This COMMENTARY by the late Adolph S. Oko on Waldo Frank’s book on the problem of the modem American Jew is, like many Jewish commentaries of the old tradition, more than a mere commentary: it is a creative extension of one man’s thought by another’s. It was found among his papers after his death in the fall of 1945; it is not known whether it was written to be printed. It has been made available for publication here by Mrs. Oko. The Jew in Our Day (New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944) appeared first as a series of three articles in the Contemporary Jewish Record under Dr. Oko’s editorship.
"The Jew in Our Day” develops and improves a viewpoint advanced in several of Waldo Frank’s earlier essays on the Jewish problem. It is a subtle, creative, and thought-stirring book, and the following are reflections evoked by it on Judaism, Jewish history, the destiny of the Jews, and their future in America—all burning and vital questions for the thoughtful Jew. . . .
By Judaism we mean (in this instance) the total harvest of thinking, feeling, living which Israel has reaped from its earliest history to the present time or—the quest of the Jewish people. This quest was the apprehension of the religious idea. But the concept “Judaism” is not synonymous with “Jewish religion.” The religion of the Jews—one hesitates to say: the religions of the Jews—is the frame of the picture. An unfinished picture, to be sure; as unfinished as is its background, which is the world itself. But art is long; and the artists—the Jews—are still busy at it. In olden times, the frame formed an integral part of the picture it enclosed, protected, and, in certain periods of history, even enhanced: the Jews lived their religion. It is noteworthy that there exists no history of the Jewish religion as apart from that of the Jewish people. For you exhibit a picture, framed; you do not exhibit a frame. At least, no artist would (though a shopkeeper may, for purposes of selling).
While the two terms Judaism and Jewish religion are not identical they are inseparable. It should also be noted that the term “Jew” (Yehudi), originally a Judaean—i.e., a member of the Southern Confederacy called Judah in the Bible—in the post-exilic period came to mean an adherent of Judaism without regard to local nationality.
The Jews and Judaism have been affected several times by the outside world. Persian thought affected them and Greek thought. After the attainment of emancipation, and when the Jews entered the full stream of European civilization, and took their part in the various aspects of European life, it was inevitable that European thought would affect them much more largely still. They were bound to absorb it, in a dozen different ways, often unconsciously. For European thought is a combination of Christian thought and Greek thought, and Christian thought is itself a product of Greek thought and Jewish thought. Judaism was able to receive because it so largely had given. There was kinship between Judaism and Europe.
Thus many cultures have contributed toward that complex entity, the “Jewish mind.” Jewish culture, throughout the ages, has stood under the sign of “symbiosis,” the term for two species living in close bodily proximity, influencing one another, irritating one another. From the Exodus to the Yishuv, the cultural development of the Jewish people has not been determined by its own form principle; in addition to the creative impulse from within, there is always discernible an extraneous agens at work, moulding and shaping it, giving it dress and style. Every other nation of antiquity had lived its individual life, and, when this was no longer possible, was doomed to perish or to be completely absorbed into a foreign nation. Only the Jewish people was able to live and develop its own life amidst foreign and often hostile surroundings, and at the same time participate creatively in the culture of these surroundings.
The Jewish group, accordingly, cannot be considered decadent. For when a group is decadent, it has lost its power of growth, differentiation, and assimilation; it is even losing the accumulated capital of the past. There is a law of change. But change, instead of being an expression of a group’s vitality, may also be the process by which its vitality is wasting away. This is clearly not the case with the Jewish group.
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The Jews of the pre-emancipation era, generally speaking, did not entertain doubts as to the truth and ethical worth of their inherited religious ideas and beliefs. It was only when the Jew emerged from the ghetto, both social and intellectual, that he found the world outside pursuing a course quite oblivious to the claims of his people and his religion which justified his former isolation. (As a matter of fact, this realization of a conflict of ideas is already reflected in Ecclesiastes.)
Few want to re-enter the ghetto. To most Jews, civic and political equality seem a great and noble prize. But they also want to exist as Jews. If we cannot create, they seem to say, we will preserve; if we cannot produce, we will stand guard over the products of the past. In Germany, for example, emancipation was an incentive to Jews to critically examine the fund of historical and literary knowledge accumulated through the centuries. The “Science of Judaism” came into being. Rabbinism was dying out. The code of the Shulhan Arukh cannot be carried out by citizens of enlightened countries. To do so would involve utter dissociation from non-Jewish elements. What is to save Judaism and the Jews as a community from decay or destruction became the great problem.
It is, of course, historical continuity, and social heritage, and not racial traits that keep the Jews together, and give them the sense of kinship. The Jews have been unified throughout their dispersion by religion, history, and common experience. From remote times they have also retained memories of a national life. The Messianic idea, too, has a strong nationalistic tinge—despite Jewish medieval philosophers and modern Reform rabbis who tried to remove all “materialistic” connotations from it.
Israel is destined to a Restoration, say the Orthodox. Judaism is capable of offering a solution to those who are not of Israel, say the Reform. If the Jewish mission or message is the propagation of an idea, on what ground is the continued existence of Israel as a separate organization—or, if you will, a spiritual entity—defensible or justified? Hellenism, too, is an ever recurrent force in civilization. Yet no one would maintain that because Hellenism is still necessary, Hellenes are also necessary. Why should Judaism need Jews?
The fact is, there are no Hellenes; but there are Jews—real human beings, not principles; and millions of them are convinced of the justification of Jewish separateness.
In any case, both Orthodoxy and Reform regard Judaism as a divine message. They both believe in the Jewish mission, that the Jews are a missionary, though not a proselytizing people, Between the Orthodox and Reform there are in regard to outward observances very marked differences; and there is an illimitable difference between the conditions of enforced separateness and those of political assimilation.
Today, the habit of life is transformed, the individual temperament is changed—the Jews have travelled far from the Middle Ages! Waldo Frank might say that we have traveled too far. There is an enthusiasm abroad for the strong and exalted moral convictions of medieval Jewries, felt and expressed by them so fervently in their religious poetry, embodied as laws in their codes, and recorded as performances in their Responsa. Indeed, it was not exactly easy to be a Jew—or a man of virtue—in the Middle Ages. Nor, for that matter, in modern times. But, Waldo Frank seems to say, it is wiser to sink under the weight of a great enigma like the so-called “Jewish Question” than to solve it falsely. To him—and to many others, too—this is not a matter of taste or opinion, but a moral question of first magnitude.
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Waldo Frank is an internationally minded left-wing intellectual—like Albert Einstein. Both are profoundly concerned with the tragedy of the Jews. Einstein is a Zionist who believes that Jewish nationalism does not aim at power but dignity and health. Frank is a non-Zionist (not, of course, an anti-Zionist). Both are significant spokesmen of the Jewish spirit.
More than that, Frank is of the new American Jews. He, of course, does not accept past authority uncritically or tradition unanalyzed. Yet he refuses to consider himself outside of the pale of Judaism, even as he struggles against being a Jew by memory only. But Frank is a poet and a mystic, and writes nearer the view of the prophet than of the sociologist or the economist. He offers only a “Preface to a Program,” with all the limitations that implies. But while he is not a social engineer, and his book is not concerned with means, it contains much excellent analysis of objective phenomena and fruitful suggestions enough to occupy many minds for a long time to come.
Frank attaches a positive importance to the survival of the Jews and Judaism for their own sake. He calls for a conscious enrichment. He admonishes especially the American Jews to take up again the teachings of the Prophets. Religion should be made coterminous with life. What we can learn from Jesus and even from Paul, we learn from Jews, and not from aliens. There is kinship between Judaism and Christianity. The Jew, he seems to say, should not only accept himself: he should accept his Jewishness, inwardly. He should cultivate those “racially” colored modes and moods of his. Not alone for the sake of loyalty (and loyalty is a virtue), but even more so for the sake of spiritual harmony.
Judaism must solve the challenge of the modem world, says Frank. He sees this challenge in the present-day crisis. The Jews have always suffered persecution; but they knew why. They were a “peculiar people”; they were Jews. “Jewishness was the treasure of their lives.” But what, he asks, is there alive in contemporary American Jewry to distinguish it from any other quantitative group of human beings? Wherein consists our Jewishness?
To be a Jew means to live a certain way of life—or else one ceases to be a Jew. Evolving with the ages, Judaism was yet an organic growth from a single tradition. This “tradition” was once our “heresy”—a great living force, and not a mere family heirloom. In the dim dawn of our history, on the plains of Chaldea, our father Abraham began the process of weeding out from our hearts and minds certain legends: he demolished the idols of his tribe. Breaking idols has ever since been our mission.
The covenant between God and Abraham was an act of will on both sides. God chose Abraham, and Abraham accepted the choice; and every member of the Chosen People from Abraham onward can be so only by receiving and answering the same call. Though Abraham’s covenant was made “for his seed forever,” to be a true heir to his covenant depends on a subjective not an objective factor—not on race, but on will. The defining Jewish term is action. Value and vision must become action.
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From this premise, American Jewish leaders are not true Jews. Jewry, Frank grants, has great men and great leaders. But they are not leaders of Jews. They are scientists, philosophers, artists, revolutionaries. The Jews make marginal contributions. But Jewish behavior has ceased to be regulated by reference to Jewish principles.
Now, to suffer for a cause that our soul loves is bearable, is, indeed, “man’s most enviable destiny.” But to suffer for nothing—to be hated as a Jew, when one’s life is not Jewish!
The conscious Jew,. the real Jew, will find a reason for his Jewishness, a reason to bear persecution, if Judaism once again embraces a workable program moving toward social justice. And Judaism must redefine what it has always meant by God. The idea of the Ehad is interwoven and shot through with a thousand threads with the moral grandeur of Israel’s prophets and sages, with the Messianic hope (that beautiful Dream and hope) of the Jewish people, and with their yearning for Ge’ulah (redemption)—that Dream of the Ideal, and Judaism’s beatific vision. The Golden Age of Judaism, as Renan said, was thrown forward into the future—for all the peoples on earth, with the Jews filling the role of the messianic people. The religion of Israel passed through a national to an ethical monotheism and expanded into the universalism of the Second Isaiah.
It would be interesting to compare Frank’s arguments with the treatment of the problem of Jewish separateness by Joseph Jacobs in his essay “Jewish Ideals,” reprinted in “Cedar of Lebanon” in the April [1943] issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record. Jacobs attempts to expound the fundamental Jewish ideals underlying the Jewish way of life, and to justify them from the standpoint of modem thought. Judaism, he holds, requires some such justification if it is to continue its existence as a separate activity amid the world’s spiritual forces. Jewish separatism must be put on a rational basis. The monotheistic ideal, he argues, has been in substance accepted by the Christian and Moslem worlds; and the question is: Are the other Jewish ideals also acceptable? These ideals, he avers, must become clearly conscious to the Jews themselves, and expounded and promulgated by them. But, concludes he somewhat lyrically: “If Israel has no future, man’s past has no clue.”
It is perhaps futile to discuss whether Jewish separateness is still necessary, since there are between twelve and fifteen million men, women, and children who live, and want to live, as Jews. Modem sociologists and psychologists hold that to cherish the individualitiy of ethnic groups need not involve the vague and invidious question of superiority. The purposes of mankind have depended on no single people or group. No nation has had permanent leadership. The Jews, it is held, can best vindicate the value of the Jewish spirit by living as Jews, and not by characterless indistinction.
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The drama of Jewish history hangs together. . . .
In an inner and profound sense, Judaism is a tendency—an attitude of the Jewish mind. The Jewish mind is the sum total of Jewish thought. The Jewish spirit is the collective memory of the Jewish people. Jewish consciousness is the special fund of experience of the Jewish community. Nations and groups and individuals carry with them their past. The past is contained in the present. You cannot leap over your own shadow. You cannot deny your own spiritual ancestry. It is fallacious to think that the Jew is primarily a man and only incidentally a Jew.
We have inherited our Judaism, and our attempts at its continuation are feeble. The world could not do without the plastic beauty of Hellas; but neither can it do without the ethical—speculative spirit of Judaism. If the precision of modem thought is a Greek contribution, its seriousness is a heritage from Judea. There are in Judaism certain ideas about life, about morality, about society, with which the world must reckon in the future. The gap between Western thought and Judaism is not intellectually and spiritually bridgeless. We shall not have to build from the ground up, we shall only have to build better.
Waldo Frank wants to see the Jewish people bring forth, on the basis of Judaism, an organic continuation of their culture in America. Not an “independent” culture, which is no more possible than an “independent” civilization, and which is quite unnecessary and, in some aspects, even illegal; but an inner culture: a culture with a Jewish tincture, intellectually and spiritually, which may flourish on America’s soil. And the soil is fertile.
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Born as a Jew into the world, one almost inevitably belongs to the world because, for some inexplicable reason, it becomes so easy to draw the world’s attention and its hatred on oneself. This begins at birth and does not end with death; nor, for that matter, with baptism.
There must be relief from political and social disabilities. But let us not hug the comfortable belief that through the activities of the Jewish protective agencies and with the good wishes of the Balfour Declaration the end of our Galut will be reached. (We mean Galut in the descriptive, not in the elegiac sense.)
For the Jewish problem is not essentially a question of “national homelessness.” And it is not a problem to be solved by philanthropists or statesmen. The Jewish problem has been in turn religious, economic, social, ethnological, psychological. The problem itself has not changed; only its formulations have changed. We should remember that anti-Semitism, about the origin of which there has been some bold romancing, is a phenomenon intimately associated with our whole history. It antedates Christianity by many centuries. The hatred of the Jews may continue until the book of history is closed. Maybe—who knows?—it has a “purpose” or a “moral.”
We have in the past performed special tasks of the intellect; we have created several aspects of thought. We have thus a special genius. We may have a special message, if we dare not claim a special “mission.” But we must expand—lest our survival as Jews be hollow and useless.
Or: is the great Wanderer weary—do we feel it in our heart of hearts that Israel can wander no longer—and are we only waiting till all is quiet and silent; hoping inwardly that the Wanderer lie down, wipe his pale forehead and die?
