Once again, fears over continuity may lead the way to renaissance and revival
Next week, more than 100 scholars will gather in Washington, DC, for what will likely be the largest conference ever held dedicated to the history of Jews in America. One of a year-long series of major events devoted to the 350th anniversary of American Jewish life, the conference will demonstrate how vibrant the field of American Jewish history has become. It was not always so.
Thirty years ago there were only five tenured positions in American Jewish history, and only a handful of reputable scholars in the field. In fact, a professor at a distinguished rabbinical seminary tried to dissuade me from my intention to join this discipline. American Jewish history, he advised me, could be summarized in a few sentences: “The Jews came to America, they abandoned their faith, they began to live like gentiles, and after a generation or two they intermarried and disappeared. That,” he said, “is American Jewish history -all the rest is commentary. Go and study Talmud.”
I did not take that great sage’s advice, but I have long remembered his analysis, for it reflects a long-standing fear that Jews in America are doomed to assimilate, that they simply cannot survive in an environment of religious freedom and church-state separation.
In America, where religious diversity is the norm and where Jews are free to choose their own rabbi, synagogue, and brand of Judaism (or no Judaism at all), many -and not just rabbinical school professors -have assumed that Judaism is fated sooner or later to disappear.
Recent scholarship questions this assimilationist paradigm. Without denying that there are many American families that disappeared from the Jewish fold after several generations, changing their names from, say, Kohn to Kerry, we nevertheless argue that “declension” is only part of the story of American Judaism; the other part is “revitalization.”
Repeatedly, we have found that young Jews, dissatisfied with the American Jewish establishment, influenced by the world around them, and fearful that Judaism would not continue unless it changed, have produced religious revolutions that strengthened US Jewish life. Radical and inevitably controversial discontinuities, like Reform Judaism, Zionism, the Jewish day school movement, the havura movement, and the Jewish women’s movement, proved to contain revitalizations, promoted Jewish continuity. Paradoxically, the fear that Judaism would not survive helped to ensure that it did.
Such was the case, for example, in the late 1870s. Widespread Jewish assimilation, the growing attractiveness of a non-Jewish religious movement (founded by Felix Adler, the son of a rabbi) called Ethical Culture, and the alarming growth of anti-Semitism at home and abroad undermined the confident optimism of post-Civil War America and led some young Jews to question Judaism’s future in America. Taking matters into their own hands, they spawned what contemporaries saw as a “renaissance” and a “strong religious revival.”
What this movement produced was nothing less than a new communal agenda characterized by a return to religion, a heightened sense of Jewish peoplehood and particularism, new opportunities and responsibilities for women, a renewed community-wide emphasis on education and culture, a burst of organizational energy and, in time, the growth of two new movements in American Jewish life -Conservative Judaism and Zionism.
By the early 20th century, thanks also to the migration of many thousands of East European Jews to America’s shores, American Judaism became stronger -religiously, institutionally and culturally -than it had ever been before. Fear of assimilation produced communal revitalization.
This and similar chapters in American Jewish history should be of interest far beyond the academy. They also offer powerful lessons from the past that can inform contemporary policymakers. For example:
Continuity may depend upon discontinuity. Repeatedly over the past 350 years, new historical conditions have created new movements, new emphases, new paradigms -the very opposite of the tried and true. However much contemporary Jews may talk about a “continuity agenda,” our history suggests that discontinuities -at least of the right sort -have a greater impact still.
Magic formulas inevitably fall short. Over and over again, those who have sought to revitalize American Jewish life have proclaimed that they alone hold the magic formula for success -Jewish education, social justice, religious reform, trips to Israel, and the like. But history demonstrates that none of those panaceas by itself ever lived up to its advanced billing. Together, by contrast, past efforts succeeded wondrously well and in ways that nobody could predict. Who, for example, would have foreseen that American Jews today would be more involved religiously and better educated Jewishly than they were 70 years ago? The lesson, then, is to resist placing all of American Jewry’s communal eggs in any one continuity basket.
The most creative ideas for revitalizing Jewish life flow from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, and from outsiders rather than insiders. The young, the alienated, and those on the periphery of Jewish life, precisely because they are not wedded to the community’s central assumptions, are the most likely to come up with innovative approaches and creative ideas. This does not mean that all of their ideas are worthwhile, but it is worth recalling how many of the central developments in American Jewish life, even in our own day, have come from these non-establishment sources. We dare not close our ears to them.
Looking back, it is clear that the American Jewish community has often benefited from challenges and emerged from them stronger than before. Indeed, over and over again they have confounded prophets of gloom and doom, and experienced surprising bursts of new life. There is, of course, no guarantee that this will happen again. Should high rates of intermarriage continue and the community grow complacent, the doomsayers may yet be proved correct.
But history, as we have seen, also suggests another possibility: That today, as so often before, American Jews will find creative ways to maintain and revitalize American Judaism. With the help of visionary leaders, committed followers, generous philanthropists and, of course, farsighted historians, it may still be possible for the current “vanishing” generation of American Jews to be succeeded by another “vanishing” generation, and then still another.
The writer is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, a member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press).
