Before taking leave of this country to return to England, David Daiches sets down some personal reflections on the situation of American Judaism as he sees it. Mr. Daiches was born in 1912 in Sunderland, England, where his father, the famous scholar Salis Daiches, served as rabbi. In 1918, Salis Daiches having been appointed rabbi of the Hebrew Congregation of Edinburgh, the family moved to Edinburgh, where David Daiches received his MA in 1934. Many will doubtless find Mr. Daiches’s views on American Judaism provocative, and ample space will be afforded in future issues for comments and differing views.

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Soon after I came to Ithaca to take up my present position at Cornell, I was asked by the local rabbi to talk to his congregation one Friday evening. He suggested that I might talk from the pulpit if I wished, or if I preferred I could talk after the service in the adjoining hall. I chose to speak in the hall, and not to attend the service. I am not sure if I could explain adequately why the idea of talking in the pulpit offended me, and why I could not even bring myself to attend the service. It is partly because where Jewish liturgy and traditions are concerned I want either the genuine thing or nothing at all. There is a very beautiful order of service for the Sabbath eve developed over the centuries and still in use by Orthodox congregations. It begins with the Ninety-fifth Psalm, which is a fine, powerful one, and when the chazan (he should never be called “cantor”) breaks into the opening “l’chu n’ranenah l’Adonai” (“Come let us sing to the Lord”) with that melancholy rise and fall, as a signal for the congregation to commence their worship, there is a spell cast over me which no fancy choir of mixed voices singing elegant extracts from an emasculated Hebrew liturgy can ever hope to throw.

I object to the pussyfooting of it all. I object to rabbis giving sermons on Truman’s foreign policy or national maritime week. I object to synagogues being called temples—as though in Jewish history and tradition that term did not have a limited, specific reference, and the difference between the beth haknesseth (assembly place for prayer), the beth hamidrash (house of study), and the beth hamikdash (temple) was not of the very essence of Jewish history. I object to the term “rabbi” being used generally as the Jewish equivalent of minister, a practice which deprives it of the nobility and grandeur that invested the title when it was confined to those who had achieved the hard discipline of obtaining the proper s’michah (ordination). I object, in short, to the pretense that Judaism is worth keeping alive when everything that distinguishes it from other religions has been quietly abolished.

I am not sure that Judaism is worth keeping alive as a practical religion. In the religion as it developed from the time of Ezra to the end of the Middle Ages there was something noble and beautiful and tragic and rather terrible. Yet, though I respect the man who says tachanun on Mondays and Thursdays and I can take part with pleasure in an early morning service with an Orthodox minyan (yes, and play the part of ba’al tefilah [precentor] too if necessary) I do not myself believe that these things are intrinsically valuable or that they arise from a view of life which one can accept as “true.” I do not myself believe with the first perek of the Ethics of the Fathers that Moses received the Law from God on Sinai and passed it on to Joshua, though I remember with pleasure the days when I read a perek (in the proper season) each Saturday afternoon at the minchah service. I do not myself believe that the “Law” is homogeneous or uniformly valuable or that God is offended if we mix milk with meat or even if we eat bacon, still less that he cares whether we sing Yigdal or Adon Olam after ma’ariv (evening service). I don’t think he cares whether Jews keep Chanukah or Christmas or simply regard the festival as the ancient Feast of Lights, that festival of the winter solstice which appears to have been common to Welsh Druids and ancient Semitic peoples. I am not sure that he exists at all, in the sense that religion postulates, or if he does whether he cares about us. This is an assumption of faith, a faith which I never had. I believed in God as a youngster not because I had that kind of faith, but because I believed that wiser minds than mine had demonstrated his existence. When I found they hadn’t, I had some radical readjusting to do. (I should add here that I believe that God’s existence and nonexistence are equally undemonstrable.)

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Why, then, do I find myself so offended by the dropping by American Jews of so many things in which I myself do not believe? Certainly not because I believe that Jews should withdraw into a ghetto and make no effort to integrate with the tradition of Western civilization. Perhaps because as a boy in Scotland I found my Jewish Orthodoxy accepted by my neighbors with respect and interest precisely for the reason that it was different, that it was the old Hebrew tradition, the real thing. Scottish Presbyterianism never succumbed to the genteel tradition to the extent that other forms of Christianity have done, and something in its ruggedness was attracted by Hebrew intransigence. When I was at school at Edinburgh and the teacher was quoting something from the Bible, he would turn to me and say, “What does it say in the Hebrew, Daiches?” And I would quote it in Hebrew and the class would listen, impressed and even thrilled. When I returned to school after an absence occasioned by one of the Jewish festivals falling on a weekday, the boys would ask, “Was it a fast or a feast?” My best friend in those days was a young red-headed Scot whose father was Presbyterian minister in the nearby little town of Prestonpans, and we would argue for hours about the true nature of Jesus. While my father was explaining rabbinic theology and Jewish ethics to audiences of Christian workingmen in Dunfermline or Dundee, I was lending my much-thumbed copy of Paul Goodman’s short History of the Jews to my schoolmates as a prelude to more discussions about the differences between Judaism and Christianity. And when I proceeded to Edinburgh University, my closest friend there was a young man going into the Church of Scotland ministry, with whom I would continue such arguments.

I was the first Jew in Edinburgh to take an honors degree in English language and literature (most of the Jewish students—including about two hundred Americans—studied medicine), and when part of the final honors examination fell on a Saturday I had, of course, to request that the day be changed—which it was, just as four years earlier the date of the university scholarship examinations had been changed because they fell partly on Saturday and partly on Succoth. What I am trying to say is that I found a lively and aggressive Orthodox Judaism an effective entrée to the non-Jewish civilization around me, and that my happy experiences of those days (I never encountered anti-Semitism until I came to America) led me to believe that a Jew who wants to play his part naturally in a Western environment can do so either by this kind of honest self-assurance or by total assimilation. American Jewry seems to me to be aiming at a confused third way which is neither philosophically tenable nor socially practicable. We call coffins “caskets” and undertakers “morticians” and garages “greasing palaces,” and in the same cowardly spirit we call Judaism 20th-century Americanism and impose the dead hand of a genteel modern nomenclature on its beliefs and practices.

This is partly because American Jews are so nervous about their Americanism. It would never do to admit that they are in any significant sense different from other Americans—unless they are nationalist Zionists prepared to emigrate to Israel. To a non-American, American Jews seem less happy and less assured about their national and civic status than British Jews. It sometimes amuses and sometimes saddens me to find that most of my American friends assume that anti-Semitism is rife in Britain and that I should be congratulating myself on having got out and come to America. (As a matter of fact, I am returning to Britain for good in August.) It is true, of course, that the policy of the British government on the Palestine issue in the last decade has not helped matters, and has caused much disquiet among Jews in Britain, but that policy was the result of misguided notions about the balance of power in the Middle East: it did not arise from anti-Semitism. (And, it should be added, the policy in Washington differed in no jot or tittle from that of the British government; but Washington, sensitive to the Jewish vote, allowed Britain to bear the opprobrium: this can be confirmed by anybody who was in Washington in those days—as I was—and knew what Loy Henderson was doing in the State Department.) American Jews strike me as being continually on the defensive against anti-Semitism, if only because in a country whose national origins are so mixed, patriotism inevitably assumes a more blatant quality and those who do not assimilate to the general pattern feel, and are made to feel, uncomfortable. They have continually to prove that they are good Americans first, and Jews afterwards, and the obvious way of doing that is to join in the general “democratic” chorus that nobody really differs from anybody else, that all religions are equally true, that Jewish worship is really just the same as Christian worship, that a rabbi can appropriately preach in a church and a Christian minister in a “temple,” and that a common ignorance of the Bible and of theology can unite everybody in a sentimental, social-service, “boys’-town” religion presided over by a Catholic priest who has the temerity to assert (thus destroying the very basis of Christian theology) that “there are no bad boys.”

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And yet mixed up with all this desire to make Judaism one of the recognized faiths comparable in all respects to the majority faiths (whereas, of course, Judaism differs so seriously from the majority faiths that it will not survive any Gleichschaltung) is a pathetic belief that Jewish “culture” can survive as something pure and separate, drawing nourishment from no unique religious position. But who are the great Jewish contributors to modern culture? Let us roll out the names of the great Jews of the Western world from Spinoza to Einstein, and we shall find that none of them made his contribution as a Jew but merely as a man and a thinker. Only a Hitler would assert that Einstein’s physics is Jewish. If by Jewish culture we mean the scientific, literary, and philosophical contributions made by individuals who happen to have been born Jews, we must admit that the disappearance of the Jews qua Jews (not, of course, qua men) is not going to impede its flourishing. If, on the other hand, we mean by Jewish culture the products of a specifically Jewish way of life and thought, then what has the modern Jewish world to offer? Monotheism? The Unitarians have that without the embarrassment of a particularist tradition. Humanism? Matthew Arnold taught us long ago where we could find that. A sense of righteousness? The most eloquent pleas for social justice in our time, the pleas that have echoed the words of the Hebrew prophets of old, have not been made distinctively or even in greatest number by Jews. Rabbinical Judaism, with its combination of legalism and humanism, its liturgical charm, its strict scholarship, its wise and kindly attitude towards man in his sexual and social aspects, its preposterous literalism, and its magnificent but untenable view of theology and history? By all means, if you can take it. It is a noble creed, and if you can stomach all of it, do so, and you will enrich society. But by spooning out of it what it has in common with other creeds or positions you are not drawing on any exclusively Jewish culture. You are practicing assimilation.

Of course, so are the Christians. Hardly any Christian today knows what he is supposed to believe. I give a course in Milton at Cornell, and it leads me to discuss the religious scene in England in the 17th century—that seed-bed of modern Protestant sects. I have never found anyone in the class who can tell me what distinguishes a Baptist from a Congregationalist or even a Presbyterian from an Episcopalian or a Calvinist from a Lutheran, nor have I discovered anyone who can explain what the central doctrines of Christianity are. Everyone believes that a church is a purely social institution and the ministry is a social service profession dedicated to the principle that all religions are alike and the sole duty of all believers is to take an interest in boys’ clubs and thrill vaguely when an organ plays. I used to think that at least the Catholics knew what they were supposed to believe, but I have not found it so—I remember the Catholic boy who, when I asked him what the Trinity was, replied “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” There was also the Jewish boy who, asked in our general literature class if he had ever read the Book of Job, replied, “Naw, we only read the Old Testament.”

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To me it seems as though the basic drive of the American Jew is to assimilate in order to prove his Americanism; but, because he has a guilt feeling about this desire, he will never admit it, and gets his assimilationist urge horribly mixed up with the fiercer kind of Zionism. While with one hand he is busy removing from Judaism all that distinguishes it from other modern faiths, with the other he is making feverish gestures towards Zion. But no one would be more astonished or upset than the American Zionist if out of Zion were really to come forth the Law and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He hopes that out of Zion will come forth good Rotarian Israelites and Hebrew-speaking hot-dog sellers. He has none of the religious passion for Jerusalem that his ancestors had. He is not likely to have sat in shul on Tisha B’av and mourned for Zion in the great plangent lament of Judah Halevi: “Tziyon, halo tishali lish’lom asirayich. . . .”—“Zion, wilt thou not ask after the welfare of thy captives, that seek thy peace, that are the remnant of thy flocks?” Nor will he have much sympathy for that great vision of Jerusalem as the seat of a revived Jewish religion that haunted the imagination both of the prophets and the rabbis.

When I gave my talk in the hall of the local temple, I saw some of the things the children had been making at Sunday school (God forbid that one should call it cheder!) and I was puzzled to find that the basic motif was the American flag interspersed with passionate nationalist sentiments about Palestine. But nowhere could I discern any feeling for Judaism. Our fathers studied Hebrew because it was the lashon kodesh, the language of the Law and the prophets: they had an ear for its eloquence and a sense of its historical significance and when they wrote it they wrote as the great Renaissance humanists wrote Latin, with a sense of glory and of reverence. But now youngsters who learn Hebrew at all learn it, one might almost say, as a political language: they learn how to ask for a cup of coffee in Tel Aviv, not to read the ringing eloquence of Isaiah or the sad glory of Koheleth. And they are taught the unmusical and inflexible Sephardic pronunciation, so mistakenly adopted by the modern Hebrew movement under the impression that it is more “accurate.” (I could write a whole essay on this point, but I shall refrain: the arguments against the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew and in favor of a modified form of the Ashkenazic pronunciation were first—but vainly—pressed by my father in an essay entitled “The Pronunciation of Hebrew” in his Aspects of Judaism, London, 1928.)

Hebrew, like Latin, Greek, and Italian, ought to be studied in any liberal arts program as one of the great dead languages, not as another way of asking for Coca-Cola. Just as I press my students of English to study Italian so that they can read Dante, not merely so that they can ask their way to the washroom in Rome, so I should like to see Jewish students (and others, for that matter) studying Hebrew so that they can read the Hebrew Bible with understanding and satisfaction. Anybody can pick up the conversational idiom of a modern language by living for a while in the country where it is spoken; and if he does not live there, then he doesn’t need that conversational idiom. But, as an educated man, he always needs to know the languages in which the great documents of Western civilization have been written, and to know them as they were in their glory.

If Zionism is merely a political means to minimize anti-Semitism, then of course there is no need to associate it with Judaism at all, or to link up the modern Zionist movement with the traditional Jewish attitude to Zion. The result of this approach to the problem will be another little Levantine state with its own language and its own national apparatus: but I for one cannot see how such a state will solve any problems or why it is a cause for congratulating anybody. If, on the other hand, Zionism is to be based on the aspirations of Jews throughout the ages, then it is illogical to get upset over the influence of the Orthodox rabbis in Israeli affairs or over the idea of a theocracy in Israel. That is precisely what, historically, Jewish Zionism has aimed at. My good friend Milton Konvitz gets excited when there is any suggestion that the State of Israel should have Judaism as its official religion, and argues in favor of a state based (as the United States theoretically is) on the polite eclecticism of the Aufklärung. This may be good Americanism, but it is a flouting of the prayers of Jews throughout the ages. They didn’t want merely a Jeffersonian Latvia or Czechoslovakia. I’m not sure that I do, and I don’t want a theocratic state either, which puts me in the position of criticizing everybody and agreeing with no one.

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I want American Jews to face the issues honestly and stop pussyfooting. If they believe, as by much of their conduct they seem to suggest, that in a modern democratic state it is possible to develop an eclectic humanism which draws some nourishment from a variety of religious traditions but which is not committed to any specific religious position, then let them boldly say so and face the logical consequences—acceptance of assimilation as an ideal. If, on the other hand, they believe that the Jewish religion as a religion has a complete way of life to offer which no other religion has, and that it represents a central truth to be found nowhere else, then let them cultivate Judaism and emphasize its differentiating qualities. But to remain Jews out of mere pride, or fear, or jingoism, or habit, to cultivate a Jewish consciousness while ignoring or disbelieving or glossing over the ideas and doctrines which constitute the Jewish heritage—this appears to me both illogical and unintelligent. If you believe that the Jewish religion can be prettied up into a modern mixture of Freud and Jefferson and kid yourself into calling your fancy synthesis Judaism (as was done in that absurd book, Peace of Mind), then I suppose nobody can prevent you: but don’t then sneer at assimilationists—they are at least honest about what they are doing.

The Hebrew tradition, in both its Biblical and its later, specifically Jewish phase, is a noble one, and a central part of Western culture. So is the classical tradition, and so is the Christian. But one does not need to be a Greek nationalist to study and enjoy Homer, or a member of medieval Christendom to study and enjoy Dante—or a Jew in order to study and enjoy the great works of Hebrew literature. These are all impressive movements of the human spirit, and they are available to all intelligent men. Let those of us with a Jewish background by all means pay particular attention to the Hebrew tradition: let us teach our children Hebrew and Jewish history and let us have them read Isaiah and Amos and Judah Halevi in the original. In teaching them the history of religion let us dwell particularly on the history of Judaism. But if we ourselves do not accept the theological assumptions that lie behind the Jewish religion and if we feel that our main duty as members of Western culture is to contribute towards that liberal humanism in which, I should imagine, the salvation of the world alone lies, let us be honest with ourselves and our children and not pretend on the one hand that everybody really believes the same thing in this great free country and on the other that we have a valid reason for remaining forever separate as Jews. The only ones who have a valid reason are the Orthodox believers in the un-American doctrine of the election of Israel.

Let us, above all, have more knowledge. Let us have less emotion about Jewishness and more reading of the Bible—yes, and the Talmud. Let us have less nationalism and more study of Jewish history. And let those Jews for whom the traditional Jewish explanation of God and his relation to his people and to the world is truly valid practice as their religion the full historical Judaism with its richness, its ceremonial, its discipline, and its strange beauty. I myself must, I suppose, be regarded as an agnostic, and if I go to shul these days it is as a sentimental exercise. But to go to a modern “temple” is not even a sentimental exercise—it is acquiescence in dishonesty. As I survey the American Jewish scene I see much of this dishonesty around me.

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The character in Jewish history who has long fascinated me is the rather cloudy figure of Elisha ben Abuyah, who lost his faith in Jewish religion but remained a student of its history and customs, so that he was able to tell his religious friends what they ought to be doing if they considered themselves religious Jews. I think I understand his position, for in a sense it is my own. Jewish ideals and Jewish history continue to fascinate me, though I can no longer believe in Jewish theology. I am scarcely less fascinated by the classical past and by the history of Christianity—for indeed I consider myself a full-fledged citizen of the Western world with profound local ties to my native country and with special knowledge both of its history and literature and of Hebrew literature and traditions. With such equipment I am prepared to look about me and play my humble part in the examination of the Western heritage and the redefinition of human ambitions. Whether the Jews are a race or a nation or a religious community has long ceased to bother me: I know that, with an individual background and heritage as every man has, I am a man, and I am interested in humanity. If anybody answers that this is an untenable position and I must declare myself to be a member of one group or another, that the Hitlers of the world will never allow me to solve the problem in this way, I can only say that I am quite sure that the Hitlers of the world will do their best to make my position untenable—but that only confirms me in my view that it is a good position, and one worth trying to live for.

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