I cannot for the life of me see any sense in the idea of promoting a Jewish culture in America, any more than I can see any sense in the idea of promoting a Ginzburg culture or a Cohen culture. I do not deny that I am a Ginzburg, descended from a long line of Ginzburgs, and I do not deny that I am by birth a Jew and descended from a long line of Jews. But I do not see that this creates any necessity to understand myself as a Ginzburg or as a Jew, or to develop “positive content” of Ginzburgism or Jewishness in my philosophy of life or cultural outlook.
In fact my reason tells me that in so far as I import “positive content “of Ginzburgism or Jewishness into my philosophy of life, I distort and falsify that philosophy of life. Hitler to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no Jewish truth and there is no Aryan truth. There is only a universal truth, a truth accessible to all men without the intervention of family, race, nation, or sect. . . .
As everybody knows, the religion of Judaism, after its crude tribal stage, developed the vision of a universal God, a God of Justice, to replace the vengeful God of a particular family, clan, or nation. However, Judaism—and the same is true of other revealed religions—is still tied by an umbilical cord to its origins in tribal religion. The set of beliefs and practices which constitutes Judaism is not something to be freely accepted by the individual after rational analysis—it is something imposed on him through family ceremonies and family pressure during childhood. There are many for whom this order of ideas still constitutes a living reality, many who seek honestly to propagate the inherited religion of the Jews as a way of life. With them I can have no serious quarrel, since I know that every living religion gropes towards the universal truth. . . .
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But Mr. Cohen’s appeal is directed not to those for whom religious Judaism is still a living thing, but rather to those for whom it has ceased to live. Mr. Cohen rejects religious Judaism as a way of life. He seeks to propagate Jewishness without Judaism—a clan outlook without the upward groping for the universal truth which redeems traditional religion. He thus commits the crime of Lot’s wife—he looks backward instead of forward.
The implicit justification that Mr. Cohen makes for Jewish culture—to a large extent he simply assumes Jewish culture as an axiom not needing demonstration or justification—is that it is necessary in order to provide Jews with a proper sense of adjustment. The familiar argument is that Jews come up against the fact of their Jewishness through anti-Semitism, but that is a negative way of learning Jewishness. What is needed is to have a positive approach to Jewishness. We must, as Mr. Cohen puts it, know “the facts about our Jewish past, to give warrant for our self-acceptance and content to our pride as Jews.”
. . . The great trouble with this line of argument is that in the guise of making the prejudice of anti-Semitism more supportable, it reintroduces the notion of group responsibility for individual actions which lies at the base of all prejudice. If I can take pride in the fact (or reputed fact) that my ancestors wrote the Ten Commandments, then the anti-Semite is justified in persecuting me because he is told that my ancestors were Christ-killers. Except for being born a Jew, I personally had as little to do with the Ten Commandments as with the killing of Jesus.
But if my individual being is to be swallowed up in my Jewish essence, as the Jewish culturists would have it, then the blood feud which the anti-Semites have been carrying on for two thousand years against the descendants of the Jews of Palestine is right and proper.
The argument about pride of race and tradition may make anti-Semitism more supportable to Jews, but what does it do for other victims of similar prejudices? What about the poor Negro who is lynched because of anti-Negro prejudice? He may not have any princely ancestors to fall back upon for pride of race; and he may not have any great cultural tradition to identify himself with. For him, according to the philosophy of the Jewish culturists, there can be no psychological or spiritual salvation. He may cry, “My Lord, my Lord, why hast thou forsaken me!”, but no answer is vouchsafed because he has no distinguished ancestors.
The whole argument of the Jewish culturists about “negative” and “positive” knowledge can be turned completely around. They tell us that Jews who take a universal outlook come up against their Jewishness negatively through anti-Semitism, and that they need to be redeemed by a positive knowledge of Jewishness—by Jewish culture. But who called Jewish culture positive? The very argument that the Jewish culturists use in support of their program indicates that the Jewish culture they put forward is nothing but the expression of the negative fact of anti-Semitism. Without anti-Semitism they would have no excuse for peddling their nostrum of Jewish culture.
It is the universalists, on the other hand, who insist that one’s philosophy of life should be determined by positive and not negative considerations—by the positive ideals of morality and reason, rather than by the failure of many people to attain and live up to these positive ideals. Granted that a large part of the human race has not yet achieved moral and intellectual enlightenment, does this mean that the rest of us have to go out of our minds and conform to a mad world?
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I have stressed the moral and intellectual objections to Mr. Cohen’s plea for a Jewish culture because moral and intellectual ideas constitute the most important part of any human cultural activity. They are also the most important elements in Mr. Cohen’s program for Jewish culture.
Culture in the aesthetic sense—the creation or appreciation of art—is linked not to abstract universal principles or ideals, but to the beauty of a concrete individual context. We see beauty not in general, but in an individual scene, in an immediate concrete experience. In this sense culture is of necessity local, regional, linguistic (as far as literary art is concerned), and ethnic (in the sense of sharing group memories).
These aesthetic individualizations of human culture do not by themselves interfere with the universality of human moral ideals and abstract intellectual principles. The various peoples of Europe, for example, have different aesthetic experiences. The beauty of the French language is not the same as the beauty of the English language, any more than the beauty of the French landscape is the same as the beauty of the English landscape. Also the unity of French history—the group memories of Frenchmen—is distinct from the unity of English history. But all such facts do not normally prevent the peoples of Europe from being united in the same culture intellectually and morally.
Conflict with universal moral ideals arises, however, whenever there is a disturbance of the basic conditions making for aesthetic individualization of the various cultures. Thus, let two peoples make war upon one another, and the national consciousness of each people ceases to be a purely aesthetic consciousness—an experience of shared memories enjoyed in and for itself. It becomes soured into a political or moral nationalism. Not only has such a nationalism no aesthetic value but in its preference for one group above the rest of humanity it violates rational morality.
In certain parts of Europe the ethnic consciousness of the various groups is so disturbed—even without war—that the possibility of a national art is destroyed without the ethnic groups being able, as yet, to fuse into a larger group-aesthetic consciousness. That may be too bad from the point of view of art, but there is little one can do about it. Humanity has its hands full organizing the basic economic and political conditions for a peaceful life, without having to guarantee a national artistic consciousness for every linguistic or historical group.
If these reflections are applied to the question of Jewish culture in America, it can be seen at once that the trend of life in America is such as to prevent the spontaneous development of an aesthetically adequate Jewish group consciousness. Such a group consciousness existed under the circumstances which governed the life of Jews in Eastern Europe, but in the United States, with all the impulsions that Jews have for mingling with others economically, intellectually, politically, and, to a certain extent, socially, there is no natural basis for an adequate group consciousness.
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A great part of most current discussions of Jewish culture is devoted to bewailing the absence of a Jewish group consciousness in America. But, after all, what can we expect? Jews speak the same language as other Americans, attend the same schools, read the same books, are members of the same political parties. And since religion does not play much of a role in the life of Jews—or for that matter, in the life of Americans generally—we cannot rely on differences of religion to individuate Jews as a group.
If, then, we are to have a Jewish group consciousness, it must be created by the use of a forced draft of Jewish nationalism. Such a nationalism, as I have previously indicated, betrays the basic ideals of universalism which it took humanity so long to achieve. But will it make for a healthy Jewish culture in the aesthetic sense? No, because it cannot undo the conditions that make Jews look to ideas and associations outside their own fold. All it can do is warp the perspective of Jews without creating for them the aesthetic experience of a Jewish group consciousness.
It may well be that because of anti-Semitism and other factors Jews may never feel themselves as aesthetically integrated in American life as other elements for whom the bars of prejudice do not exist. Or it may even be that the whole texture of American life will never be as aesthetically integrated as is the texture of the older established nations. So what?
In this troubled age, when we must all gird ourselves for the task of preventing world-wide atomic destruction, when we must deal with the need for bread and life and freedom for hundreds of millions, the question whether some group or other is or is not to have the joys of sharing common aesthetic experiences is of singularly little moment. The essential thing is that all the sons of Noah work together in a spirit of peace, cooperation, and human understanding.
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