In his article “Is America Exile or Home?” (in our November 1946 issue) Israel Knox declared that it was high time that American Jews began to create a culture of their own, indigenous to this soil. Obstacles to this development, in his opinion, included a persisting dependence on earlier European centers of Jewish culture and a sense of inferiority and defeatism, fostered by some Jewish nationalist ideologists and organizations who continue to talk of America as galut (exile) rather than as a homeland for Jews.
Dr. Knox’s thesis aroused nationwide discussion and we present here two commentaries on it. It will occasion no surprise that these discussions on fundamental issues of Jewish thought are by men not professionally engaged with such problems: in the Jewish tradition there are no laymen in these matters.They write here, of course, in their personal, not official capacities. (For a related discussion on the theme of Jewish culture in America, as it applies to a specific problem, readers are referred to Mrs. Wischnitzer-Bernstein’s article “The Problem of Synagogue Architecture” in this issue.)
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It is a discouraging commentary on the world’s sanity and its obtuseness to history that the question whether America is home or exile need even be asked. I happen to concur in the views expressed by Dr. Israel Knox. But American Jews, like other human beings, are capable of embracing the most contradictory beliefs at one and the same time. Consequently, something more than a bare endorsement of Dr. Knox’s article may be useful.
America is home, as Dr. Knox reminds us, and unless the madness that makes Dr. Knox’s question pertinent should destroy the hope and the possibility, America should yet be a center of Jewish culture to the extent that modern civilization permits any separate culture to exist within the one broader culture of a single large geographic area. Such a culture may fail to develop here, but, if so, nothing worth having will develop anywhere for the Jews. What may continue to exist in most of Europe will be no more than anachronistic husks. What may come in Palestine is not likely to be of any real meaning to general civilization, and it therefore will hardly be in the great tradition of the Jewish cultures that have made Judaism a thing of value in the world’s history. What may come in our own country offers, it seems to me, far greater promise. Indeed, America could well be the scene of the repetition of the Golden Age in Spain.
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The question whether America is home or exile could not be asked if it were not for the fact that Jewish religious education, through poetic license or the inertia of tradition, still teaches our children in terms of the Wandering Jew. I read in my children’s Sunday-school books that the Jews “sojourned” in Spain from the year 711 until 1492! A “sojourn” is “a temporary stay, as of a traveler in a foreign land.” Is a residence of three-quarters of a millenium a temporary stay in a foreign land? Exodus to Nebuchadnezzar, the duration of the stay of the Hebrews in Palestine, was less than 750 years. Cyrus to Vespasian measures a second “sojourn” in Palestine of hardly more than 600 years, of which less than 100 were years of an independent state. Jews have already “sojourned” in the New World for nearly 500 years. A population of 5,000,000 Jews now resides in the United States. At no previous time and in no other place have so many Jews ever lived together, much less lived in circumstances of such freedom as to permit the development of an individual and useful culture.
Probably no Jewish culture has yet arisen in the United States. We cannot be sure, for cultures grow and are not manufactured. We may be in the midst of a new culture unawares. But it is doubtful. Until recently our Jewishness was constantly renewed by drops of the concentrated Judaism of Europe, latterly of East Europe. These infusions, like strong dyes permeating through the Jewish communities of this country, have supplied the essence of Jewishness here. At the same time they have served to retard the development of our own Jewish culture. The unspeakable catastrophe in Europe that has destroyed the retorts in which this essence was distilled might well have marked the beginning of a free native development in the United States, were it not for the fact that concurrently we have been seized by the frenzy of Zionism.
With no future possibility of the renewal of European Jewishness in this country, the question naturally arises whether the Jews in the United States will disappear as Jews. Members of any Jewish community are forever flying off into space, and when the pressure of the surrounding medium is reduced, the rate of evaporation is increased. If some internal cohesion can be found, a community will remain. If no cohesive force is discovered or developed, the community can-be preserved by confining it in a sealed container, but its preservation will then be senseless.
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Whether Jews will remain as Jews is the same question as whether a Jewish culture will develop here. Two other recent articles in COMMENTARY are pertinent to the question—Dr. Gaster’s review of Rabbi Steinberg’s Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (in the November issue) and the first two pages of Professor Paul Weiss’ “The True, the Good, and the Jew” (in the October issue). . . Both Gaster and Weiss ask, in effect, “What is a Jew?” and each gives part of the answer, but I have yet to see the formulation of an answer both complete and completely satisfying. And until such an answer is both formulated and accepted by nearly all Jews, no Jewish culture is likely.
Dr. Gaster points out that to describe the Jews as a “people” merely designates them as an identifiable group but leaves it unclear why they are so identifiable. In an effort to avoid the term “race,” which the anthropologists have made unscientific and the Nazis unpleasant, and to rise above the term “religion,” which is too cramping to political aspirations of the nationalist type, even the term “peoplehood” has been manufactured, doubtless because of its resonant emptiness. As Dr. Gaster puts it, any such designation “merely restates the fact of Jewish existence without providing a criterion by which its continuance can be validated.”
If by “validated” Dr. Gaster means “justified,” the bald truth seems to be that the continuance of Jewish existence cannot be justified by any exercise of logic alone. We desire and we hope for that continuance for a compound of reasons. We do not know all the elements in the compound, any more than we know “what is a Jew” the questions are the same. But one of the elements is pride in achievements in past ages when general culture and general civilization were built around and compelled the existence of peoples in separate cultural groups; another is a common history of sorrow (which, unfortunately, has bred too much of a defensive and self-pitying attitude). And the chief element is certainly religion, although one may regard oneself and be regarded as a Jew without conscious adherence to the religion.
When religions were the core of life, our religion was the great cohesive force. In an age when religions have receded from the center to the perimeter, religion will be a weaker force for the continuance of the Jews as an identifiable group. It so happens, however, that the recession of religion means less to Judaism than to other religions. Judaism as a religion has had far less mystical content and far more of the intellectual than other religions. Its essential nature has been expressed in fewer postulates. As long as religion is accepted by human kind, those postulates must be accepted, and they will be the last to be forsaken. As Professor Weiss says, “The theology of the Jews is theology at a minimum. It affirms nothing more than that God is One, leaving open even the question of what His nature is, what it means for Him to be, and what His Unity implies.” The Jew’s cosmology, too, is at a minimum, affirming little more than the dignity of man; his faith is the faith of the intelligence, of one who tries to understand truth by faithfully pursuing it, and the faith “that there are acts that are absolutely right and acts that are absolutely wrong.” His ethic is the Golden Rule.
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These are the fundamentals of our religion. They remain the same from age to age, but from age to age they have become overlaid with other things. Some of these additions have been merely modes of thought or expression, now alien to us, but clothing ideas we still hold; some have been excrescences. Of these, some have from time to time been shed, but others not. It is trite to say that the Judaism of Biblical times is not that of today. It is equally true that Judaism enriched by Talmudism cannot be the Judaism of today, and that Judaism encrusted with Kabbalism cannot be the Judaism of today. No more can the East European Judaism created by the last years of an over-prolonged dark ages be the Judaism of today. Yet so much of what we call Judaism is Talmud, Kabbala, and the like.
Similarly, as Dr. Gaster points out, it is absurd to talk of a Jewish culture as if it were a “bundle of traditional mores and institutions which have somehow, willy-nilly, to be conserved and perpetuated.” The culture of the Hasidim is not mine and, in Gaster’s words, “I cannot see where the singing of Hebrew folk songs (which do not really emanate from my society) should make me any more a Jew than singing of hula-hula tunes would make me a Hawaiian.” Nor can I see why the longings of the dispossessed Jews of Europe for settlements in Palestine and for a communal existence should determine the culture in which I and my children are to live.
The Messianic expectations that lay at the center of past forms of Judaism have ceased to be acceptable. They should have been transmuted into something wholly spiritual. Somehow, with many of us, they have been transmuted only into the lead of nationalism. If in some tiny speck of land, seized upon out of emotional romanticism and misvaluation of history, a Jewish nationality should develop, it may spell temporary rest for some Jews and it may there fore serve a valuable purpose. But as I have suggested, it is not likely to develop a Jewish culture for a modern world. Samaria, the Palmyra of Queen Zenobia, and Khazaria were Jewish states, but the Judaism that has contributed to the civilization of the world came not from them.
Each age in the past has produced its own Jewish culture. Some have been the cultures of spores, an encystment to preserve bare existence in unfavorable surroundings, something not to be cherished and preserved when the environment permits them to be shed. Others have been great. The Jewish culture of today must be of today and formed of the finest spirit of today.
Moreover, any Jewish culture must partake of the culture of the non-Jews among whom it is set. Apart from the periods of encystment, it has always been so. Even in Talmudic times it was so, for that was an age when each religion had its speech, its script, its laws, and its habit. Jewish culture flowering in Spain partook of the character of Moorish civilization, and Spain ceased to be a home for the Jews only when it ceased to be a home for Moorish civilization.
Consequently, any Jewish culture to be developed in the United States must be primarily Western and American; it will be part of American civilization. American culture has doubtless not itself yet flowered. When it does, it will not be monolithic but multiform. There will be room in it for many subcultures, of which Judaism can be one and, it pleases us to hope, one of the more important from the standpoint of what it will contribute. But it will be an American culture, not Biblical, not medieval, not Yiddish, and not Zionist.
Dr. Gaster asks whether it is “possible to be anything other than an intellectual and/ or spiritual adherent of a Judaism which is now, in fact, a thing of the past, the expression of a society now defunct.” And he adds that “until that problem is met squarely, all other discussion of the Jewish problem is futile.” His question presupposes that Judaism is merely the expression of a society now defunct. The real question is something else. I doubt whether it is even correct to ask whether Judaism can express a living society, and I think the question is how we can demonstrate that it can. And it is that problem that must first be met, or all other discussion is futile and no new culture will be developed.
It is here that we still find no answer. The present-day national Jewish agencies have yet done little to find an answer. I would not blame those agencies for not creating a modern Jewish culture, since, as already observed, cultures grow and are not made. But they have done little to aid the natural process and, with their pre-occupation with anti-defamation and protection against anti-Semitism, their occasional seduction into leftish attitudes by false analogies, their bemusement by the glitter of far-off stars, their 20th-century chasing after David Rubeni and Sabbatai Zevi, they hardly create an environment conducive to a natural growth.
But, then, perhaps, these agencies are not the cause of the absence of a new and modern culture, but the effect of its absence.
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Who, then, will find the answer for us, and where may we look for a modern Maimonides? Just as it has been said that war is too important to leave to the military, this matter is too important to be left to the rabbinate, a professional group whose members in large part either give themselves over to the priestly preservation of ancient forms and the daily etiquette of the congregation or else, feeling that the forms and the etiquette are empty, meddle with equal futility in sociology and economics or, with baneful results, in racial politics. These strictures are doubtless far too severe. But, severe or not, the answer will probably have to be found by intelligent laymen. The best hope may lie, as Dr. Knox indicates, in lay organizations reorienting themselves to the task, such as the American Jewish Committee in its sponsorship of COMMENTARY. But all efforts must somehow be made pervasive and brought home to all who still regard themselves as Jews.
A great Jewish culture may flower in the United States. If it does not, it will be because Judaism has indeed served its mission and run its course. And whether such a culture flowers or not, America is home. And it will remain home for the Jews of this land and for their descendants unless in a frenzy of madness we forsake it, or our American civilization is itself destroyed.
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