The intellectual history of modern Jewry is singularly repetitive. As early as the 18th century, West European Jewish intellectuals defined the basic problem of retaining Jewish identity in a world both attractive and at the same time manifesting varying degrees of hostility. The following two hundred years largely represent the gradual process of one generation after another losing its unself-conscious Jewish identity and reacting with varying degrees of affirmation or rejection to Western civilization. The reflections of the newly acculturated maskilim of Galicia in the 1820’s closely parallel those of the Mendelssohn circle a generation earlier; with the exception of the Zionists and the socialists, the countless defense pamphlets written by Jews against anti-Semites all through the modern period nearly always repeat the same familiar, usually apologetic arguments.

Jewish responses to modernity all appear as reactions to the problem of Jewish particularism: inwardly- and outwardly-directed attempts to justify the continued existence of the Jews as a separate entity. For pre-modern Jews that was never a problem: the concept of chosenness made the question irrelevant if not blasphemous. But once the divinely ordained status of the Jewish people was called into doubt, some human reason had to be found. In descending degree of loftiness these justifications included the religious mission of the Jews, the inherent value of Jewish culture, the inability to achieve universalism except as mediated through a particular tradition, the persistence of anti-Semitism directed even at the convert from Judaism, and, finally, the psychological damage resulting from a denial of a conscious or unconscious element in one’s identity.

From the beginning of modern Jewish history there have of course been large numbers of Jews for whom no justification of continued Jewish existence carried sufficient weight to counterbalance the very real deprivations which they suffered as Jews; European society even after the secularization process spurred by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution still remained notably Christian and notably anti-Semitic. Again and again many Jews were led to think that the solution to human conflicts must lie beyond all particularisms and that the last great task of the Jewish people would be to abdicate its own separate existence, thus supplying an example and a model for Christianity. Though Moses Mendelssohn, standing at the very beginning of the modern period, came to realize through his own tortured experience with the Christian community of his day the naiveté of such thinking, many of his followers in Germany did not. They represent the first in a long line of individual and common attempts by Jews either to divest Judaism of all particularism, leaving it a ceremonial vessel of universalism, or to go further, and divest themselves of Judaism to seek fellowship among others similarly “liberated” from religious tradition.

It is with some trepidation that a Jewish historian tries to deal with this latter phenomenon in its individual and group manifestations. The subjects he must consider are frequently of the highest intellectual and moral caliber. Their motives and goals are unimpeachable. Yet the temptation lingers to ask whether all such longings for universalism, however noble, do not in many (most?) instances represent an attempt to escape from the odium of Jewishness.

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In American Jewish history there is perhaps no better known effort to move beyond particularism than the Ethical Culture movement, founded nearly a century ago. Though familiar, at least by name, to most Jews, especially in the New York area, the history of Ethical Culture until recently remained to be written. A new book by Howard B. Radest, executive director of the American Ethical Union, now fills this gap—and does so with remarkable objectivity.¹

Felix Adler, the founder of the movement, was the son of the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El and heir apparent to its pulpit. Upon his return from rabbinical and secular studies in Europe, he was asked to deliver a Sabbath sermon, which he called “The Judaism of the Future.” Quoted in part by Radest from the Ethical Culture archives, the sermon made a familiar plea for universal religion, though Adler at this stage still preferred to call it Judaism: “. . . we discard the narrow spirit of exclusion, and loudly proclaim that Judaism was not given to the Jews alone, but that its destiny is to embrace in one great moral state the whole family of men. . . .” I suspect that Adler’s words did not scandalize his Reform listeners nearly as much as Radest believes. As Reform Jews, they were accustomed to hearing Judaism spoken of in universal terms. It was apparently Adler’s rejection of theism that was crucial in determining his break with Temple Emanu-El. In fact, it was Adler himself who shortly thereafter refused to accept the pulpit and, if we can accept his own testimony, did so on theological grounds.

Radest makes much of the influence of Emerson and American Transcendentalist thought upon Adler. While Adler did sometimes refer to Emerson, the basic philosophical influence upon him seems to have been German Idealism and especially Immanuel Kant. Here, too, Adler stands in a long tradition. The attraction for Jews of Kantian philosophy—particularly its theological consequences—has been pronounced and continuous since the days of Kant himself. The disciples who best understood the Königsberg master in his own time were Jews like Solomon Maimon, Marcus Herz, Lazarus Bendavid. Thereafter the line of his adapters to Judaism runs from Solomon Steinheim to Hermann Cohen to Leo Baeck. The primacy which Kant ascribed to morality immediately attracted Jews who discovered a secularized form of the mitzva in the categorical imperative and the Kantian sense of duty. Kantian rationalism was equally appealing to a Jewry justifiably fearful of the anti-Semitic consequences of religious romanticism. In Kant, Adler found the philosophical underpinning for a religion centering upon morality which did indeed have its American counterpart in Emerson. Rejecting the God of revelation, Adler moved to a veneration of the universal moral Ideal which he regarded as a new and higher form of religion. Setting aside ritual, ceremony, and prayer, he retained the language of faith. His creed was this:

I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the law of righteousness is the sanctification of human life; and I believe that in furthering and fulfilling that law I also am hallowed in the service of the unknown God.

But, as Adler stressed again and again, creed really did not matter much. What counted was the deed. There could be a multiplicity of beliefs within Ethical Culture as long as there was unanimity on commitment to moral action. The weekly lectures, the Ethical Culure schools, were all intended to prepare the participants to act morally in the community. And in fact the Ethical Culture Society created an enviable record of successful social-welfare projects in New York City.

Those who in 1876 first accepted Adler’s religion of morality and his practical program were mostly middle- and upper-class German Jews. Jewish names predominate among the first members of the Society, and the early financial supporters seem to have been almost exclusively Jewish. From the Reform movement these first-and second-generation Americans were already accustomed to regard religion as principally concerned with ethics and to reject religious ceremonialism as primitive. From the earliest days of Reform in Germany, the sermon had assumed centrality in the service and had been frequently turned into an ethical discourse for the moral and spiritual Erbauung (edification) of its hearers. From this it was only a small step to the removal of all ceremonialism in favor of a somewhat longer informative and inspirational lecture. Adler made the transition particularly comfortable by his high evaluation of the Jewish prophetic tradition and of Jewish messianism. Those Jews who joined Ethical Culture could feel that they were not really rejecting themselves as Jews but only fulfilling the highest aspirations inherent in their tradition.

The preponderance of Jews in the Ethical Culture movement may have been a bit embarrassing to Adler and his Jewish followers, though Radest gives no evidence on this score. It does seem at least surprising that, while the trustees remained largely Jewish, the first professional leaders assisting Adler were all Christians, mostly with some clerical training. One cannot avoid the suspicion that the Jewish Ethical Culturists were trying to make up for the small reponse their proffered universalism evoked within the Christian community by clothing the professional leadership of their movement with names like William Maclntire Salter, S. Burns Weston, and Stanton Coit.

Adler’s stimulating Sunday-morning lectures attracted thousands to Carnegie Hall. Yet the large response seems to have been more a veneration of the man and an appreciation of his charismatic qualities than any deep-seated devotion to the ideals of the movement. Those who came listened, but they were hesitant to participate. “From time to time a choir was organized,” Radest tells us, “but the congregation would not sing.” Of those who attended, many did not bother to go through the procedure of officially joining the organization.

Within the Jewish community it was Reform Judaism that seemed most threatened by Ethical Culture. Itself committed to a universal interpretation of Judaism, it could hardly attack Ethical Culture on these grounds. Reform rabbis, and notably Kaufmann Kohler, later president of Hebrew Union College, attacked Adler for his non-theistic interpretation of religion rather than for his break with Judaism. But in reality there was little need for Reform to fear. Ethical Culture remained small. Efforts to establish societies outside New York and even in Europe often floundered and were seldom more than moderately successful. The total membership of all the societies until World War II remained well below four thousand.

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Radest deals very cogently with the problems that prevented the expansion of this potentially universal religion beyond the narrowest limits. In part the failure actively to seek new members was due to the frank elitism which prevailed during the first generation. The founders of the movement regarded themselves as a moral vanguard composed of the educated, successful, and socially committed. Adler himself was suspicious of popularization and ambivalent about pressing for organizational growth. Adler’s original conception was that of a society in which each member played an active role in the intellectual life and social projects of the organization. The leader was conceived as teacher, prophetic voice, social critic. But in the course of time, the changing membership of the Society began to regard the relationship between leader and member more on the model of minister and congregation than as an ethical partnership among equals. They wanted a pastor as much as a prophet and even favored the introduction of ritual. The English society went so far as to introduce a new form of Gregorian chant. Adler’s vision had looked beyond such “clericalism” and, as Adler continued to be senior leader until his death in 1933, his view competed with that of some of his younger colleagues, preventing any unified conception of the member-to-leader relationship. The failure to establish any permanent ritual forms or a solid organizational base caused the focus of the Society to remain upon the personalities of its leaders and thus greatly aggravated the loss suffered by the death of Adler and a number of his colleagues within a very short period in the early 1930’s.

Adler’s undisputed leadership of the movement for nearly sixty years proved an increasing disadvantage to Ethical Culture. Firm in his Kantian Idealism, Adler failed to respond with sufficient flexibility to the new currents of thought coming into prominence after World War I. Despite the crushing experience of the war, he held fast to his faith in progress, even if he now admitted it could not be scientifically demonstrated; despite the increased influence of ethical relativism, he continued to assert his belief that the good and the right were capable of determination; despite the popularity of Freudianism, he remained steadfast in his opposition to psychoanalysis and his insistence upon the sacredness and inviolability of the personal life; and despite the quickened search for a more radical political philosophy even among many of his members, Adler unconditionally and consistently rejected Marxism as a violation of individual ethical responsibility. Thus, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Adler’s lectures, now drawing diminishing audiences, seemed notably out of keeping with the times.

The increasing lack of ideological consensus in Ethical Culture was joined to a similar lack of agreement with regard to specific social issues. Adler and the original circle were conservative and reformist in their approach. But after the war a number of the leaders and some of the members began to look for more radical solutions. The society was split between meliorists and socialists, preventing it from taking an official position on specific issues. The lack of ideological consensus was not critical in a movement which focused upon the deed; the failure to achieve moral consensus was crucial.

Nor did Ethical Culture continue to appeal to later generations of Jews as it had in the first years. For the East European immigrants, who gradually came to dominate the Jewish scene, Jewish identity involved a good deal more than allegiance to the prophetic tradition. “Jewishness has taken the place of Judaism,” Adler complained. “Its emphasis is race, not religion.” Despite continued Jewish participation in Ethical Culture, from the point of view of Jewish intellectual history, Adler’s society can be linked only to the experience of the German Reform Jew newly resident in America.

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The different and yet remarkably similar response of the East European Jew, achieving Americanization half-a-century later, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, can be illumined only by turning to a movement which attempted an analogous transformation within the Jewish community itself. The history and problems of Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionism in many ways parallel those of Adler’s Ethical Culture movement. Again we are fortunate to have available now a critical and quite objective study, by Charles S. Liebman, which sheds much light on this second attempt to respond to the question of Jewish existence in the American environment.²

Even more than Ethical Culture, Reconstructionism has been guided by the charisma and prolific writings of a single man, Mordecai Kaplan, who founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in 1922 and has remained the venerated mentor of Reconstructionism for nearly fifty years despite his present retirement from direct organizational responsibility. Aside from his students at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Kaplan’s first adherents in the 1920’s and 1930’s were well-to-do first- and second-generation East European Jews with some American education and a degree of social conscience. They were unhappy with the existing forms of Judaism and felt powerfully attracted to Kaplan’s personality. Like Adler’s adherents, they were troubled by supernaturalist theology and sought some religious accommodation with the fruits of science. But unlike the early Ethical Culturists, Kaplan’s followers were the products of traditional Jewish homes and continued to value Jewish customs and rituals. They were looking for Americanization and rationalization within the framework of Judaism.

Well aware of Ethical Culture, Kaplan consciously borrowed from Adler. As Liebman notes, he preferred the term “leader” to that of “rabbi” and later modeled the Reconstructionist magazine on the format of the Society’s journal. Theologically, Kaplan was also not far removed from Adler. He, too, abandoned the traditional concept of a personal God in favor of an impersonal conception linked to man via ethics. Like Adler, he spoke of the “Power that makes for Righteousness” and rejected traditional Jewish conceptions regarding the Sinaitic revelation and otherworldly salvation. The Reconstructionists, like the Ethical Culturists, took theology seriously, refusing assent to any doctrine which seemed at variance with science. They, too, were embarrassed by the theological particularism inherent in the concept of the Chosen People, a notion which Kaplan alone among Jewish thinkers was eventually willing to abandon. The philosophical influences upon Kaplan, however, were different from those operative upon Adler. Kaplan’s thinking was molded in America where he received virtually all of his education. Drawing also upon Kant and Durkheim, Kaplan shaped his theology mainly on the model of the then popular functionalism of John Dewey and other American Pragmatists. German Idealism was not sacred for East European Jews as it was for the first generation of Ethical Culture.

Had it not been for his own and his followers’ emotional loyalty to Judaism, Kaplan might have led a later generation of American Jews down a path very similar to Adler’s. But American Jews of East European origin did not come out of a Reform tradition which more than a century earlier in Germany had already confined Judaism to the status of a religious denomination. In Russia and Poland Judaism had remained Yiddishkeit, an intense national feeling which persisted even after the complete rejection of traditional Jewish religion. For the East European Jews in America a crisis of Jewish faith did not imply the abandonment of Judaism. They were quite ready to accept Kaplan’s definition of Judaism as a civilization complementing the American one. Transforming the mitzvot into folkways or “sancta” made it possible to preserve ethnic allegiance and emotional ties without commitment to what seemed the outworn notion of a God commanding specifics of religious observance. It also retained for Reconstructionism traditional and concrete modes of expression, preventing the movement from falling victim to the plague of excessive abstraction which afflicted Ethical Culture.

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Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two movements is not ideological but structural. In each case intellectual influence far outdistanced organizational growth. Like Adler, Kaplan was ambivalent about expanding the practical scope of his movement. He preferred to exert influence through his writings, his contact with students at the Seminary, and the Reconstructionist magazine. Like Ethical Culture, Reconstructionism was organizationally centered around the original society in New York, with occasional efforts at founding new congregations or fellowships proving at best modestly successful. In terms of actual membership Reconstructionism has remained tiny when compared with Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, and with Jewish secular organizations. (The Reconstructionist Foundation has about nine hundred paid members; the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Fellowships has about 2,300 family members in ten congregations.) Like Ethical Culture, it has been unable to decide whether it should be a school of thought or an institutionalized religious denomination. Recently both movements have made efforts at greater organizational cohesion. In each case these efforts have been undertaken by the successors and not the founders of the movement. The most recent and probably most significant endeavor of the Reconstructionists has been the establishment of a rabbinical school in Philadelphia with a curriculum modeled upon Kaplan’s view of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization.

It is usually assumed that the failure of Reconstructionism to grow must be attributed to Kaplan’s hope that much of his program, culturally if not theologically, would be adopted by Conservative and Reform Judaism. Both groups have now indeed generally embraced Kaplan’s conception of the Jews as a Zion-centered civilization as well as his devotion to social justice. His books are widely read among non-Orthodox rabbinical students, even though the original impetus of Americanization and the felt need for reconciling Judaism with scientific thought are no longer evident. Since World War II his theology has had to compete with the theism of Buber, Heschel, and Rosenzweig—all little known in America during the 30’s—as well as with other non-theistic formulations. But the Holocaust and the State of Israel have given increased force to his stress upon Jewish peoplehood.

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It is the principal contention of Liebman’s article, however, that this acceptance represents at best a partial answer to the surprising incongruity between influence and organizational strength. Reconstructionist ideas possess disproportionate influence, Liebman argues, because to a very large extent they faithfully represent the ideology of American Jewry. According to Liebman, Reconstructionism holds—a set of opinions, he claims, concurred in by most American Jews—that: Jews live in two civilizations, Jewish and American, but with the latter, however, as the object of first loyalty; the separation of church and state protects the status of the American Jew; Judaism is a peoplehood, not a religion; God is not a supernatural being, but in any event theology is secondary to participation in the Jewish community; Jewish rituals enhance the life of the people, but their observance should be governed by personal choice; and Jews should support the State of Israel but need not feel obliged to live there. Thus the principles of Reconstructionism largely reflect what Liebman calls “the grassroots or folk religion of American Jews.” To test his hypothesis Liebman conducted a survey to determine whether American Jews were more in agreement with Reconstructionist rabbis than with their counterparts in Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reform. He found that in terms of behavioral norms there was indeed a tendency to support the Reconstructionist position, though in religious concepts the laymen followed the thinking of their own rabbis. One may quarrel with the survey’s use of certain loaded terms such as “supernatural” and “inconvenient,” but the results do indicate quite clearly that most American Jews, who actively identify as such, practice the tenets of Reconstructionism. If so, why has Reconstructionism as a movement failed to grow?

It is Liebman’s contention that while Reconstructionist ideology thus represents the folk religion of American Jews, Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reform are the three elitist ideologies of American Jewish religion. The latter are espoused by rabbis to their congregants who pay lip service to the ideas, but act according to the folk religion. The organizational failure of Reconstructionism is attributable to the strategic error of formulating folk religion in elitist terms. In trying to bring intellectual order into unstructured folk religion, Kaplan necessarily brought ideological considerations into the foreground and thus negated the non-ideological essence of folk religion. In giving it an elitist formulation, Liebman implies, Kaplan made the Jewish folk religion unrecognizable to the folk. He adds that Reconstructionism’s growth was also hindered by Jewish reluctance officially to admit disbelief in a personal God and to affirm publicly the more than religious base of Jewish identity. Then, too, there is Reconstructionism’s dilemma of advocating Jewish unity while launching yet another denomination. But Liebman’s principal contention remains that Reconstructionism failed to realize that folk religion cannot be ideologized without alienating those who practice it.

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While there is doubtless something to be said for this highly original interpretation, it is my impression that Liebman’s analysis is a bit procrustean and that in its attempt to employ sociological categories it pays insufficient attention to much more basic factors. It is simply not correct to argue that the non-Reconstructionist forms of Judaism represent elitist religion in the sense of ideological primacy. That primacy is limited to the seminaries and rabbinical conferences; what is practiced in the synagogues—of all three denominations—is a good deal more folk than elitist. The organizational failure of Reconstructionism, it seems to me, is much more basically and simply explained by the fact that when Kaplan came upon the scene American Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reform were already institutionally well established. Kaplan himself was bound to the Conservative movement through his teaching position at the Jewish Theological Seminary where, at least in the 20’s and 30’s, his influence was such that he could realistically hope to move Conservative Judaism in his direction. In the course of time his conception of Jewish existence was increasingly accepted in the Jewish community while his theology after World War II lost appeal. What good reason was there for joining a separate organization whose ideas had either become common currency or were widely thought to be outdated? One need not resort to distinctions of elitist versus folk religion in order to explain the organizational failure.

Despite the efforts being made today within both Ethical Culture and Reconstructionism to expand their organizational scope, they remain, at least with regard to their initial impetus, the responses of specific generations of Jews to the question of religious and cultural identity in America. It is as yet undetermined whether these two movements have played out their historical role or whether one or both of them possess sufficient inner adaptability to assure their continued survival.

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¹ Toward Common Ground: The Story of the Ethical Societies in the United States, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 348 pp., $8.50.

² “Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book 1970 (Volume 71).