“As does the Christian so does the Jew.” This insight into the social behavior of modern Jews, which we owe to the poet Heinrich Heine, has become something of a sociological axiom, in particular for students of American Jewry. Thus, Seymour Martin Lipset, in an important and frequently cited article,¹ speaks of the propensity of Jews to accommodate “to the dominant behavior patterns within the Gentile community,” to the extent that Jews constitute “the most American of all groups in the nation [and] exhibit the predominant American traits in a more integrated fashion than any other group.” The thesis that American Jewish behavior is best understood as the conscious or unconscious adjustment of institutions and behavior patterns to those of American culture at large has been reiterated frequently in recent years; and a new book by Joseph Blau, Judaism in America,² enshrines it as almost a matter of sociological law.

The “accommodationist” thesis is of course based on socio-historical analysis, but it may also serve as an ideological weapon, and on two opposing sides. Those who object to Jewish efforts at maintaining separate institutions, or are embarrassed by distinctive patterns of Jewish religious practice which deviate from accepted norms of American behavior, may take a certain comfort in a theory which suggests that Jewish particularism is abnormal not only by American standards but according to Jewish historical experience in America as well. An “accommodationist” thesis thus reinforces the position that Jews ought to be more American and that those Jews who are more American stand within the main line, as opposed to recent immigrants, or “separatist” Jews, or Jewish “extremists” who seek to develop patterns of behavior and institutional structures which offer barriers to full Jewish integration into American culture and society. On the other side are those who find in the “accommodationist” thesis confirmation of their view that since American Jews are coming increasingly to reflect the Gentile environment, they will cease to exist as a distinguishable group. As this is a virtually inevitable process, such people argue, it is pointless to continue to support efforts at maintaining an independent Jewish existence in the Diaspora; those who want to survive as Jews must move to Israel.

But whatever the ideological implications of the “accommodationist” thesis, a prior question needs to be asked about it: is it correct? Obviously, in the most basic sense, it is. American Judaism does bear the impact of the American experience in many significant ways, and the same rule applies to every Jewish community in history, from the time of the Bible onward. The biblical narrative abounds in examples of the way the surrounding culture affected the masses of Jews and scholars have noted its role in the formulation of normative Jewish concepts of God, man, and the cosmos. Not that one can account for the development of ancient Judaism by recourse to its environment alone, but neither can one understand Jewish uniqueness until one has understood how the Jews reformulated and reshaped the myths and rites of Near Eastern civilization. And what holds for the biblical era holds as well for later Jewish history, even for those periods during the long sojourn in medieval Europe when Jews seem to have formed a completely isolated and self-contained community.

The critical question is not whether Jews have historically adapted themselves to the surrounding culture—this is a self-evidently true proposition. The question is which elements of that culture have they simply assimilated and adopted without change, which elements have they transformed in the process of absorbing them, which elements have they resisted, and which important elements, if any, have they ignored? This is an empirical question, one that must be approached in strict objectivity and which requires careful attention to the proper definition of terms, bearing in mind their potential ideological component. For instance, was the development of Jewish fraternal lodges in the 19th century, with their secret ceremonials and rites, a symptom of accommodation to urban middle-class norms, or a transformation of those norms into terms appropriate to Jews? The answer one gives to this question may depend not only on what one sees as essential and what as peripheral in Jewish history, but also on whether one is anxious to make a case for the propensity of Jews to assimilate or a case for their capacity to survive. The same applies to instances of Jewish behavior that straddle the line between accommodation and resistance to the environment.

All these distinctions, hard to make under any circumstances, are especially blurred when it comes to Jewish behavior in America. In the first place, America is an open society and does not impose its culture on its citizens in the way that France does on Frenchmen, England on Englishmen, or, for that matter, Israel on Israelis. Secondly, American culture is highly differentiated, and its regional, ethnic, and religious variety provides “space” for a host of cultural sub-varieties. This also accounts for the fact that Americans are less attentive to deviances which might be intolerable in a more uniform culture. Thirdly, the geographic concentration of Jews in the United States affords them an opportunity for mutual reinforcement and acts as a screen against the larger culture, whose impact might otherwise be felt more intensely. Fourthly, the relatively advanced position of Jews in American society enables them to exercise an influence of their own on the larger culture. The American attitude toward minorities, the American brand of political liberalism, even the very concept of cultural pluralism, owe important debts to Jews. Finally, secularism in America is not, as it historically has been elsewhere, a creed or a self-conscious movement in and of itself, and it does not provide a separate focus of identity. This means that Judaism and Jews are under less pressure to conform to forces which in other societies they have embraced.

Still, the fact that America offers a more fluid environment does not mean that the Jewish reaction to that environment cannot be observed and assessed. In what follows, and as an explicit challenge to the reigning theory of Jewish behavior in America—the theory which stresses the element of accommodation and adaptation rather than the element of resistance or transvaluation—I want to suggest that there have been in the past, and there are today, currents in American life that have had virtually no impact on Jews, that important areas of Jewish life have remained untouched by American culture. Four such areas strike me as being of special significance.

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Peoplehood. In the 18th and 19th centuries, under the pressure of Western conceptions of nationality and the nation-state, Jews reformulated their age-old definition of themselves as a people and paid lip-service, and sometimes a good deal more than lip-service, to the idea that they constituted nothing but a religious faith. In America, the 1885 “Pittsburgh Platform” of Reform Judaism proclaimed: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”

Yet despite all this, and despite the fact that there is nothing in American culture which supports the sense of identification, kinship, and responsibility that American Jews feel toward other Jews throughout the world, that sense has been particularly salient in the consciousness of American Jewry. It was the Damascus blood libel in 1840 that led to the first concerted action by Jews throughout the country, and the Mortara affair in Italy in 1858 that sparked the establishment of the first Jewish umbrella organization in the United States, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. The “Pittsburgh Platform” aside, wealthy “uptown” Reform Jews openly expressed their concern for the persecuted Jews of Russia and Rumania, helped them when they arrived in the United States, and even interceded with the American government in their behalf in a manner unparalleled by any other religious group. Most remarkable was the support given by those same Reform Jews to Jewish settlement in Palestine, and their efforts to create and assist Jewish communities in the Soviet Union.

The wealthy Reform philanthropists who bore the burden of support for both these projects were neither Zionists nor Bolsheviks—indeed, they were outspoken antagonists of the Zionists, and we may assume that they felt no less kindly disposed to the revolutionary regime of the Soviet Union in the 1920’s—and at the time these projects were being fostered, the 1920’s, Jews had good reason to fear the growth of anti-Semitism in the United States. Yet despite every consequence and implication, and despite the absence of cultural “legitimacy” for their activity, wealthy Reform philanthropists continued to support Jews in need.³

This is not to say that no one had reservations about support for Soviet or Palestinian Jews, or that no one felt any conflict between such activity and “proper” American behavior. Rather, the value of Jewish peoplehood overrode, even in the case of these highly Americanized Jewish philanthropists, their otherwise sober calculations of American social reality and what accorded with it.

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Voluntaryism. Joseph Blau, in Judaism in America, borrows the term “voluntaryism” from the sociologist Sidney Mead and finds that it is a “pervasive trait” in American cultural life which has shaped American Judaism. “Voluntaryism” rests on the belief that an individual’s rights take precedence over the rights of society, and his duties to himself over his duties to society. Blau argues that “voluntaryism,” to the American Jew, means that “a man’s religious affiliations are his own concerns and not the business of the community. . . .” Hence, not only is the civil status of the Jew independent of his religious ties but the Jew is “completely independent of synagogue control.” Moreover, Blau implies, “voluntaryism” extends as well to the Jew’s ties to the organized Jewish community itself.

Now there is no doubt that “voluntaryism” is a pervasive trait in American culture at large, yet the fact is that Jews are in some ways indifferent to it. Contrary to what one might have expected from a community anxious to accommodate to American norms, contemporary American Jews increasingly express their Jewishness outside their homes and outside their private lives, at the public, communal level.

Daniel J. Elazar, in his recent book, Community and Polity,⁴ highlights the emergence of Jewish federations of philanthropy and welfare funds as central instruments of the Jewish community. They, in turn, are “dominated by people who are involved in the total life of the community and who therefore tend to see its problems from a perspective based on a conception of the community as a whole.” The federations have increasingly strengthened their position vis-à-vis other Jewish institutions and have undertaken broad communal planning and even a measure of communal control. The very principle behind Jewish federations, the principle that the individual Jew should make his philanthropic contribution to a central agency which then allocates the sums to local, national, and overseas institutions, contravenes the principle of “voluntaryism,” according to which the individual should contribute directly to those organizations and institutions for which he has a special affinity. Finally, whether a Jew does or does not support a federation is very much a matter of communal concern. Indeed, the community exercises every means it can to elicit contributions from Jews, imposing its collective choices on its constituent members in as non-“voluntaryistic” a manner as the law permits.

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Organized Religion. It is generally agreed that organized religion no longer addresses itself to man’s deépest spiritual needs and has come to play a secondary role in his life. As Bryan Wilson, the British sociologist of religion, has pointed out, lower rates of church attendance reflect the declining capacity of the church “to summon the loyalties and donations of the laity.” Once, says Wilson, organized religion “legitimated the moral and social order, . . . mediated relationships of authority, helped balance social control and self-restraint, provided a moral order colored with myth to rationalize local action in cosmic terms, and reinforced group solidarity with imposed ritual practice.” Now it has become “inconsequential.” Wilson acknowledges that some of the recently imported Third World religions (he might well have added sectarian and fundamentalist varieties of Christianity) are taken seriously by their adherents, but, he argues, while they offer private and personal systems of meaning, these new forms of faith have little to say to the larger social order. They do not represent culture, “but just a congeries of options in a plural society—a diverse set of options ‘out.’” Given the position of Jews in American society, they might well be expected to follow the pattern of the declining church outlined by Wilson.

Let us concede at the outset that the synagogue in America plays a less central role in Jewish life than it did twenty years ago. The increased attention devoted to Israel and Soviet Jewry has contributed to a rise in importance of institutions and individuals best able to organize the Jewish community at the philanthropic and political level. But in its relation to these institutions, the synagogue fulfills precisely that function which Wilson says the church no longer fulfills; it supports the Jewish social order, reinforces group solidarity with imposed ritual practice, and provides a moral order colored with myth which rationalizes local action in cosmic terms.

Moreover, “secular” Jewish institutions, far from offering a threat to the authority of the synagogue (as many rabbis believed they would), tend to exhibit great sensitivity toward Jewish religious life and great respect for Jewish religious values. Jewish communal activity, particularly among younger people, often leads to a search for the spiritual meaning of Judaism. The sense of peoplehood, though not the same thing as a religious sensibility, can and often does conduce to the awakening of such a sensibility. Though the current upsurge in ethnic consciousness in America, by which many Jews have been affected, may be understood at one level as a symptom of religious decline, with ties to the group taking the place of ties to the church, the American Jewish sense of kinship and peoplehood (as we have seen) is in fact a constant in American Jewish history, one which is as likely to lead to a greater affinity for the religious aspects of Judaism as it is to act as a surrogate for religious affiliation.

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Religious Observance. This final point emerges directly from the previous one.

The prevalent notion in American life is that a “religious” person is someone who behaves morally. As Joseph Blau puts it, the thrust of contemporary Protestantism (the new upsurge of evangelism notwithstanding) is to evaluate conduct “in terms of the relations of man to man alone, without regard to ulterior considerations of the relations of man to God.” According to Blau, “except to professional theologians, the distinction between morality and religion is today unimportant, and virtually nonexistent.” Moralism, the stress on universal standards of ethical behavior as opposed to particularistic standards of proper ritual practice and faith, dominates the religious culture of America, especially that part of the religious culture in which American Jews make their own lives.

Yet moralism as a religious idea is not very helpful in understanding contemporary American Judaism. It is true that in a random sample of American Jews one is likely to find relatively low levels of religious observance. Large numbers of Jews, perhaps a majority of American Jews, are indifferent to the demands of the Jewish tradition and far more attuned to the cultural standards of urban, middle-class America. (To some degree they even create those standards.) But these Jews do not set Jewish standards, nor do they pretend to. They neither control Jewish institutions and communal organizations nor dictate the norms of American Jewish behavior.

In Jewish life today, Reform no less than Orthodox, and in the communal agencies no less than in the synagogues, the tendency has been increasingly toward placing the emphasis on observance, ritual behavior, and cultic practice. This is decidedly a new development in American Jewish life. Thirty or forty years ago, even twenty years ago, the communal leadership of American Jewry, including large sectors of the rabbinate itself, were considerably less concerned with Jewish ritual and tradition than is the case today, when rabbis, synagogues, and Jewish communal institutions of all types are more sensitive to the demands of traditional religious observance. It may be that this development signifies a growing polarity among those nominally identified as Jews. It may even be that assimilation has eaten so deeply into the community that only the committed remain, although this is extremely doubtful. But whatever the development portends, what is significant about it for our present discussion is that it cannot in any way be accounted for by the “accommodationist” thesis of Jewish life.

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The impact of America on American Judaism, then, is not so simple or so unambiguous as has sometimes been maintained. American Jews have done more than accommodate themselves to their environment. They have not only transformed that environment in some instances, and resisted it in others, but have even remained utterly indifferent to it in areas that touch their deepest concerns and values as Jews. And therein, perhaps, lies some basis for a continued hope for distinctive Jewish survival.

¹ “The American Jewish Community in a Comparative Context,” in Peter I. Rose, ed., The Ghetto and Beyond (1969).

² University of Chicago Press (1976).

³ See Barbara W. Tuchman, “The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story,” COMMENTARY, May 1977, for more on this.

⁴ Jewish Publication Society (1976).