. In the following decade, Bialik devoted many years to the project of
Sefer Ha'agadah, and the book became a great success. It won critical acclaim and
was something of a bestseller (in early-twentieth-century Hebrew terms). However,
with his rare sense of self-criticism, in his poetry Bialik did not describe these
efforts of renewal and restoration as great accomplishments.
In 1910, shortly after the publication of Sefer Ha’agadah, Bialik wrote and pub­
lished one o f his greatest and most ambitious poems, “In Front of the Bookcase."
It is also one o f the most autobiographical poems of a poet renowned for his abil­
ity to fuse the national and the personal, and to turn his own biography into a col­
lective spiritual and emotional portrait. Like Bialik's entire poetic oeuvre, this
poem extends from the personal, to the poetic and national.
However, against all expectations, Bialik did not celebrate the great achieve­
ment o f the publication o f his anthology. On the contrary, the celebratory mood
was replaced by a ruthless sense of disappointment and failure. Bialik felt not only
that the attempt to find personal happiness and consolation in the traditional
Jewish books was mistaken and bound to fail, but also that it was wrong to project
his own fantasies onto the books and the religious Jewish tradition they repre­
sented. These “aging, elderly” books always promised and could promise only one
thing—the values and traditions of religious Judaism. Any effort to find anything
else was totally irrelevant, especially the attempt to find in them the Nietzschean
liebesspruch o f life philosophy that Bialik and others projected onto them.

I look, I see—and I do not recognize you, old folk,

From within your letters no won't gaze
Any longer to the depths of my soul opened eyes
That stir in a forgotten grave in the distance .. .
Has my eye dimmed or my ear grown faint?
Or are you decay, you eternal dead
With no survivor in the land of life . . .35
 232 SHACHAR PINSKER

What, then, did Bialik come out with after working so intensely in "the grave­
yards of the nation, and the ruins of the spirit?” According to the poem, he found
nothing but the “dagger” and “dust” that those who engage in "burial” and in
“archeological digs” find. In his own poetic account, Bialik attempted to revive
Judaism as a living modern-secular culture, but he failed and accomplished some­
thing akin to the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, who embarked on a mis­
sion of giving Judaism "a proper burial.”

And who knows,

If when I go out again to the rule of night
From digging in graves of people and ruins of spirit
And nothing remains with me and nothing is saved
Apart from this spade that cleaves to my hand
And this ancient dust grooved in my fingers—
If not poorer and emptier than I was
To the glory of the night I'll not spread my hands . . } 6

As Dan Miron and other scholars have demonstrated, this sense of failure was
to a certain degree due to Bialik’s sense that the more attention he gave to Sefer
Ha’agadah and the entire project of kinus, the less he wrote poetry.37 However,
Bialik’s writer’s block does not sum up the larger issue with which Bialik struggled
all of his life. The feeling of failure is to a large degree a result of conflicted ambiva­
lence and a painful, tragic realization that it was impossible to transform the entire
range of religious Jewish experience into a secular national Hebrew system.
The producers and consumers of Hebrew literature and culture in the forma­
tive period of Zionism and the Hebrew revival came almost entirely from the
yeshiva world, and almost all tried, later in life, to flee it. However, in order to pro­
duce the desired new secular Hebrew culture, there was a need to go deeper and
deeper into the religious system and its language. The transformation was never as
successful or complete as they had hoped. Bialik himself realized this, and he gave
this sense of simultaneous hope and disappointment, successes and failure, an
astonishingly honest expression in his poetry. Writers like Berdichevsky and
Brenner expressed similar tortuous and ambivalent attitudes in their prose fiction
and in their essays.

Afterward, or Back to the Future

These inherent contradictions in the nature of modern Jewish national culture and
the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of creating a truly secular or "normal” litera­
ture in Hebrew were recognized by critics such as Baruch Kurzweil, Dov Sadan,
and Yonatan Ratosh, who were active in the Yishuv and the young state of Israel
during the 1940s and 1950s.38 In their judgment, with the establishment of the state
and with the rise of a new generation of writers (known as the Paltnah or the Sabra
generation) who were born in Palestine and educated in the Hebrew secular system
of the Labor Zionist movement, the transformation Bialik and others hoped for
began to materialize. For sure, these critics had a different assessment of these
 Modern Hebrew Literature 233

developments. For Yonatan Ratosh (the poet, founder, and ideologue of a move­
ment called the Young Hebrews, better known as the Canaanite movement) it was
a sign of great success that signaled the beginning o f a Hebrew literature that was
separating itself from its Jewish sources and traditions.39 The critic Baruch
Kurzweil identified the same developments, but he saw them as a colossal failure
that must lead Hebrew literature and culture to an artistic and spiritual dead end.40
Dov Sadan, another major critic and a prominent professor of Yiddish and Hebrew
literature at the Hebrew University, found in these developments a reason for hope
for the future. Since Sadan was a committed Zionist, he viewed the establishment
of the state of Israel as a miraculous event. But he also believed that secular nation­
alism, which had been necessary for the fulfillment of the Zionist vision, would
decline quickly without a renewed encounter with traditional Jewish religious
experience. He was convinced that a reconciliation o f the two must happen and
would happen very quickly.41
In his discussion of Zionist hopes and Israeli realities, Dan Miron, one o f the
most important contemporary Israeli scholars of Hebrew literature, claims that
Sadan, Kurzweil, and Ratosh were wrong in their predictions about the develop­
ment of Israeli literature. Miron claims that Kurzweil’s ideology prevented him
from seeing some of the most interesting writers and texts in Isreali literature of
the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, Miron has asserted, the overwhelming
majority of Israeli writers did not follow Ratosh's “Canaanite” program, and the
“Semitic space" he envisioned did not become the main cultural influence on
Israeli literature. According to Miron, Israeli literature also exposed Sadan's vision
of reconciliation with tradition as wishful thinking. Instead, he claimed:

Israeli literature became the vanguard of the battle against the reconciliation
that Sadan predicted [between secularism and Jewish religious tradition]. It is
no doubt in a defensive position, but if it fails in this battle, and reconciliation in
its contemporary Israeli version takes over our cultural life, it is probable that
Hebrew literature, instead of reaching a synthesis of the best of the past and
the present, will decline and maybe even disappear.. . . In the face of the neo-
Judaic ascendance, which inevitably nowadays goes hand in hand with extreme
right-wing politics, most Israeli writers see not a resurrected father, but a fright­
ening hybrid—an enemy whose cultural victory would be the downfall of
everything for which they stand.42

Instead of the reconcilation that Sadan envisioned, Miron and many other
Israeli writers and critics of his generation spoke of a secular-religious culture war,
with Hebrew literature as a key player on the battleground. It should be clear what
side Hebrew literature was on, in Miron's view. Moreover, Miron is candid about
his identification of religion (or “neo-Judaism," in his words) with nationalistic
right-wing politics, which is of course opposed to "enlightened,” "moderate,” left-
wing secular culture.
Is this an accurate picture of Hebrew literature in Israel? Is Miron right about
the failure of Kurzweil, Ratosh, and Sadan to predict the future developments in
 234 SHACHAR PINSKER

Israeli literature? Is Hebrew literature really the secular "vanguard" in the culture
war? Although these kind of assessments are necessarily based on generalizations
(to which there are always some exceptions), Miron's analysis is indeed quite accu­
rate for the literature that was produced in Israel in the 1940s, 1950s, and even most
of the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of its variety and achievements, this literature is sur­
prisingly homogeneous. The overwhelming majority of the writers in this period
were products of secular socialist Zionism. Their stories and novels were not only
usually set in a kibbutz, the army, or in youth movements, but these settings were
also their main themes. The language aspired to capture the colloquial speech of
young people in these institutions. This style precluded the intertextual dialogue
with rabbinic literature and other traditional Jewish texts that typifies Hebrew fic­
tion and poetry of the early twentieth century, and it did not leave much room for
religious themes or concerns.
Yet one can hardly describe Hebrew literature of the 1980s, or especially the
1990s, without noting religious themes and concerns. Clearly, contemporary writ­
ers have shattered the facade of what was seen as a "monolithic" Israeli culture.
Recent Israeli literature can be described as a battle of conflicting narratives—nar­
ratives of national, religious, gender, and ethnic identity—all struggling to make
themselves heard in their own voices and in their own ways. Over the past decades
there has been an explosion of writing by and about Mizrahi Jews, Holocaust sur­
vivors, Arabs, religious Jews, and other groups that together bear witness to the
diversity of Israeli society and culture.
Many sociologists and other social scientists who study the changing face of
Israeli society observe that what is defined as “Israel’s hegemonic secular Ashkenazi
labor Zionist culture” has waned, and a different social and cultural order is in for­
mation. A new system of subcultures and countercultures are now engaged in an
escalating culture war with the fading but still-powerful secular Zionist culture,
which is rapidly losing its hegemonic position. Some critics and scholars, such as
sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, have attributed this crisis to the decline of the
hegemonic secular-Zionist Ashkenazi cultural and social elite, while others, like
Charles Liebman, have argued that it is the product o f the polarization of Israeli
politics, and of Israeli society’s metaphysical and spiritual view of the world. Still
others, such as Eliezer Schweid, believe the crisis signals the decline of a secular
movement that has nearly exhausted its cultural resources.43
It is quite clear that in recent years, parallel with the process of rapid
Westernization (sometimes referred to as “Americanization” ) of Israeli society, the
automatic identification of Israeli culture (even high culture) with secular-national
culture might be eroding with the collapse of the political and cultural hegemony
of the Ashkenazi-secular elite group. What replaces this model of Israeli literature
and culture? Everything in the recent developments and debates about religious
and secular elements in Israeli literature indicates that these have become, for bet­
ter or worse, categories of representation in which “religious,” “secular,” and also
“traditional” (masorti) represent distinct social and political groups. The founders
of Hebrew literature would certainly not be at ease with this notion of Hebrew
 M odem Hebrew Literature 235

literature and culture, but this seems to be the meaning o f these categories in
recent years in the political, social, and even literary systems.
The question that remains unanswered is this: Which narrative of cultural
change really describes these shifts? On one hand, there is a narrative o f an ever­
growing and expanding multicultural Israeli identity that now embraces all the
groups not represented in the Zionist ideal of the melting pot (Arabs, women, and
orthodox and traditional Jews from European as well as Arab countries). On the
other hand, an alternative narrative describes an escalating cultural war between
these conflicting subcultures or countercultures. Surprisingly—at least for those
who identify revolution with innovation—these countercultures are not necessarily
based on new and radical ideas, rituals, or practices. In fact, most of them are not
new at all. They are the current incarnations of streams of thought and literature
that have been part of Zionism and Hebrew culture since its inception. Perhaps
what we are seeing is a new and quite unexpected return to the questions and con­
cerns that preoccupied modern Hebrew literature and culture at its birth.
Nothing illustrates this shift and these unresolved questions more than the new
phenomenon of Shira Emuttit—religious poetry or faith poetry—that has emerged
in Israel over the last two decades. Poets of faith, among them Admiel Kosman,
Yonadav Kaplun, and Miron Issakson, identify themselves or are identified by oth­
ers as religious. This wave of religious poetry sought to create a poetic expression
based on religiosity and an intense dialogue with traditional Jewish texts, which
some critics labeled as "Midrashic poetry."44
Two different but interrelated developments have enabled the rise and promi­
nence of religious poetry in Israeli literature during the last two decades. One is the
crisis in poetry in Israel since the late 1970s, during which there was a notable
decline in the status of poetry, partly due to an absence of a leading poet (or group
of poets) such as Alterman, Shlonsky, Zach, and, Amichai. The other element is the
fragmentation o f the cultural and social environment. These two elements seem to
parallel each other, and the result is that Israeli literature is now divided into many
distinct and minor poetic voices without a major and defined center.
Likewise, there seem to be two contrasting views of what can be read as Shira
Emunit. On one hand, there is a tendency to ignore the model of identity politics of
religious and secular and to include much of Hebrew and Israeli literature under
the rubric of more abstract religiosity (or its opposite, abstract secularism). In such
a view, Admiel Kosman, Miron Issakson, and their colleagues carry on the tradition
o f Bialik, Berdichevsky, Amichai, Appelfeld, Oz, Zach, Rabikovitz, and others. On
the other hand, there is the opposite tendency to classify the poetry as religious and
secular based on the discourse and politics of identity and difference. According to
this view, once the hegemony of secular-national Israeli culture was challenged, the
seculars became only one of many groups, and the elite secular culture cannot be
seen as defining an Israeli culture common to all Israelis or even Israeli Jews.45
Finally, Shira Emunit seems to be defined by its critics and observers in two
potentially different ways, which also allow for different notions of secularity. The
first notion of religiosity is the engagement of an all-purpose spiritualist sensibility,
 236 SHACHAR PINSKER

which is not localized in any specific cultural milieu. The yearning for the divine,
for faith, wonder, an encounter with the mystery of life, the sense of something
greater than oneself, a sense of humbleness that can be associated with the reli­
gious experience (or at least with some aspects o f it) are all values and sensibilities
that are usually not associated with a secular worldview. A secular ethos is one that
emphasizes self-deficiency, rationalism, and so on. However, this kind of religiosity
can be regarded as lacking any specifically Jewish content, despite its use of Hebrew
language and references to Jewish texts.
The other notion o f religiosity in Hebrew literature is based on a specific
engagement with (or disengagement from) traditional Jewish life as defined mainly
by a relation to traditional Jewish texts and symbols.46 Such an encounter, in the
case of Shira Emunit, is presumably faith-based—that is, invested with recognizably
Jewish approaches to the metaphysical. However, this assumption is not automatic
or self-explanatory, since there are many literary texts that are based on intense dia­
logue with traditional Jewish texts and symbols, and yet they are not always under­
stood as religious by the writers, readers, and others who participate in what can be
called "the Hebrew literary community," or the "Hebrew literary republic.”47 This
is one o f the main conceptual difficulties as well as the reason for countless recent
debates about the issue of the religiosity and secularity of Hebrew literature.
In historical perspective, few people will question the fact that the emergence of
modem Hebrew literature presupposed a rejection of many normative Jewish beliefs.
The cultural moment that lies at the heart o f modem Hebrew literature is a complex
experience in which negation and positive creativity are closely interwined. In many
crucial moments in its history, modem Hebrew literature drew its creative force from
the tradition against which it was revolting.48 Paradoxically, if there are any charac­
teristics that are prototypical of Hebrew (and perhaps also of Jewish) secularism, it
is the existence of self-doubt about its own validity and achievements. The debates
over the secularity and religiousness of Hebrew literature can be seen as a continual
sign of its decline and weakness, as well as a healthy sign of a dialectic renewal
and regeneration. After all, this is a culture whose icons are conflicted writers and
intellectuals such as Bialik, Berdichevsky, Brenner, and Agnon. In this sense, current
Isreali writers, both those who define themselves or who are defined as faith-based or
religious, as well as some of those who are defined as secular, are true heirs of the
complex and ever-changing cultural phenomena of modern Hebrew literature.

NOTBS
1. Hanna Wirth Nesher, ed., What Is Jewish Literaturef (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1994); Ruth Wisse, The Modem Jewish Canon (New York: Free Press, 2000).
2. This is especially true in anthologies o f "Modern Jewish Literature” in which Hebrew lit­
erature is represented. See, for example, Howard Schwartz, Gates to the New City: A Treasury o f
Modem Jewish Tales (New York: Avon, 1983). On the other hand, see the example o f Anton
Shammas, Sayed Kashua, Salman Matzlaha, and other Israeli Arab and Druze writers who
write in Hebrew but are not Jewish, and who may or may not write about Jewish themes.
3. See Gershon Shaked, Modem Hebrew Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2000).
 Modern Hebrew Literature 23 7

4. Gershom Scholem, "On Our Language," in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our
Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001).
5. Ch. N. Bialik, "Al-Ha'agadah,” in Dvarim She-Be’al Peh (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 71.
6. See Max Weinreich's description o f traditional Jewish life in Ashkenaz as Derech HaShas
(The Way o f the Talmud). Max Weinreich, The History o f the Yiddish Language (Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press, 1973).
7. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University o f California
Press, 1993). 17.
8. Fierberg, "Letter to Berdichevsky," in Kol Kitve Fierberg (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1940), 156-161.
9. Dan Miron, Bodedim Be-Moadam (Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved, 1987), 75-76.
10. Bialik, “ Hasefer Haivri," in Bialik, Divrei Sifrut (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1965), 29. This is a direct
reference to Nietzsche's dictum: "In order to build a temple one must destroy another one."
See Azan Yadin, "A Web o f Chaos: Bialik and Nietzsche on Language, Truth, and the Death o f
G od,” Proojtexts 21 (Spring 2001): 179-203.
u. See Israel Bartal, “The Ingathering o f Traditions: Zionism ’s Anthology Projects,"
Proojtexts 17 (January 1997): 77-93.
12. Bialik, "Hasefer Haivri.” See Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Zionism ’s Image o f the
Educated Jew : Reflections on Creating a Secular Jewish Culture," Modern Judaism 18 (October
1998): 227-239; Eliezer Schweid, Hayahadut ve-hatarbut hahilonit (Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz
Hameuachad, 1981).
13. Ch. N. Bialik, "Hakdama," in Sefer Ha’agada (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1966); Ch. N. Bialik,
"Lekinusa shel ha'agadda,” in Kol Kitvei Bialik (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 220-222.
14. Ch. N. Bialik, "The study o f the Agadah,” in Dvarim sheBea-al Peh.
15. Yosef Heineman, "Al darko shek Bialik be’agdat hazal," Molad 17 (1959): 266-274; E. E.
Urbach, "Bialik ve-agadat hazal," Molad 31 (1974): 82-83; David Stern, introduction to The Book
o f Legends (New York: Schocken, 1992); Mark Kiel, “ Sefer ha’agadda: Creating a Classic
Anthology for the People and by the People,” Proojtexts 17 (May 1997): 177-197.
16. Bialik, "Lekinusa shel ha’agadda,” 221.
17. Bialik, “Al-Ha’agadah,” 42.
18. Ibid.
19. Bialik, “ Lekinusa shel ha’agada,” 222.
20. Dan Ben Amos, introduction to Mimkor Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1976); Zipora Kagan, "Hom o Anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological
Genre,” Proojtexts 19 (January 1999): 4i~5i-
21. M. Y. Berdichevsky, Tsjunot va’agadot (Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved, 1965), 11.
22. Mendes-Flohr, “Cultural Zionism's Image o f the Educated Jew," 234.
23. Ch. N. Bialik, "Yotzer hanusah," in Kol Kitvei Bialik, 245-246.
24. Bialik, "Mendele veshloshet hakrahim,” in Kol Kitvei Bialik, 242-245.
25. See Shachar Pinsker, "Old Wine in New Flasks: Rabbinic Intertexts and the Making of
Modernist Hebrew Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., University o f California, Berkeley, 2001).
26. Bialik, “ Lekinusa shel ha’agada,” 221.
27. Similar ambivalence can be found in Berdichevsky’s writing. As oppose to his defiant call
for "transvaluation of values” and his belief in the act o f making religious Jewish texts into a
folkloric literature, one can find in his stories and novels deep doubts and ambiguities. See, for
example, "In Two Camps,” "Beyond the River," and “The Red Heifer.” For a comprehensive
discussion o f Berdichevsky's fiction and ideology, see Avner Holzman, Hakarat panim: Masot al
Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (Tel-Aviv: Reshafim, 1993).
28. Here and elsewhere in his poetry, Bialik plays with the different meanings o f the Hebrew
word Or (light). On one hand, light is traditionally associated with the Torah and the activity of
studying Torah. On the other hand, at least from the end o f the eighteenth century—light is
associated with the European (and Jewish) Enlightenment.
 238 SHACHAR PINSKER

29. Dan Miron, ed., Chaim Nahman Bialik: Shirim, vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: Dvir and the Katz
Institute, 1983).
30. Ibid., 139.
31. Ibid., 137. English translation by Atar Hadari, Songs from Bialik (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2000), 15-16.
32. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 137.
33- Ibid., 253.
34. Ibid., 255.
35. Ibid., 283.
36. Ibid., 283-284 (English translation in Hadari, Songs from Bialik, 27-28).
37. Dan Miron, Boa Layla (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1987), 183-185. For a similar perspective, see Alan
Mintz, "Sefer Ha ’Agadah: Triumph or Tragedy?” in History and Literature: New Readings o f Jewish
Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band, ed. William Cutter and David C. Jacobson (Providence: Brown
Judaic Studies, 2002), 17-26. A different perspective on Bialik's ambivalence toward the Agadah
and other Jewish religious-traditional texts examines the mixture o f the romantic and decadent
tendencies in his poetry. This perspective was best articulated in Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga’im
shel Decadence: Bialik, Berdichevsky, Brenner (Be'er-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1997),
106-129.
38. An extensive version o f the discussion in this section can be found in Shachar Pinsker,
"And Suddenly We Reached God"? The Construction o f 'Secular' and 'Religious' in Israeli
Literature,” Journal of Modem Jewish Studies 5, no. 1 (2006): 21-40.
39. Yonatan Ratosh, Sifrut Yehudit balashon haivrit (Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1982), 37-50.
40. Baruch Kurzweil, "On the possibility o f Israeli Fiction,” in The Searchfor Israeli Literature,
ed. Zvi Luz and Yedidya Itzhaki (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1982); Baruch Kurzweil,
Sifrutenu Hahadash: Hemshech 0 mahpecha (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Shocken, i960), 11-146.
41. Dov Sadan, Ben din leheshbon (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1963).
42. Dan Miron, Im lo tihye Yerushalayim (Tel-Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuhad, 1987), 139.
43. Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness (Berkeley: University o f
California Press, 2001); Charles Liebman and Elihu Katz, The Jewishness o f Israelis (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1997); Eliezer Schweid, Likrat Tarbut Yehudit Modemit (Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved, 1995),
293-314.
44. Hannan Hever, Sifrut She-Nichtevet Mi-Kan (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1999), 134.
45. A recent Israeli political and secular phenomenon like the Shinui party, which defines
itself as secular rather than mainstream Israeli, means that the secular has become one sector
or subculture in Israeli society. For a discussion o f this development, see Baruch Kimmerling,
Mehagrim, Mityashvim, Yelidim (Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved, 2004), 353-360.
46. Leaving o f religion is also religious in its quality and should be considered as such.
Grappling with the loss o f faith is indeed a religious wresding, and the literature produced by
Jewish writers who lost their faith should be considered religious literature, in spite o f its secu­
lar context. See Kurzweil, Sifrutenu Hahadash; Alan Mintz, “Banished from their Father’s Table”:
Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Pinsker,
"Old Wine in New Flasks."
47. The notion of the "Hebrew literary republic" is developed in Miron, Boa Layla, 9-19.
48. See Alan Mintz, "Hebrew Literature as a Source o f Modern Thought," in Translating
Israel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 227-242.
j \ \ fy r * | t
.1 ’ i. 1 A I I. V

SECULAR JEWISHNESS IN
THE DIASPORA TODAY
Probably the most secular Jewry in the world is in the Slavic areas of the former
Soviet Union. Prevented by the authorities from learning about Judaism or practic­
ing it easily for about seventy years, Soviet Jews developed a surprisingly strong
sense of Jewish identity, abetted by the state's official identification of them as such.
But it was an identity without cultural content. Using the largest surveys ever taken
of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry, Zvi Gitelman explores what being Jewish means to
Jews who do not practice Judaism. Now that official identification by nationality
has been abolished in Russia and Ukraine, and none of the successor states to the
USSR pursue anti-Semitic policies, will Jewish identity survive? What will be its
content and how will its boundaries be drawn?
Turning to American Jewry, Calvin Goldscheider's provocative chapter chal­
lenges three widely held beliefs: American Jews' religious commitment is declining,
their sense of ethnic identity is weakening, and their secular culture is disappear­
ing. Goldscheider argues that what sustains the ethnic and religious continuity of
American Jews are communal institutions and social and family networks.
Institutions are able to construct new forms of Jewish cultural uniqueness that
redefine the collective identity of Jews. Jewish values are the sources of continuity
and are anchored in the structural underpinnings of communities. The family may
be the most important of those institutions.
The most radical separation of Judaism from Jewishness is found in secular
Judaism. There are several types of secular Judaism. Adam Chalom uses textual and
sociological analysis to discuss secular humanist Judaism. Secular Judaism uses cel­
ebration and study, not prayer, to articulate a cultural-ethnic Jewishness. Chalom
describes the types of people who are drawn to secular humanist Judaism and the
ideological debates that take place in the movement.
 Jewish Identity and Secularism in
Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine

ZVI GITELMAN

Being Jewish has meant different things at different times to different people.
Reiterating the observation of Melville Herskovits, "no word, one may almost con­
clude, means more things to more people than does the word ‘J e w * •. . Of all
human groupings, there is none wherein the problem of definition has proved to be
more difficult than for the Jews."1 Not only are the Jews difficult to define, using
conventional terms for different types of groups, but, like many other groups they
redefine themselves with some degree of regularity. Jews confound conventional
social science wisdom in two ways: (i) they were probably a nation before print cap­
italism, pace Benedict Anderson, and before print;2 (2) They don’t fit the usual cat­
egories neatly: race, nation, ethnic group, religion. Both these exceptions are due to
the antiquity of the Jews, with relatively modern categories not able to capture
them easily. Academics especially need to be reminded that these categories are
invented—or, to put it more fashionably, constructed. They do not exist in nature
but are designed by humans to make sense of and bring order to social phenomena.
Therefore, if a collectivity does not fit neatly into one or another category—if it
cannot easily be put into the pigeonholes marked "race,”3 "ethnic group," "nation"
or "religion”—it is not the group that is problematic and lacking but the categories
and the larger conceptual system of which they are a part.4 Perhaps the difficulty in
classifying Jews helps explain diminishing interest in them in academic research,
where a holy trinity of race, gender, and ethnicity has become so popular. Probably
a more important reason is the fact that in Western societies most Jews have moved
into the mainstream, even the "establishment,” and that, for some reason, makes
them less interesting to sociologists, psychologists, historians, and those engaged in
“cultural studies.”
Nevertheless, there remains an urge to classify in order to understand.5 That
urge is no less strong among members of the group itself than among those who
would analyze it. As Michael Meyer has noted, “Long before the word became fash­
ionable among psychoanalysts and sociologists, Jews in the modern world were
obsessed with the subject of identity. They were confronted by the problem that
Jewishness seemed to fit none of the usual categories."6 Perhaps this is because
Jews emerged in the ancient Near East, where religion and ethnicity were not dif­
ferentiated. When Jews were emancipated in eighteenth-century Western Europe,
 242 ZVI GI T E LM A N

the distinction between these two categories began to be made and, for the first
time, Jews could choose not to be Jewish or to be Jewish and something else. Jews
have struggled ever since to define themselves and establish whether they are a
race, religion, ethnic group, nation, or a cultural group. Are they a chosen people
or humanity's misfortune? This has not been just an academic exercise, since iden­
tity has attitudinal and behavioral consequences. Perhaps that is why “few subjects
arouse so much passion and misunderstanding as the identity and status of the
Jewish people."7
Discussions about the nature of the Jews are directly relevant to the question of
secular Jewishness, because if being Jewish means only practicing the religion
known as Judaism, there can be no secular expression of Jewishness. On the other
hand, if being Jewish means belonging to an ethnic group, "nationality,” or
“nation," religion may be irrelevant. But does being Jewish ethnically admit of
being Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, etc., religiously? If not, and if Jewishness is a
fused ethnoreligious concept, in which one must not be a practitioner of Judaism
but cannot practice any other faith, can one element of the fusion exist without the
other, not so much in an abstract logical sense but in a practical way? Can self­
described Jews be part of a religious community only, as Reform Judaism asserted
in the nineteenth century, or part o f an ethnic or cultural community that has no
religious component and yet is distinctly and recognizably Jewish?
One way to answer such questions is to engage in logical, abstract argumenta­
tion about categories and their contents. Another is an empirical path wherein one
examines historically how Jews have defined themselves and acted as Jews. In this
chapter, we follow the latter. For most of world history, Jewishness was expressed
in religious modes and categories. In modern times, several modes of Jewishness
were devised. The content of Jewishness was shifted from religion (Judaism) to lan­
guage by Yiddishists and Hebraists, to territory by Zionists and some others, and to
culture by still others. This was the outcome of secularization, a term debated
almost as much as “Jewish.” We take it to mean the separation of ideas, activities,
or things and institutions from their religious meanings.8 Secularization need not
mean the abandonment of faith, though it can include it, but a process wherein reli­
gion no longer is the primary driving force of thinking and acting. Religion is not
omnipresent in daily life but is either abandoned or compartmentalized to a greater
or lesser extent. Judaism becomes relegated to specific places (synagogues,
temples) and times (holidays) with clearly religious rituals rather than being a con­
stant guide to life. Therefore, secular expressions of Jewishness can be conceived as
attempts to rescue the feeling of being Jewish and the contents of Jewish cultures
from its separation from Judaism, the religion. Secular, but not necessarily antireli-
gious, alternatives to expressing Jewishness were proposed that did not depend on
theistic beliefs. For example, the Yiddishist ideologue Chaim Zhitlovsky claimed
that a "complete revolution . . . the secularization of Jewish national and cultural
life,” had occurred and had been made possible by the substitution of Yiddish lan­
guage and culture for religion. "The great significance of this Yiddish culture
sphere is that it has succeeded in building a ‘spiritual-national home,' purely secular,
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 243

which can embrace Jews throughout the world.” (Whether Zhitlovsky seriously
thought that Sephardic Jews would adopt Yiddish, or whether he simply ignored
their existence, is not clear, but telling.) For Zhitlovsky, Yiddish had become the
content of Jewishness: "The Yiddish language form becomes for us a content of
great weight, a fundamental.”9 Thus, for the first time, language was identified as
the "distinctive characteristic” or "epitome of peoplehood” of the Jews. As it
turned out, Yiddish was overwhelmed by socially more powerful languages in the
Americas, Western Europe, and South Africa, and was being challenged by local
languages in Eastern Europe, but then it was literally dealt a death blow during the
Shoah.
During those years of mass murder, most of the adherents of secularist expres­
sions o f Jewishness were killed, and their ideologies mostly went with them. In
Western Europe and North America, though not in Latin America, Jewish ethnic­
ity was expressed mostly in religious forms, and it is not always easy to distinguish
form from content. However, in the eastern part of Europe one may still find the
largest concentration of self-conscious Jews, outside of Israel, who are not consis­
tent and committed practitioners of Judaism but who have surprisingly strong
Jewish feelings or awareness of being Jewish. Jews in Russia and Ukraine today con­
stitute an unusual Jewish collectivity. If ethnicity consists of content and bound­
aries,10 then the ethnicity of Soviet Jews was defined since the 1930s much more by
boundaries than by content. Neither language, nor religion, nor dress, nor foods,
nor territory (despite the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast' in
Birobidzhan) marked them off from other Soviet citizens. Rather, it was state-
imposed identity and social perceptions. Despite the long-standing denial by
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin that Jews are a nation, in 1918 for reasons that are
still unclear, the Soviet government classified Jews as a natsional’nost’ or ethnic
group, one of well over a hundred such groups. After 1932 all urban residents had to
carry an internal passport in which one's official "nationality” was recorded on the
fifth line, which became notorious as the piataya grafa, because it could serve to
make distinctions, often invidious, among individuals and peoples. Anyone who
had two Jewish parents was classified as a Jew, irrespective of his or her subjective
feelings of belonging, language, residence, religion, or desires. The very strong
urge not only to acculturate (that is, to drop Jewish culture and acquire Russian or
other cultures), but also to assimilate (that is, to change one’s very identity from
Jewish to Russian) was blocked by the state-imposed category o f “Jewish”—this by
a state committed to Marx’s vision of a world without nations, to Lenin's notion of
sliianie, or fusion of nationalities, and to the abolition of ethnicity as a bourgeois
construct used to divide the working class. One of the many ironies of Soviet
Jewish history is that the Soviet state preserved the Jewish identity of millions. This
was complemented by popular perceptions and anti-Semitism, so that even thor­
oughly acculturated Jews could not assimilate.
At the same time as the boundary between Jews and others was maintained,
and even strengthened, the content of Jewishness was being emptied. Official
attacks on Judaism, Hebrew, Zionism, and the traditional shtetl way of life of the
 244 ZVI GITELMAN

1920s eradicated much of the traditional small-town Jewish way o f life. Beginning
in the mid-i92os, but ending about a decade later, some made efforts to create a sec­
ular, socialist, Soviet culture based on a de-Hebraized Yiddish language, which was
also purged, as much as possible, of religious ideas and even terminology. The
Soviet Union became the only state in history to fully fund a network of over a
thousand Yiddish elementary schools—to what extent they were also Jewish is
arguable—along with newspapers, magazines, theaters, and scholarly research
institutions that conveyed a secular, antireligious Yiddish culture. However, many
Jews rejected this secular substitute for the Jewish culture they and their ancestors
had known on two grounds: (1) for those still clinging to tradition, this was an
ersatz and even inimical culture; (2) for those aspiring to upward vocational, politi­
cal, and—as they saw it—cultural mobility, Yiddish was the culture of the out­
moded, backward prescientific shtetl, whereas Russian culture was a world culture
that in its Soviet form stood for science, technology, rationality, and progress.
Purposive programs o f cultural and societal transformation were comple­
mented by the consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization and the
mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Jews to places beyond the old Pale of
Settlement. The social and cultural effects of this migration were not much differ­
ent from those resulting from the transoceanic voyages of the relatives and friends
of the Jews of the Russian Empire. Language, clothes, foods, mores, vocations
were changed, and the traditional barrier against marriage with non-Jews was
increasingly breached. By 1936, 42 percent of Jewish men and 37 percent of Jewish
women in the Russian republic who married that year married non-Jews. In the old
Pale areas of Ukraine and Belorussia, the percentages were much lower (15 percent
in Ukraine for men and women; in Belorussia, 13 percent for men and 11 percent for
women).11 Paradoxically, the rise of intermarriage rates occurred at the same time
as grassroots anti-Semitism became more visible.
Following World War II, state-sponsored anti-Semitism reached its peak, and
the remnants of Soviet Yiddish culture were destroyed. A sense of Jewishness was
now maintained almost exclusively by boundaries, not cultural content, though
there were still subtle cultural markers that set Jews off from others, such as urban­
ity, aspirations for higher education, close families, more amicable relations
between spouses, and perhaps lower levels of alcoholism.

After the Soviet Union

Though Nikita Khrushchev and his successors ameliorated the position of the Jews
somewhat, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his policy of perestroika in the
late 1980s, there was still not a single Jewish school of any kind in the country. The
only Jewish newspaper had few pages, was published in Siberia (Birobidzhan), had
a small circulation, and could not be read by most Soviet Jews since it was in
Yiddish. The literary journal Sovetish haimland that had begun publishing in 1961 ini­
tially had a circulation of 50,000 but ended with 7,000, a substantial portion o f
which were sent abroad. About ninety synagogues existed for a population o f
about 2.5 million Jews. Teaching Hebrew was generally treated as a subversive
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 245

activity, and after 1967 there was hardly any contact with Israel, although the Jewish
state was regularly excoriated in the mass media. Thus, when the USSR broke up in
1991, there was little “thick” Jewish culture available to the Jews of the successor
states. Yet, as then the second largest Diaspora Jewish population, and probably
now the third or fourth,12 post-Soviet Jewry is a significant part of world Jewry.
Post-Soviet Jews have opportunities to fill the boundaries demarcating their
Jewishness with content. Ethnic and religious “entrepreneurs” are offering a variety
of forms of Jewish living and expression. What conceptions of Jewishness prevail
among Russian and Ukrainian Jews? How do they mesh with those held in most
other parts of the Jewish world, including Israel, and what do the similarities and
differences portend for post-Soviet Jewry and for its relationship with world Jewry?
In sum, what do the Jewish identities of these people mean to them and what are
the practical consequences of these identities?

Identities
Identity is widely discussed in recent years in both social sciences and the humani­
ties.13 Identity is “a person's sense of self in relation to others, or . . . the sense of
oneself as simultaneously an individual and a member of a social group.”14 Who
you think you are or how others define you often determines how you behave and
even how you think. This is crucial for individuals and for groups. Yugoslavia's fate
illustrates how much it matters whether people who inhabit a state think of them­
selves as members of that state. The Yugoslav case also affirms that identity is not
fixed but shaped by culture and events, by situations, ideology, and geography.
When Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians identified less as Yugoslavs and reverted to
earlier identities, which were ethnic and not civic, the Yugoslav state collapsed and
its peoples could no longer live together. The failure to convince people that they
were first and foremost Yugoslavs, and only then Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, et al., pre­
cipitated the fall of Yugoslavia.
Another example of the importance of identities is the fate of the USSR.
Despite claims in the 1970s,15 the Soviet regime failed to create enough “new Soviet
men” or a new type of ethnos, the Sovetskii narod (people)—a meta-ethnic, civic
identity—so that when the center collapsed in 1991, what was left were fifteen states
at least nominally ethnically defined. The system broke down because of economic
and political failure. The centrifugal forces in the Baltic, west Ukraine, and perhaps
the Caucasus were not strong enough to tear the system apart by themselves.
Indeed, Belarus and the Central Asian states, and perhaps Russia, were forced into
independence because the center collapsed, but once it did, the shards of the USSR
were shaped by the answer to the question “who and what are we?” As we observe
the Middle East and other parts of the world, we see that it can make an important
difference for a state's policies whether it sees itself as Islamic, Christian, Jewish,
democratic, part of the developing world, etc.
Identity means two things: (1) who you think you are, how you label yourself; (2)
what you think you are, what the label means. I will focus more on the second than
the first, more on what is a Jew than on who is a Jew, on what one thinks it means to
 246 ZVI G I TE L M A N

be Jewish rather than whether one is or is not. In the former Soviet Union, the state
no longer determines and assigns nationality; people are free to define themselves
and choose their identities. The emigration of large numbers of Russians,
Germans, and Jews compels Russia, Germany, and Israel to deal with the status and
identities of the emigrants and decide what responsibilities the states, and their
people, have toward them. The question o f what and who is a Jew is therefore not
an academic one but a matter o f practical policy, with profound personal and col­
lective consequences.
To understand the Jewish identities of post-Soviet Jews and find out what they
mean to them, I and two colleagues in Moscow—Vladimir Shapiro and Valeriy
Chervyakov—conducted a survey of 3,300 Jews in three Russian and five Ukrainian
cities in 1992/93, followed by a survey of the same number (but not the same
people) in 1997/98 in the same cities—Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg
(formerly Sverdlovsk) in Russia; Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Odessa in
Ukraine. Of course, the very fact that we were able to survey ethnic attitudes and
that Russian and American researchers could cooperate in studying sensitive issues
showed how much had changed since the Soviet period, when any empirical
research on ethnic issues was deemed sensitive and possibly subversive.
Cooperation in such research with bourgeois scholars was unthinkable. Any study
of Jews and Jewish issues was also highly suspect. So this was a highly unusual
opportunity to study the outlooks and conceptions of Jews in Russia and Ukraine,
and it resulted in the largest such study ever undertaken. The geographical-cultural
diversity of these cities and the fact that they include more than half the Jewish
population give us confidence that the survey represents the broad cultural and
geographical spectrum of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry. Face-to-face interviews
were conducted in respondents' homes by interviewers of Jewish origin trained
specifically for this project. Interviews generally lasted between one and one-and-a-
half hours and were conducted in Russian. Respondents had to be at least sixteen
years old, but there was no upper age limit. In 1992/93, our sample replicated very
closely the gender and age distribution of the Jewish population over sixteen years
of age in each city. Because of the lack of updated information, in the second wave
we structured the local samples according to the 1989 age-gender distributions. The
only important change from 1989 is the dramatic aging of the Jewish population
owing to the very unfavorable birth-to-death ratio and the emigration of younger
people, as can be seen in tables 13.1 and 13.2.
In the absence of a list of Jewish residents of each city, we created a “snowball”
sample. First, in each city we created a group, or panel, of several dozen Jewish
men and women of different ages and socioeconomic status. We did not interview
them but asked them to name several of their relatives, friends, and acquaintances
whom they considered to be Jewish and who would tentatively agree to be inter­
viewed. Then we asked these friends and relatives for their agreement to be inter­
viewed and asked them to identify, in turn, their friends and relatives who might be
interviewed. Only one member of each family could be interviewed. The panels
informed us of the gender, age, type of employment, and professional background
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 247

Table 13 . i D istribution o f Russian Jew ish urban population

Survey sample in
Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Age 1989 cmsui Microcensus Ekaterinburg
S e l e c t e d c it ie s
(Moscow, St.
P etersbu rg ,
E k a t e r in b u r g ) 1994 R u ss ia 1992-93 1997-9
R u ssia (% ) (%) (%) (%) (%)

Men
16-19 3.0 30 2.9 2.9 2.6
20-29 9-9 93 79 9-3 9.2
30-39 14.7 13.1 11.8 14.0 13.4
40-49 16.6 16.7 17-7 16.2 16.7
50-59 21.7 22.2 20.6 22.3 22.5
60 and older 34-1 35-7 39.1 353 35.6
Women
16-19 2.6 2-5 2.6 2.6 2.5

20-29 7.9 7-3 6.5 7.0 7.1

30-39 11.9 10.5 9-5 10.9 10.5
40-49 13-6 13-5 14.6 13-2 13.2
50-59 18.1 17-7 17.3 18.7 18.0
60 and older 45-9 48.5 49-5 47.6 48.7

of potential respondents. This allowed us to adjust the sample structure constantly

to conform to the parameters of the overall Jewish population over sixteen in
each city.
Some might question the reliability of the responses we obtained on the
grounds that former Soviet citizens are more likely than most to tell interviewers
what they believe are the politically correct answers and those the interviewers
would like to hear. We have several reasons to believe the responses were sponta­
neous and authentic. First, our response rate was very high. Remarkably few
people declined to be interviewed, suggesting that there was no fear of participat­
ing. Second, interviewees were told that the sponsors of the survey were the
Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of
Michigan, not a state organ or Jewish organization. Third, respondents were prom­
ised anonymity (though several protested and said they wanted people to know
what they thought). Finally, the issues that we probed were not political or related
 248 ZVI GI TE LM AN

Table 13.2 Distribution of Ukrainian Jewish urban population

Survey sample in Kiev,
Odessa, Kharkiv, Lviv,
Age 1989 census Chernivtsi
S elected c it ie s
(K ie v , O d e s s a ,
K h a r k iv , L v iv ,
U k r a in e (% ) C h e r n iv t s i ) (% ) 1992-93 (%) 1997-98

Men
16-19 3.6 3.6 3-7 3-3
20-29 10.5 10.7 10.5 10.9
30-39 15-9 15-7 16.0 16.2
40-49 15.5 16.0 16.0 16.i
50-59 21.3 21.1 20.5 20.4
60 and older 33-2 329 33-3 331
Women
16-19 2.9 30 3.0 3-3
20-29 8.4 8.7 8.8 8.3
30-39 12.4 II .9 12.5 12.5
40-49 13.0 13.2 13.2 12.9
50-59 18.5 18.1 17.7 17.6
60 and older 44-8 45.1 44.8 45-4

to income but those on which the interviewees, for the most part, had never had a
chance to express an opinion. We also do not see any item on which there is a large
proportion of people giving what could be construed as “correct” or "desirable”
answers.

The Meanings o f Jewishness in Russia and Ukraine

The dominant conception of Jewishness held by people in Russia and Ukraine who
consider themselves Jews or who were registered as such by the Soviet authorities
is that it is, in Soviet terms, a nationality (ethnic group). It is a category that is sec­
ular and ethnic, having little to do with Judaism, and is based on biological descent
and an ineffable feeling of belonging. Jewishness is not based on language, terri­
tory, customs, or behaviors. For most Russian and Ukrainian Jews, sentiment and
biology have largely replaced faith, Jewish law and lore, and Jewish customs as the
foundations of their Jewish self-conceptions. Table 13.3 shows the components of
Jewishness as understood in Russia and Ukraine.
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 249

Table 13.3 Components of Jewishness as understood in Russia and Ukraine

Russia (%) Ukraine (%)
1992 1997 1992 1997

1. Pride Be proud of one’s 33-3 22.9 29.4 31.4

nationality
Defend Jewish honor 27.1 17 3 21.4 19-7
and dignity
Not hide one's 0.5 20.8 0.7 13-6
Jewishness
2. Judaism Believe in God 2.7 4.2 3-9 5-4
Know the basics of 1.0 0.7 0.2 0.3

Judaism 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.1

Circumcise one's son 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1
Observe kashrut 0.0 0.3 O.3 0.4
Observe the Sabbath 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.1
Attend synagogue
3. Jewish Remember the 73 I5.I I5.5 21.5
knowledge Holocaust
Know Jewish history 5.0 2.8 3.O 2.1
Know a Jewish 2.2 1.2 1.6 0.4
language
Give children Jewish 1.2 0.8 2.0 1-3
education
4. Social Marry a Jew 1.8 1.1 1.1 0.8
closeness to
Jews
Help other Jews 7.1 4-3 6.6 6.4
Feel a tie to Israel 4.2 4-3 5-7 2.8
5. Other Share Zionist ideals 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.2

Judaism has little to do with Jewishness, which is secular and ethnic, though
people are uncertain as to whether one can practice another religion and still be a
Jew. Judaism as organized religion plays no role as a “facade for ethnicity” among
Russian and Ukrainian Jews. This does not mean that they are without faith. They
are without religion. Contrary to official Soviet hopes and expectations, belief in God
was not eliminated, but religion as systematic theology, doctrines, and practices
was largely repressed and hence is unknown. Substantial proportions o f our
 250 ZVI G I T E LM A N

Table 13.4 Belief in God

Russia Ukraine
1992 (%) 1997 (%) 1992 (%) 1997 (%)

Yes, I believe in God 18.3 22.8 24.2 31.0

I am inclined to such belief 239 25.3 29.7 24.4

I am not inclined to such belief 19.1 17.2 18.3 17.1
I do not believe in God 31.1 28.3 23.2 22.1

Don't know/no answer 6.4 7.6 4.8 5-5

respondents believe in God, but even those who believe do not draw a connection
to behavior or even beliefs prescribed by Judaism. A young Ukrainian Jew explains:
“Believing is something spiritual, something completely not understandable . . . It
doesn't obligate you to anything . . . but religiosity is simply a religious person . . .
who is obligated to carry out certain things.” 16 On the other hand, nonbelief does
not point to militant activity against religion as the secular religion of Communism
would prescribe.
Table 13.4 shows the answers to our straightforward question: do you believe
in God?
Both among the general population of Russia (and some areas of Ukraine), as
well as among Jews, it is the oldest and youngest who are most inclined to theistic
belief. Among our respondents, those under thirty and, to a lesser extent, those
over seventy, are the most inclined to belief. A Russian study maintains that Russian
religiosity has two sources: traditional religious upbringing, which is what explains
the beliefs of people over sixty, and what they call "avant-gardism," the desire by
young people to be associated with Western civilization, which they perceive as
standing for “democracy, human rights, the market, multiparty systems” and reli­
gion.17 We cannot tell whether this is true of the Jewish respondents or whether
their greater inclination to belief is due to their being targeted by “religious entre­
preneurs” or "missionaries"—or some other reason.
But mark well that belief in God does not necessarily imply practice of
Judaism. We asked which religion people preferred, and the results are summarized
in table 13.5.
Even among religious believers—those who believe in God and also prefer
Judaism to other faiths—Judaism is not the major mode of expressing their
Jewishness. Having faith does not imply that one follows God-dictated command­
ments (mitzvot), nor that one sees God as intervening in human history, two major
premises of Judaism. In the year preceding the survey in Russia in 1992, only about
half the religious people fasted on Yom Kippur or participated in a Passover seder,
rituals generally observed by Reform as well as Orthodox Jews. Significantly, in 1997
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 251

Table 13.5 A ttractiveness o f religions in Russia and Ukraine

Russia Ukraine
1992 (%) 1997 (%) 1992 (%) 1997 (%)

None 36.3 441 38.5 36.6

Judaism 33.2 26.7 37-6 32.4
Christianity 13-2 13-7 10.7 15-5
Islam 0 0 O .I O .I

Other 4-4 54 0.0 2-9

Don't know/No answer 13.0 10.2 9.6 12.6

in Russia the proportion of religious people fasting on Yom Kippur increased only
slightly, but nearly three-quarters participated in a seder, probably because these
gained in popularity as communal events. In Ukraine, larger proportions (two-
thirds to three-quarters) of religious Jews fasted on Yom Kippur, but only about 60
percent participated in a seder.18 Only slightly more than a third of those we call
'‘religious" observe the Sabbath in either country; less than a quarter say they
observe the dietary laws. In Russia in 1992 only 14 percent said they observed
Shabbat and 10 percent said they observed kashrut.19 In all, only half of those affirm­
ing Judaism observe the religious laws about which we inquired, and a quarter do
not observe them at all. Clearly, the term "religious Jews" does not necessarily
describe people who adhere to traditional behavioral norms.
Jewishness is an ethnic matter. Russian and Ukrainian Jews accept without
question the Soviet conception of Jews as a nationality. However, they are uncer­
tain about the Zionist conception of Jews as a nation. Thus, they have a parochial
or localized conception of Jewish nationality. The old slogan of the American
United Jewish Appeal, "We are one,” would be viewed skeptically by post-Soviet
Jews. They feel much closer to Russian non-Jews in their own city than to Georgian
or Mountain Jews. They are uncertain whether even Belorussian and Ukrainian
Jews, from whence most Russian Jews derive, are part of the same group (not cate­
gory—the Soviets made sure they were in the same category). In contrast to
Russian Jews, more Ukrainian Jews feel affinity for Russian Jews than they do for
local Russians, and they feel greater affinity for local Russians than for Ukrainians.
Like Russian Jews, they are distant from the non-Ashkenazic Jews, though less so
than Russian Jews. Other measures also indicate that Jews in Ukraine have a more
powerful sense of Jewish kinship and affinity than Jews in Russia.
Jewishness is seen as biological. It is an inherited trait, and for most it is suffi­
cient to inherit it from one parent; it does not matter which one (cf. halacha).
Conversion to Judaism is not necessarily entry into the Jewish collectivity, contrary
to Jewish norms where conversion confers membership both in the religion and the
 252 ZVI G I T E L M A N

people (“amaich ami ve-elohayich elohay”—your people are my people and your God
my God, says the biblical Ruth). From the viewpoint of the post-Soviet Jew, this
separation of religion and ethnicity makes sense, since if Judaism is not an essential
ingredient of Jewishness, why should acquisition of the former confer the latter?
One respondent defines ethnicity so independently of religion that for her practic­
ing Judaism does not make one a Jew (contrary to Jewish tradition, which admits
any practitioner of Judaism to the Jewish people).20 “I can be a French person and
practice Judaism,” she maintains, "but that does not make me a Jew.”
Jewishness is based on feeling and is much more primordial than instrumental.
A woman in Kiev, in her eighties, says she is not particularly proud to be Jewish and
years ago might have preferred to be registered in her passport as something else,
observes no Jewish holidays, and is not at all active in Jewish public activities. But
she says, “There must be something hidden deep inside which is very hard to char­
acterize. For example, when I hear Jewish songs, they touch something deep inside
of me, even though I grew up in a Russian environment. We didn’t observe any spe­
cial traditions or anything. And even so something touches me.” Two-thirds of 1992
Russian respondents say that “to feel oneself a part of the Jewish people” is what
being Jewish is all about, and nearly as many say that “to be proud of the Jewish
people" is the essence. The most frequent way of expressing these sentiments
among our Ukrainian respondents in 1997 is “to feel yourself part of the Jewish
people [narod]” or “to feel an inner kinship with Jews, to feel we’re one family.”
Some find it difficult to express: "this is an internal feeling. It’s difficult to transmit
[peredat'] it.” One respondent expresses his being a Jew in a classic primordialist
manner: “I feel that way and I don’t need any additional reasons for it,” or, "I feel
like one and that’s that" [w oshchushchaiu takovym, i vsyo/] Even starker is the state­
ment by an elderly lady in Ukraine: “Kto Evrei, to znaet chto on Evrei, i vsyo”
[Whoever is a Jew knows that he /she is a Jew, and that’s that]. Finally, a resident of
Kharkiv, where we found the lowest levels of Jewish commitment, describes a
Jewish seminar he attended. “A euphoria enveloped me because nowhere and never
before, in no group and not in my student days did people understand me so well
and I understand them. Well, I .. . This is—mine! I felt it! Explain it? Explain it
exactly? I don't know, I can’t. . . . Maybe it's a mentality. . .. People find it simpler
to find a point of contact with each other.” This bears out the idea that in the
Former Soviet Union one does not have to do anything Jewish, one simply is Jewish.
This parallels what Fran Markowitz found among Soviet Jewish immigrants in
Brooklyn, New York. “[For them] being a Jew is an immutable biological and social
fact, ascribed at birth like sex and eye color. It may or may not include belief in the
Jewish religion, but being a Jewish atheist is not considered a contradiction in
terms. Being a Jew is self-evident. . . . [whereas] In American society where one’s
Jewishness is not self-evident, it is necessary to demonstrate, both to the gentile
world and the Jewish community, that one is a Jew by doing specifically Jewish
things.”21
Biology and sentiment may seem to be very different bases for ethnic attach­
ment.22 After all, “blood” is physical, concrete and determined, whereas sentiment
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 253

is abstract and not preordained but developed through experience. The post-Soviet
Jew might argue that “blood” is a prerequisite to feeling; if one—such as a con­
vert—does not have the genetic background, he or she will not have the sentiment.
This is not necessarily true, but what may be implied is that without a family back­
ground one does not have memories of Jewish events, foods, music, and rituals.
One has not usually associated more with Jews than with others and has therefore
not picked up on the "glances of recognition” by which members of a group
acknowledge their ties to one another. In any case, in the former Soviet Union,
where converts to Judaism are far more rare than in the United States, it is far more
likely that one who "feels" Jewish has some Jewish ancestry, and vice versa.
Perhaps the feeling or knowledge that one is Jewish is externally generated,
mostly the product of anti-Semitism. About 55 percent of the Russian respondents
in 1997 cite anti-Semitism as the major factor contributing to their consciousness of
being Jewish, though nearly as many cite reading books as the major factor. In
Ukraine the figures are 40 and 44 percent, respectively. In both countries, fewer than
10 percent mention religion.
Even if encounters with anti-Semitism—or other forms of racial, religious, or
ethnic discrimination and insult—are rare or occasional, and even if they have not
been recent, they may leave a deep psychological mark. Slights experienced in
childhood may have long-term effects. Alla Rusinek recalls her school experience in
Soviet times. She describes her dread each year when on the first day o f school each
child had to announce his or her name, nationality, and father’s occupation. "She
asks my nationality and then it begins. The whole class suddenly becomes very
quiet. Some look at me steadily. Others avoid my eyes. I have to say this word . . .
which sounds so unpleasant. Why? There is really nothing wrong with its sound,
Yev-rei-ka (Jewish girl]. But I never heard the word except when people are cursing
somebody. . . . Every time I try to overcome my feelings, but each year the word
comes out in a whisper: Yev-rei-ka.”23
Especially when being Jewish does not usually involve extensive knowledge of
Jewish culture, practice of the Jewish faith, or observing Jewish customs, labels largely
devoid of content take on greater importance to the one labeled—and libeled. In the
absence of positive cultural content or even sentiment, association of Jewishness with
anti-Semitic feelings and expressions can produce a Jewish consciousness that is largely
negative, a feeling that being Jewish is a curse that should somehow be removed
(some, referring to the fifth line of the passport, call themselves "invalids of the fifth
category”). Social scientists have long observed the phenomenon of selbsthass,
self-hatred, especially frequent among minorities of one sort or another, and its
occurrence among Jews is well known. It leads to alterations of one’s comportment,
language, culture, name, and even physiognomy in attempts to change one's outward
appearance and hence perceived identity.24 In Soviet times, people adopted various
strategies to change their names, fairly easily done, and their passport registration, a
much more challenging process and one often accomplished by bribery
Strikingly, most people we interviewed associated their realization that they
were Jewish with negative feelings. We asked an open question: "What were the
 254 ZVI G I T E LM AN

circumstances in which you became aware of your Jewishness?" We coded the

responses as having positive, negative, or neutral valences. In Russia in 1992, 45 per­
cent associated negative emotions with their awareness of being Jewish, and 54 per­
cent did so in 1997. In Ukraine, the figures were 60 percent and 52 percent. Only a
quarter to a third of our respondents identified the circumstances in which they
learned their nationality as positive (the rest were coded as “neutral," either with­
out any emotional connotation or with a mix of positive and negative emotions).
Some typical responses were the following: "I was the only Jewish girl in the class;
the teacher and pupils acted toward me not with hostility but as toward someone
strange; this influenced me a great deal." “I glanced for the first time at the class
register under the rubric 'nationality' and discovered that all the others had the
proud 'R' [Russian] next to their name, while only I had the slimy 'E' [Evrei, Jew].”
In almost all age groups the formation of Jewish identity is associated with neg­
ative rather than positive circumstances, but those under thirty and over seventy
reported the most positive feelings about the discovery of their Jewishness. The
oldest cohort was exposed to more positive expressions of Jewishness while grow­
ing up in the 1920s, when many Jewish traditions were still being observed and non-
traditional Soviet Jews were attending Yiddish schools or reading Yiddish
newspapers and books and felt themselves equal to other Soviet peoples. At the
other end of the spectrum, the youngest people came to social and ethnic aware­
ness largely in the post-Soviet period. This may tell us that Jewishness has lost much
of its stigma since the collapse o f the Soviet Union.
For some, Jewishness means possessing certain traits—though they are not
essential components of Jewishness. Urbanity, education, a penchant for intellectu­
ality, “decency,” and tight-knit families are among these. An oft-repeated theme is
that Jews have been socialized to study and work harder so that they can overcome
the barriers placed in their paths. Another is that Jewish families are tighter knit,
more caring, and that women are better treated in them. A Kievan feels that “Jewish
mothers are more caring. They care more about their children, they watch over
them more carefully. .. . Some people say that Jewish husbands are more devoted,
more caring, more sympathetic, but I think that’s all in the past. Nowadays every­
one is the same—that’s been my experience.”

How Being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine Differs

In Soviet times, Jewishness was a largely private matter. Whereas in many Western
societies Jewishness is demonstrated and affirmed in public—in synagogues, at
meetings, rallies, dinners, and celebrations—in the Soviet Union it was manifested
almost exclusively within the family, at home: in conversations among friends and
families, in reading, in holiday celebrations of some sort. While in the United States
organizational affiliation, Jewish philanthropy, and public observance o f Jewish
rites and holidays are the ways in which many express their Jewishness, these were
impossible in Soviet circumstances. There was not a single Jewish organization to
belong to, nor, aside from a few synagogues, was there an opportunity to give
money to Jewish institutions or causes.
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 255

This is changing. As a result of communal reconstruction and the activity of

ethnic entrepreneurs, many of them foreign, Jewishness is now being “performed
in the public space,” in the jargon of the “cultural studies” academics. Jews get
together for communal sedarim, for Hanukkah and Purim parties, for fund-raising
dinners and meetings, and they do so in places that have become defined as Jewish
venues—synagogues and former synagogues, Jewish clubs, and the like.
Perhaps a more important and less changeable way that post-Soviet notions of
Jewishness differ from Jewishness elsewhere is willingness on the part o f a substan­
tial portion of our respondents to cross two major boundary lines long essential to
the definition of Jewishness and which still hold true for Israeli and Diaspora Jews:
practicing a faith other than Judaism and marrying non-Jews. When Judaism was
the defining hallmark of Jewishness, conversion was the definitive step out of the
Jewish fold. At least from medieval times, converts were regarded as "traitors, as a
weak and dispensable element, or simply as lost souls whose choice to leave the
fold excised them conclusively from Jewish history," and certainly the Jewish com­
munity.25 After religion and ethnicity were made distinct, the theoretical possibility
of Jews practicing another religion was raised. The Brother Daniel case in Israel in
the 1960s demonstrated the impossibility of Jewish ethnicity coexisting with active
non-Jewish faith, when the Supreme Court of Israel, a secular body, ruled that a
person could not be a practicing Catholic (the Carmelite monk Brother Daniel) and
claim Jewish identity by virtue of ethnicity (he was born Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew, in
Poland). A recent study among "moderately affiliated [American] Jews” found that
the taboo on practicing a faith other than Judaism still holds, even while the stric­
ture on intermarriage is weakening. In the United States, Jewishness is often
defined by the fact that it is not Christianity: "The only way to lose this Jewish
birthright is to choose a different religion for oneself.”26
Today there is considerable uncertainty among Jews in the Former Soviet
Union about that. Some are quite unequivocal that practicing Christianity removes
one from the Jewish fold. As one Ukrainian Jew put it, "As far as I know, a Jew is a
Jew because he professes Judaism. As soon as he ceases to do so, he ceases to be a
Jew!” Or as someone from Odessa put it, quoting his landsman Isaac Babel, “a Jew
who rides horses has become a Russian, not a Jew. . . . A Jew is a person who feels
Jewish. If he crosses over to another religion that means he no longer feels Jewish
and doesn’t want to be one.” Zhanna P., bom in Moscow in 1956 and now in Israel,
says: "A Jew who is an atheist—this is normal. But to convert to another religion—
this is betrayal of your people."
But with just as much certainty, a Muscovite who says she is unsure how to
define a Jew asserts, "There is a difference between a Jew-by-nationality [Evrei] and
a Jew-by-religion [Iudei]. So a Jew can take on a different religion." This is quite log­
ical: if Jewishness is ethnicity only, then one should be able to practice whatever
religion one wishes without affecting one's ethnicity. In Russia and Ukraine, in both
years of the survey, only 30-39 percent are prepared to condemn Jews who "convert
to Christianity.” While only 4 percent condone this, 60 percent say they would nei­
ther condone nor condemn Jews who become Christians. As one St. Petersburg
 256 ZVI G I T E LM AN

member of Betar put it, “A Jew who practices a religion other than Judaism is not a
bad Jew—it’s his choice . . . If you want to believe in Jesus Christ, believe, please,
who forbids you to do so?” Between 39 percent (Russia, 1997) and 48 percent
(Ukraine) would neither condone nor condemn “Jews for Jesus," though fewer than
10 percent would support them.
Conceptions of Jewishness among post-Soviet Jews are bound to be inconsis­
tent and uncertain because the Soviet state defined Jewishness as an ethnic form
without content. Jews had no access to teachers, texts, and the Jewish cultures in
the rest of the world. What remained were beliefs and practices of grandparents
and great-grandparents, but these were often challenged by the state (e.g., attitudes
toward religious observance or intermarriage) and by the society (attitudes toward
Christianity and to Jews themselves). Therefore, Jews in the Former Soviet Union
can be unaware of strictures against practicing other religions or marrying non-
Jews. They attach no particular value to Jewish languages or texts. What seems to
stir more people than anything else are music and foods, probably because they
arouse pleasant associations with a dimly remembered past and a vaguely imagined
culture and way of life. Moreover, Philip Converse long ago pointed out how atti­
tudes are illogically and inconsistently held.27 The messages brought by religio-ethnic
entrepreneurs may confuse post-Soviet Jews even more, since, like most people,
they gain only partial, fragmented—and sometimes inconsistent and self-contra-
dictory—information. They may be told different things by Jewish Agency and
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) representatives, or by Orthodox and
Reform.
A third possible explanation for the range of understandings o f Jewishness is
individuation. There has been no religious authority or authoritative ethnic leader­
ship for decades, and each person is free to compound his or her own Jewishness.
There were no books of formulae available, and those available now recommend
different compounds. No person or institution can impose rules and norms, though
Orthodox groups do this indirectly when they turn non-halachic Jews away from
educational institutions or religious ceremonies. Especially in the post-Soviet
atmosphere, where there is strong animus against doctrine and dogma, a single
Truth and its presumptive guardians and interpreters, people are more inclined to
pick and choose that which attracts them rather than submit to a discipline. This is,
o f course, true among Jews elsewhere. A classic example is Conservative Judaism.
The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) shows that only 29 percent of
Conservative Jews buy kosher meat only and 28 percent had two sets o f dishes,
practices unambiguously supported by Conservative teaching.28 We can expect
even less adherence to principle, dogma, and tradition among those who have not
been taught the basics of Jewish faith and culture.

Interm arriage
The traditional ban on marriage to non-Jews, which goes back centuries, is, perhaps
along with the dietary laws, the most explicit expression of the Jewish sense of
apartness.29 “A Jew converted to another faith ceased to be regarded as a Jew by all,
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 257

except for some non-Jewish religious fanatics or racists from the Spanish
Inquisition to the Nazis."30
In the Soviet Union at the same time, “the media and arts presented interethnic
marriages as a sign of progress and of the younger generation's liberation from
outdated views.”31 A well-known work on the "revolutionizing" of the shtetl
includes a story of love and marriage between a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish
man (in Russian).32 A Yiddish poem about a Jewish girl who went to fight in the civil
war and comes home with a Russian boy celebrates the passing of the matchmaker
(shadkhn) and rabbi, and the triumph of interethnic love.

Mame, frey zikh haynt in tsveyen

Nokh a kind kh'hob dikh gebrakht,
Zest dem bokher mit der peye
Mit oygn, shvartse vi di nakht
-vu zhe hostu im genumen
un vos iz er far a mench?
O.nit keyn shadkhn, nit keyn mume
un keyn rov hot undz gebensht!
[Mama, today you have a double joy
Because I've brought you another boy
See this fellow with the wave in his hair
With eyes as dark as the night.
‘Where did you get him
And what kind of person is he?'
Without a matchmaker, without an “auntie"
And no rabbi blessed us!]33

Today the taboo of intermarriage is weakening in most diaspora countries. In

Sweden, where a third of those affiliated with Jewish communities are married to
non-Jews, half the Jews surveyed in 1999-2001 agreed that a Jew should marry a Jew,
30 percent disagreed, and 20 percent were neutral.34 In the United States the 1990
NJPS found that 52 percent of Jews who had married since 1985 had married non-
Jews. In September 2000, a national study by the American Jewish Committee
found that 56 percent said they would not be pained if their children married a gen­
tile (16 percent “see such marriages as a ‘positive good' ”); about three-quarters said
that rabbis should officiate at Jewish-gentile marriages; and only a quarter agreed
that the gentile partner should be encouraged to convert to Judaism.35 While nearly
everyone in a sample of United Synagogue (Orthodox) members in London agreed
with the proposition that “a Jew should marry someone who is Jewish,”36 among
our respondents in the Former Soviet Union only 37-43 percent agreed in 1997 that
a Jew should choose a spouse of the same nationality, a decline from 1992.37 Robert
Brym's and Rozalia Ryvkina's 1993 survey of a thousand Jews in Moscow, Kiev, and
Minsk found that “only 26 percent said that it was important for Jews to marry
other Jews."38
 258 ZVI G1 T E L MA N

Table 13.6 Preferences for Jew s as spouses, Russia 1997

Age Jews No difference Others Don’t know

16-29 35-3 58.3 2.2 4-3

30-39 37-2 55.8 0.0 7.1

40-49 41.6 52.8 0.5 5-1

50-59 41-3 52.3 1.1 5-3

6 0+ 48.8 48.5 0.2 25

Table 13.7 Reaction to child marrying a non-Jew, Russia 1997

Age Positive (%) Indifferent (%) Negative (%) Other (%) Don’t know (%

16-29 20.0 40.0 0.0 2.0 20.0

30-39 6.2 60.0 13.8 31 16.9

40-49 5-3 57.4 22.3 7-4 7-4

50-59 12.2 58.5 14 6 7-3 7-3

6 0+ 0.0 73.3 20.0 0.0 6.7

In the Former Soviet Union, intermarriage, high mortality, and low fertility are
undermining the biological base of Jewishness. In 1988, 48 percent of Soviet Jewish
women and 58 percent of Jewish men who married, married non-Jews.39 In 1993 in
Russia, only 363 children were born to two Jewish parents. In 1996 in Russia, Jewish
mothers gave birth to 930 children, only 289 of whom had Jewish fathers.40 By 1996,
the frequency of mixed marriages among all marriages in Latvia involving Jews
was 85.9 percent for males and 82.8 percent for females, and in Ukraine this indica­
tor was 81.6 and 73.7 percent, respectively—levels much higher than those of the
Russia's Jews in 1988.
Among our respondents, even among those advocating marriage only to Jews,
a third claim they would not be upset were their children to marry non-Jews. Thus,
the historic boundary setting Jews off from others is rapidly blurring. This can be
seen vividly in responses to our questions regarding attitudes toward intermar­
riage, illustrated in tables 13.6 and 13.7.
In no age group—not even the most elderly, among whom intermarriage rates
are low—is there anything approaching a majority opposed to intermarriage, and
among no cohort is there a majority willing to endorse the more benign proposi­
tion that Jews should marry Jews.
Attitudes toward ethnically mixed marriages vary clearly (and predictably) by
age. The younger one is the more inclined to say that it is not necessary for Jews to
choose a Jewish spouse. But even in the oldest cohort, those over sixty, only 57-58
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 259

percent in 1992 and 42-49 percent in 1997 believe that Jews should marry other
Jews.41 This is in line with the general trend between 1992 and 1997 toward greater
acceptance of interethnic marriage. Indeed, as we have seen, these attitudes are in
line with the actual tendency of Jews to marry non-Jews. One does not know, of
course, whether the change in attitudes toward intermarriage preceded its actual
rise and facilitated it, or whether increased intermarriage is due less to attitudinal
change and more to the shrinkage of the Jewish marriage market and the ongoing
weakening of tradition. I suspect that, faced with the reality of intermarriage,
people's attitudes have changed accordingly, as they have apparently in the United
States and other countries.
Rare is the person who says, as a twenty-three-year-old from Chernivtsi did,
that Jews should marry other Jews in order to preserve Jewish culture through the
generations. A woman of exactly his age and from the same city disagrees. Love,
she says, “is a great feeling and it doesn’t check one's passport before it comes.”
Besides, she argues, mixed marriages produce genetically stronger children. An
older woman observes, “If you love someone you cannot start thinking about the
fate of the Jewish people.” Many are aware of the tension between personal inter­
ests and those of the Jewish collective. An elderly man whose wife is Russian and
whose children do not consider themselves Jewish—"I failed to preserve their
Jewishness”—says he is concerned about intermarriage because it reduces the
diversity of humankind and “that’s abnormal.” “On the other hand we are dealing
with the fate of two concrete people who fell in love with one another—one
Jewish, the other Russian. How can we force them not to marry each other? Here
we have the conflict between the fate of a person and the historical fate of one's
people.” Finally, a young woman who is very active in Jewish affairs bemoans the
loss to “the Jewish tribe” that intermarriage causes but argues that “the main thing
is happiness. If I meet a person with whom I will be happy for the rest of my life,
it's not that important what 'nationality' he is. . . . After all, we are not living with
the sole purpose of the revival of the Jewish nation. We are regular people and we
want to be happy. And if the only person who can make us happy is o f another
‘nationality,’ then why not?” Some struggle between what they see as their respon­
sibility to the collective Jewish entity and their personal desires. In the United States
fewer and fewer people seem to pay any attention to the former as the “me gener­
ation” engages in the pursuit of individual happiness. It may be that similar ten­
dencies are appearing in the postcollectivist societies of the Former Soviet Union.
In the Former Soviet Union, there are some who advocate intermarriage. A poet
in St. Petersburg insists that “I don't suffer from xenophobia” and “children born in
mixed marriages are smarter and more alert. And that's a fact! And that's good!
And it doesn't matter to me [that they become less Jewish].” A man whose parents
were die-hard Communists and named their children after Lenin and other revolu­
tionaries thinks the more intermarriage the better, since it will reduce ethnic con­
flict and hatred between nations.
People married to Jews are the one group firmly committed to the idea that
Jews should marry other Jews. Of those married to Jews, no matter what their own
 260 ZVI G IT E LM AN

origins, 70-80 percent believe it necessary for Jews to marry other Jews. And those
who are fully Jewish and are married to Jews are twelve times as likely to oppose
their children intermarrying as those who are married to non-Jews. It seems that
once an intermarriage occurs, opposition to it naturally weakens, and it will be
more likely to occur in succeeding generations, perhaps not so much because there
will be less explicit opposition to it than because if one's parents have intermarried
there would seem to be little reason not to do so.

Conclusion
The Jewish identities o f Russian and Ukrainian Jews are stronger than many would
suppose but are problematic in several ways. First, they may be uniquely the prod­
uct of a Soviet environment that no longer exists. Ethnic identities are often refor­
mulated and "Jewish identities in general are to be understood as constructs in
response to the circumstances."42 But Soviet circumstances were unique, not repli­
cated even in allied socialist countries where nationality was not registered in one's
identity document. In some of those socialist countries, Jewishness was defined as
a religious, rather than ethnic, category. In the USSR, state-imposed identity and
governmental anti-Semitism combined with grassroots anti-Semitism to maintain
boundaries between Jews and others long after Jewish content had largely disap­
peared from Jewish ethnicity. Russia and Ukraine no longer impose official ethnic
identity, and none of the successor states to the USSR pursues an anti-Semitic pol­
icy. Popular anti-Semitism, which may wax and wane, may be the last barrier to
assimilation. So some of the ingredients of Soviet Jewish identity have been
changed, though of course descent and feelings o f kinship remain.
Second, the conceptions o f being Jewish held by the great majority of Russian
and Ukrainian Jews are so different from those prevailing in most o f the rest o f the
Diaspora and in Israel that sensitive questions of mutual recognition inevitably
arise. The criteria for admission to the Jewish club that are set in the Jewish world,
though by no means uniform, are not shared by a significant portion o f post-Soviet
Jewry. Thus, the gatekeepers of the Jewish club, whoever they may be—this, of
course, is one of the most contentious issues in world Jewry today—have three
choices when Former Soviet Union Jews present themselves for admission. The
gatekeepers can abandon the rules altogether and adopt the suggestion of some of
our respondents that "whoever thinks he or she is a Jew, is a Jew." Thus, they would
have to abandon any external criteria and include as Jews “Jews for Jesus” or anyone
else declaring himself or herself a Jew, thus perhaps pleasing postmodernists for
whom “essentialism" is a cardinal sin but emptying the category “Jew" of any
meaning at all.43 In addition, the gatekeepers can modify the rules for admission,
but if they do so extensively the rules can become so loose as to be inoperative or
meaningless. Or, they can stick to the rules they have evolved and turn away many
who seek admission. The rejected may form their own, competing "Jewish club,”
or they may turn away from the gates altogether and seek membership elsewhere.44
Third, and most generally, the challenge of developing a viable Jewish identity
in Russia and Ukraine is formidable because it involves constructing a secular
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 261

Jewish identity. Amyot and Sigelman find that “Religious devotion . . . is the main
pillar of Jewish identity in America, although close interpersonal relations with
other Jews also play an important role." To the extent that American Jews reject
“ethnoreligion,” they also renounce their ethnic heritage.45 This is not the issue in
Russia and Ukraine. One must assume that for the foreseeable future most Jewish
identities in the European Former Soviet Union will be secular and that interper­
sonal relations with other Jews will decline along with the sheer number of Jews—
unless Jewish communities develop.
Secular Jews have long struggled with the problem of maintaining ethnicity
divorced from religion and its symbols. This is clearly brought out in Shachar
Pinsker’s chapter. A secular Yiddish educator observed that when the “secular ship"
floats on the “Jewish sea," one permeated by religion, "it turns out that one floats
empty, with no ballast. And a terrible similarity appears between secularism and
simple assimilation."46 Some secular Jews substituted ethics for religion, others the
Yiddish language and culture, and still others a modern Jewish state. All found
themselves reverting to symbolism emanating from religious sources, though they
tried to infuse the symbols with new emphases. As one of the ideologists of secu­
lar Yiddishism put it, "if the Jewish Passover is kept because a people liberated itself
from slavery and went out to seek a land in which to live its own life freely—though
the whole story of the Exodus from Egypt is perhaps only a legend—the festival is
of . . . great human significance. . . . On the understanding, of course, that there
must be no supernatural elements introduced into the observance, nothing of con­
fessional faith."47 A Hungarian Jew explains the dilemma this way: "We want to
belong without taking on the belief. We do not want to practice religion itself
but we want to belong. . . . It is incredibly difficult, we are Negroes without the
color."48
Almost from the establishment of the State o f Israel "toda’a Yehudit” (Jewish
consciousness) and the Jewish identity of the nonreligious population have been
the subjects of discussion. Israeli educators continue to wrestle with the problem
o f how to convey Jewish history, literatures, values, and traditions to nonreligious
students. In America, where Yiddish, the basis of East European secularism, yielded
to English, Jews have maintained Judaism as a facade for ethnicity. One sociologist
asserts that "Jewish self-definition is that of a religious group but few Jews are
believers in any significant way. As a Reform rabbi stated the problem, ‘Prayer is
still the pretext, but the justification of the act, the real purpose, is now achieve­
ment o f community, the sense of belonging.’ ”49 In Britain, too, according to a soci­
ologist, "a feeling of belonging, rather than belief in God, is the driving force
behind synagogue attendance.”50 In the Soviet Union, because religious forms were
unacceptable, they did not serve the same purpose as they do in America or Britain.
Secular, socialist, Soviet forms devised by the Jewish Sections o f the Communist
Party were seen as ersatz and never replaced Judaism-based symbols and rituals.
Nevertheless, secular Jewish identity in the Soviet Union was powerful because it
was maintained by a combination of official designation, anti-Semitism—whether
state-generated or grassroots—and a feeling of apartness, especially after the 1930s.
 262 ZVl G IT E LM AN

Today, as we have seen, some of these elements o f identity are gone. Is popular
anti-Semitism, which waxes and wanes, the last basis of Jewish identity? Aside from
its being a completely negative cause of such identity, is it sufficient to maintain it,
or can one now escape since the boundaries o f ethnicity have become permeable
and blurred as a result of intermarriage?
One possibility is that rituals and customs that are religious in origin may be
maintained and elaborated as ethnic ones. For example, as in the case o f Passover
cited earlier, holidays and observances based on historic events can be observed
without imputing religious meaning to them. Even holidays that do not claim to
commemorate historical events, such as the High Holidays, have been used by sec­
ularists as occasions for reflection, rededication, or celebration o f milestones.
Whether these have the emotional power and personal significance that traditional
holidays do is questionable. Moreover, there is a big difference between feeling a
sense of obligation, being commanded to do something, and exercising an option
to participate or not in an available activity.
In the USSR individuals marked Jewish holidays in their own way. Matzah, dif­
ficult to obtain, would be eaten along with ham. On Rosh Hashana, toasts would
be made with vodka to the Jewish people and the new year. Traditional foods, one
of the last ethnic markers to disappear, would be served on holidays, though few
people knew the origins of the traditions. Thus, individualized, highly unorthodox
ethnic—not religious—rituals took place. In the future, such rituals and obser­
vances, now observed more in public, may become the ethnic culture o f post-
Soviet Jews.
The interesting question becomes what new understandings will emerge. Is
thin culture or symbolic ethnicity transferable across generations? How far can
something that is already thin be stretched across generations before it breaks
entirely? In other words, can Jewishness survive without Judaism? As Henry
Feingold has written, “The survival dilemma posed by secular modernity is
whether the corporate communal character at the heart of Judaism can accommo­
date the individuation that is the quintessence o f modem secular life. It is whether
Jewishness can become again a living culture without its primary religious ingredi­
ent, Judaism, from which it has become separated."51 Secular Jewishness as it
emerged just a century ago was based on a common language (Yiddish), territorial
concentration of Jews (the Pale, ethnic neighborhoods), a high degree of concen­
tration in certain professions (needle trades, artisanal trades, commerce and trade),
and a strong sense of being part of a distinct Jewish entity. Jews were kept distinct
both by anti-Semitism or—for immigrants—by their cultural apartness, and by
their sense of cultural superiority in many countries (Lithuania, Russia, Romania),
though in others they strove to the “higher culture” as they perceived it (France,
England, Germany, the United States). Today in the United States, Yiddish and
Hebrew are no longer used or even posited as ideals, Jewish neighborhoods no
longer concentrate as high a proportion of the population or do not exist alto­
gether, and the Jewish working class has disappeared, and with it Jewish dominance
of certain trades. Thus, the bases of secular Jewishness have eroded or disappeared.
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 263

In such conditions, can there be a viable, transferable secular Jewish life? Today
“classical Jewish identity has . . . broken up (if not also broken down) into multiple
Jewish identities, some of which . . . trace connections with the more distant past,
while others [as in the Former Soviet Union] define themselves more directly and
explicitly through highly contemporary issues." Thus, if the classical definition of
Jewish identity is discarded, as Jonathan Webber has noted, "there would appear to
be no simple, self-evident, and adequate formula to replace it with.”52
Perhaps the search for a single definition of Jewish identity is fruitless in an age
of individuation, the erosion of communal authority, and the decline of humility.
Empirically, one might expect post-Soviet Jewry to be populated by the same types
of Jews and their commitments that one observes in diasporas generally. It seems
to me that there are four ways in which Western Jews relate to their Jewishness, and
they may appear in the Former Soviet Union, though in different proportions.
There are those who are indifferent or even hostile to their ethnicity; there are the
occasional participants in ethnic or religious public and private events; a third
group is involved in Jewish life, but it is a part-time avocation and not their domi­
nant identity; finally, there are people who are driven by Jewishness and for whom
it is their primary identity (some are "professional Jews” and others are laypeople
intensively involved and who see many issues through the prism of their
Jewishness).
Whatever will emerge on the communal and individual levels, after a hiatus of
more than seventy years, it is at last solely up to the Jews of the Former Soviet
Union themselves to choose whether and how to be Jewish.

NOTES
1. Melville Herskovits, “Who Are the Jews?” in The Jews, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1949), 4:1168,1153.
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
3. For an overview o f discussions o f Jews as a race, and a rejection o f the category o f race
altogether, see Steven Kaplan, “ If There Are No Races, How Can Jew s Be a Race?” Journal of
Modern Jewish Studies 2, no. 1 (2003): 79-96.
4. A handy Russian-language compendium o f such terms and their meanings is
V I. Kozlov, ed., Etnicheskiei i etno-sotsial’nye kategorii (Moscow: Statistika, 1995).
5. It is instructive that a book that was for many years one o f the most popular general
histories o f the Jews among Jews themselves, Nathan Ausubel's Pictorial History o f the Jews
(New York: Crown, 1953) begins with a discussion o f whether Jews are a race, nation, religion,
people, etc.
6. Michael Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modem World (Seattle: University o f Washington
Press, 1990), 3-
7. Anthony D. Smith, “The Question of Jewish Identity," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7:219.
8. C. John Somerville, "Stark's Age of Faith Argument and the Secularization of Things: A
Commentary," Sociology o f Religion 63 (Fall 2002): 361-372.
9. Chaim Jitlovsky, “What Is Jewish Secular Culture?" in The Way We Think, ed. Joseph
Leftwich (South Brunswick, NJ: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 1:92, 93, 95.
10. Stephen Cornell, "The Variable Ties That Bind: Content and Circumstance in Ethnic
Processes," Ethnic and Racial Studies 19 (April 1996): 265-289.
 264 ZVI GI T E LM A N

11. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve o f the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Centre for
Research o f East European Jewry, Hebrew University, 1998), 74.
12. There are probably about 400,000-450,000 self-defined Jews in the former Soviet Union;
260,000 in the Russian Federation; 103,600 in Ukraine; and about 25,000 in Belarus, with smaller
populations in the other former Soviet republics. The "enlarged Jewish population" in Russia,
which includes all non-Jewish members in the household is estimated to be 520,000. The differ­
ence between “core” and "enlarged" Jewish populations is testimony to very high rates of inter­
marriage. See Sergio Della Pergola, Jewish Demography: Facts, Outlook, Challenges, Alert Paper
No. 2 (Jerusalem: Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, June 2003), 3.
13. A recent critique of the category argues that since those who use it "routinely
categorize . . . it as multiple, fragmented, and fluid [it] should not be conceptualized as 'iden­
tity' at all. Identity as a category of analysis and as a category of practice is often blurred," and,
in general, " ‘identity’ tends to mean either too much or too little." "Self-understanding" or
“self-conception" are proposed as more useful terms. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper,
"Beyond ‘Identity,’ ’’ Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47. I do not accept the general thrust of
their critique, though I agree that "self-understanding" or "self-conception” are just as useful as
"identity," and perhaps more so. Another critique of “identity” comes from Mervyn Bendle,
who claims, inter alia, that it is “a cultural and historical artifact peculiar to Western modernity
and reflecting underlying processes of social change.” ‘‘The Crisis of 'Identity' in High
Modernity," British Journal o f Sociology 53 (March 2002): 1-18.
14. Perry London and Allissa Hirschfeld, "The Psychology o f Identity Formation," in Jewish
Identity in America, ed. David Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (Los Angeles: Wilstein Institute o f
Jewish Policy Studies, 1991), 33.
15. E. Bagramov, “The Soviet Nationalities Policy and Bourgeois Falsifications," International
Affairs (Moscow) (June 1978): 76-85. See also M. I. Kulichenko, “Socialism and the Ethnic
Features o f Nations: The Example o f the Peoples o f the Union o f Soviet Socialist Republics,”
in Perspectives on Ethnicity, ed. Regina Holloman and Serghei Arutiunov (The Hague: Mouton,
1978), 426-427.
16. Rebecca Golbert, “Constructing Self: Ukrainian Jewish Youth in the Making,” (Ph.D.
diss., St. Cross College, Oxford University, 2001), 217.
17. Ibid., 14. The “traditionalist" believers have no such attachment to Western values. In
fact, they display more authoritarian oudooks than others. They prefer strong government and
have positive views of Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Communist Party (14-20).
18. It is not clear why this should be so. Perhaps in the 1990s the communal seder was not as
popular or widely available in Ukraine as in Russia.
19. It is difficult to explain the substantial increase in observance of these two rituals in
Russia over the five years. It may be that "observing Shabbat and kashrut" may mean to respon­
dents that occasionally they might engage in a ritual such as lighting Sabbath candles or eating
kosher food, the kind of behavior that may well take place in communal settings and at the
kinds of events that increased substantially in the 1990s.
20. See Zvi Zohar and Avraham Sagi, Giyur vezehut Yehudit (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik and
Machon 1 Iartman, 1994).
21. Fran Markowitz, "Jewish in the USSR, Russian in the USA: Social Context and Ethnic
Identity," in Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish
Experience, ed. Walter Zenner (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 81, 83.
22. Prof. Ben Nathans of the University of Pennsylvania first brought this point to my
attention.
23. Alla Rusinek, Like a Song, Like a Dream (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 20.
24. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
25. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts Jrom Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 2.
 Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine 265

26. Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in
America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 23. In MessianicJudaism (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1999), Carol Harris-Shapiro seems to suggest that American Jews should consider includ­
ing “messianic Jew s" in their fold (see 184-189).
27. Phillip Converse, "The Nature o f Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Ideology and
Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964).
28. Jack Wertheimer, Jew* in the Center (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000),
25, table 1.2.
29. See Genesis 24 and 27, Numbers 25, the prohibitions on marrying Moabites and
Ammonites (Deuteronomy 23), and the condemnation o f King Solomon for having taken non-
Jewish wives. O f course, the Bible recounts many instances o f marriage between Jew s and non-
Jews. Todd Endelman suggests that prohibitions on intermarriage in antiquity probably reflect
greater contact between Jews and their neighbors and that when Jew s were ghettoized it was
less necessary to make such prohibitions explicit. Intermarriage became a serious issue again
when Jew s were emancipated and could mix with non-Jews.
30. Baron, "Problems o f Jewish Identity," 33.
31. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jew ry on the Eve o f the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic
Profile (Jerusalem: Hebrew University and Yad Vashem, 1998), 70.
32. V. Tan Bogoraz, Evreiskoe mestechko v revoliutsii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926), 84. I am
indebted to Dr. Anna Shternshis for this reference.
33. "Gitele fun Komsomol," Yungvald 2 (1925): 10 -11 (my translation). This material was also
kindly supplied by Anna Shternshis, who points out that "there are definitely more intermar­
riage stories in Russian than in Yiddish. It is in fact hard to find one: most Yiddish stories are
about friendship between children (Jews and gentiles), joint work, but not going out or m arry­
ing. The same is true about Yiddish songs o f the period—they like to get married without the
rabbi, but to a Jew. However, working together with a non-Jew is fine.” Shtemshish, personal
communication, May 29, 2002.
34. Dencik, "Jewishness in Post-Modernity."
35. American Jewish Committee, 2000 Annual Survey o f American Jewish Opinion, New
York, 2000, 3.
36. Stephen Miller, “ Religious Practice and Jewish Identity in a Sample o f London Jew s," in
Jewish Identities in a New Europe, ed. Jonathan Webber (Oxford: Littman Library, 1994), 199.
37. In 1992, 53-55 percent agreed that one should marry a Jew. The decline over five years
reflects the increase in intermarriage and the greater proportion o f endogamous marriages
among émigrés.
38. Robert Brym and Rozalina Ryvkina, The Jews o f Moscow, Minsk and Kiev (New York: New
York University Press, 1994), 26. Only 69 percent o f the sample said they were registered as jew s
in their passports (see 22-23). One can reasonably assume that if a higher proportion o f regis­
tered Jew s had been interviewed, the proportion opposed to intermarriage would have been
higher.
39. Mark Tolts, "Jewish Marriages in the USSR: A Demographic Analysis,” East European
Jewish Affairs 22, no. 2 (1992): 8.
40. Mark Tolts, "Recent Jewish Emigration and Population Decline in Russia,” Jrw s in Eastern
Europe 35 (Spring 1998): 21.
41. The question was worded in Russian as "Kak vy schitaete, evreiam sleduet vybrat’ sebe
suprugu(a) svoei natsional'nosti, drugoi natsional'nosti, ili eto ne imeet znacheniia?"
42. Jonathan Webber, "M odem Jewish Identities," in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed.
Jonathan Webber (London: Littman Library, 1991), 82.
43. Rebecca Golbert criticizes scholars for "their applications o f certain fixed external crite­
ria to measure the self-identification o f Jew s" and for “ignoring] the local frameworks for self-
definition and cultural continuity and the multi-linear processes o f sodal and political change
which have affected them.” She performs an important service in pointing out that there are
 266 ZVI G I T E LM AN

subtle ways in which Jewish identity was expressed and transmitted in the Soviet Union, but in
her zeal to establish a new paradigm she ignores the questions o f multigenerational viability
and external validation or recognition o f the peculiarly Soviet—or, Russia, Ukrainian, etc.—
identity that evolved. Rebecca Golbert, "In Search o f a Meaningful Framework for the Study o f
Post-Soviet Jewish Identities, with Special Emphasis on the Case o f Ukraine," East European
Jewish Affairs 28 (Summer 1998): 15.
44. Ronald Suny argues that two different ideas o f nation-making should be distinguished.
"In the first, the nation exists even when people argue about what it is; in time they will get it
right. In the second, the nation is precisely that cultural and political space where people create
and recreate their sense o f who they are. Like culture, it is an arena o f contestation, an argu­
ment about membership and boundaries, o f authenticity. It is in the debate that the nation
exists and is created and recreated." Comment at conference on "A Century o f Modern Jewish
Politics: The Bund and Zionism in Poland and Eastern Europe,” Frankel Center for Judaic
Studies, University o f Michigan, February 15-16,1998. The second notion is compelling, but it
is hard to see how people can be admitted or barred from a "cultural and political space." The
nation is surely an "arena o f contestation," but the contestants must agree on some boundaries
for the arena itself.
45. Robert Amyot and Lee Sigelman, "Jews without Judaism? Assimilation and Jewish Identity
in the United States," Social Science Quarterly 77 (March 1996): 187-188.
46. Yudl Mark, "Yidishkayt un veltlikhkayt in un arum undzere shuln," in Shul-Pinkes, ed.
Shloime Bercovich, M. Bronshtain, Yudl Mark, and Y. Ch. Pomerantz (Chicago: Sholem
Aleichem Folk Institute, 1948), 14.
47. Chaim Jidovsky, "What Is Jewish Secular Culture?" in The Way We Think, ed. Joseph
Leftwich (South Brunswick, NJ: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 1:95.
48. Andras Kovacs, "Antisemitism and Jewish Identity in Postcommunist Hungary,” in Anti-
Semitism and the Treatment o f the Holocaust in Postcommunist Eastern Europe, ed. Randolph
Braham (New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, City University o f New York
and Columbia University Press, 1994), 138.
49. Paul Ritterband, "M odem Times” (unpublished paper, March 1991), 22-23.
50. Miller, "Religious Practice and Jewish Identity," 200.
51. Henry Feingold, Lest Memory Cease (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 8.
52. Webber, "Modern Jewish Identities,” 8.
 yg
lf Judaism, Community, and Jewish
Culture in American Life
CONTINUITIES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

CALVIN GOLDSCHEIDER

Observers and analysts of the American Jewish community have constructed three
flawed but compelling arguments about the Jewish past and present. These argu­
ments have been based, in part, on social science theories, and they have gained
legitimacy in Jewish communities in the United States and around the world as a
basis for policy formation, research agendas, and strategic planning. They are also
consistent with a set of ideological orientations that have been current in the
Jewish community for more than a century. Although somewhat oversimplified,
these arguments can be summarized as follows.
According to the first argument, over the last century Jewish communities have
moved away from a foundation in religion and religious activity toward secularism.
In modem, open voluntary societies, Jews, like others, have become more secular,
less attached to religious activities, religious institutions, and a religious way of life.
Whatever religious orientations their grandparents and great-grandparents had,
contemporary Jews have fewer. Religion is simply less central in their lives today, so
it is argued. Judaism itself, with its associated religious institutions, has become
more secular. Therefore even those who are religiously committed are more secu­
lar than their forebears. This so-called secularization theme has been applied to all
communities of Jews in and outside of Israel.
The second argument, which focuses on the ethnic or "peoplehood” dimension
of Jewish identity, states that Jews in the past had a distinct sense of being a people
apart from the Christian and Muslim societies where they lived—that is, Jews were
a social minority, not only a religious minority. Their minority status reduced
access to social and economic opportunities and involved political constraints and
discrimination in everyday life, at times to extreme levels. However, with the
increasing openness of society, the expansion of political rights, citizenship, eco­
nomic opportunities, and the acceptance of Jews into society, the ethnic compo­
nent of Jewishness has diminished. Like other white social minorities subject to
decreasing discrimination, over the generations Jews have assimilated ethnically
into Western societies. Jews have accepted their new situation and have been
accepted by others. As generational distance from immigrant origins has
increased—fewer and fewer American Jews have grandparents who began their
 268 CALVIN GO L D S CH E ID E R

lives outside of the United States—the ethnic distinctiveness o f American Jews has
faded. Jews have become thoroughly and indistinguishably American.
A third argument flows directly from and combines the secularization and
minority assimilation arguments. It assumes that as religious identity weakens and
ethnic identity fades, the cohesiveness of the American Jewish community weakens.
External stimuli are needed to ignite the dying embers of Jewishness. These sparks
might come from a cultural attachment and pride in a new nation-state (Israel) or
some recognition of Jewish vulnerability to external forces that threaten group sur­
vival. In their anti-Semitic and pro-Israel guises, these external factors tend to be
unpredictable and to remain marginal to the daily lives o f most Jews outside of
Israel. Thus, as secularization diminishes Judaism and assimilation decreases Jewish
ethnicity, few internally generated Jewish values or features o f Jewish culture remain
to sustain continuity of the community or continuity of identity. The Jewish com­
munity in America is therefore characterized only by symbolic religion and sym­
bolic ethnicity. As Judaism and Jewishness fade, according to this argument, nothing
beyond externals can undergird the viability of American Jewish communities.
Hence, some perspectives from social science and history postulate that the
American Jew is vanishing and that the American Jewish community is eroding.1
According to these views, the decline of Jewish communities outside o f Israel is in
sight—if not in the present generation, then soon. These three arguments about
secularization, assimilation, and cultural distinctiveness have in one form or
another informed discussions and analyses of the American Jewish community
over the last decades.
However, a systematic body of evidence challenges the main implications of
these arguments, which do not describe accurately the paths Jewish communities
have taken in modern, open pluralistic societies. Although Jews have clearly assim­
ilated, their communities have not always proportionately weakened, and many
have been strengthened anew. Furthermore, the fundamental dichotomy between
religious and ethnic identity is not as useful among Jews as it may be among other
groups. Because of their ethnic identity and culture, Jews are not simply a religious
group like Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims. But because of their
religious culture, Jewish Americans are also not an ethnic group like Italian
Americans or Hispanic Americans.
Furthermore, because Judaism readily incorporates the secular, the distinctions
between religious and secular identities are also not clear. Empirically, there are mul­
tiple links between religious and ethnic secular indicators of Jewishness, although
Judaism and ethnic Jewishness are not identical. The distinctions between religious
and secular or between ethnic and religious do not neatly distinguish among insti­
tutions of the community. Synagogues and temples have diversified their activities
to incorporate strong ethnic components, and secular Jewish institutions have often
stressed sacred themes.2 So the survival paradigms—the dichotomies of ethnicity
versus religion, minority versus majority—are not very useful as guidelines for
studying contemporary American Jewish communities (if they ever were in the past,
and regardless of their usefulness for studying other groups).
 Judaism and Community in American Life 269

How can we make sense of the historical changes in American Jewish commu­
nities? How can we go beyond current arguments about decay, which cloud our
analyses to new understandings? How do we go beyond the clichés of social sci­
ence, the nuances of assimilation versus transformation, and the rhetoric of opti­
mists versus pessimists that trivialize the basic issues? Indeed we should move away
from the selective truths of Jewish ideology and Jewish organizational propaganda
to delve more systematically into the fundamentals of Jewish continuity and
change in the past and in the future. I aim to move beyond oversimplified demo­
graphic arguments to assess the major forms of “Jewish quality.'' As I have argued
elsewhere, the issues of the American Jewish community are mainly associated
with the quality of Jewish life, and that quality needs to be operationalized, meas­
ured, and analyzed.3

American Jewish Distinctiveness

Instead of asking whether the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Eastern
European Jewish immigrants to America are assimilating, or whether they are sur­
viving as a community (they are doing both), some social scientists have reformu­
lated the central analytic questions about Jews and other ethnic and religious
minorities in the United States: (i) What factors sustain the ethnic and religious
continuity of American Jews in the absence of overt discrimination and disadvan­
tage? (z)What structural and cultural forces sustain continuity in the face of pres­
sures toward the disintegration of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their
communities? The short answer to these questions is that communal institutions
and social and family networks are the core elements sustaining communal conti­
nuity. Communal institutions are able to construct new forms o f Jewish cultural
uniqueness that redefine the collective identity of Jews. Jewish values are the source
of continuity and are anchored in the structural underpinnings of communities.
Three features of social life form the basis for my assessment of the transfor­
mation of American Jews. First, I focus on the structural, not only the cultural, fea­
tures of Jewish communities. Second, I emphasize the contexts (networks and
institutions), not only the values, that distinguish Jews from others. Third, I target
communities and families rather than individuals as themes of interpretation and
analysis. To assess the formation and development of the community over time, I
argue that we need to examine the quality of Jewish communal life in its broadest
meaning. With the emergence of the fourth and later generations, distance from
immigrant origins has faded as the major axis of change in the community.
Although individuals exit and enter the community, the institutions and the collec­
tively shaped culture sustain ethnic continuity and commitments.
Social class and family patterns of American Jewish communities are the core
of generational continuity, and institutions are the sources of the communities' dis­
tinctiveness. Jews have been transformed from an immigrant group defined by a
combination of religious and ethnic distinctiveness to an American ethnic com­
munity defined by a distinctive cultural construction o f Judaism and Jewishness
with central, particularly American features. This transformation makes historical
 270 CALVIN G O L D S C H E I D E R

comparisons by generation particularly problematic and cross-national compar­

isons using similar indicators of continuity distorting. I argue for the importance of
context and structure in shaping comparisons over time. Changes over the life
course as families are re-formed and expand are the bases for exploring group dis­
tinctiveness in a wide variety of social spheres.
Several analytic themes shape my orientation: First, changes over time in the
characteristics of Jews and their communities do not necessarily imply the decline
of the community or total assimilation. There is no simple inference that can be
extrapolated from change to communal continuity. Hence, the identification o f
changes over time may imply the transforming of community but not its disinte­
gration. Second, my focus is on the cohesion of communities, based on the extent
and contexts of intra- and intergroup interaction, along with a shared constructed
(and often changing) culture. Sharing and interaction may occur in specific institu­
tional or religious contexts but are also likely to occur in the daily round of activity
associated with multiple spheres of social activities—work, school, neighborhood,
leisure, and family. Nevertheless, an examination of interaction in any one sphere
may not have implications for interaction in other spheres. Third, time can be
viewed both in terms of generations, historical context, and the life course. I expect
that ethnic and religious identity, at both the individual and communal levels,
varies over time as context changes. The life course is one perspective at the micro
level for studying a variety of unfolding and emerging changes in the context of
ethnic communities.
Wide varieties of structural and institutional features link Jews to one another
in complex networks and mark Jews off as a community from those who are not
Jewish. These features include family and social connections, organizational, politi­
cal, and residential patterns, and religious and ethnic activities that can reinforce
the values and shape the attitudes of American Jews. I will review some of these
core features to identify their role in the integration o f Jews into American society.
At the outset, I reiterate that institutions play a powerful role in ethnic communi­
ties as they continually construct the cultural basis o f community and represent
conspicuous communal public symbols of community. Family and social networks
reinforce shared cultural constructions of Judaism and Jewishness. Declines or
increases in any one sphere do not necessarily imply similar changes in all spheres.
For example, evidence of generational decline in organizational participation or
synagogue attendance does not mean the decline in other forms of communal
activities. Similarly, low levels at some stages of the life course do not necessarily
imply low levels at other stages. Thus we need to examine a variety of social
processes over time to assess future directions in the transformation o f the Jewish
community.

Some Historical Perspective

Examining cross-sectional survey data to understand the transformation o f the
American Jewish community without attention to some historical perspective pro­
vides limited results. Therefore, we will briefly consider the historical context of
 Judaism and Community in American Life 271

American Jewish communities. The immigrant generation at the turn o f the twen­
tieth century could not shed its Jewishness, but it could change it. The foreignness
of the immigrant population, which fit structural and cultural characteristics, pre­
vented or constrained their full assimilation, as did the discrimination they encoun­
tered. Residential, educational, and occupational networks combined with family
and organizational networks to reinforce a cohesive ethnic community. These bases
of cohesion would inevitably change over time as the children of immigrants
moved to new neighborhoods, attended different schools for longer periods of
time, obtained better jobs, and faced the economic depression of the 1930s and war
in the 1940s. Yet the children of immigrants were raised in families which were
cohesive and supportive, where an ethnic language was distinctive, where cultural
closeness to origins was undeniable, and where networks and institutions were eth­
nically based. Together, these powerful elements made the second generation
Jewish by both religion and ethnicity. But their ethnicity (in the sense o f national
origin) was fading and their Jewishness was becoming Americanized. Although
sharply different from the Jewishness of their parents' generation, their children's
Jewishness was clear and distinctive by American standards. The issue of change
and continuity among Jewish Americans, critical for both scholars and the commu­
nity, focuses initially on generations in the sense of closeness to foreign origins and
to length of time in American society. The continuation of integration into the
third and fourth generations, distant from their cultural origins, directly raises the
question about the changing culture (i.e., quality) of American Jewish life.
At work, in neighborhoods, in schools, as well as in religious, political, and
social activities, immigrant Jews and their children interacted with other Jews.
Yiddish and socialist schools competed with public and religious schools for enroll­
ment, and Yiddish newspapers competed with English ones. Credit associations,
landsmanshajtn, and local fraternal and communal institutions were formed and
expanded. Although they were learning English, Yiddish remained the language of
business and social life among Jewish immigrants. Even when their children
rejected Yiddish, it still formed the cultural environment of their upbringing. In the
pre-World War II period, most Jews in America interacted with other Jews in their
community. Jewish families and communities rejected those who, through inter­
marriage or by their behavior, rejected their community. For most Jews, the num­
ber of bases of communal cohesion was large indeed. The overlap of occupation,
residence, and ethnicity was as high in America as anywhere in urban Europe. Jews
left the Old World behind—but not all of it—to become American. Their
Jewishness was conspicuous by their background, culture, and social structure.
What happened to the community and to ethnic and religious identity among
the descendants of immigrants? Clearly the third and later generations faced a very
different social and economic context. The role of the educational and occupa­
tional opportunity structure was to shape generational social and residential mobil­
ity. In turn, stratification—the concentration of Jews in particular social
classes—became one of the conspicuous forms of communal cohesion in the
United States. I will briefly examine the education and occupation o f Jews using
 272 CALVIN G O L D S C H E ID E R

evidence from 1910, 1970, 1990, and 2000 national data sources (U.S. censuses and
sample surveys) on Jewish men and women in comparison to other white, non-
Hispanic populations.

Education
The story of the changing educational profile of the American Jewish community
from the turn o f the twentieth century to its end is for the most part clear and well
known. Jews in the United States have become the most educated group of all
American ethnic and religious groups, of all Jewish communities around the world,
and of all Jewish communities in recorded Jewish history. This is quite a feat, con­
sidering the low level of education of the American Jewish community three to
four generations ago. This accomplishment reflects both the value that Jews place
on education and the educational opportunities available in the United States. Over
90 percent of contemporary American Jewish young men and women go to col­
lege, and their parents' generation also attended college, forming two generations
of college-educated men and women. Moreover, many have grandparents with
exposure to at least some college education. Increases in the educational level of
the American Jewish population have been documented in every study carried out
over the last several decades, and the level attained is a distinguishing feature of
American Jewish communities. Therefore, it may be considered a core value of
contemporary American Jewish culture.
National data sources allow us to analyze this dramatic change in detail.
Elsewhere I have used the 1970,1990, and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys
along with comparable data on the non-Hispanic white population from U.S. cen­
sus and Current Population Survey data to construct the educational attainment
levels of American Jews born in the pre-1905 period to the 1960s and 1970s. These
cohorts show how school enrollment ranged throughout the twentieth century,
and the reconstructed data highlight several important features o f the educational
transformation of American Jews.4
First, cohorts of Jewish men and women born before 1905 had relatively low
levels of education, which increased first for men and then for women. Viewing
these cohorts as the experience of a generation, Jewish men and women born in
the first decade of the twentieth century aggregated at low educational levels. Even
those who completed high school were exceptional within the Jewish community
as well as among their non-Jewish age-peers. In contrast, those who were raised at
the end of the twentieth century are college graduates; those who do not finish col­
lege have become clear exceptions among Jews. In contrast, those born in the 1920s
and 1930s were much more educationally heterogeneous than cohorts born before
or after them. These middle cohorts lived through a period of transition in the
schooling of American Jews, where the rate of educational change and the choices
about whether to continue schooling at various stages were at a maximum. These
contrasts clearly reflect the transformation from a generation characterized by low
levels of education to a generation where two generations of Jews are character­
ized by college levels of education. The transitional generation (born in the
 Judaism and Community in American Life 273

1920S-1930S) also exhibited the greatest tension between foreignness and American
integration. Furthermore, generational conflict as revealed by levels of educational
attainments was greatest during this middle period.
These educational data refer to individuals, retrospectively constructed, with
generation and compositional changes inferred. At the turn of the twentieth cen­
tury, census data on those whose mother tongue was Yiddish (or who lived in a
household where Yiddish was spoken) had distinctively lower school enrollment
and literacy levels than comparable white Americans. By the end of the twentieth
century, Jews had become a community with distinctively high levels of education,
higher than other groups in the United States. The overall increase in the educa­
tional levels over the last several decades has only marginally reduced the gap
between Jews and others. On the whole, the Jewish community has become con­
centrated at the upper end of educational distribution, reducing the educational
heterogeneity among Jews, and thereby creating a new structural basis of commu­
nity and commonality between generations.

Occupation
Consistent with the literature and with educational patterns, the 1910 census data
show that a majority of American Jews were either skilled or semiskilled workers.5
Few were professionals or managers. When Jews worked in white-collar jobs, they
gravitated toward "sales" work. In 1910 Jewish women were heavily concentrated in
these same categories of blue-collar work, and few held professional and managerial
jobs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, both Jewish men and women were
therefore distinctive in their occupational concentration in sales and factory work.
In the two generations until 1970, the Jewish occupational pyramid was
upended: it shifted from having 55 percent of males in worker or service positions
in 1910 to having 69 percent in professional and managerial positions in 1970; from
73 percent of Jewish women with jobs classified as worker or service categories in
1910 to 46 percent in professional and managerial jobs and 37 percent in clerical jobs
in 1970. Between 1970 and 2000, even this category was formed by an increase in
professional occupations among Jewish men and women, along with a rather sharp
decline (over 50 percent) in managerial positions among Jewish men.
These radical shifts over time in the occupational structure and in type of jobs
have resulted in new forms of Jewish occupational distinctiveness in the United
States in comparison to white, non-Hispanics in metropolitan areas. Particularly
conspicuous is the greater concentration of Jews not only in professional jobs, but in
specific occupations. Without going into detail, these data show an enormous trans­
formation in occupational concentration with new forms of distinctiveness.
Considering the decline in self-employment of American Jews from around 40 per­
cent to 15 percent (1910-2000) and the convergence between Jews and other males,
the Jewish level continues to be distinctive. Clearly the meaning of self-employment
has also radically changed. Self-employed professionals and self-employed tailors
not only require different levels of education, but also are likely to have different
implications for generational occupational transfers and for ethnic networks. Both
 274 CALVIN G O L D S C H E I D E R

occupational diversity and new types of occupational concentration emerged

among Jews by the 1970s, patterns that continued through the end o f the twentieth
century.

Implications o f Stratification for Jewishness

There are two views on the implications of these changes in education and occu­
pation for the continuity of the American Jewish community. On the one hand,
increases in educational attainment and the diversification of occupational types
result in greater interaction with "others" who are not Jewish. These new contexts
of interaction between Jews and non-Jews challenge the earlier segregation of Jews
and, in turn, the cohesion of the Jewish community. The institutional contexts o f
schooling and the workplace may also expose Jewish Americans to new networks
and alternative values not ethnically or religiously Jewish. The combination of
interaction and exposure may result in a diminishing of the distinctiveness of the
community over time through family changes and generational discontinuity.
Therefore stratification is often associated with new intergroup interaction pat­
terns that in turn result in diminished community cohesion.
On the other hand, there is a different interpretation o f stratification. The
emerging commonality of social class among Jews and the distinctiveness of Jews
relative to others are themselves important sources of cohesion within the Jewish
community. Jews are both marked off from others and linked with other Jews by
their resources, networks, and lifestyles. These are the obvious implications of
their occupational-educational distinctiveness and their high levels of attainment.
To the extent that community is based on both shared interaction among members
and a common set of values and lifestyles, the occupational and educational trans­
formations among American Jews suggest significantly stronger bases of commu­
nal cohesion than at midcentury, when there was more educational and
occupational heterogeneity. The mobility of Jews away from the occupations char­
acteristic of the immigrant generation has been a dominant theme in research.
However, missing from analyses has been an emphasis on the new forms o f educa­
tional and occupational concentration that have emerged.
These two alternative outcomes of the educational and occupational transfor­
mations that Jews have experienced in twentieth-century America are often pre­
sented in oversimplified and extreme forms. Clearly American Jews cannot be
characterized as either a totally assimilated community (in the sense o f the loss of
communal cohesion) or as an isolated, totally cohesive community. There should
be more direct ways other than by inference to assess the impact o f stratification
changes on the quality of Jewish life. However, researchers have achieved no con­
sensus about how or even what to measure to reveal the quality of Jewish life in the
United States. Nor is there sufficient evidence about the nature and implications o f
the educational and occupational networks Jews have developed over the life
course and generationally. Thus the emerging balance of Jewish communal life and
its link to educational and occupational changes experienced by Jews cannot be
assessed fully.
 Judaism and Community in American Life 275

Nonetheless, there are national data on selected aspects of Jewish life that can be
linked to the educational and occupational patterns I have outlined. A review of
some analytic explorations along these lines is suggestive. Measures of Jewishness
that tapped the multidimensional ethnic and religious expressions of Jews in 1990—
including seasonal ritual observances (Passover and Hanukkah), traditional rituals
(kashrut and Shabbat observances), organizational participation (Jewish educational
and organizational activities), associational ties (Jewish friends and neighbors), phi­
lanthropy (contributions to Jewish charities), and intermarriage attitudes—were
related statistically to the occupational and educational characteristics of house­
holds. Not surprisingly, the results are complex and revealing. First, many of the
measures of education and occupation are not related directly to contemporary
indicators of Jewishness. Jewishness reflects the family life course (e.g., age, family
structure, and presence and ages of children) rather than educational or occupa­
tional attainment. Occupational measures were only weakly related to most of the
Jewishness factors that were examined. It appears that the commonality of jobs and
self-employment are not directly linked with religious and most ethnic ties.
The data are consistent with the argument that occupational concentration and
related measures have altered over the generations and, hence, the implications of
these factors for Jewish continuity may also have changed. In the past, occupational
mobility and educational attainment were linked to disaffection from the ethnic
community. This is no longer the case. The absence of a relationship between occu­
pation and measures of Jewishness may also imply that having these occupational
ties is an important basis for Jewish interaction and Jewish networks. If occupa­
tional networks substitute for Jewish communal and religious networks, then we
should expect that the relationship between occupational concentration and
measures of Jewishness would be weak. There are no measures of ethnic economic
resources, ethnic networks, and ethnic business connections to test out these argu­
ments directly.
The situation is clearer for education. The evidence using several indicators of
education shows that higher levels of education reinforce and strengthen Jewish
expressions, particularly those that are tied to participation in Jewish communal
activities. College education seems to promote Jewish-related activities for the age
group below forty-five, although this is less the case among older cohorts. In this
sense, the relationship between attending college and Jewishness negatively related
to Jewishness in the past changed significantly by the 1990s. Again, this is consistent
with the view that Jewish alienation presumed to be associated with higher levels of
educational attainment occurs when higher education is an exceptional group fea­
ture, characteristic of the few. When exposure to college and university education
is an almost universal experience for American Jews, its impact on Jewishness
becomes minimal or is reversed.6
Finally, there is no systematic evidence that the changed stratification profile of
the American Jewish community results in the abandonment of the Jewish com­
munity in terms of the wide range of Jewish expressions. There is no systematic
relationship between becoming a professional, working for others, or being in a job
 2 76 CALVIN G O L D S C H E I D E R

where there are few Jews, on the one hand, and most, if not all, of the measures of
Judaic expression as individual measures or as part of a general Jewishness index,
on the other.

Contexts o f Assimilation
The evidence points to the conclusion that neither high levels of educational attain­
ment nor being in managerial and professional jobs weaken the intensity of
Jewishness in all of its multifaceted expressions. Yet the commonality of social class
among American Jews and their high levels of educational and occupational recon-
centration are not likely to be sufficient to generate the intensive in-group interac­
tion that characterized the segregated Jewish communities in some areas of Eastern
Europe and the United States a century ago. The benefits of these stratification
transformations in terms of networks and resources have not re-created the cultural
and social communities of Jews of a different era. Nevertheless—and this is the criti­
cal point—the evidence indicates that the emerging social class patterns are not a
threat to Jewish continuity in the transformed pluralism of American society.
The educational and occupational transformations of twentieth-century
America clearly mark Jews off from others as well as connect Jews to one another.
The connections among persons who share history and experience and their separa­
tion from others are what social scientists refer to as community. The distinctiveness
of the American Jewish community in stratification patterns has become sharper.
When these stratification profiles are added to the residential concentration of
American Jews, the community features become even clearer. Many have observed
the migration away from areas of immigrant residential concentration, the residen­
tial dispersal of American Jews, and the reshaping of new forms of residential con­
centration for the second and later generations of American Jews. But new forms of
residential concentration have emerged. The development of Jewish neighborhoods
in large urban areas, middle- and upper-class suburban areas with large Jewish pop­
ulations, and smaller concentrations in the South and West also encourage interac­
tion among Jews. Jewish networks have formed around schools, country clubs, and
religious institutions that reinforce ethnic and religious culture. So the national data
on residential concentration combined with educational and occupational concen­
tration reveal new forms of community interaction. The occupational concentra­
tion of Jews, attendance at selective schools and colleges away from home, and work
in select metropolitan areas have resulted in new powerful forms of networks and
institutions. For a voluntary ethnic white group several generations removed from
foreignness and not facing the discrimination of other American minorities, the geo­
graphic concentration of American Jews is astonishing.
The value placed by Jews on educational attainment as a mechanism for
becoming American (and obtaining good jobs and making higher incomes) is
clearly manifest in the context of the opportunities open to Jews in the United
States. Their higher level of education and their concentration in professional and
managerial jobs has not led to the “erosion" or total assimilation o f the Jewish com­
munity. While these stratification changes may result in the disaffection of some
 Judaism and Community in American Life 277

individual Jews from the community, it may also result in the greater incorporation
within the Jewish community of some who were not bom Jewish, increasing the
general attractiveness of the community to Jews and others.
Educational, residential, and occupational concentration implies not only cohe­
sion and similarity of lifestyle among Jews, but also exposure to options for inte­
gration and assimilation. Education implies exposure to conditions and cultures
that are more universalistic and less ethnically based, even when most Jews are
sharing this experience together and are heavily concentrated in a select number of
colleges and universities. If high levels of educational attainment and occupational
achievement enhance the choices Jews make about their Jewishness, then Jewish
identification and the intensity of Jewish expression are becoming increasingly vol­
untary in twenty-first-century America. In that sense, the new forms o f American
Jewish stratification have beneficial implications for the quality of Jewish life. A bal­
ance exists between the forces that pull Jews toward each other, sharing what we
have called "community”—families, experiences, history, concerns, values, com­
munal institutions, religious commitments and rituals, and lifestyles—and those
that pull Jews away from each other, often referred to as "assimilation.” The avail­
able evidence suggests that the pulls and pushes of the changing stratification pro­
file toward and away from the Jewish community are profound. They are positive
in strengthening the Jewish community and represent a challenge for institutions to
find ways to reinforce their communal and cultural benefits.

The Value o f Education

Education has become one of the core values o f contemporary American Jewish
culture. In the past, it was a powerful path toward social mobility. Education led to
better jobs, higher incomes, and escape from the poverty o f the unskilled and
skilled labor characteristic of one’s parents, and from the neighborhoods and net­
works that consisted of the foreign-born. Education was a means o f escape from
the association of foreignness with a foreign language, a foreign culture, and for­
eign parents. Likewise for many, education was an escape from Jewishness and
Judaism. In short, education was the path to becoming American, but it required
leaving the community.
Education has almost always been celebrated among Jews with pride in the
group's accomplishments. When children and grandchildren became doctors and
lawyers, skilled businesspeople and teachers, it was thought that this was the
"Jewish" thing to do. But in those early years there was a cost: for Judaism and
Jewishness, and more important, for generational relationships. Although parents
encouraged their children to obtain a high level of education, the lifestyle associ­
ated with higher education often meant disruption and conflict between parents
and children who had different educational levels, and between siblings and peers
who had different access to educational opportunities.
Looking beyond the costs, over the last two generations Jews have now appre­
ciated the value of education. The value of education has not lessened, but oppor­
tunities have increased and spread. Education has not disrupted Jewishness but has
 278 CALVIN G O L D S C H E ID E R

increased generational similarities and removed one source of the generation gap.
So the meaning o f two generations of college-educated Jews becomes not simply a
note of group congratulations and pride, and not only a changed relationship to
Jewishness as a basis of inteigenerationai commonality; educational attainment has
also become a feature of families that is not disruptive to them and that points to
increasingly shared common experiences.
An analysis of educational attainment points to the increased power of fami­
lies, the generational increase in resources and the common lifestyles that far from
divide families but bind parents and children together into a network o f relation­
ships. Emphases on education and achievement and on family cohesion and values
have become group traits that make the Jewish group attractive to others. Unlike in
the past, when interaction and marriage between Jews and non-Jews was also a
mechanism of escape from Jewishness and foreignness, the Jewish group has now
become attractive because of their family and communal traits—particularly, but
not only—education. Hence, like education, intermarriage cannot have the same
meaning in the modem context of generations as it did in the former context of
rejection and escape. By binding the generations, education has become a family
value.

The Content o f Jewishness: Religion and Religiosity

But what about the content of this generational commonality? What are families
sharing Jewishly? Are they sharing Jewish culture and Judaism? Let us do a brief
mental exercise. Think about the meaning of Judaism two hundred years ago in
Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews in the world lived and where most
ancestors of American Jews originated. Let us consider a social scientist who
decided to take a survey of these communities. Under financial constraints of the
Jewish organizational sponsor and under pressure from local rabbis, the researcher
included on the survey a question about synagogue membership, the frequency of
attending religious services, and the extent of Jewish education as indicators of reli­
giosity. In carrying out the statistical analysis of this survey, the social scientist is
surprised by the following findings: Almost no women attend synagogue services
(except in a few large cities) and then only a few times a year. Few young boys past
the age of Bar Mitzvah, and even fewer young girls of any age, have any Jewish edu­
cation. Neither have their parents. Many men do not attend services regularly
because they do not have a quorum o f ten adult men (living in communities where
there were few Jews), except for a few times a year when they are able to come to a
larger town with a greater Jewish population. Questions on studying religious texts
or knowledge about religious ritual were excluded because no one expected the
frequencies to be high.
Although almost all the synagogues were filled with worshipers, not all people
were able to attend daily or weekly services because they lived too far from the syna­
gogues or lived in towns or locations where there was no minyan, a quorum of adult
male Jews. Many Jews lived in places where there were few synagogues, few Jews, and
no Jewish institutions. Most Jews were busy with the difficult task of making a living
 Judaism and Community trt American Life 279

and surviving economically, which occupied most of their time and energy. Most
neither had a formal Jewish education nor provided any for their children.
Our social scientist also was able to make some further observations. The bit­
ter cold of late fall in the rural areas of Eastern Europe and the absence o f access
meant that other Jewish rituals in the annual Jewish calendar were neglected—such
as building a sukkah, purchasing their own Lulav or Etrog for Succot, or other fam­
ily ritual activities. These were simply out of reach for most of the poor Jews in
these communities. The poverty even limited giving charity—too many of the Jews
were themselves poor. Together, climate, geographic access, money, and leisure
time availability were constraining features in the expression of Judaism a century
or two ago.
The picture was not much different when we consider formal Jewish education.
Few persons were educated in Jewish institutions two hundred years ago; there
were few Jewish schools, no adequate Jewish curriculum, and the tutors or teachers
were themselves poorly educated. If judged by partial and anecdotal evidence,
these teachers were more often a discouragement to education than a stimulus to
knowledge. (Much of the Jewish education of a generation or two ago in the
United States was a major turn-off to thousands of American youngsters foF much
the same reason.) Most Jewish men and women in the beginning of the nineteenth
century were not literate in any language. Even if Jews could afford Jewish books,
there were few to be purchased, and few could read them. Jews were living in a
Jewish cultural wasteland. At least in terms o f synagogue attendance, the depths of
Jewish literacy, and Jewish education, and even the observance of some public and
family religious rituals, Jews in America by the end of the twentieth century fared
much better. However, despite this and extensive other information collected in
our hypothetical survey, only an incompetent social scientist would have concluded
that Jews two centuries ago were not religious, that they did not “value" Jewish
education, or that their communities were eroding.
Correctly, you would admonish me for presenting such superficial historical
comparisons: The comparisons are distorting because formal Jewish education,
synagogue attendance, and ritual observances were limited by available resources
and by the absence of choice. In the home and within families, Jews were commit­
ted to their Judaism as much as circumstances permitted. They were Jewish by
necessity if not always by choice, being responsive to the peer pressure o f their
Jewish friends and the discrimination of their non-Jewish neighbors.
Those are powerful arguments, because they highlight the centrality of family
and community in the development of Judaism and the quality of Jewish life in the
home. Identical points can be made about contemporary American Judaism and
Jewish education. American Jewish communities are not confronted with the same
constraints of the past, but new constraints and newly emerging pressures operate
in similar ways, limiting exposure to Jewish education and the performance of
some religious rituals. At the same time, new forms of communication and tech­
nologies bring Judaism to remote areas of the country and from distant places to
the homes of American Jews. New Jewish rituals—Jewish craft fairs; annual Jewish
 280 CALVIN GO L D S CH E ID B R

Federation meetings, which pull together Jewish oiganizations representing over

eight hundred localities and millions of Jews in the United States; celebrations for
Israel's Independence Day; Holocaust Memorial Day; scholar-in-residence week­
ends; and certain special lectures on Jewish themes in universities—dot the
American Jewish calendar as never before. Perhaps these replace some public reli­
gious rituals of the past. A glance at local annual calendars of Jewish communities
throughout the United States reveals the enormous range of impressive activities
characterizing today's Jewish communities.
Being Jewish in the past was part of everyday life; it was the focal point of fam­
ily and community. The major distinguishing feature of Judaism was its connection
to the totality of Jewish life, which meant association ties and family-economic net­
works, the omnipresence of community and the positive impact of being distinc­
tive, and shared lifestyle and values. The totality of Jewish life was intensive and
cohesive, reinforcing the values and shared experiences of individuals.
Yet I argue that religious ritual observances, formal Jewish education, and
attending religious services are no more and no less valid indicators of contempo­
rary American Judaism than of Judaism two hundred years ago. Then, the work
Jews performed, the jobs they had, the institutions and their cultural forms they
created—i.e., the shared totality—reinforced a sense o f distinctiveness and Jewish
community. Moreover, non-Jews reminded them that they were a minority.
Likewise in America today, the numbers show that most Jews at the beginning of
the twenty-first century share Jewish holidays and ritual occasions with other Jews
(Passover, Hanukkah, and the High Holidays being the most popular), share com­
mitments to the State of Israel, and give charity to Jewish causes. Most see other
Jews as their closest friends, work with other Jews, attend Jewish institutions, and
want to provide some Jewish education to their children to transmit Jewish culture
to the next generation. In general, Jews consider being Jewish important in their
lives, even when being Jewish is as abstract as “tradition" and "family values."
Indeed, in the minds of American Jews, being Jewish in some form is one of the
most expressed and deeply felt values. If poverty and lack of access to opportuni­
ties used to be the preoccupation of Jewish communities, contemporary American
Jews are distracted by wealth and resources. The commonality of religious expres­
sion between the generations at the end of the twentieth century reinforces the
bonds created in the home. Just as educational similarities between the generations
are sources of family bonds and communal cohesion, the commonality of religious
expression binds the generations. This is the case even when the religious base of
both generations is weak.
Unlike generations ago when immigrants and their parents were raised in
homes that were characterized by different levels o f religious observance, and cer­
tainly unlike the immigrant generation and their children, the religious attitudes o f
the third and fourth generation in America have much in common culturally. To be
sure, their Judaism is secularized and transformed, but it is not a source o f genera­
tional conflict. Among the younger generation, Judaism is not a source o f rejection
and escape, as it was in the past.
 Judaism and Community in American Life 281

Yet what is the content of contemporary Jewish institutions? What distin­

guishes them as Jewish? Institutions selectively construct Jewish history and cul­
tural memory, providing one basis for cultural and religious continuity. This
pattern is similar to families and generations of the past that constructed their own
version of Jewish culture and religion, even as the content of their culture had
changed. It is the community, the networks, the shared lifestyle, values, and con­
cerns of American Jews that bind them together. The form and content are radi­
cally different today than in the past. I argue that the community itself and the
institutions that shape the culture of the community are critical in terms of ethnic
continuity. Institutions are the visible and conspicuous symbols of Jewish culture
and the basis of Jewish communal activities.
In contemporary America, the evidence suggests that a critical part of Jewish
continuity is connected to whether there are Jewish-based communal institutions.
Jewish schools and Jewish libraries, Jewish homes for the aged, Jewish community
centers, and many diverse temples and synagogues are important elements in the
development of American communities. Jewish institutions compete with one
another for loyalty and commitments. Playing golf with other Jews in a mostly
Jewish country club, swimming and playing softball at the Jewish Community
Center, or using day care facilities in a Jewish institutional setting do not seem to be
very Jewish on the surface, but they are. They are part of the total round of activ­
ity that makes for a community of intertwined networks. These secular activities
within Jewish institutions can enhance the values of Jewish life, intensify shared
commitments, and increase the social, family, and economic networks that sustain
the continuity of the Jewish community. They may also reinforce the value of
Jewish religious rituals and religious institutional activities. Using Jewish institu­
tions to create networks forms the potential to improve the quality of Jewish life
and to ensure its continuity. All of these activities together—not only the formal
educational and religious ritual ones—form what we mean by community. Indeed,
our studies show that the secular activities of Jewish life reinforce the religious and
vice versa, because so many Jews participate in them. The intensities often go
together because they lead to the same place—the Jewish community. And it is
community that shapes the lives and future of Jews in America, as it has in the past.
The connection between the family and these communal institutions therefore
becomes a central feature of Jewish continuity.
I have focused on the transformation of religion in America, the development
of institutions, and the remarkable choices Jews have made about their Jewishness
and Judaism. This is not to argue that there is no decline in some aspects of Jewish
communal life, which clearly there are. But taking a broader perspective, I have
suggested how Jewish communities in America have changed and how they have
developed new and creative forms of Jewish culture. I do not define change as
decline, nor the development of new forms of Jewish culture and religion as secu­
larization. Rather, I have argued for a more dynamic view of change that implies
the value of choice, diversity, and creativity in the emergence of new forms. Some
social scientists have missed these new forms by solely measuring the older forms,
 282 CALVIN G O L D S C H E I D E R

and some have dismissed them as the last gasps o f a dying community. I reject both
points of view by arguing that Jewish cultural forms are emergent and developing
and are likely to form the new basis of American Jewish communities in the com­
ing generations.
Jews create institutions—federations, Hillels, synagogues and temples, schools,
Jewish community centers, museums and Holocaust foundations, philanthropies,
and other local organizations—in which they invest, on whose boards they serve,
and which they expand. These kinds of institutions provide major benefits to the
community as a whole. From an organizational goal point of view, these institu­
tions define the nature of Jewish culture, Jewish creativity, and Jewish continuity.
The old joke about the lone shipwrecked Jew who had built two synagogues, one
that he attended and one that he did not, symbolizes the enormous capacity of
Jews to build institutional Jewish life.

Concluding Thoughts
Let us revisit the themes that help us understand the contemporary American Jewish
community. Defining who is included in Jewish communities is not simply a social
science research question, but a profound theoretical and practical concern. In a vol­
untary community, people define themselves in and out of the community at vari­
ous points in their lives. One consequence is that those who have taken snapshots of
the community at one survey time period (and not dynamic moving pictures) obtain
distorted pictures of ethnic identity and community. Life course transitions, such as
when children are not living at home and have not yet started their families, are par­
ticularly vulnerable. People’s ethnic and religious identity is often in flux, and their
communal commitments throughout life are difficult to forecast.
Categorizing some Jews as "core" and others as "periphery" (as was done in the
formal reports of the National Jewish Population Surveys in the United States) does
more than establish an arbitrary classification system. The distinction becomes a
social construction of the margins of the community, which culturally polarizes
and justifies policy initiatives directed at the “core" and not at the "periphery.” The
categorization itself is based on a cross-sectional snapshot, formed by asking ques­
tions over the telephone about current Jewish identification.
While family values and cohesion are central to the understanding of contem­
porary Jewish communities, few studies have had a family focus. Social scientists
have been primarily concerned about individual identity. When we focus on family
we tend to measure only group processes o f fertility and family structure. Yet we
have argued theoretically for the power of networks as a basis for continuity among
ethnic populations. Thus we need to refocus directly on these family networks. The
American Jewish community’s obsession with marriage and intermarriage has not
led to studies of children and young adults when they are not living at home. We
argue about generational continuities—the core o f communal changes—but we do
not study life course transitions.
How do we conceptualize the Jewish family? Too often we start (and end) with
indicators of family deterioration. Rather, we can study how Jewish families
 Judaism and Community in American Life 283

strengthen our communities by beginning systematic studies o f blended families,

reconstituted families, intermarried families (not only couples), stepfamilies, and
their children. When we study families, we should look beyond the nuclear family
to identify the roles of extended relatives and kin. Incorporating an emphasis on
gender in our research also requires us to examine the relationship between men
and women and the intergenerational relationships between parents and children.
For example, the gender switch in Jewish intermarriages from mostly Jewish males
marrying out to a more equal pattern for men and women may be o f particular
importance in evaluating Jewish continuity. These in turn need to be related to
institutional structures, such as synagogues and Jewish organizations, and what is
happening within Jewish homes.
Furthermore, how do we take religious transformation into account? Socio­
logists have incorporated in surveys measures o f the intensity of religious expres­
sion: for example, most, if not all, Jewish surveys since the 1960s have included
questions on candle lighting on Friday night, or on Hanukah or Passover Seder cel­
ebrations. On the basis of these and other similar questions about ritual, we have
made conclusions about changes and variation in religious activities o f Jews. We
have also made conclusions about religious decline and secularization. However,
if we only had the survey questionnaires as a guide to what constitutes Judaism, we
would have a distorted view. If the survey questionnaire were our Judaic text,
we would conclude that some religious rituals are more important than others. For
example, is lighting candles more important to measure than people doing good
deeds or having a Friday night dinner with family members, or visiting the sick?
The rabbis of the Talmud could not prioritize among the mitzvot, and therefore it
seems arrogant for social scientists to do so. How distorting to assert that we
understand contemporary Judaism by examining the results o f our past national
surveys. Have we biased our views of those "Jews on the periphery" by measuring
whether they publicly attend the synagogue regularly or how often they fast on
Yom Kippur? Do we dismiss their Seders on Passover and Hanukkah celebrations
by noting that they are “only" occasions of family get-togethers and Hanukkah is
“only" the Jewish counterpoint to Christmas in America? It is on the basis o f these
questions asked in a cross-sectional survey that sociologists have inferred about
changes toward secularization.
Institutions, let alone networks, seem to be missing from research. Of course
we have included in our surveys whether people are synagogue members or give
charity (to the Federations), but we do not ask whether living in a community that
has a Jewish community center or a Jewish day care center or home for the aged
matters for the quality of Jewish life. Do we find out in our surveys whether Jewish
day care strengthens Jewish networks and community? Does our emphasis on
national Jewish studies mask the rich diversity among Jewish communities? To con­
clude that ethnic ties and networks decline on the basis o f simple questions about
formal organizational membership and the number of Jewish friends reduces the
theoretical richness of the argument to empirical trivia (especially when life course
changes are not considered).
 284 CALVIN GO L D S CH E ID B R

Finally, we should evaluate Jewish education and not only study how many
years and in what types of institutions people obtain their education. I have often
argued that the quality of a university course can be measured by how much the
instructor learns. I would similarly argue that the quality of Jewish education, espe­
cially at younger ages, is seen by how much the parents learn. As far as I know, sys­
tematic information on these aspects of education has not been obtained in our
demographic/community surveys.
The key and most powerful finding of our research is the reinforcement of the
importance o f examining the quality of Jewish life. Clearly there is an interaction
between the numbers and quality (indeed you need a minyan for some purposes),
but who is counted toward that quorum is not a social science question where hard
data can shed light.
Two critical points need to be stressed: the diversity of Jewish communities and
the process of continual change. What works for one community may not work for
others. If our premise that contexts (including social, political, cultural, and eco­
nomic in addition to institutional and historical contexts) matter is correct, then it
follows that when context changes, Judaism changes. When contexts vary,
Jewishness and Judaism vary as well. Our expectation is that community variation
is normal, not exceptional. Hence we should not be surprised that the measures of
what characterizes the community in various places should vary. We are not likely
to consider the extent of monthly Mikvah use in the twenty-first century as an indi­
cator of Jewish identity, nor would examining the wearing of clothing made of
wool and linen (Sha’atnez) be useful. (These categories may have been useful in
analyzing nineteenth-century Morocco or Slobodka.) Similarly, we would also not
use only the public celebrations o f Hanukah and celebration o f Rosh Hashanah as
indicators of how communities in the 1950s expressed their Judaism.
We have entered a new century and a new millennium. Continuity with the
past is limited when the communities we are studying have changed so drastically.
Therefore, we should focus on community and families, instead of diverting our
energies from grand questions about Judaism and the Jewishness of our homes to
obsess about biology. Imagine if 90 percent of American Jews were ending up with
marriage partners who happened to be born Jews but cared little about their
Jewishness. There would likely be no perceived crisis, and we would not be con­
cerned about Jewish continuity in America. There would be no perceived erosion,
no perceived demographic decline, and we would probably be arguing among our­
selves about the right ways to investigate the decline o f Judaism.
Whatever the message the American Jewish community thinks it is sending to
the next generation, most of them hear the following: “We Jews are great musi­
cians. Your grandparents were musicians, as were their parents before them. For
centuries our people have made the most extraordinary music. Therefore the num­
ber one priority of our community is that whomever you marry should have a
mother who is a musician."7 Young people are perplexed by this message. “We
don't get it," they might say. “There was relatively little music in our homes when
we were growing up. A couple of times a year we went to big concerts where we
 Judaism and Community in American Life 285

didn't know the score. We enjoy hearing the music from time to time even though
we can barely read a note. If music is so important to our family and to our com­
munity, why is it that the only thing I hear them talking about is whether or not my
potential mother-in-law is a musician?"
Jewish families and Jewish institutions, homes, and communities have been the
music of Jewish lives. My personal hope is that Jews and their children and their
partners, and their children's children and their partners, will learn to play this
music and contribute to this great unfolding Jewish symphony.

NOTES
Some ideas for this paper were developed in C. Goldscheider, Studying theJewish Future (Seattle:
University o f Washington Press, 2004).
1. See Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew : In Search o f Jewish Identity for the Next
Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996); Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in
Europe since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Sergio Della
Pergola, World Jew ry Beyond 2000: The Demographic Prospects (Oxford: Oxford Centre for
Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 1999).
2. See Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986).
3. See especially Calvin Goldscheider, Studying the Jewish Future (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2004).
4. See the empirical details in Calvin Goldscheider, “Stratification and the Transformation o f
American Jew s," in Papers in Jewish Demography, ed. Sergio Della Pergola and Judith Even
(Jerusalem: Avraham Harman Institute o f Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 2001),
27:259-276; Calvin Goldscheider Studying theJewish Future.
5. See, for example, Barry Chiswick, "Jewish Immigrant Skill and Occupational Attainment
at the Turn o f the Century," Explorations in Economic History 28 (January 1991): 64-86; Thomas
Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Stanley Lieberson, A Piece o f the Pie: Blacks and White
Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1980); Calvin Goldscheider,
Jewish Continuity and Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
6. Esther Wilder, "Socioeconomic Attainment and Expressions o f Jewish Identification: 1970
and 1990," Journal for the Scientific Study o f Religion 35 (June 1996): 109-127.
7. This is taken from an insightful essay by Michael Brooks in Sh’ma (October 1999).
 Beyond Apikorsut
A JUDAISM FOR SECULAR JEW S

ADAM CHALOM

In rabbinic literature, the term apikoros (derived from the Greek philosopher
Epicurus) refers to a Jewish heretic who is both familiar with and scornful of rabbinic
wisdom and knowledge. The Mishnah declares that the apikoros has no share in the
world to come, along with "he who says resurrection of the dead is not in the Torah"
and one who asserts that "the Torah is not from Heaven.”1 The Talmud describes an
apikoros as one who insults a scholar (Sanhedrin 99b), and elsewhere in Sanhedrin, the
wise are warned: "R. Eliezer said: Be diligent to learn the Torah and know how to
answer an Epikoros. R. Johanan commented: They taught this only with respect to a
Gentile Epikoros; with a Jewish Epikoros, it would only make his heresy more pro­
nounced.” This Jewish heretic is particularly difficult for traditional Judaism, for
unlike the am ha’aretz (ignorant), the apikoros knows the rules he is breaking and
continues to break them anyway. As the medieval Talmudic commentator Rashi
noted in reference to the passage above, "With him, therefore, discussion is not
advised since he is deliberate in his negation and not therefore easily dissuaded.”2
Versions of secular Judaism have certainly similarly defined themselves by their
rejections of Jewish law, rabbinic authority, and the constraints and theology of tra­
ditional Judaism. Jewish anarchists "celebrated” the Jewish New Year with explicitly
antirabbinic observances:

The ticket of admission to this affair in 1890 read in part: "Grand Yom Kippur
Ball, with theater. Arranged with the consent of all new rabbis of liberty . . .
The Kol Nidre will be offered by John Most. Music, dancing, buffet, Marseillaise,
and other hymns against Satan." . . . Anarchists determined to scandalize
Orthodox Jews, particularly on Yom Kippur. One year they advertised on the
eve of the Day of Atonement that a certain restaurant. . . in New York’s Lower
East Side would remain open on the following day to feed all freethinkers.
Many outraged Jews came to protest and the ensuing battle between traditional
Jews and the atheists brought out the police reserves.3

These were people and organizations that were called, and to some extent, called
themselves, “apikorsim.” But secular organizations that are primarily negative have
limited staying power; after all, the second generation does not understand why
 Beyond Apikorsut 287

those other Jews fast on the night of the Kol Nidre ball. They know the punch line
but cannot get the joke.
The issue at hand is the risk that secular Jews and scholars of secularism gener­
ally treat organized secular Judaisms as only or primarily apikorsut, or heresy. For
Jews raised in the Sholem Aleichem shule system, Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle)
communities, or secular Jewish camps like Kinderland and its noncommunist
socialist rival Kindering,4 their secular celebrations of socialist- and Yiddish-oriented
Passover or Hanukkah were experienced as a Jewish fusion o f modern ideas and
historical Jewish culture. American Reform Rabbis claimed in the 1885 Pittsburgh
Platform both that “[they] accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only
such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify [their] lives, but reject all such as are not
adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization” and that “[they] are con­
vinced of the utmost necessity of preserving the historical identity with [their]
great past.”5Just as Reform Judaism is generally presented and certainly self-under-
stood as a Jewish response to the modern world and as an alternative to total assim­
ilation, secular Judaisms should be considered likewise.
Classifying Jews can be exceedingly difficult. If one were studying
"Conservative Judaism,” Conservative Jews could be defined by the official halachic
(religious Jewish legal) pronouncements of the Rabbinical Assembly. Or they could
be studied through the formal public liturgy and ritual behavior of Conservative
Jews in synagogue. Or they could be classified by the private behavior of ordinary
Conservative Jews. Each of these lenses would yield different understandings of
what "Conservative Judaism” means. For instance, official pronouncements might
highlight strong kashrut (dietary law) observance, while private behavior may be a
hodgepodge of traditional kashrut, kosher in the home but not in restaurants,
“kosher-style,” or not kosher at all. An official spokesperson might say that the lat­
ter examples are not “truly” Conservative Jews but are members of Conservative
synagogues and would self-identify on surveys and in public as Conservative Jews.
The truth is that different aspects of the phenomenon of Conservative Judaism can
be understood simultaneously through each lens, if one is willing to explore these
aspects as a sociologist rather than as a theologian.
This mirrors the approach we will take to explore secular Jewishness in
America. We will first examine a formal approach to Jewish identity that appeals to
secular and secularized Jews called Secular Humanistic Judaism. We will then
determine how the official philosophy of Judaism translates into one model of
Jewish community life, through texts as well as my own experiences raised in,
trained as a rabbi for, and working within this movement with congregations of the
Society for Humanistic Judaism. Finally, we shall get an idea of the kinds of people
drawn to such Jewish ideology and community based on my experience as well as
recent statistics from the founding congregation of Humanistic Judaism, the
Birmingham Temple in suburban Detroit.
If it is difficult to classify Conservative Jews, it is even more challenging
to define American secular Jews who do not agree on a label and who may never
join anything. The term secular could mean anything from “opposed to religious
 288 ADAM C H A L O M

institutions and authority" to "this-worldly/anti-supernatural." The Yiddish term

for "secular," veltlekh, can be understood as either “worldly” (i.e., cosmopolitan) or
“this-worldly" (as opposed to “supernatural").6 Thus the paradox presented by the
American Jewish Identity Survey of 2001, discussed by Zvi Gitelman in his conclusion
to this volume, in which almost half of the Jews who called their outlook on life
"secular" still believed in a God that performs miracles and answers prayers.7 On
the other hand, if one accepts self-chosen labels as definitive, this group of Jews
that has much in common is split into many subgroups—fifty “cultural" Jews,
forty-five "secular” Jews, thirty-five “atheist" Jews, and so on. One could similarly
separate “ultra" Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, and Hasidic Jews, even though they
have much in common conceptually and in liturgy and practice.
Some of the other labels that certain American Jews might choose for themselves
that we can subsume under the general heading of "secular” include the following:

• Secular (capital S): a self-aware member of a Secular Jewish community, such

as those in the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations;8
• cosmopolitan: a "citizen of the world” who happens to come from a Jewish
background;
• secularized (lowercase 5): someone influenced by the general secularization of
Western European and American culture;
• anti-institutional: the proverbial "spiritual but not religious” individual who
may have supernatural beliefs but is personally or emotionally opposed to
organized religion and religious institutions;
• unaffiliated: not a member of a Jewish congregation, a category that at any
one time includes around 50 percent of the American Jewish population;9
• cultural: an increasingly popular label in multicultural America;10
• just Jewish: consistently a popular survey choice when offered;
• of Jewish origin: someone with at least one Jewish parent, but sometimes
with two.11

None of these include personally secular Jews who are members of religious Jewish
congregations for any number of reasons: their spouse is active; they live in a small
Jewish community and want to publicly identify; or for emotional or historical rea­
sons.11 Each of these possible labels defines a piece of the whole, and many labels
may apply to the same person or group of people at once.
Even within a somewhat organized movement like Secular Humanistic
Judaism, there are disagreements regarding terminology. Some members o f that
movement prefer the term Humanistic and object to the label secular, because they
consider Humanistic a more positive term, and, after all, they are organized in reli­
gious forms (many as congregations, some of which employ rabbis), and they meet
religious needs.13 Others in that movement prefer Secular (capital S) and reject the
description “religious” because, for them, Jewish religious organizations center on
God, Jewish tradition, and commandments, and this movement does not. A promi­
nent affiliate of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations describes its vision o f
Jewish identity as “Secular Jewishness”14—capital-S Secular, preferring "Jewishness”
 Beyond A pikorsut 289

over the term "Judaism” (i.e., a belief system) to translate "yidishkayt." Despite this
semantic difference, secular and secularized Jews attracted to Secular Humanistic
Judaism have much more in common. The problem stems from the paradox that
“Secular Humanistic Judaism is an expression of a non-contradictory, bona fide sec­
ular religion.” 15 Or, in other words, it supports a congregational model that can
appeal to secular Jews.

A Judaism for Secular Jew s

Secular Humanistic Judaism embraces a human-centered philosophy that
affirms the power and responsibility of individuals to shape their own lives inde­
pendent of supernatural authority. .. . Secular Humanistic Jews value their
Jewish identity and the aspects of Jewish culture that offer a meaningful connec­
tion to the past and a genuine expression of their contemporary way of life.
Secular Humanistic Jewish communities celebrate . . . inspirational ceremonies
that draw upon, but are not limited to, traditional literature.16

Secular Humanistic Judaism is a blend between a humanistic philosophy and a

cultural and ethnic Jewish identity. It does not use prayer and worship but rather
celebration and study to articulate Jewishness. It understands Jewish and human
history through scientific and academic study rather than through traditional
wisdom, and it sees ethics as a function of personal and social consequences rather
than the keeping of commandments (mitzvot). Secular Humanistic Judaism is
a balance between connecting with Jewish tradition and articulating contemporary
values and beliefs.
There is an irony in articulating a Judaism aimed at secular Jews, because they
are often individuals who are opposed to and alienated by organized religion. To
some extent, Secular Humanistic Judaism sees itself as descriptive rather than pre­
scriptive. “Most humanistic Jews do not know that they are what they are. . . . They
have never bothered to articulate the real beliefs that lie behind their lifestyle—
because, to do so, would force them to deal with the discrepancy between what
they say they believe and what they actually do believe.”17 Those raised in
Humanistic congregations, of course, are taught to understand Jewish identity
through this perspective. But the majority o f its members were raised in other
Jewish settings, and find that this approach articulates what they already believe
rather than teaching them what they should believe. One member has reflected: “It
was the first time in a Jewish congregation that I didn't feel a need to escape, the
first time that I experienced no cognitive dissonance.”1*
In its connections with Jewish culture, Secular Humanistic Judaism considers
Judaism as the total culture or civilization of the Jewish people:

Bible is Judaism, Talmud is Judaism, everyday life is Judaism, Jewish history is

Judaism, Jewish poetry is Judaism, Jewish customs are Judaism, Jewish food is
Judaism, Jewish jokes are Judaism; just as religion is Judaism. But you cannot
argue that Judaism equals the religious beliefs of Jews; first, because these
beliefs were and are different, even mutually contradictory; and second,
 290 ADAM C H A L O M

because religion was and is just one aspect of Jewish existence; today, for many
Jews, it is not even that. Judaism, then, is everything that the Jewish people in
their very long history have produced. Judaism is Jewish civilization, Judaism is
Jewish culture.19

In this approach, there are important similarities with Reconstructionist Judaism,

though it is significant that Secular Humanistic Judaism does not see Judaism as pri­
marily a religious civilization, but rather as a culture that subsumes religion. One
can see in this passage the importance of historical study and consciousness, as well
as the removed or secularized anthropological stance that religion is “just one
aspect” o f Jewish identity.
From this general orientation toward Jewish culture, Secular Humanistic
Judaism derives three conclusions. First, if Judaism is a culture, one may connect to
his or her Jewish identity in many ways, such as lighting Shabbat candles or reading
Jewish history. Food is as Jewish as fasting. Second, if Judaism is a culture, then it was
created by the Jewish people, evolved through the Jewish historical experience, and
can even be changed today. In the words of an early Jewish secularist, Chaim
Zhitlovsky, "We created the Jewish religion: Judaism exists by virtue of the existence
of the Jews. We elevated religion to a national duty of every Jew because our people
needed it and because religion had the power to maintain us as a nation. In these
times, however, religion is being transformed into a private matter of individuals
alone, for it is now deemed that every individual has the right to believe as he
wishes.”20 According to this perspective, even the Torah and Talmud were created
by people and thus should be treated with the reverence o f ancestral but not super­
natural wisdom. Third, if Judaism is an ethno-cultural identity rather than primarily
a religious identity, as defined by rabbinic Judaism, then Jewish family and commu­
nal celebrations, such as holidays and life cycle events, can signify more than rabbinic
observance. For example, Pesah (Passover) may be explored as a harvest holiday, a
spring celebration of universal significance, and a family observance that evolved
differently through 1,500 years of rabbinic Judaism and the Diaspora. New connec­
tions with modern life can be made through creative hagadot, stories of migration
and liberation, recalling the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion (which began erev Pesah,
1943)» and even by placing an orange on the Seder plate to assert gender equality. As
we shall see, this open approach to Jewish culture/civilization as the vehicle to artic­
ulate Jewish identity will lead to significant changes in Jewish ceremonial life.
On the philosophical side, the "secular humanistic” perspective of Secular
Humanistic Judaism derives from both the Jewish and the human experience.
Rather than Secular Humanists who happen to be of Jewish background, "from the
beginning we have been Humanistic Jews, rooted in the history and culture o f the
Jewish people. Our humanism has always been enhanced by our Jewish connection,
because the message of Jewish experience is that we cannot rely on the kindness o f
the fates.. . . The rabbinic establishment may have told us that we are the Chosen
People. But our memories tell us that we are the victims of a cruel destiny. If the
Jewish people survived, it is only because of human self-reliance, courage, and
 Beyond Apikorsut 291

cooperation.”11 In other words, humanism is a philosophical conclusion drawn

from one's personal understanding of the Jewish experience. Furthermore, there
are many examples of historical Jewish emphasis on the importance of human
actions: the tradition on Yom Kippur that one must be forgiven by the person one
has wronged before asking for divine forgiveness; commandments in the Torah and
rabbinic literature to personally attend to the widow and orphan; and even in the
skepticism of Jewish folk stories and humor.

Judaism is made up of two categories of expectations. The first is mitsvot bein

adam lamakom, commandments between man and God. For us, these are not
really commandments—there being no commander—but teachings.
Interestingly, the word mitsva has come, colloquially, to mean "good deed"; and
that is because the second category is known as mitsvot bein adam lekhaveiro,
teachings governing interpersonal behavior, guided by values and ethics, includ­
ing social action to benefit members of the community and strangers in need.21

In the Yiddish saying "a foyln iz gut tsu shikn nokhn malech-ha-moves" (it’s good to
send a lazy person for the angel of death), one can hear some doubt regarding
angelic efficiency.
To be sure, these sources of Jewish literature and folklore often phrased their
emphasis on human action in religious language. But in looking for evolutionary
ancestors, contemporary setting may be less important than emphasis:

There are many stories that clearly express essential humanistic values. They
teach us to question authority, resist injustice and respect human dignity within
a Jewish cultural/religious context.
In Jewish folklore, one can find Mother Rachel teaching God compassion,
rabbis challenging God's injustice, freethinkers questioning traditional pieties
and ordinary Jews defying unjust laws. Exploiters of the poor are castigated,
religious fanaticism is denounced and the virtues of mentshlekhkayt are elevated
over ritual observances. There is plenty of humor too. This is a rich source of
Jewish humanism that we ought to tap.23

In response to the objection that these stories are being taken out of their original
religious context and serving "secular" aims, it should be recalled that citing texts
and phrases out of their original context to highlight new insights is nothing new
to those familiar with rabbinic literature. More important, because Secular
Humanistic Judaism understands Jewish culture and literature as human creations
rather than revelation, it sees its Jewish connection based on ethnicity and history
more than on theology: "The Jewish personality that emerged out of the Jewish
experience was heavily laced with skepticism. Jewish ambition and self-reliance did
not come from piety. They arose out of the deeply-felt conviction that the fates
were not as dependable as the rabbis made them out to be."24 The culture created
by that "Jewish personality” is the source of Jewish connectedness.
The second derivation of the "secular humanism” of Secular Humanistic
Judaism is from the human experience in general—for example, characteristics of
 292 ADAM C H A L O M

human life such as the suffering of the just, natural disasters, or the power of scien­
tific knowledge—that has led both Jews and non-Jews to humanistic conclusions.
Secular Humanistic Jews “share a humanist agenda with other humanists.
Humanist philosophy, ethical education, and the defense of the secular state are
some o f the [shared] items.”15 In addition to affirmations of Jewish cultural and his­
torical connection, we also find the following in the "Core Principles” of the
Society for Humanistic Judaism: “We affirm the value of study and discussion of
Jewish and universal human issues. We rely on such sources as reason, observation,
experimentation, creativity, and artistic expression to address questions about the
world and in seeking to understand our experiences. We seek solutions to human
conflicts that respect the freedom, dignity, and self-esteem o f every human being.
We make ethical decisions based on our assessment of the consequences of our
actions.” 26 These general philosophical conclusions such as rationality and conse­
quential ethics are not uniquely Jewish in either derivation or application and are
supported intellectually by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, A. J. Ayer, and
Jean Paul Sartre (even though not Jewish). The scientific attitude stems from a
human-centered approach to knowledge, focusing on “what we can know” about
the world as well as what we cannot know. As one Secular Humanistic Shabbat cel­
ebration of science affirms, “‘I do not know' is a brave and dignified answer, espe­
cially when it is true."27 Consequential ethics also emerge from a human focus on
behavior and its consequences. If Leviticus 19:18 states "you shall love your neigh­
bor as yourself; I am the Lord,” commanding mutual respect through divine fiat or
because each is in the divine image, Secular Humanistic Judaism accepts the formu­
lation with another rationale: love your neighbors as yourself because they are in
the image of you.
To summarize, the official ideology o f Secular Humanistic Judaism is both
philosophic and cultural, both ethnic and universally human. It is not unique in
Jewish history to have drawn on non-Jewish philosophy (e.g., Maimonides and
medieval neo-Aristotelian philosophy). What is distinct is that Secular Humanistic
Judaism uses philosophical tools to draw conclusions on major issues explicitly dif­
ferent from those drawn by traditional Jewish sources, rather than create new
philosophical defenses or apologetics for old beliefs and practices. “Humanistic
Judaism is a nontheistic religion that combines a humanistic philosophy o f life with
the holidays, symbols and ceremonies of Jewish culture. Its principles affirm the
value of reason, individuality, and freedom. It interprets Jewish history as the prod­
uct of human decisions and actions rather than the unfolding of a divine plan.” 28
Both sides of this identity—“secular humanism” and "Judaism as Jewish
culture/civilization”—are clearly evident in the above description and the one cited
at the beginning of this section. The way this ideological approach will translate
into communities remains to be seen.

Congregations for Secular Jew s

Congregations and rabbis were useful inventions. Secular Jews need full-service
communities, and they need trained leaders who can respond not only to their
 Beyond Apikorsut 293

Jewish cultural needs but especially to their human needs for coping with the
human condition. . . . In many ways Humanistic congregations function in the
lives of their members in the same way as Reform, Conservative and
Reconstructionist synagogues do. They provide the same services, ask the same
questions—even though they provide different answers.29

Again we find an irony in speaking of congregations for secular Jews, many of

whom define themselves as individualists and are against organized religion.
Historically, American secular Jewish organizations were more often schools or
mutual-aid societies, but because of their political orientation to the left, they tended
to be opposed to formal leadership, and certainly clergy-like leadership. These organ­
izations included "the Sholem Aleichem folkshuln, which were ostensibly Yiddishist
and nonpolitical, and the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) schools, which were sec­
ular, socialist-oriented institutions reminiscent of the Bundist academies of
Poland.”30 Through these leftist Jewish organizations, early American secular Jews
felt a Jewish connection: "The Jewish labor movement and its institutions became the
secular substitute for the old community. In many ways, the Jewish immigrant work­
ers looked upon the institutions of the Jewish labor movement. . . as their contribu­
tion to Jewish continuity.”31 The students themselves and their parents, as well as
thousands of "unaffiliated” Jewish families, lived in densely Jewish neighborhoods
where being Jewish was a function of language and residence as much as belief and
ritual practice. Thus they felt little need to join a congregation to self-identify as Jews.
Yet how can we explain current attempts of Humanistic Judaism to attract sec­
ular Jews to a congregational model? Two trends have provided the impetus. First,
American Jews have been socially and economically successful. As many sociolo­
gists have noted, in the last fifty years Jews have moved in great numbers from pre­
dominantly ethnic neighborhoods to dispersed suburban subdivisions. No longer in
Jewish neighborhoods or densely Jewish professions, Jews have experienced a
greater need for community identification, which out of necessity takes the form of
a chosen association, such as the synagogue model, a common form for the last
two generations. As this move to dispersal progressed, American Jews also became
more professional, and by 1971 "nearly 90 percent of American Jews in the labor
force were white-collar workers.”32 As a result, it should not be surprising that as
aspirations to radical social change became less attractive as they became more suc­
cessful, "most second generation Jews chose a middle-class secular ethnicity, unen­
cumbered with a radical ideology.”33 The accompanying demographic and
organizational decline in secular socialist Jewish institutions created an intellectual
or institutional space for something new.
The second trend is more personal and is formed by Jews raised in religious
congregations who are dissatisfied with their experience. The narrative of one
Humanistic rabbi's journey from his conventional Jewish upbringing to
Humanistic Judaism is typical of this trend:

As a child, 1 learned the Sh’ma and the Borchu, "Hiney Ma Tov" and "Ayn
Keloheynu." But I never paid attention to the words. . . . Only later did I wonder
 294 A DAM C H A L O M

who was this God to whom I was praying, only later did I question the core
beliefs of traditional Judaism that I had simply accepted on the authority of
inherited doctrine.
It was while conducting funeral services as a rabbi that I first began to find
inconsistencies between my own beliefs and the prayers. . . . In the face of
death and tragedy, and certainly after the Holocaust and nuclear devastation,
I could not accept God as a shepherd whose rod and staff were supposed to
comfort me.34

Some of these individuals remain in the mainstream religious Jewish world if only
temporarily—for example, while their children are in Bar or Bat Mitzvah training,
or because of familial or emotional ties. But as evidenced by affiliation statistics,
many others do not stay. Some in this latter group are willing to try something
different—such as in a havurah or Humanistic Judaism—that articulates their beliefs
and ritual connections more satisfyingly. At the same time, unlike the vituperative
break from traditional Judaism shown by early American secular Jews, these more
recently secularized Jews are open to communities that to some extent retain the
congregational model with which they are familiar.
This forms the general background for the origins of Humanistic Judaism.
A new Reform congregation in suburban Detroit, founded in the fall of 1963 and led
by Reform-trained Rabbi Sherwin Wine, quickly evolved beyond Reform Judaism
by removing the term God from its liturgy in favor of increased attention to the
human condition. This created much local and even national controversy at the
time, but it also generated interest from likeminded Jews. By 1969, the Society for
Humanistic Judaism was formed with three congregations, and today it claims over
thirty congregations of varying sizes, with significant congregations (around one
hundred family member units) in New York; Chicago (two); Washington, DC; San
Francisco; Sarasota; Boston; Orange County, California; and suburban Detroit,
where the founding congregation boasts around four hundred memberships.35 In
1982, the Leadership Conference of Secular and Humanistic Jews was organized in
cooperation with lay leaders of the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations. This
ultimately led to the creation of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic
Judaism (IISHJ), a leadership training institution, in 1985. The IISHJ began its North
American rabbinic training program in 1992, and as of the fall of 2007, the IISHJ
Israeli rabbinic program has graduated seven rabbis. Other Humanistic rabbis have
been ordained by different rabbinic training institutions. Finally, the International
Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, established in 1986, provides support to
likeminded organizations outside of North America and shares space and staff with
the Center for Cultural Judaism in New York City.36
While congregations of the Society for Humanistic Judaism neither pray
devoutly nor observe halacha (Jewish religious law), from my personal experience,
they are indeed congregations, providing Shabbat and holiday celebrations,
schools, life cycle celebrations, and community support. Many have trained leader­
ship, either rabbis trained within the movement or in other seminaries, or
 Beyond A pikorsut 295

"Leaders” trained by the IISHJ. Some are organized primarily around schools or
discussion groups and may prefer the term community to congregation, but a neutral
observer might call them congregations nevertheless: "Imagine a recently arrived
Martian taking a tour of religious institutions as their devotees are engaged in their
distinctive practices. Assume also that our extraterrestrial friend has not yet gained
a clear understanding of the content distinguishing the respective religions from
one another. By observing behavior, the Martian would find no appreciable differ­
ence on the basis of which to deny that Secular Humanistic Judaism is a religion.”37
Moreover, congregational life in Humanistic Jewish congregations has all of the
benefits and challenges common to all congregations, such as politics, gossip, and
interpersonal conflict.
Yet the most important overarching difference between Humanistic Jewish con­
gregations and Reform or Conservative synagogues (aside from official theology) is
the attitude toward "tradition.” If one personally or philosophically differs from
one’s inherited liturgical or ritual tradition, but nevertheless desires a positive con­
nection, one finds a balance between integrity and continuity: "Humanistic
Judaism seeks equilibrium between continuity with Jewish civilization and creative
expressions of a new Jewish identity.”38 Giving primacy to integrity means saying
words and performing actions that clearly reflect what one believes, which requires
creativity when those beliefs differ from historical Judaism. Giving primacy to con­
tinuity means forging direct connections with the past by using words and rituals
created and celebrated by one’s ancestors, even if the content is philosophically
problematic. Most liberal Jewish congregations tend to follow the latter course,
making minor changes to a few texts and using English "translations” that are more
acceptable than literal ones. For example, a current Reform prayer book translates
the end of the song Oseh Shalom as “among us, all Israel, and all the world” while
the Hebrew “aleynu v’al kol yisra’ei’ refers only to "upon us and all Israel.”39 This
same prayer book, like its predecessor two decades prior, uses gender-neutral refer­
ences to human beings, and in this version “the gender-neutral approach is
extended to English-language references to God, and, in some degree, to the Hebrew
[my emphasis].”40 The desire to use the traditional Hebrew text is thus more
important than the modern commitment to gender neutrality at all times.
Another strategy, common to Reconstructionist Judaism, is to maintain tradi­
tional liturgy but to supplement or reinterpret: “The readings play an important
role by providing a counterbalance to the Hebrew. Changing huge sections of the
Hebrew liturgy would sever our roots in traditional prayers. So missing themes
must find their place elsewhere. . . . For example, the voices of women emerge in
the readings.”41 We can clearly see the importance of “roots in traditional prayer,”
even if the original Hebrew text is in need of a "counterbalance.” As for interpreta­
tion, what one is encouraged to think about while reciting the traditional Shema
and the first following paragraph (Dt 6:4-9), including loving God with all one’s
heart and soul, etc., is very different from traditional theology (even though the
Hebrew and translation follow the original): "ve-ahavta,” and you must love. You
shall love your God intellectually, emotionally, and with all your deeds. Whatever
 296 ADAM C H A L O M

you love most in these ways is your god. For the Jewish people, the deepest love
should be for freedom, justice and peace.M4i A God that is the abstract human con­
cepts of “freedom, justice and peace" could hardly perform the actions credited to
him/it in traditional liturgy, but it may be more palatable to a modernized audi­
ence than the literal content of the Hebrew texts.
Implicit in both of the described approaches of Reform and
Reconstructionism—minimal editing with creative translation or interpretation—
is a third Jewish "strategy" that affirms continuity over integrity. This strategy is
rarely articulated explicitly, but it is one with which many are familiar: do not
worry about what the prayers mean "because they're in Hebrew and no one under­
stands it anyway.” As one Humanistic rabbi observes about Jews with such an
approach, "It is possible for them to recite blessings and prayers that bear no rela­
tionship to their lives or actual values and attitudes—indeed, that contradict their
actual values and attitudes—with no sense of the discrepancy. The words themselves
have become ritualized to the extent that their meaning is ignored as irrelevant."43
Continuity with Jewish tradition trumps integrity because the difference between
personal philosophy and prayer content is unknown or even ignored. The result of
these affirmations of continuity over integrity is prayer services that are similar in
structure and significant portions, even if the balance between Hebrew and English
varies from one to the next.
If the balance tilts the other way and one emphasizes integrity over continuity,
one is willing to change traditional texts, even in the Hebrew, that are objectionable
to modern sensibilities, as Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism did with the Avot
(ancestors) blessing but were unwilling to do in other cases.44 One may also create
new and original texts and rituals that more clearly articulate one’s contemporary
beliefs and values. Thus, Marcia Falk's feminist The Book of Blessings includes a new
Shema: “Sh’ma, yisra'eyl—la’elohut alfey panim, m’lo olam sh’khinatah, ribuy paneha
ehad” (Hear, O Israel—The divine abounds everywhere, and dwells in everything;
the many are one.)45 This Shema begins with Shema Yisrael and ends with ekhad, but
the rest of the Hebrew is entirely different. The same is true for her standard bless­
ing introduction: “n’vareykh et eyn hahayim’ (let us bless the source o f life).46 This
new formula is more impersonal than the traditional "baruh atah Adonai” (blessed
are you [masculine] our Lord), which avoids gendered God language, is more
ambiguous on theological beliefs, and is more supportive of imminent (God in
humanity) as opposed to transcendent (God ruling humanity) theology. While
other feminist Jews have tried substituting "Shehina" (divine presence) for
“YHWH" (the name of God read as "Adonai" or Lord), in Falk's opinion, “the reten­
tion of the formulation ‘Blessed are you' has its own limitations. This passive con­
struction is ultimately disempowering in that it masks the presence of the speaking
self .. . that is performing the act of blessing. Perhaps more important, the state­
ment ‘Blessed are you' leaves the traditional view of God as Other unchallenged—
and this theology is clearly problematic for many Jews today."47 Falk is aware of
how controversial her work is: "How does one dare to rewrite such words? I have
no answer to this question beyond the raison d'etre of this book as a whole, which
 Beyond Apikorsut 297

is, simply, that we ought to try to say what we mean when we pray.”48 If one no
longer believes the content of traditional prayers, then one must change the text
one reads and sings to accomplish this goal.
Similarly, the liturgy and celebrations of Humanistic Judaism differ markedly
from the traditional Jewish prayer service in both structure and content. Where tra­
ditionally Jews asked God to make peace (oseh shalom) for them and Israel,
Humanistic Jews sing modified words to the same melody:

Na’ase shalom ba’olam Let us make peace in the world.

Na’ase shalom aleinu Let us make peace for us,
V’al kol ha-olam And for the entire world.
V’imru shalom And let us say: peace.49

Continuity is provided by the traditional melody, similar-sounding Hebrew, and a

similar overall theme of hope; integrity is provided by the emphasis on human
action and universal scope. Traditional songs and rituals consistent with Secular
Humanistic Jewish perspectives, like Hinay Ma Tov or the Passover Four Questions,
are sung or read in the original texts, but modern Israeli music and poetry are also
used to provide Hebrew content for Jewish celebration.50 The large majority of
liturgical text and almost all prose and responsive reading is in English, with many
(though by no means all) songs in Hebrew Blessings tend to either begin “Baruh
haor ba’olam” (Blessed is light in the world) and end with traditional formulae like
“hamotzi lehem min ha’aretz” (brings forth bread from the earth), or they focus on
the people performing the action being blessed: “b’ruhim ha-motzi’im lehem"
(blessed are those who bring forth bread, etc.). Entirely original Hebrew songs are
also used; for example, a song written by Sherwin Wine early in the movement's
history is one of the most commonly used:

Ayfo Oree? Oree Bee. Where is my light? My light is in me.

Ayfo Tikvatee? Tikvatee Bee. Where is my hope? My hope is in me.
Ayfo Kohee? Kohee Bee. Where is my strength? My strength is in me.
V’gam Bah. And in you.51

For those raised in this movement, these texts, songs, and blessings are much more
familiar and have more familial and emotional resonance than the traditional
Shema, Kaddish, and other classical texts of historical Jewish prayer.
From my experience, for secular Jews in Humanistic Jewish congregations
there are two general standards for Jewish practice: personal meaning and philo­
sophical consistency. Some may choose to fast on Yom Kippur, and others may not.
Some may choose to observe Passover rules regarding grain, even if they do not
observe kashrut in general—like the Israeli who eats a Tel Aviv McDonald's cheese­
burger on a matzah-meal bun during Pesakh. They may read the Bible, or Saul
Bellow, or even scholarly studies of Jewish life to experience a personally meaning­
ful Jewish connection. In the standard of personal meaning, Humanistic Jews are
no different than most Conservative or Reform Jews who pick and choose which
practices they will follow based on personal preference: kashrut at home but not at
 298 ADAM C H A L O M

restaurants, wearing talit or tefilin in synagogue but driving home afterward. As

sociologist Steven Cohen and theologian Arnold Eisen have suggested, "The prin­
cipal authority for contemporary American Jews, in the absence o f compelling reli­
gious norms and communal loyalties, has become the sovereign self.”52
Philosophical consistency, the second standard for Humanistic Jews, would
apply in certain cases: wearing tefilin is both clearly fulfilling a commandment and
a practice commonly understood to be this, and for those unsure of any “com­
mander” and striving to say what they mean and mean what they say, such a prac­
tice would not be clearly consistent. The result of the application of these two
standards—personal meaning and philosophic consistency—is that practice varies
within a range from congregation to congregation and from individual to individ­
ual. For example, some may consider fasting on Yom Kippur philosophically incon­
sistent because, historically, it was a way to fulfill the commandment to “afflict your
souls,”53 while others may give fasting a secular significance, such as solidarity with
the hungry, a test of will, identification with past Jewish generations, or a personal
purification for the new year. Despite this diversity, throughout the congregation as
a whole there is generally broad agreement on both the philosophical basis for the
organization and on the practical expression of that identity. However, it should be
noted that Humanistic congregations are susceptible to ritual and liturgical debates
as much as congregations of any other denomination.

Who Are Secular Humanistic Jews?

The final lens we will use to explore this vision of Judaism aimed at American sec­
ular Jews is the demographic composition of families involved in a Humanistic
Jewish congregation, provided by statistics from a self-conducted survey of the
Birmingham Temple (about four hundred member families) in 2003-2004, as well as
my personal impression of other communities in the national movement.54 It
should be noted that these may not be the relative proportions of American secu­
lar Jews as a whole; rather, this represents a self-selected group o f secularized Jews
who (1) are attracted to this model; (2) were interested enough to have joined the
congregation and filled out the survey; (3) live in a community with a Humanistic
Jewish congregation; and (4) have heard of the movement in the first place. Other
Humanistic congregations may have different proportions o f each group. So who
are the individuals to whom a Humanistic Jewish congregation may appeal?

• The Native: like myself, someone who was raised in a secular, cultural, or
Humanistic Jewish identity. They may have grown up in a socialist or
Yiddishist school, in a Workman's Circle, or even in a Humanistic Jewish
congregation. They comprise 10 percent of the Birmingham Temple
membership.
• Evolved: the most typical member of a Humanistic Jewish congregation, as
much as half of any congregation. They were raised in a conventional liberal
Jewish religious identity, but that identity does not match who they have
become as adults. Between personal philosophical questions and the
 Beyond Apikorsut 299

difference between what they experience in synagogue and how they live their
private lives, they find in Humanistic Judaism a Jewish connection that fits
their beliefs and behavior. In the Birmingham Temple survey, 20 percent of
the respondents were raised as Reform and 30 percent as Conservative Jews.
• Rebelled: people who were raised very traditionally (often Orthodox or even
ultra-Orthodox) and broke away. They are looking for a Jewish cultural and
ethnic identity but reject strict ritual requirements and traditional theology.
They are also attracted to Humanistic Judaism's willingness to say "I don't
know" and to ask questions rather than provide dogmatic answers. Of the
Birmingham Temple, 7.5 percent fit this category.
• Ethnic or Cultural: individuals who are “unaffiliated Jews” or “just Jewish."
They often know they are Jewish, even though they have had little formal
Jewish education outside of home holidays. Jews from the former Soviet
Union could also fit into this category. They want a stronger Jewish
connection for themselves or for their children (in part because o f the
declining ethnic experience described above), but they do not accept
traditional theology and do not connect with a traditional lifestyle. This group
represents 15 percent of the Birmingham Temple.
• Secular Israeli: Here there is no question of a Jewish ethnic or national
connection, and many Israelis have strong affinities for Jewish language,
history, and literature as the major components of a modern Jewish cultural
identity. Sometimes Humanistic Judaism is a natural fit for this group.
However, like some Russian Jews, many Israelis are dubious about the “right”
to change traditional texts and practices ("the synagogue I don't go to is
Orthodox”). Israelis also tend to desire more Hebrew language in their
celebrations and schools than most Humanistic Jewish congregations provide.
This group represents only 1 percent of the Birmingham Temple survey
responses.
• Blended: Many families with one non-Jewish partner find homes in
Humanistic Judaism because both partners are welcome as equal members,
and families are allowed to explore the cultures of both parents on their own
without hiding that fact. The Humanistic Jewish congregation can support the
Jewish side of a mixed cultural identity. At the Birmingham Temple, 17
seventeen percent of respondents were not raised Jewish, statistically
suggesting that at least one-third of the membership is involved in an
intercultural marriage. In other congregations, the percentages are higher.

Understandably, congregations with members from such diverse backgrounds

have a challenging time creating celebrations that speak to all of these personal
experiences.
At the same time, Secular Humanistic Judaism does appeal emotionally and
intellectually to individual members. It is not the only version of a secular Jewish
identity that exists today or that could exist, and many more individuals (con­
sciously or not) agree with the general philosophical approach of Secular
 300 ADAM C H A L O M

Humanistic Judaism than are currently members of Humanistic Jewish congrega­

tions. This can be seen by surveys such as the American Jewish Identity Survey
(AJIS) or National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), as well as in behavior: many
Jews affiliate only temporarily to celebrate a Bar or Bat Mitzvah because the reli­
gious congregation does not relate to their lifestyles; many others drop in or only
buy tickets for High Holidays because their Jewish and human selves are not closely
connected; Jewish community programs like cultural festivals, Israel walks, and
music performances draw crowds that otherwise might come to nothing; and char­
itable donations from unaffiliated Jews to Israel and Jewish Federations demon­
strate ethnic solidarity in the absence of synagogue membership.
So why do not more of these individuals join a Secular Humanistic Jewish con­
gregation? Some simply have not heard of it, and others live in smaller Jewish com­
munities and join what is already available there. Some are repelled either by
congregational structure or the associated financial burdens, and some have so
strongly rejected their Jewish background that they are opposed to any “institu­
tions,” “organized religion,” or “religious authority” Some do not agree with mak­
ing changes to traditional Jewish language and practices, and many American Jews
care much less about ideas and philosophy than about conventionality and commu­
nity. And like every Jewish movement, some join Humanistic Jewish congregations
to educate their children and then drop out when they are done, since being Jewish
in general is simply not as important to them as adults.
But for those who do find it meaningful, Secular Humanistic Judaism provides
Jewish communities that justify and celebrate their secular lifestyle while creating
connections to an ethnic Jewish identity they value. A Jewish identity addressed to
secular Jews that does not demand conformity to traditional models is not a way
out of Jewish identification, but rather a way in. Secular Humanistic Judaism is not
simply an Apikoros heretical rejection of Jewish tradition in favor of secular free­
doms, but rather the free adoption and adaptation of Judaism by secularized Jews
to the secular lifestyle they already enjoy. They could have chosen to be nothing;
they have chosen to identify as part of a Jewish community instead.

NOTES
1. Mishnah Sanhédrin 10:1. Philip Blackman, ed., Mishnayot (Order Nezikin) (New York: Judaic
Press, 1963-64), 285.
2. Sanhédrin 38b; Israel Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud (London: Soncino Press, 1952) . cited
from Jewish Classics Library.
3. Philip Goodman, comp., The Yom Kippur Anthology (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1971), 331.
4. See “A Brief History o f Camp Kinderland,” at http://www.kinderland.org/campkinderland/
history/history.htm.
5. "The Pittsburgh Platform (1885),’’ in The Jew in the Modem World, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr
and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 371-372.
6. Uriel Weinreich, Modem English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, 1968), 285.
7. Egon Mayer, Barry Kosmin, and Ariela Keysar, American Jewish Identity Survey 2001,
Exhibit 13, http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/ajis.pdf.
 Beyond Apikorsut 301

8. See http://www.csjo.org. The constituent organizations of this body are the heirs o f the
secular shule movement o f previous generations o f American secular Jews. See the Sholem
Community o f Los Angeles at http://www.sholem.org.
9. This label may be temporary; many o f this group will affiliate at some point in their lives,
usually around the age o f a child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah.
10. See, for example, the Center for Cultural Judaism at http://www.culturaljudaism.org.
11. For example, see Mayer et al., AmericanJewish Identity Survey 2001 for their discussion o f their
statistical category o f “Jewish Parent: No Religion," http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/ajis.pdf.
12. See Michael B. Herzbrun, “The Silent Minority: Nonbelievers in the Reform Jewish
Community,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Journal (Summer 1998).
13. See articles by Sherwin Wine, David Oler, and Walter Heilman in Humanistic Judaism: Is
Humanistic Judaism a Religion? 30 (Winter 2002).
14. The Sholem Community o f Los Angeles, at http://www.sholem.org/secular.asp.
15. Joseph Chuman, "What Do the Courts Say?" HumanisticJudaism 20 (Winter 2002): 13.
16. “The International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism," in A Life o f Courage: Sherwin
Wine and Humanistic Judaism, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Harry T. Cook, and Marilyn Rowens
(Farmington Hills, MI: International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, 2003), 311.
17. Sherwin Wine, HumanisticJudaism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978), 2.
18. Barbara Behrmann, “ Reclaiming My Jewish Identity," Humanistic Judaism 29,
(Spring/Summer 2001): 12.
19. Yehuda Bauer, introduction to Judaism in a Secular Age: An Anthology of Secular Humanistic
Jewish Thought, ed. Renee Kogol and Zev Katz (Farmington Hills, MI: International Institute for
Secular Humanistic Judaism, 1995), xiv.
20. Chaim Zhitlovsky, “Unzer tsukunft do in land” [1915], cited in Mendes-Flohr and
Reinharz, The Jew in the Modem World, 388.
21. Sherwin Wine, "Reflections," in Cohn-Sherbok et al., A Life o f Courage, 293.
22. David Oler, “Securing the Future o f Humanistic Judaism," Humanistic Judaism 29
(Autumn 2001): 8.
23. Bennett Muraskin, Humanist Readings in Jewish Folklore (Farmington Hills, MI:
International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism and Milan Press, 2001), 2-3.
24. "Jewish Humor," Humanistic Judaism 21 (Summer/Autumn 1993): 41.
25. Sherwin Wine, Judaism Beyond God (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1995), 217.
26. "Core Principles" (adopted October 8,1999), http://www.shj.org/CorePrinciples.htm.
27. Sherwin Wine, Celebration: A Ceremonial and Philosophic Guidefor Humanists and Humanistic
Jews (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 157.
28. Daniel Friedman, Jewish without Judaism: Conversations with an Unconventional Rabbi
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 92.
29. Wine, “ Reflections,” in Cohn-Sherbok et al., A Life of Courage, 291-292.
30. Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 119.
31. Lucy Dawidowicz, “The Jewishness o f the Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,"
in The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna (NY: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 160.
32. “ National Jewish Population Study, 1971," cited in Dawidowicz, "The Jewishness o f the
Jewish Labor Movement, 158.
33. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (NY: Columbia
University Press, 1981), 55.
34. Peter H. Schweitzer, “A Rabbi's Journey to Humanistic Judaism," in Humanistic Judaism 29
(Spring/Summer 2001): 3.
35. Society for Humanistic Judaism Board o f Governors meeting material, May 2005.
 302 ADAM C H A L O M

36. More information on each organization is available at their respective Web sites. For the
society, see http://www.shj.org; the leadership conference, http://www.lcshj.org; the institute,
http://www.iishj.org; the federation, http://www.ifshj.org; and the center, http://www
.culturaljudaism.org.
37. Chuman, "Courts," n.
38. Adam Chalom, "To Destroy and to Build: The Balance o f Creativity and Continuity,” in
Cohn-Sherbok et al., A Life o f Courage, 104.
39. Chaim Stem, ed., Gates o f Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays: A Gender Sensitive Prayerbook
(NY: Central Conference o f American Rabbis, 1994), 124.
40. Ibid., iv. A well-known example o f such a Hebrew change, not only in Reform Judaism, is
the addition o f matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah to the Avot (ancestors) blessing in
the Amida (standing prayer).
41. Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Vehagim (Wyncote, PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1994), xxiii.
42. Ibid., 277.
43. Daniel Friedman, "Humanistic Judaism: For the Many or the Few,” in Cohn-Sherbok et al.,
A Life o f Courage, 169-170.
44. Stem, Gates o f Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays, 124.
45. Marcia Falk, The Book o f Blessings (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 170-171.
46. For example, "hamotzi’ah lekhem min ha’aretz” (that brings forth bread from the earth).
Falk, The Book o f Blessings, 18-19.
47. Ibid., 419.
48. Ibid., 432.
49. Wine, Celebration, 423.
50. Peter H. Schweitzer, The Liberated Haggadah: A Passover Celebration for Cultural, Secular and
HumanisticJews (NY: Center for Cultural Judaism, 2003), 9,36. A few Humanistic congregations
choose to modify "shevet ahim” (brothers/siblings dwell) to "shevet amim” (nations dwell)
because o f gender sensibilities.
51. Wine, Celebration, 397.
52. Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 2.
53. Lv 23:27.
54. The study was facilitated by APB Associates o f Southfield, Michigan, and statistical results
were distributed to congregation leadership. There were 439 individual respondents to the sur­
vey. For this question, respondents were asked, "In what denomination were you raised?" and
given the following choices: "Conservative,” "Humanistic or secular," "Orthodox," "Reform,"
“'Just Jewish’ (no denomination),” "Other Jewish (SPECIFY),” and “ Non-Jewish.”
 Conclusion
TH E NATURE AND VIABILITY OF J E W I S H
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR IDENTITIES

ZVI GITELMAN

As has been made clear in this volume, Jews are difficult to define and have
redefined themselves periodically, most often as a religious or ethnic group.1
Writing in the 1960s, C. Bezalel Sherman suggested that Jews "would seem to be all
o f these and more": a religious group, a "historical continuum,” a “cultural group
with peculiar racial traits,” a "people.” However, he noted, "Collectively, American
Jews regard themselves as first of all a religious community.”2 At the same time,
other sociologists noted that most Jews in New York City had no synagogue or
temple affiliation and that what really linked them was a “sense of common fate.”
“But we know from experience that when asked, ‘what is your religion?' even [non­
religious and antireligious Jews] answer, 'Jewish.'” Glazer and Moynihan con­
cluded that "the common fate is defined ultimately by connection to a single
religion, to which everyone is still attached by birth and tradition, if not by action
and belief.”3 Bernard Levin averred in The Times (London) that he was a non­
believer, but “when I am filling in a form on which there is a space labeled ‘Religion,’
I don't hesitate, but put Jew. .. . Am I a Jew? If I do not pray with the Jews, and sing
with the Jews, and refuse to eat pork with the Jews, and read books backwards with
the Jews, how can I be a Jew? Well, don't forget the form that I filled in.”4
A decade after Moynihan and Glazer, Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen
argued that for Jews, “ties to tradition and minority experience are far more import­
ant than common belief, making it more an ethnic than a religious collectivity in
many respects.”5 They called “familism” the “key element of the Jewish collective
consciousness.” Jews see themselves as part of an extended family, “a group into
which a person is born and of which the person remains a part regardless of what he
or she does.”6 Thus, American and other Jews conceive of, describe, and present
themselves differently at different times and in different places. The debate about the
nature of the Jewish entity continues within and outside it, and not in the United
States alone.
At the turn of the twentieth century, there were available in the marketplace of
Jewish identities perhaps five conceptions of who and what Jews are. These were
the traditional ethno-religious fusion; Reform Judaism's restriction of Jewishness
to religion and denial of Jewish nationhood; Zionism’s claim that Jews are a mod­
ern as well as ancient nation and hence deserve a state; a secular Diaspora national­
ism that justified the existence of a people but saw no need for a state; and

303
 304 ZVI G I T E LM AN

assimilationism, the idea that whatever Jews might have been in the past, their
future was to merge into the peoples among whom they lived.
The oldest conception is that Judaism is a tribal religion. Whoever adheres to
Judaism is considered a member of the tribe or people, unlike the ‘‘universal'’ reli­
gions, Christianity and Islam, whose adherents are of different peoples or nationalities.
In this respect, the Jewish people resemble the Greeks, where to be Greek one
must be Greek Orthodox.7 There is a wide spectrum o f the relationship between
religion and ethnicity. It ranges from the congruence of religion and ethnicity, as
in the Jewish, Saudi Arabian, Tibetan, Greek, and perhaps Amish cases, to a close
association of the two—as in the Polish/Catholic and Italian /Catholic cases—to
countries of immigration, such as the United States, Canada, and South Africa,
where the association between religion and ethnicity is tenuous or nonexistent.
Then there are largely secular societies such as the Scandinavian, where the associ­
ation between ethnicity and religion is largely historic. Nevertheless, Denmark,
one of the most secular states in the world if judged by the church attendance of its
nominally largely Christian population, has a constitution that still makes the
Evangelical Lutheran Church the established church of Denmark, and, as such, it is
supported by the state.
For the present purpose, I differentiate between Judaism and Jewishness. By
Judaism I mean a religion with a distinct set of beliefs and practices.8Jewishness, on
the other hand, is a sense of being Jewish, in whatever way one—or, importantly,
others—chooses to define it. It may be defined, of course, primarily through religion,
Judaism. At a minimum, Jewishness may be defined as what people are not—not
Christians or Muslims, not Arabs or Poles.

Secularization
Secularization is a process whereby that which had been explained and understood
in religious terms comes to be understood without reference to the divine and
metaphysical. On the behavioral plane, the behaviors emanating from those under­
standings change or dispense with the rationale for those behaviors. Behaviors may
continue, but they are no longer motivated or undergirded by the same rationales.
The process of secularization occurs on two planes, which may not always be as
connected as might be expected. Secularization is an intellectual process, often but
not exclusively occurring among people who ponder issues o f cause and effect,
belief and evidence, teaching and experience. But it is also a behavioral process, not
necessarily informed by philosophical consideration. On the first level, seculariza­
tion is due to what is perceived as new knowledge, especially in science and history,
and conclusions drawn from the consequent argument.9 As a mass behavioral or
social process, secularization has often been the concomitant of mass migration,
new technology, or urbanization, rather than o f a conscious mass rethinking of
previous ideas. The process of secularization is "neither one-dimensional nor
inevitable and varies in pace, incidence and impact from place to place, depending
on such factors as the socio-cultural situation, the conflicting groups involved, and
the impact of functional rationality on society and its different spheres.” 10 These
 Conclusion 305

generalizations apply to European societies, including those in which Jews have

lived, and they may also be relevant to Jews in Israel and North America, if not nec­
essarily to Arabs in Israel and non-Jews in North America.
As several authors in this volume point out, Jewishness was expressed in religious
terms until modem times. If we examine secularization as an intellectual process,
Baruch Spinoza is often identified as the first modern Jew to question systematically
and publicly, by virtue of his writings, some of the sacred doctrines of Judaism, espe­
cially in his skepticism regarding the scientific reliability of biblical accounts. Despite
inferences made by some contemporary advocates of secularjewishness, Spinoza did
not launch a movement and did not sketch out an ideology that would preserve a sec­
ularjewishness while rejecting the main tenets of Judaism. It was not the ideas of one
man or even a group that stimulated mass-level secularization. Rather, it would seem
that for most Jews the process of secularization was on the second level, where behav­
iors were changed by mass movements and radically changed social situations.
It is not clear when Spinoza began to be read by Jews. His Tractacus Theologico-
Politicus—it is doubtful that many Jews read it in the Latin original—was first trans­
lated into French in 1679 and into English a decade later." In the mid-nineteenth
century the maskil (“Enlightened Jew") Solomon Rubin translated into Yiddish a
play about Uriel da Costa, another "heretic," and in so doing “transformed da
Costa into a radical, skeptical, anticlericalist maskil fighting to defend his views.” 12
Rubin translated some of Spinoza's writings into Hebrew in 1857 and advocated
that Jews abandon the study of Maimonides for Spinoza's writings. But "moderate
maskilim could not bear the idea of Spinoza as a major historical hero,”13 and some
opposed any attempt to portray Spinoza as a faithful Jew. Nevertheless, Meir
Letteris published in 1845 “The History of the Wise Scholar Baruch Spinoza, may
his Memory be Blessed” in Bikurei ha’itim hahadashim, and, according to Shmuel
Feiner, "the maskilim were already familiar with Spinoza and his philosophy.” 14
They identified him as a persecuted maskil and were more interested in his bio­
graphy than in his philosophy.
Only at the turn of the twentieth century did works by and about Spinoza
appear in Yiddish.15 The first Yiddish booklet (sixty-four pages) about Spinoza
appeared in 1905.16 About 1926, a self-described group of "Spinozists” in New York
launched "active work on the Jewish street" aimed at attracting "Jewish workers
and folks-inteligentn" to a class on the Ethics and to symposia on Spinoza's thought.17
Needless to say, this was not a mass movement. In 1932, an academic appraisal of
Spinoza appeared in a Warsaw Yiddish literary journal.18 Apparently, the first
Russian edition of Spinoza's works did not appear until 1935. Despite the intentions
of the New York Yiddishist Spinozists, his works never became popular reading
among the Jewish proletarian or religious masses.
Some believe that Jewish secularism as an intellectual movement began with
the Haskalah ("Enlightenment” ). Among those Orthodox Jews whose knowledge of
the classic texts and of Jewish history is gained from the Art Scroll editions and sim­
ilar contemporary tendentious publications, it is often assumed that the Haskalah
was an antireligious movement. The truth is more complicated. The founding
 306 ZVI G I T E L M A N

father of the Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, remained an observant Jew through­

out his life, though his children converted to Christianity.19 One scholar of the
Haskalah in Galicia-Poland describes it as a "moderate, reasonable, and religiously-
informed movement.”20 As Nancy Sinkoff observes, “Enlightened Jews on both
sides of the Oder River on Prussia’s eastern border sought to balance the relation­
ship between traditional religious obligation and modernity's commitment to indi­
vidualism and moral autonomy.”21 The maskil Mendel Lefin (1749-1826) in Podolia
(now in Ukraine) and Galicia was faithful to rabbinic culture and "believed in indi­
vidual intellectual autonomy because it was a gift from God.”22 Lefin and other
maskilim "did not reject the rabbinic culture of Ashkenaz in its entirety.”23 Perhaps
the virulence of the critique of Hasidism by many maskilim makes it easy to con­
strue the Haskalah as an antireligious movement, especially by those whose ideo­
logical agenda is well served by rejection of science and general or "secular”
culture, a rejection that was not the universal position of East European rabbis in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.24 The Misnagdim’s critique of Hasidism
was no less sharp and biting, but such luminaries as the Vilna Gaon can hardly be
accused of secularism, so the wrath of the putative defenders of Orthodoxy was
directed more at the maskilim.25
As Mordechai Zalkin notes, the relationship between Haskalah and religion var­
ied from place to place. It could be assumed that the maskilim of Odessa, a newly
established port city, of which it was said that “seven miles around it, the fires of
gehenom [hell] burn,” would be nonreligious. But in Vilna (present-day Vilnius)
most maskilim had studied in yeshivas. They did not look to cut the tie with reli­
gion and tradition. Isaac Baer Levinson’s Teudah beYisrael, “which was to the East
European maskilim what Mendelsohn's writings were to the West European mask­
ilim,” argued that “if there is no Torah there is no [general] wisdom, and if there is
no [general] wisdom there is no Torah.”26 The Vilna maskilim of the first half of
the nineteenth century had opened themselves to new ideas, but they lived their
lives according to traditional norms.
However, a “radical Haskalah” developed later in the nineteenth century and
“became increasingly pessimistic and disillusioned with the Enlightenment and all
its fine ideas that were never realized.”27 Some turned to science “in the hope that it
would provide . . . a secular, precise, true and certain explanation and would foretell
the inevitable events of the future.”28 The more radical maskilim advocated reli­
gious change and attacked the rabbinic leadership, provoking a counterattack by the
latter. Before the 1860s, maskilim had explicitly rejected the kind of reform that was
going on in Germany, but later some called for a revision of Halacha and the
Shulhati aruch, the most important code of Jewish law. The kulturkampf in Europe at
the time, in which the Catholic church fought the loss o f control over education and
Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of papal infallibility, influenced some maskilim
who became vocally anticlerical. Thus, by the late nineteenth century the Haskalah
movement encompassed a spectrum of attitudes toward Judaism, but most mask­
ilim, even the anticlerical among them, did not espouse explicitly antireligious posi­
tions, though many advocated "modernization” and reform of Judaism.
 Conclusion 307

Shmuel Feiner sums up the relationship between secularity and the

Haskalah thus:

The enlightenment revolution in eighteenth-century Jewish society was a secu­

lar one [but] most of the maskilim did not declare a cultural war on religion
itself. They did not wish to sever their followers’ ties to the religious sources,
the sacred tongue or the observance of the commandments or the holidays . ..
as some enemies of enlightenment claimed.. . . They tried to shape a Jewish
tradition that was compatible with the Enlightenment and emphasized moral
values and reason. It was, however, a secular revolution, because it weakened
the public standing of religion and of the clergy and established, alongside
them or in their place, a secular culture and institutions. . . . One broad and
diverse development took place, in the course of which the sacred and the pro­
fane were separated. In this way, two blocs of knowledge, institutions, and pat­
terns of behavior were created, and each of them gained autonomy. They drew
upon different sources of authority—one of them from the sanctity of divine
authority, the other from the reason, experience, and human will himself [sic].19

The question of authority has been further complicated in recent decades in many
societies, including those in which most Jews reside. In addition to religious and
secular institutions of authority, to which individuals had previously paid alle­
giance, the authority of the individual has been reasserted, not so much in terms of
rights, as was the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but as the entity
most qualified to decide what is best and correct for that individual. The decline of
deference in speech and public and private behavior is a manifestation o f ‘‘individ­
uation,’’ the idea that individual assessments and beliefs take precedence over sys­
tematic and generalized ideologies. In the religious realm, individuation involves a
"stress on inner authenticity and autonomy . . . a personal quest for meaning."30
Thus, while "organized religion” may decline, new forms may arise. The popular­
ity of “spirituality”—intensely personal and rarely institutionalized—and of
kabala, which makes few institutional or behavioral demands, at least in its current
popular interpretations, attest to changing fashions in religious expression. Such
trends may have greater implications for a collectively oriented, ethnicized, and
communally based religion as Judaism than for other religions, which are more
toward the universal side of the tribal-universal spectrum.

Secularism and Its Jewish Expression

The common ground of several definitions of “secular” is removing spheres o f life
from the sacred (kodesh) and treating them without reference to a divine being or to
another world (hoi). Foods (no dietary laws), clothing (nothing prescribed or pro­
scribed), governance, and economics are relatively easy to desacralize. As Americans
have become increasingly aware, sexual relations, education and beginning-of-life
and end-of-life issues are much harder.
In Karl Dobbelaere’s view,31 secularization means three things: (i) functional dif­
ferentiation in society, so that religion becomes one subsystem among others and
 308 ZVI GITELMAN

loses its overarching claim; (2) organizational secularization involves the change in val­
ues, beliefs, morals, and rituals of a religious group (Reform Judaism and Unitarianism
might be examples); (3) individual secularization means the diminishing congruence
between the norms of religious groups in beliefs, rituals and morals and the atti­
tudes and conduct of their members. American Catholics who ignore Vatican teach­
ings on birth control and abortion; American Conservative Jews who do not follow
their movement's rulings on dietary laws, driving to synagogue, etc.; Orthodox Jews
who violate state laws—all exemplify individual secularization.
The secular/religious dichotomy is not as sharp as it may seem. When a Szatmar
hasid who abjures secular education, has no television or computer in his house, and
reads only religiously sanctioned literature steps into an elevator and pushes the but­
ton—not on shabbes, of course—has he entered the secular world of technology and
science? Or does he do so only when he rejects a belief in the existence of God or,
short of that, the divinity of the scriptures? When a teacher in a secular institution
attends a class (shiur) on Halacha, is he performing the religious act of Torah study, as
his counterpart in the yeshiva is doing, or is he engaging in the same kind of textual
analysis and intellectual exercise as his university colleague? Of course, we may
answer the question by examining intent, but the activity itself, whether observed by
an outsider or reflected on by the person performing the act, is probably neither
wholly religious nor wholly a-religious. Were the university teacher to read the text
to discover its inconsistencies and logical flaws in order to desacralize it, perhaps he
might be more clearly engaged in a secular—and secularizing—act.
Uncertainties, ironies, and subtleties in the religious /secular dichotomy were
reflected in the quip of the late philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser a few weeks
before his death when he was in great pain. “Why is God making me suffer so
much? Just because I don't believe in him?"32 Morgenbesser, who had once contem­
plated the rabbinate as a career but became a nonbeliever, often demonstrated his
Jewishness publicly at Columbia University at a time when it was not customary to
do so. Perhaps Judaism, because of its ethnic component, blurs the lines between
the secular and the religious more than most religions.
An early example o f blurring of the religious and secular, Judaism and Jewish­
ness, religion and ethnicity, is the Book of Esther, incorporated into the biblical
canon by the rabbis o f the Talmud after some discussion.33 Some suggest that this
book was the first seemingly purely secular and purely ethnic expression o f Jewish
ethnicity. “The lack o f religious piety in the Hebrew version of Esther is notorious.
God is not mentioned by name at all.34 Neither Esther nor Mordecai display any
concern for any of the laws of Judaism . . . Esther becomes the sexual partner and
then the wife o f a Gentile; she lives in his palace and eats his food with no recogni­
tion o f the laws of kashrut. . . . There are no prayers, sacrifices or other acts of con­
ventional religious piety . .. Jewish identity in Esther is ethnic, and Jews can
successfully hide that identity."35 Others argue that there may be at least a hint of
Divine intervention in the phrase “revah vehatzalah ya’amod mimakom aher” (salva­
tion and delivery will come from another place) with Makom (place) one o f the
attributes or names of God.36
 Conclusion 309

In any case, modem experiments in a-religious Judaism or Jewishness began in

nineteenth-century Europe. Among them were what might be called familism,
Yiddishism, territorialism, autonomism, Jewish socialism, Zionism, and the Soviet
experiment in secular socialist Yiddish culture. By "familism” I mean—to expand
on Liebman and Cohen—nothing more than social association, the strong procliv­
ity for endogamous marriage, and the feeling o f belonging together. This was
exemplified in the founding of B’nai Brith, until some years ago the largest Jewish
organization in the world, followed by "social orders” such as B’nai Abraham, B’nai
Zion, Knights of Pythias, and their equivalents in several countries, and by "Jewish”
fraternities and sororities in European and American universities.37 A common lan­
guage, food and dress cultures, vocational niches, territory, and lack of full accept­
ance by non-Jewish society, or merely compact settlement, were sufficient bases for
Jewish solidarity. In other words, Jews were seen as a social group, identified as such
by themselves as well as by non-Jews.
In the Russian Empire a variant of Jewishness developed that was largely
unknown in Western Europe, secular Jewish nationalism based on language and
autonomy within the Diaspora. An ideology of Yiddishism developed.38 An architect
of this ideology, Chaim Zhitlovsky, claimed that the substitution of Yiddish language
and culture for religion "succeeded in building a ‘spiritual-national home,' purely sec­
ular, which can embrace Jews throughout the world.”39 For Zhitlovsky, Yiddish had
become the content of Jewishness. "The Yiddish language form becomes for us . . .
a fundamental.”40 For the first time, language was identified as the “distinctive char­
acteristic” or essence of the peoplehood of the Jews.41 In the early decades of the
twentieth century the idea of a Jewish people based on a culture, rather than religion,
was popular across a wide political spectrum, from Zionists to Diasporists—that is,
those who believed Jews could form a viable national entity without their own state.
"In postreligious society, culture was to become the main ingredient of secular
attachment to Jewish peoplehood, filling the enormous niche hitherto occupied by
religion. Yiddish literature was seen as the most important component of secular,
modem culture.”42 Though probably few of the advocates are aware of it, those who
today are promoting Jewish culture in English and other non-Jewish languages are
heirs to this ideology, with the crucial difference that not only is Judaism no longer
the nexus of Jewishness, but neither are Jewish languages.
In the Yiddishist movement language replaced religion, but as David Fishman,
a contributor to this volume, points out, the movement was not uniformly antireli­
gious or even a-religious. The movement failed for several reasons. Most Yiddish
speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. But even beyond the
grasp of the Nazis, Yiddish did not survive transplantation from its native soil to the
new worlds of the Americas. It could not compete in the marketplace of languages
and cultures, ceding preeminence to English, Spanish, and French.
At the beginning o f the twentieth century, historian Simon Dubnov argued that
"a proper understanding of Jewish history in the Diaspora, to be achieved through
historical research, would be the foundation o f a new secular Jewish national iden­
tification based in the Diaspora.”43 He complemented this naive view of the nature
 310 ZVI GI TE LM AN

o f national identity with the promotion of a modernized, democratized kehilla as

the oigan of national autonomy within Diaspora states. More than a century
before Will Kymlicka and others now arguing the cause of collective group rights
and representation, Dubnov vehemently rejected the idea, first proposed by the
Comte de Clermont-Tonnere to the French in the late eighteenth century, that Jews
could have equality with others as long as they abjured all claims to national, col­
lective rights. Dubnov opposed the notion that only as individuals did Jews need
and deserve rights. Each nation—which Dubnov but not Clermont-Tonnere con­
sidered Jews to be—should have some form of collective rights. The kehilla would
be democratic, secular, and nationally conscious—if not nationalist—and it would
administer Jewish affairs. The weakness of this scheme is that it depended on two
dubious assumptions, that states would permit this autonomy and that in such
states Jews would prefer communal autonomy to direct integration, even assimila­
tion, into the larger body politic, bypassing the Jewish communal substate.
It is instructive to compare this idea of a Diaspora nation sustained by its culture,
history, and autonomous self-governance with the Polish experience. Like Jews and
many others, the Poles lost their state, once one of the largest and most powerful in
Europe, in the late eighteenth century. Polish intellectuals nevertheless kept the
national political aspirations of their people alive through language and culture.
Eventually, Poles regained their sovereignty and reestablished Poland as a state in
1918. Could Polish peoplehood have been sustained over many generations without
a state? The Polish and Jewish cases are not analogous because Jewish statelessness
lasted 1,878 years and Polish statelessness only 123. Moreover, while there was a sig­
nificant Polish political and later economic emigration, most Polish people contin­
ued to inhabit their native territories, which Jews did not. But as with the Jews,
religion played a major role in sustaining the national consciousness of Poles. They
counterposed their Catholicism to Prussian Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy,
not as purely theological but as cultural and hence national difference.44The Russian
authorities tried to suppress Polish religion, language, and culture, but that only
made mobilization around these more plausible and effective for nationalist Poles.
Thus, though Poles and Jews lived side by side in a common state o f statelessness for
over a century, Polish success in using culture and language as the means of national
survival does not offer a useful analogy to the Jewish situation.
Jewish Diaspora territorialism and autonomism were beaten out by Zionism,
which emerged from the wreckage of World War II as the prominent solution to
Jewish powerlessness and vulnerability. Jewish socialism, most prominently
Bundism, was dealt mortal blows by the murder of most of its adherents, the rise
of Jews out of the working class in all Diaspora countries, and the association of
socialism with Stalinism and Soviet communism, however unfair and simplistic
that might be. The Soviet experiment with Yiddish-based secular, socialist Soviet
Jewish culture failed, not only because the state withdrew its support, but also
because Soviet Jews developed the same outlooks as their cousins abroad who
regarded Yiddish as the archaic, somewhat ludicrous language of the "old country"
or of the shtetl, one which would not serve well either in the new countries or in the
 Conclusion 311

cities of the industrializing USSR. In 1931 there were 1,100 Yiddish schools in the
USSR enrolling 150,000 students, but by 1948 there were no schools and no students.
True, the government refused to allow them to reopen after the war, but already in
the 1930s many Soviet Jews had rejected state-manufactured Jewishness as inau­
thentic, an ersatz creation of the very people who had robbed them of their real
traditions and ways of life. Systematically stripped of its religious and traditional
references, Soviet Yiddish seemed to some a desiccated caricature of the language.
Others rejected Yiddish education and institutions as impractical and useless for
educational, vocational, and social mobility.
An American visitor to a pre-World War II Yiddish school in Kiev observed that
pupils preferred Russian textbooks and concluded that “Russian is the language of
a culture stronger than the secular non-Hebrew culture conveyed by the Yiddish
language in the Soviet Union; Russian is also the language spoken . . . generally in
the USSR; and all those pupils, and parents too, who ever expect to move freely
about the Union must have complete mastery of the Russian language.”45 A porter
at a meeting of transport workers in 1924 put it directly when he argued against
having his trade union operate in Yiddish. “The matter is quite simple . . . For many
years I have carried hundreds of poods on my back day in and day out. Now I want
to learn some Russian and become a kontorshchik [office worker].”46 Since Yiddish
had been made into practically the only legitimate content of Jewishness, the fail­
ure of Sovietized Yiddish to win the allegiance o f the masses had important conse­
quences for the future of Jewish identity in the USSR.
In general, language does not appear to have been a very powerful nexus for
Jewish ethnicity. It has not been the “distinctive characteristic” or "epitome of people-
hood” for Jews.47 As Professor Roman Szporluk once remarked to me, “Jews are
linguistically promiscuous.” Though Hebrew is a language unique to one people—
unlike Arabic, Spanish, English, or French, but like Japanese and Hindi—and Jews ele­
vated it to the status of the holy tongue, “lashon hakodesh," Jews have not been
completely loyal to it. They have picked up and dropped languages with impressive fre­
quency, though abandoned languages have left their traces on successive Jewish vernac­
ulars. Even some very traditional and highly conscious Jews have adopted non-Jewish
languages: Georgian has long been the dominant vernacular of even the very tradi­
tional, religious Geoigian Jews, as Italian was the common language of all kinds of Jews
in Italy, and Arabic or French the languages of North African and Middle Eastern Jews.
Culturally isolated and religiously fervent Szatmar Hasidim and other Hungarian
groups seem to have no hesitation in using Magyar. More recently, English has gained
wide acceptance even among Hasidim in communities such as Borough Park in New
York and Stamford Hill in London. At the same time, Yiddish and Hebrew literature
are neither written nor very much read today in any Diaspora community. Ironically,
after the establishment of the State of Israel, whose main language is Hebrew, it may
be that fewer non-Israeli Jews in the Diaspora speak the language or, certainly, write
prose, poetry and dramas in it than before Israel's emergence.48
If a Jewish language is not a plausible foundation for a Diasporic Jewish culture,
are there other forms of a-religious Jewish culture that pass the test o f viability?
 312 ZVI G I T E LM AN

One way to define viability is that a culture should be transmissible across at least
three generations. It should be more than symbolic and be able to constrain and
direct behavior. And it should engage a substantial proportion of the population
associated with it.
Do religious forms of Jewishness meet that standard? Orthodox Judaism does,
though it was not long ago that many doubted it was either transmissible or trans­
plantable, as it seemed to fade very rapidly with immigration to the Americas and, to
a lesser extent, Western Europe. Conservative Judaism seems to be in crisis, as its
membership declines and ages, and its ideology seems uncertain.49 Reform Judaism
seems transmissible, but it is also a default position of Jewishness, the last stop on the
way out of Jewishness, because its rules of admission are so flaccid as to accommo­
date half-Jews, inattentive Jews, non-practicing Jews. Perhaps we dare generalize
about most Reform, most Conservative, and most “cultural" Jews: theirs is “symbolic
ethnicity," in Herbert Gans’s term, less a determinant of everyday behavior and more
a symbolic manifestation of origin, some positive sentiment, and filial piety. Of
course, those active in “civic Jewishness," participating in nonreligious Jewish organ­
izations, social and cultural activities, and working for Jewish causes and institutions
have an active ethnicity, one that is important to them and takes much of their time
and other resources. Many observers of American and other Jewish societies believe
the proportion of such people is shrinking in Jewish populations.
For one thing, a-religious Jewishness is difficult to maintain in a heavily
churched society such as the United States, where 95 percent o f the population
claims to believe in God and 40 percent claim they attend church regularly (the pro­
portions are considerably lower among Jews). But it is perfectly acceptable and
is even the norm in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Denmark, and other countries.50
In the United Kingdom, where religion is weak and weakening, there seems to be
a decline in attachments to Judaism.
In most Western Jewish populations, as religious commitment seemed to
decline for several decades after World War II, support for Israel and identification
with the Holocaust were the main pillars of Jewish identity. They assumed a promi­
nent role in Jewish literature, public commemorations, art, music, civic activity,
fund-raising, museum building, education, and travel abroad. Recently, mass pro-
Israel sentiment and active support has declined, especially among younger people
in the United States and United Kingdom.51 This may reflect disagreement with
Israeli policies, increased salience of other issues, or disenchantment with what was
once seen as a noble social experiment whose failures have become increasingly
apparent. Or, this may simply reflect a distancing from Israel as a Jewish state. But,
according to one report, “Strikingly, there was no parallel decline in other measures
of Jewish identification, including religious observance and communal affiliation."52
Only 57 percent agreed that “caring about Israel is a very important part of my being
Jewish," compared with 73 percent in a similar survey conducted in 1989.
The only experiment in secular, cultural Jewishness that succeeded in achieving
its goals and being transmitted from one generation to the next is Zionism, the
most successful a-religious movement in Jewish history. It has achieved three of
 Conclusion 313

four of its major aims: the establishment of a Jewish state that would be a safe
haven for persecuted Jews; the "ingathering o f the exiles" (in a few decades Israel
will have more Jews than any other country in the world); mizuggaluyot, the fusion
of people of many different cultures and from widely scattered lands into an Israeli
nation. The fourth aim, that of establishing a model state (or laGoyim netaticha) has
not been attained. But perhaps precisely because of these attainments, most
Zionist youth movements and adult organizations are moribund, the World Zionist
Organization is a retirement home for failed politicians, and there is much talk
among Israeli intellectuals on the left of post-Zionism.
As the Shoah passes from living, personal memory, and as it is routinized or insti­
tutionalized in curricula, a proliferation of museums and an ever-increasing volume
of publications, people begin to get used to it. Though politically incorrect to say so,
it is likely that a person who has seen the iconic photos of the Shoah may times—the
little boy with his hands up in the Warsaw Ghetto, the shooting of a man in a ravine
near Vinnitsa, the survivors of Auschwitz behind the wire photographed by the Red
Army movie cameraman, the piles of emaciated corpses at Buchenwald or Bergen-
Belsen—is less and less moved by them. As the Shoah passes from personal memory
to collective memory, from experience into history, it will take its place with the
destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem—formally mourned, commemorated on a
special day, and occupying a prominent place in history books—but not very person­
ally meaningful to most. This may not happen for decades, but it probably will hap­
pen, especially as human beings continue to ignore the ‘lessons of history” and
slaughter each other in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, or the Balkans.
Nevertheless, Israel and the Shoah are examples of how alternatives to syna­
gogue-based Jewishness can become very meaningful and command action, but for
relatively short periods. Bechol dor vador—in every generation—in modern times,
nonreligious expressions of Jewishness have emerged, become popular to one
degree or another, and mostly waned. We have seen Yiddishism, Zionism, a Jewish­
ness of civic action and social justice, "Federation" Jewishness, and cultural Jewish­
ness. A century and more ago both the Reform movement and the socialists
emphasized social justice as the core of Judaism and attempted to make it "relevant”
or appealing to contemporary Jews. The Reform movement continues to stress
social action—it has a highly visible special committee dedicated to that element of
Reform Judaism—but it never abandoned the synagogue or temple, and in recent
years many in the Reform movement have moved toward traditional Jewish forms
(increased use of Hebrew, Friday night and Saturday morning services, wearing
kippot, and Zionism).
Jewishness as a civic religion inspired by the social justice ideals o f the prophets
still enjoys currency in the Jewish world, though the Orthodox seem increasingly
focused on ritual and less concerned with prophetic ideals. Tikun olam (making the
world a better place) has been the one Hebrew phrase that most Jewish civic lead­
ers, otherwise blissfully ignorant of Hebrew and any other Jewish language, repeat
as a mantra. But the disillusion with the left in Europe, with the African American
movement in the United States, and with much of the third world, as well as the
 314 ZVI GI TE LM AN

embourgeoisement of world Jewry has made this channel for the expression of
Jewishness less popular than it was from the 1930s to the 1960s. At the same time,
many Jews ask why social justice need be sought in a “parochial'' Jewish context,
just as some Jews see no further need for Jewish athletic or social clubs.
Following the Six Day War in 1967, for about thirty years a new form of Jewish
activism and expression became popular. This was a civic Jewishness, expressed by
being active in communal politics and projecting a Jewish political agenda onto
local, state, and national arenas. Perhaps the nomination of Joseph Lieberman in
2000 by the Democratic Party to be vice president of the United States marks the
decline of that mode of Jewish expression, since he showed that a highly visible,
even traditionally religious, Jew could be in the mainstream of American politics.
Jews need not be on the sidelines with special agendas but could be in the thick of
things and yet maintain their own values. Similarly, the current decline of federa­
tions and their role in local and national Jewish life signals that the path to upward
Jewish mobility does not lie exclusively through them. The heyday of federation
Jewishness in the United States, and perhaps of civic engagement in British, French,
German, Russian, and other Jewish communities, may be over. Riven by organiza­
tional disputes, diminished by rapid personnel turnover, damaged by the poor qual­
ity and Jewish ignorance of some of the Jewish "civil service,” federations, still the
largest fund-raising institution of American Jewry, attract fewer people to their
conventions, have not increased their fund-raising even though Jewish wealth con­
tinues to grow, and may not be attracting the same caliber of activists as they did
earlier. Now that Jews can serve on the boards o f local symphonies, national muse­
ums, and the most exclusive organizations, federations are no longer the main
channel for upward social mobility and high communal visibility.
In Europe, national Jewish bodies have been challenged by upstarts and have
been at times stained by corruption. In the former Soviet Union, they have failed to
inspire and organize the Jewish population, and in other post-Communist states
(Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Ukraine) they have fractionated into publicly
feuding groups. Similarly, the World Jewish Congress, badly damaged by internecine
disputes and recriminations, may enjoy much more authority with non-Jewish
bodies than with Jews themselves.
Could it be that this shift from one form of civic Jewishness to another is pre­
cisely the strength of an a-religious Jewishness? It reflects the ability to adjust to
changing circumstances, shifting tastes, new fashions. But it can do so only as long
as there is a critical mass of people committed to their Jewishness, its expression and
perpetuation, whether by primordial sentiments, intellectual conviction, or even
inertia. They must be willing to posit their Jewishness as an identity that, though its
forms and even content may shift, will always command their loyalty. Judaism (reli­
gion) also changes, of course, though its fundamental beliefs seem to persist. It
demands undivided loyalty, though lately some have argued for the possibility of a
Jewish-Christian identity.
Finally, in recent years artistic and literary expressions of Jewish culture have
been touted as important ways of being Jewish in Europe and the United States.53
 Conclusion 315

The death of Saul Bellow signaled a transition to the new generation of Allegra
Goodmans, Jonathan Foers and others who are regularly reviewed in both the
Forward and the New York Times, awarded literary prizes, funded by the National
Foundation for Jewish Culture and others, and make frequent appearances at Jewish
Community Centers, the 92nd Street Y, and college campuses. Is literature, gener­
ally considered a pastime for nonwriters, sufficiently demanding and informative to
shape people's lives, or is it at most reinforcement for what one already does and
believes—perhaps provoking an occasional réévaluation—and at a minimum enter­
tainment? Much celebrated in Jewish media as evidence of a "Jewish revival,"
expressions of Jewishness in the arts do not have the power to direct behavior that
religion does. Reading literature is for most people an occasional activity. Even if
regularly accompanied by visits to Jewish museums and concerts, can literature and
the arts constitute or even support a way of life? Perhaps the consumer of Jewish
arts does so because he or she has a basic underlying commitment to Jewishness—
to Jewish literature and Jewish an—born of a primordial sense of belonging and
identification with the tribe and its culture. For such a person, Jewishness may not be
a way of life, but it is a part of life. The choice of reading books on Jewish themes is
not accidental, but does it portend more than that? We shall return to this issue.
In the United States, Israel, and some other major centers of Jewish population—
probably not in the Former Soviet Union—there has been a shift to emphasis on the
individual ("individuation") and the satisfaction of his or her wants (or perceived
needs) and away from the collective. As observed earlier, this is expressed in “spiritu­
ality," "Jewish renewal," the adaptation and distortion of kabala to a "new age” fad,
a renewed emphasis on personal creativity and artistry, as exemplified in the Jewish
cultural festivals, artistic endeavors, and the foundations that support them. In
Israel, the demise of kibbutzim and youth movements are manifestations of the
same de-emphasis on the collective. Whatever else they do, these new modes of
Jewish expression affect the collective. Some believe they weaken the collective by
encouraging centrifugal forces that impede the sense of collective belonging and
commitment, creating a cacophony that prevents outsiders from hearing a single
voice of the Jewish people. Others argue that by accommodating diverse expressions
of Jewishness, more people are brought into a larger tent of Jewishness, enabling the
harmonization of personal expression with collective belonging.
There the spectrum of attitudes toward Jewishness and concomitant behaviors
range from militant, conscious secularism of the kind that once led the anarchists
to have balls on Yom Kippur; to a de facto secularism, one born largely of indiffer­
ence and inattention; then to a de facto religionism created by conformity to what
are seen as communal norms in America and its Jewish population (and this obei­
sance to communal expectations exists no less in the Orthodox than in the other
denominations); and finally to conscious, considered, committed religiosity. What
makes contemporary Jewry in Europe and the Americas different from the Jewry of
a century ago is that, to cite a popular cliché, Jews today are all “Jews by choice.”
Not only can belief not be coerced, which was never really possible, but even
public behavior and expression o f Jewishness cannot be commanded—which once
 316 ZVI G I T E LM A N

was possible—but must be gained in fierce competition with other allegiances and
even identities.54
We should remember that ethnic groups are defined not only by cultural con­
tent, but by boundaries—that is, the lines drawn by those inside the group and out­
side it which determine who is in and who is out. In multicultural, diverse America,
the boundaries between Jews and others have been blurred by intermarriage and its
acceptance, acculturation, social integration, and the erosion of a distinct culture.
Though the boundaries between Jews and others have greatly eroded in the United
States, they are still quite discernible in Eastern Europe and in parts of Western
Europe. In Europe, the side of the wall constructed by the group inside the bound­
ary (Jews) may have eroded, but the side constructed by those outside has generally
not eroded as much. In any case, it could be rebuilt.
The near disappearance of militant secularism in America, Western Europe, and
the post-Communist states (though one could conceive of it reviving in America in
reaction to the Christianizing of the public square) and the indifference of secularism-
by-default means that for most Jews on this end of the religiosity spectrum there is no
longer a thick Jewish culture, one with strong, tangible, visible manifestations such as
distinctive language, customs, foods, clothing, areas of residence, and occupations.
Yiddish, Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish foods, and types of clothing, and the concen­
tration of Jews in the needle trades are subjects of nostalgia and memory rather than
components of contemporary Jewishness. Instead o f these, we have a thin culture,
a “common and distinct system of understandings and interpretations that constitute
normative order and world view and provide strategic and stylistic guides to
action."55 The Orthodox, especially the ultra-Orthodox, retain a thick Jewish culture,
but most a-religious Jewish cultures have been very much thinned. There are groups
of nonreligious or non-Orthodox Jews involved in thick cultures—those who teach
and take Judaic studies courses, activists in Jewish organizations, and Jewish civil ser­
vants and teachers. But the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora give only occasional
expression to their Jewishness. It is a pastime, not a vocation; a luxury, not a necessity;
occasional rather than constant and all-embracing. How much stamina does thin cul­
ture have? Does it inevitably move from thin culture to symbolic ethnicity,56 and then
to assimilation and hence the disappearance of Jewishness (“straight line theory"), or
does it have a long shelf-life, a self-sustaining capacity?
That question should be answered empirically, rather than speculatively or by
wishful thinking. So we turn to empirical data on the question o f contemporary sec­
ular and religious expressions of Jewishness. The American Jewish Identity Survey
took a survey by phone of 1,668 people who were identified as Jewish. The inter­
views lasted only seven minutes on average and did not permit exploration or clari­
fication of ambiguities (e.g., “What do you mean when you say... . ?”).57 There are
at least two other problems with this study. It was sponsored by advocates of secular
or cultural Judaism rather than by a disinterested body. The results were interpreted
by the survey's sponsors as showing that more than half of American Jewry consid­
ers itself secular. However, the survey did not define secular either to the respon­
dents or in its report. Thus, there is no way to know what those who designed and
 Conclusion 317

responded to the survey understood by secular. Does it mean agnostic, atheist,

believing in a deity but not in organized religion? Is it to be understood as not adher­
ing to the prescriptions and proscriptions of a religion while retaining a nominal
affiliation with it? Does it mean working and living in an a-religious environment?
The confusion and lack of clarity this engendered can be seen in the following find­
ings. On one hand, 42 percent of those who say they are Jewish “by religion” describe
their outlook as "secular” or “somewhat secular." But of these 42 percent, only
14 percent deny (even “somewhat") the existence of God. Only 23 percent of Jews
with “no religion” deny God's existence. Are they deists who believe that God exists
but do not believe in religion? The biggest conundrum is in table 13: 53 percent of
those who are “fully secular” believe God exists and 55 percent believe God hears
prayers. In fact, 12 percent of the respondents define themselves as both “secular"
and “Orthodox.” So what on earth—or in Heaven’s name—does secular mean?
Does it mean that they do not follow a religious lifestyle, whatever that may be?
That they never participate in a religious ceremony? We are told that two-thirds of
American Jews participate in a Passover seder.58 Is that seen as a religious act or just
food, family, and fun? Are these people analogous to the masortim described by
Liebman and Yadgar in this book? Curiously, only 1 percent of the respondents
identify themselves with the secular humanist branch of Judaism. From this survey
we learn next to nothing about how secularism is understood, and so we are no
better off in understanding what secularism means to American Jews than we
were before the survey.59
The problematic 2001 National Jewish Population Survey also sheds no light on the
question. While in 1990 the NJPS estimated that 16 percent of American Jews had been
born Jewish but had no religion currendy, and thus were classified as “secular,”60 the
results of the 2001 NJPS do not seem to include this category.61 In Great Britain, 26 per­
cent of Jews surveyed nationally in 1995 defined themselves as secular, and another
18 percent as “just Jewish.” In Russia and Ukraine, while over a third of Jews surveyed
in the early and late 1990s declared a belief in God or inclination to such belief, very
few professed to follow the Jewish religion. Thus, there is no doubt that a-religious
Jews form a substantial portion of several Jewish populations, though their proportion
in the American Jewish population, still the largest in the world, is uncertain. But I
believe it is misleading to assert, as some have, that the majority of Jews worldwide self-
define as secular—that is, they live a nonreligious, non-halachic lifestyle—since this
would include all Reform, Reconstructionist, and the great majority of Conservative
Jews in America, the masortim in Israel (perhaps 40 percent of adults) and many people
affiliated with the (Orthodox) United Synagogue in the United Kingdom. They may live
“a non-religious, non-halachic lifestyle,” but would they see themselves as secular?
Except for the masortim, analyzed by Liebman and Yadgar, the others do not generally
adhere to Halacha. Yet, I suspect most of them would deny that they are secular.

Jewishness and Judaism

We tend to periodize “ages o f” something. We speak of "the age of reason” or an
"age of secularization." These may be useful as heuristic devices. They help simplify
 318 ZVI G I T E L M A N

and order events and tendencies, but they should not be taken literally. In each one
of these "ages" there have been and probably always will be countertrends to the
dominant one. Thus, in a “religious age,” there might well be nonreligious voices
and activities. If the present age is one of secularization—that seems to be true in
Western Europe—we observe the concurrent strengthening of religious beliefs and
behaviors in other parts of the world.
Church attendance and belief in God have plummeted in Western Europe, even in
such formerly religious countries as Spain and Italy. In 2004, only 44 percent of Britons
said they believed in God, in contrast to the 77 percent who asserted such belief in
1968, and a third of the young people surveyed described themselves as agnostics or
atheists. Fully 81 percent said Britain was becoming more secular.62 Ronald Inglehart’s
and Pippa Norris’s study in many countries confirms this tendency—except in
America, of course.63 Here we have a religious resurgence, a form of American excep-
tionalism that no one has been able to explain satisfactorily. In the last ten to twenty
years religion seems to have replaced class as the organizing principle of many people's
political thinking and behavior. About 40 percent of Americans surveyed in 2002
considered themselves evangelicals or "born-again” Christians. The president, vice
president, Speaker of the House, and the House majority leader, as well as the former
attorney general at the time all defined themselves as members of this group.64
Rodney Stark titles his article analyzing the decline of secularism as "Secularism,
R.I.P.”65Jeffrey Hadden writes of “Desacralizing Secularization Theory” and maintains
that sociologists who discern secularization as the trend of the times are making a
“silent prescriptive assertion that this is good,” but “there is no substantive body of
data confirming the secularization process. To the contrary, the data suggest that sec­
ularization is not happening [in the United States].”66
The data on Jews are too sparse to judge whether they are becoming more secu­
lar. Significant numbers of Jews may be attracted to Judaism, but other powerful
forces pull even greater numbers away from it. Still, as long as America remains a
"churched” society and social expectations are that one has at least a formal affiliation
with a religion—no candidate for major political office has declared or would declare
himself or herself an atheist—Jews will be pressured to have at least a nominal affili­
ation with Judaism. Adam Chalom’s chapter illustrates how even a secular humanist
variant of Judaism or Jewishness is cloaked in religious forms (“temple,” “congrega­
tion,” meetings on the Sabbath). But it seems that Jewishness will be a secondary,
tertiary, or even more remote driving force of most Diaspora Jews' thinking and
behavior. Those whose professions or leisure time commitments involve them heav­
ily in Jewish affairs will be the minority, as they are now. This does not mean that
Jewish culture will be irrelevant or inconsequential to the majority. Just as there are
opera fans who attend several performances a year and pay heavily for the privilege,
and just as some spend some time outside the opera reading and thinking about it, so
too will Jewish culture, however expressed, continue to entertain, fascinate, attract,
and engage. But, like opera, it will not be a guide to life.67 It is not clear that forms of
Jewishness that will engage large numbers of nominal Jews exist apart from religion
today, except in the State of Israel. Stephen Whitfield postulates that “only religion
 Conclusion 319

can form the inspirational core of a viable and meaningful Jewish culture," at least in
America,68 and Yadgar and Uebman come to the same conclusion in their chapter on
secular Jews in Israel. That was not true in Eastern Europe before the Second World
War, and it may not be true in parts of Europe today, but it is difficult to find good rea­
sons to dispute Whitfield regarding the largest Jewish Diaspora community. It may be
equally difficult to ascertain what constitutes “sufficient" Jewish involvement and
commitment to assure the survival and intergenerational transmission of nonreli­
gious Jewishness. In some countries, anti-Semitism can still be counted on to force
Jewish consciousness on those who otherwise would not have it. But, as in the case of
Soviet Jewry, a negative Jewish consciousness can also increase the incentives to aban­
don Jewishness. In any case, most Jews believe that Jewish culture or Judaism have
more to offer than being an object of scorn and persecution. On what precisely that
is, there is no agreement. As long as significant numbers of people debate the issue,
the survival of Jewishness is assured.

NOTES
x. For a survey and analysis o f nineteenth- and twentieth-century sodal science studies of
Jews, see Mitchell Hart, Social Science and the Politics o f Modem Jewish Identity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
2. C. Bezalel Sherman, The Jew within American Society (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1965), xi, 218.
3. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1963), 140-142.
4. "The Jews Who Choose,” London Times, October 6, 1995. Strikingly, none o f the five
letters to the editor reacting to Levin's article even hinted that one could be a Jew without
practicing Judaism (London Times, October 10,1995, 19).
5. Wade Clark R oof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape
and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 102. Similar conclusions are
reached by Barry Kosmin and Seymour Lachman, One Nation Under God (New York: Harmony
Books, 1993), 121.
6. Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990), 17.
7. The historical relationship between Christian Orthodoxy and nationality is traced in
Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization and Orthodoxy (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2001); on the Greek case, see Adamantia Polis, “The Greek Concept o f National Identity," ASEN
Bulletin 7 (Spring-Summer 1994), 11-14; on Romanian Orthodoxy and ethnic identity, see Gavril
Flora, Georgina Szilyagi, and Victor Roudometof, "Religion and National Identity in Post-
Communist Romania," Journal o f Southern Europe and the Balkans 7 (April 2005): 35-55.
8. Karl Dobbelaere defines religion as "a unified system o f beliefs and practices relative to
a supra-empirical, transcendent reality that unites all who adhere to it into a single moral
community.” Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels (Brussels: PIE—Peter Lang, 2002), 52.
9. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization o f the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), 250.
10. Dobbelaere, Secularization, 103.
11. Personal communication from Steven Nadler, April 1, 2005. The French tide is Reflexions
curieuses d ’un esprit des-interrese . . ., and the tide page indicates it was published in Cologne by
Claude Emanuel. Apparently, the French translation was published surreptitiously, with three
different title pages.
12. Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History (Oxford: Littman Library, 2002), 145.
 320 ZVI G I T E LM A N

13. Ibid., 147.

14. Ibid, 145.
15. Personal communication from Alan Nadler, April 3, 2005.
16. Philip Krantz, Boruch Shpinoza, zayn lebn un zayn filosofie, cited in Jacob Shatzky, Spinoza
buch (New York; Spinoza Institute in America—Yidisher optayl, 1932), 176.
17. Ibid., 7.
18. K. Gutenboim, "Shpinoza motivn," Globus 4 (October 1932): 1-24. The editor stated that
"in a forthcoming number," Aharon Zeitlin would publish "God, Man and Geometry,” an
article about the " 'godless' god o f the philosophers, the man-less [mentsh-lozn] god o f Boruch
Shpinoza, and the living man-god o f Lev Tolstoi" (24). In an earlier issue o f Globus, Leo
Finkelshtain reported on a Spinoza conference in The Hague. “These are congresses o f fervent
fans. The Hasidim are going to the rebbe’s grave. It’s a Spinoza community which makes peri­
odic pilgrimages [oileh regel] to The Hague.”
19. See Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Littman
Library, 1998), and Dominique Bourel, Moses Mendelssohn: La Naissance du Judaisme modeme
(Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
20. Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modem in the Polish Borderlands (Providence:
Brown University Press, 2004), 272. A Soviet Marxist interpretation o f Lefin and his followers can
be found in Maks Erik, Etiudn tsu dergeshichte fun der haskole, 1789-1881 (Minsk: Meluche farlag,
natsektor, 1934). For example, Erik writes, "The right wing of the Galician Haskalah under the
leadership o f Lefin, Perl, Rapapport, Krochmal represents a closed system o f ideas—the
ideology o f a reactionary detachment o f the bourgeoisie, still confined to feudal views and
concepts, the ideology o f a stratum which marches forward to capitalist development, but
cautiously, fearfully, looking backwards" (191). The Soviet rhetoric should not put one off from
a valuable study.
21. Ibid., 5.
22. Ibid., 9.
23. Ibid., 90.
24. Jacob Raisin cites many examples o f secular knowledge and writings among East
European rabbis and concludes that "it must not be supposed that supremacy in the Talmud
was secured at the cost o f secular know ledge.. . . Not a few o f the prominent men united piety
with philosophy, and thorough knowledge o f the Talmud with mastery o f one or more o f the
sciences o f the time” (The Haskalah Movement in Russia [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1913], 35). Nevertheless, because o f some radical maskilim, Haskalah became "synony­
mous with apostasy or licentiousness.. . . To be called ‘Berlinchick' or 'Deitschel' was tanta­
mount to being called infidel and epicurean, anarchist and oudaw” (131, 133). “Thus began the
bitter fight against Haskalah, in which Hasidim and Mitnaggedim, forgetting their differences,
joined hands, and stood shoulder to shoulder" (134). On the conflict between Hasidim and
Maskilim, see Raphael Mahler, Hahasidut vehaHaskalah (Merhaviya, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1961).
25. On the opposition to Hasidism, see Alan Nadler, The Faith o f the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic
Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
26. Quoted in Mordechai Zalkin, Be-alot hashahar (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 263.
27. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 371.
28. Ibid.
29. Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 371.
30. Dobbelaere, Secularization, 143.
31. Ibid.
32. Obituary, New York Times, August 4,2004.
33. Talmud Bavli, Tractate Megilah, chap. 1 , 7b.
34. Some have seen the reference to salvation coming from “Makom aher” (literally, another
place; 4:14) as a reference to God since one o f God's names is "Makom.”
 Conclusion 321

35. Sidnie White Crawford, "Esther and Judith: Contrasts in Character,” in The Book o f Esther
in Modem Research, ed. Sidnie White Crawford and Leonard Greenspoon (London: T & T Clark,
2003), 68.
36. Whether the book is the first in the Jewish canon to separate ethnicity and religion, it cer­
tainly is the prototype o f the classic Diaspora Jewish political strategy o f shtadlones, or political
intercession and begging for concession and protection, a strategy typical o f weak minorities.
37. On "Jewish" fraternities, see Marianne Sanua, Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the
United States, 1895-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).
38. See Emanuel Goldsmith, Architects o f Yiddishism at the Beginning o f the Twentieth Century: A
Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), and
David Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am
and the Shaping o f Modem Jewish Identity (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996).
39. Whether Zhitlovsky seriously thought that Sephardic Jews would adopt Yiddish, or
whether he simply ignored their existence, is not clear.
40. Chaim Jitlovsky [Haim Zhitlowski], "What Is Jewish Secular Culture?" in The Way We
Think, ed. Joseph Leftwich (South Brunswick, NJ: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 1:92, 93, 95.
41. Ibid., 13. Weinberg believes that ultimately the secularists o f the “transitional generation
could not shake their deep-seated belief that the core o f Jewishness lay in spiritual and ethical
ideas that were eternal and independent o f outside influences.”
42. Gennadi Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2005), 28.
43. Simon Rabinovitch, "The Dawn o f a New Diaspora: Simon Dubnov's Autonomism, from
St. Petersburg to Berlin” (unpublished manuscript).
44. In Hapsburg-ruled Galicia, there was no conflict between the religion o f the rulers and ruled.
45. Harold Weinstein, "Language and Education in the Soviet Ukraine,” Slavonic and East
European Review 20 (1941): 138.
46. Der emes, April 6, 1924, quoted in Z vi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 369.
47. "We may define the ‘ethnie’ or ethnic community as a social group whose members share
a sense o f common origins, claim a common and distinctive history and destiny, possess one or
more distinctive characteristics, and feel a sense o f collective uniqueness or solidarity"
(Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival in the Modem World [Cambridge, 1981], 66).
48. The last Hebrew magazine published in America, Hadoar, closed in 2005 after many years
o f declining readership.
49. According to the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey, a third o f American Jews define
themselves as Conservative, down from 38 percent in 1990; 39 percent call themselves Reform,
down from 42 percent; and 21 per cent are Orthodox, up from 7 percent a decade earlier. Some
o f these changes may be due to sampling errors and other errors in method in both years o f the
survey. According to NJPS 2001, a high proportion o f Reform Jew s were raised in Conservative
homes, indicating that Conservatism is weakening, just as Orthodoxy had early in the twenti­
eth century when most Conservative Jew s had been raised in Orthodox homes.
50. See chapters by Dencik on Denmark; Miller, Kosmin, and Goldenberg on the UK;
Gitelman on Russia and Ukraine; and Kovacs on Hungary in Zvi Gitelman, Barry Kosmin, and
Andras Kovacs, eds., New Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003).
51. Steven M. Cohen, "Poll: Attachment o f U.S. Jews to Israel Falls in Past 2 Years,” Forward,
March 4, 2005, p. 1.
52. Ibid.
53. Jonathan Webber, “Notes Towards the Definition o f ‘Jewish Culture’ in Contemporary
Europe," in Gitelman et al. New Jewish Identities, 317-340.
54. “ Secular identity formation also difFers from the premodern in that it is not organically of
one piece. The secular persona is necessarily split and divided to enable him and increasingly
her, to function in the complex modern world. . . . O f all the roles he plays, it is the professional
 322 ZVI G I T E L M A N

or working role that is the integrative one. Ask m odem man who he is and his likely to tell you
what he does.” Guidance o f family and tribe are diminished. "The quest for self-actualization
becomes the prime organizing principles [sic] o f secular life, playing the role that tribe or
church did for premoderns. . . . One cannot be commanded; one must be persuaded” (Henry
Feingold, "From Commandment to Persuasion: Probing the 'Hard' Secularism o f American
Jewry,” in National Variations in Jewish Identity, ed. Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk
[Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], 165).
55. Ibid., 271.
56. Herbert Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1979): 1-20.
57. Egon Mayer, Barry Kosmin, and Ariel Keysar, American Jewish Identity Survey, 2001 (New
York: Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Center o f the City University o f New York).
58. National Jewish Population Survey, 2001.
59. In a message to me on January 10, 2002, responding to my question about what secular
means in the survey, the late Egon Mayer wrote: “Yes, it would have been and would be inter­
esting to find out what people mean by any one o f these terms. B u t . . . we simply set a differ­
ent goal: how do people choose among the terms 'religious,' somewhat religious,' 'somewhat
secular,’ and 'secular' when they describe their outlook? Then we sought to describe that sort­
ing by a host o f demographic variables." But the meaning o f secular to the surveyors and
respondents is still undefined, and it would seem that all the survey tells us is which terms
respondents chose, but not what the terms mean to them or anyone else.
60. "They reported 'none,' 'agnostic' or 'atheist' to a question on their current religion. They
are commonly referred to as 'secular Jew s' ” (Highlights o f the CJF 1990 National Jewish
Population Survey, 3).
61. In a 1995 national Jewish survey in Great Britain (n = 2,180 surveyed by mail), 26 percent
defined themselves as secular and 18 percent as “just Jewish” (Stephen Miller, Marlena Schmool
and Antony Lerman, Social and Political Attitudes o f British Jews: Some Key Findings o f the JPR
Survey, J PR Report no. 1, February 1996,10).
62. (Johannesburg) Star, December 28, 2004.
63. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
64. Gallup poll, cited in Edward Rothstein, "Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound,” New York
Times, December 20, 2003.
65. Rodney Stark, "Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249-273.
66. Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe, Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered
(New York: Paragon, 1989), 22.
67. “A Jewishness based on identity rather than an assumed w ay o f life complicates matters
for Jewish survival, but, at the same time, seems to be the only way to achieve Jewish survival
in our times. The question remains as to whether even that is enough. First, identity must be
built or established and then ways must be developed to translate that identity into concrete
and continuing manifestations. . . . Speaking social scientifically, it does not seem likely that it
will be a successful project. It requires too much voluntary effort on the part o f a population
that essentially is becoming more ignorant o f what being Jewish all about, generation by gen­
eration if not even more quickly. In addition, it must be achieved in the face o f horrendous [sic]
competition which, precisely because it seems so open and welcoming, is so dangerous to the
success o f the project, imposing its norms and ways on the Jewish people in the name o f free­
dom, choice, and democracy, very real values in their own right. At the same time, however,
Jew s have confounded social scientists or their predecessors for many centuries. Hence, as long
as the effort is made, no final verdict can be registered" (Daniel Elazar, "Jewish Religious,
Ethnic, and National Identities: Convergences and Conflicts,” in National Variations in Jewish
Identity, ed. Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], 41).
68. Stephen Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover: Brandeis University
Press, 1999), 224.
 Contributors

Ga b r i e l e boccaccini is professor of Second Temple Judaism and Christian

Origins at the University of Michigan. Author and editor of numerous publications
in the field, he is the founding director of the Enoch Seminar and the editor-in-
chief of the journal Henoch.

m iriam BODiANis professor of Jewish history at the University of Texas, Austin.

The author of Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian
World (2007), she is now working on a book about an unusual trial of the Portu­
guese Inquisition.

adam ch a lo m is the dean for North America of the International Institute for Sec­
ular Humanistic Judaism and the rabbi of Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation in
Highland Park, Illinois. A Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Near Eastern
Studies, his dissertation was entitled " 'Modern Midrash': Jewish Identity and Lit­
erary Creativity.”

yaron is the Samuel Frankel Associate Professor for Rabbinic Literature

eliav

at the University of Michigan. He studies the multifaceted cultural environment of

Roman Palestine, with emphasis on the encounter between Jews and Graeco-
Roman culture. His latest book is God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Space,
and Memory (2005).

todd m . endelmanis the William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History

at the University of Michigan. A specialist in the social history of European Jewry
and in Anglo-Jewish history, he is the author most recently of The Jews of Britain,
1656-2000 (2002).

david e is professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Sem­

. fishman
inary of America. He is the author of The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (2005).

z vi g i t e l m a n is professor of political science and Preston Tisch Professor of

Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of fourteen
books. The second edition of his A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and
the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, was recently published in Russian (2008).

is professor emeritus of sociology and Ungerleider Pro­

Ca l v i n g o l d s c h e i d e r
fessor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. He is now Polinger Scholar in Resi­
dence at American University. Among his many books are Israel’s Changing Society
(2002); Cultures in Conflict: The Arab-Israeli Conflict (2002); and Studying the Jewish
Future (2004).
 324 CONTRIBUTORS

ju lia n levinson is the Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies

and associate professor of English at the University o f Michigan. His book, Exiles
on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture, was published
in 2008.

s. l i e b m a n (1934-2003) was professor of political science and sociol­

Ch a r l e s
ogy at Bar-Ilan University. He was an Israel Prize Laureate in Political Studies and
published extensively on Israeli and American Jewish identities. Among his works
related to this volume are Choosing Survival: Strategies for a Jewish Future, with
Bernard Susser (1999) and TheJewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report,
with Elihu Katz (1997).

steven nadler is William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and Max

and Frieda Weinstein /Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza’s Heresy (2002) and Rembrandt’s
Jews (2003). His latest book is The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers,
God and Evil (2008).

shachar PiNSKERisan assistant professor of Hebrew literature and culture at

the University of Michigan. His research and publications focus on modern
Hebrew and Yiddish writers. He recently coedited (with Sheila Jelen) Hebrew, Gen­
der, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction (2007). His forthcoming
book is The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe: 1900-1930.

s c o t t s p e c t o r teaches history and German Studies at the University of Michi­

gan. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation
in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle (2000). He is currently completing a book on sexual and
criminal identities and cultural fantasies of violence in central Europe from i860 to
1914-

mark tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at

the University of Michigan, where he also serves as vice provost for International
Affairs. His recent publications include an updated edition of A History of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. He is currently conducting political attitude surveys in
seven Arab countries as part of the Arab Barometer project, which he directs in
collaboration with scholars in the Middle East.

yaacov Y A D G A R i s a sen io r le c tu re r at Bar-Ilan U n iv ersity ’s d ep artm en t o f p o liti­

cal studies. H is c u rre n t research fo cu ses on Je w is h identity, ethnicity, and n a tio n a l­
ism a m o n g Israeli Je w s .
 Index

Aboab, Immanuel, 51 Cairo Genizah, 14, 19

Abrahamic religions, 34, 35 Calvinism, 41, 40
acculturation, 67,105, 109, in , 113 Canaanite, 31
Acmonia, 14 Catholic Church, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 180
Agadah, 222, 224, 226, 228-231, 238^7 Catholics, 46, 98, 114, 121, 268, 308
Ahad-Haam (Asher Ginzburg), 222, 223, 226 Chadwick, Owen, 40,114
Alexander the Great, 9 Christian(s), 11 , 1 2, 1 3, 24, 29, 3*. 64, 65, 98,
America (United States), 70, 72, 74, 75, 81, 86, 242; Arabs, 195; Evangelical, 180; and Jew s
89n25,142, 143, 239, 243, 260, 262; American in pre-modern Europe, 39, 40, 46, 47; and
Jewish community, 267, 269, 270, 275, 276, Jew s in modern Western Europe, 104,
282, 284, 314; American Jewish Identity 105,106, 10 8 ,10 9 ,114 ,115 ,116 ,117 ,12 0
Survey, 300, 316-317; American Jewish Christianity, 11, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, *55,
literature, 315; education o f Jews in, 304; as a movement in Judaism, 5, 27, 33; in
272-278; occupations o f Jews in, 273-278; Germany, 99, in ; in pre-modern Europe,
religious life o f Jew s in, 278-282 44, 46, 54; in modern Europe, 113,12 1
Amsterdam, 41, 42, 53, 54, 55, 60, 65,112,113,114 citizenship, 105, 106, 122
anti-Semitism, 90, 94, 95, 9 8 ,116,16 4, 253, Cohen, Shaye, 27, 28, 30
260; in the United States, 135, 137,139; in Communism, 83
western Europe, 120 Communists, 72, 87
Aphrodisias, 14 Conversos, 46, 64,104
apikorsut (heresy), 286-287 crypto-Jews, 5, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50
Arabs, 210, 213, 214, 235; attitudes toward Czernowitz, 70
secularism, 195, 217; conflict with Israel,
194, 202, 215; in Israel, 194, 197, 201, 205, Dacosta, Uriel, 41, 4*, 50, 51, 5*. 53, 55
206, 207, 208, 217, 236n2; political parties, d’Assumpçâo, Diogo, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53
198,199, 202 Davies, Philip, 25
Aramaic, n Dead Sea Scrolls, 25
Aschheim, Steven, 94, 98, 100 de Castro, Isaac Orobio, 43, 49
Ashkenazim, 39, 40, 105, 110, 153; in Israel, de Modena, Leon, 51
173,176, 177, 179, 180, 186, 198,199; voting de Prado, Juan, 43, 50, 53, 54, 55
behavior in Israel, 201, 203, 204, 205, 207, de Silva, Francisco Maldonado, 44, 45
208, 209 de Vera, Lope, 45, 48
assimilation, 38, 62, 65, 80, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, Diaspora, 10,18, 38, 44, 166, 239, 245, 303,
95, 112; in the United States, 268, 274, 276 309-310, 316
Azulai, Hayyim Yosef David, 41 dietary laws (kashrut), 12,193, 251, 287
Dubnov, Simon, 309-310
Bar Kochba, 7, n Dutch Republic, 39
Berdichevsky, Micha Yosef, 222, 223, 225, 226,
227, 235, 236, 237n27 Eastern Europe, 69, 70, 87, 138,139, 165, 243,
Bez (Bezprozvany), Chaim, 78, 79, 85 269, 278-279, 316, 319
Bialik, Chaim Nachman, 222-232, 235, 236, Egypt, 195, 196, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218
237n 28, 238n37 emancipation, 67,105, 107, h i , 120, 121,124,
Bible, 9, 18, 75, 78, 84, 86, 133, 136, 289, 297 125
Birobidzhan, 243, 244 Enlightenment (Haskalah), 104,107,108, 222,
Brenner, Yosef Hayim, 223, 236 223, 305-307. 32on20, 3201124
Brown, Peter, 2in3 Enochic tradition, 29, 33
Buber, Martin, 97, 99, 100 Entin, Joel, 70-71, 76, 82
Bund(ism), 71, 80, 86, 134, 144, 310 Essenes, 33
 326 Index

ethnic group, 241, 242 Jaffee, Martin, 27, 28, 30

ethnicity, 10 6 ,117,123,14 2,14 3,14 5,14 7,19 3, Jesus Christ, n, 17, 24, 25, 28, 44, 46, 48, 53, 80
243, 251, 260,32in47 (definition); in Israel, Jewish law. See Halacha
147,152,153,172; in the United States, Jewish nationalism, 69, 73
268, 271 Jewishness, 96, 105, 106,140, I46ni3,158, 241,
ethnos, 28 252, 270, 314, 317, 318; definitions, 30, 31,
104, 304; in Germany, 122-124; in Western
Farband, 71, 72, 73, 76, 81, 87 Europe, 10 9 ,112 ,114 ,117 -118
Jews, 11, 13, 14; baptized, ii6 , 118; converted,
Geertz, Clifford, 174 116; German, 90, 91, 100; and German-Jew­
Gellner, Ernest, 28 ish culture, 91, 93; German-Jewish identi­
Gentiles, 32, 85 ties, 91, 93, 94 , 95 , 97
Geonim, 19, 32 Jordan, 195,196, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216,
Gospels, 13,16, 44 217, 218
Greco-Roman culture, and Judaism, 8, 9,15, Josephus, 24
17 Judaic, 30
Greek, 8, 9, 1 1, 80 "Judaicness," 30, 31, 34
Guttman Report, 152,153,154,158, i68ni4, Judaism, 35, 54, 99,176, 249, 250, 317; in
176.182.186 America, 270, 279, 280-283, 286; ancient, 5,
7, 8, 9, 1 1 , 1 2, 1 6, 24, 31, 34; conservative,
Halacha, halachic, 7 , 1 2 , 1 3, 1 8, 51, 59, 63, 59,185, 256, 286, 295, 308, 312, 317;
64, 7 5 ,16 2 ,16 4 ,18 4 ,19 7,19 9 , 203, 205, definition, 304; “Messianic," 37;
216, 217, 294 Orthodox, 25, 109, 137, 140, 167112, 174, 198,
Haskalah. See Enlightenment 201, 204, 209, 250, 288, 299. 308, 312, 313,
Hasmoneans, 10,13 315, 317; Rabbinic, 24, 27, 29, 45, 50;
Hebrew, 80, 8 4,117,149, 243, * 44 , 262, 295. Reconstructionist, 290, 295, 296, 317;
297. 313; language in America, 70, 72, 73; Reform, 59, 67,185, 242, 250, 256, 286, 295,
literature, 74, 76,133,147,148, 221-227, 232, 296,303,312, 313, 317; Second Temple, 25,
234, 235-236 (religious), 311 26; secular (see secular Judaism)
Hellenism, 7, 9, 1 0, 1 7, 32, 33, 80 Judea, 10
hiloni (secular), 14 9,151,152, 156, 159,171,182,
184.186 Kafka, Franz, 95, 96, 97, 99, i02n30, 102^2,
Hoffman, Ben-Tziyon (1874-1954), 71 132
Hofshi, 150,151 Karaites, 53
Holocaust (Shoah), 25, 35, 86, 95,140,141, Karo, Joseph, 19
156,157,162,164, 243, 280, 282, 294, 312-313 kashrut. See dietary laws
Katz, Jacob, 41,105, in , 118
identity, 5, 8 , 1 0 , 1 1 , 1 7 , 20, 67,100,104, 215, Kherem (ban), 61
303; in American Jewish literature, 131,134,
138, 14 1,14 3 ,14 5 ,146ni3; German-Jewish, Lehrer, Leibush, 83, 84, 87
91-98; Israeli, 154,163, 245, 264ni3, 312; Levin, Jacob (Yankev), 77, 79, 84
masorti, 147» 173', m Russia and Ukraine, Lewisohn, Ludwig, 135,136,137, 142
239, 241, 246, 254, 255, 260, 261, 263, 2651143; Libertines, 39, 40
in Yiddish schools, 69, 70, 72, 75, 86 Lieberman, Chaim, 78
Idumean, 11
integration, 10 5 ,10 9 ,111 Maccabees, 7,10, 31, 32
intermarriage, 116,118, 119, 120, 244, 256-260, magic, 14
265029, 282, 299 Maimonides, 13, 25, 305; Mishneh Torah, 19
International Workers' Order (IWO), 72,73, Malkin, Yaakov, 17 0 ^ 4
75 Mark, Yudl, 82, 83
Islam, 30, 33, 34, 35,180, 195, 210, 211, 212, 218, Marx, Karl, 95, no
304; Islamic law, 195 Maskilim (enlighteners), 55
Israel, 80, 9 0 ,14 7 .187,193,195, 211, 212, 214, Masorti(m), 14 7 ,150 ,152-156 ,16 1,16 2, 166,
218, 246, 261, 312; in antiquity, 10, 28, 30, 32; 17 1,17 3 ,17 5 ,17 7-179 ,181-186, 234, 317;
and Jewish identity, 152,156,158,165-166; Masorti identity, 172, 181, 1 82, 1 87, 1 88
National Election Study, 196, 205 Mendelssohn, Moses, 38, 39, 95, 306
 Index 327

Midrash, 20 307, 316-317; in ancient Near East, 5, 7, 9, 20;

Miron, Dan, 233-234 in the modem Middle East, 193,197,
Mishnah, 18, 19, 80 201-202, 205-206, 215, 217; and Spinoza, 59,
Mitsvot (precepts, commandments), 12,13 61-65, 74
Mizrahim, 153, 173, 174, 176, 177-179, 181, secularization, 60, 67, 105, 111, 113, 114, 149,
183-187; Mizrahi identity, 176, 177. See also 172, 267, 307-308; definition, 304; in
Sephardic Jews pre-modern Europe, 38, 40, 54; in the
modernization, 171,174, 306; multiple United States, 268
modernities, 186,188 secular Jewish culture, 131, 134, 139, 221
Moses, 41, 45, 48, 52, 55, 63, 79, 84, 133; Law secular Judaism, 62, 92, 152, 239, 261, 262,
of, 38, 39 . 63 286, 288; in the Diaspora, 239, 243; in
Mount Moriah, 15 Israel, 149, 156,159,160-163,165, 166;
secular Humanistic, 287, 288, 291-296, 318;
nationality, 104,122 secular Jewish schools, 71, 73; "secular
National Jewish Population Surveys (U.S.), Judaists,” 150; "secular universalists," 150
257, 272, 282, 300, 317, 3iin 49 Sefer ha-Razim, 14
Nazism, 125 Segal, Alan, 28, 29
Neusner, Jacob, 24, 25, 27 Sephardic Jews, 39, 40,183, 184, 198, 201-204,
207-210; as crypto-Jews, 5
Palestine, 10, 72, 137, 138, 165 Shechina (presence), 15
Paul, 33 Shira Emu nit, 235, 236
Persian Empire, 17, 20, 32 Shoah. See Holocaust
Pharisees, 13, 27, 29, 80 Shokeid, Moshe, 172, 173, 176
Philo o f Alexandria, 11, 32 Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute (schools),
Poale Zion. See Farband 72, 73, 74, 81-86
Protestant Reformation, 39 Simon, Shloyme (1895-1970), 83, 84
Protestants, 114, 118, 121, 268 Sirach, 31
Smith, Anthony D., 28
Rabbis ("the” ), 17; Rabbinic literature, 18; socialism, 69, 72, 86, 87, 143
Rabbinic Judaism, 23n40, 24, 25, 28 Soloveitchik, Haym, 174, 175
Rabbi Isaac o f Fez, 13 Sorkin, David, 92-93
Rabbi Jacob ba’al haturim, 13 Soviet Union, 72, 86, 239, 261
race, 124, 241, 242; "race scientists,” 122,123 Spinoza (Espinoza), Baruch (Benedict), 41,
Ravnitski, Yehoshua, 224-225 42, 54, 61-65; Ethics, 64; as secularist, 5, 59,
Reformation, 39, 46 305; Theological-Political Treatise, 61, 63,
ritual, 14 64, 305
Roman, 8, 9, 1 0, 1 1 , 1 2, 1 4, 20 Stein, Edith, 98
Rosenzweig, Franz, 91, ioins, 222 subjectivity, 97, 103^9
Russia (Tsarist), 69, 70 synagogue, 16, 22n33, 25, 38, 60, 178, 179, 268,
Russian immigrants in Israel, 154, i7on5o, 181 278, 282, 283
Russian Jews, 239, 243, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251,
260,317 Talmud, 18, 50, 75, 133, 139, 164, 224, 226,
Russian language, 71, 311 228-230, 283, 286, 289, 290, 308
Talmud Torahs, 75
Sabbath (shabbat), u , 17, 177, 178, 183, 187, temple, 63, 81; First Temple, 16; Holy of
193. 249.190 Holies, 16; in Jerusalem, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17;
Sadducees, 32, 80 Second Temple, 10, 17, 25, 26, 27
Samaritanism, 30, 31, 34, 35 Tobiads, 31, 32
Sanders, E. P., 26, 27, 28, 29 Torah, 12, 13, 15, 18, 26, 31, 32, 50, 52, 60, 81,
Sanhédrin, 10 133, 154
Schiffman, Lawrence, 27, 28, 29 Tosefta, 20
Scholem, Gershom, 90-92, 94-99, 100, 115, tribalism, 121, 124
132, 222
Schwartz, Seth, 26, 27, 298 Ukrainian Jews, 239, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251,
scripturalism, 174-176, 179, 184, 187 260,317
secularism, 85, 87,134,141,144,149, 164,187, United States. See America
 328 Index

Wasserman, Jakob, 93, 96, 98 Zadok, 29, 31, 32

Wine, Sherwin, 294, 297 Zhidovsky, Chaim, 242, 243, 290, 309
Workmen's Circle, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81-84, 86 Zionism, 7, 80,123,137, M 4,188, 193, 216, 243,
303, 309-310, 313; in Germany, 93, 94', and
Yarmulke, 179 Israel, 152,156,158, 166, i67n3, 193; and
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 92, 105 literature, 233-235; religious, 182; in the
yeshiva, 20, 71, 140, 228 United States, 134-135
Yiddish, 67, 69, 75-78, 84, 117,133, 142, 143, Zionists, 71,94, io in 4 ,120,122,165, 221, 224,
152, 243, 244, 261, 262, 271, 273, 288, 242
309-310, 316; literature, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, Zohar (journal), I9in48
86, 138, 139, 141, 254, 3n; schools, 67, 69, 70,
72-74, 80, 82, 83, 87, 254, 271, 287, 293, 3«;
Yiddishism, 70, 134, 242, 309, 313
yidishkayt, 71