IN THE United States, the assimilation of immigrants was a subject of great con- cern in the early 1920’s. Since then, with the decline of immigration, both popular and academic interest in it has waned. In other countries, however, it is being more intensively analyzed than ever. Two studies on the assimi- lation of immigrants, in Australia and Israel respectively, bear witness to this new interest -an interest forced upon these two countries by the great importance immigration has now assumed for their national lives.
I 7 USTRALIA’S is by far the simpler case of the two. Until the Second World War, her non-aboriginal population was almost wholly THE problem of "acculturation," which under the older term of assimilation engrossed the at- tention of Americans in the days before the U.S. virtually closed its gates to immigrants, is now a vital concern for two widely separated countries: Australia and Israel. WILLIAM PETERSEN here considers the subject in con- nection with two recent works on immigration to these countries. Mr. Petersen, who is now an assistant professor of sociology at the Uni- versity of Colorado, was born in Jersey City in 1912 and educated at Columbia, the New School of Social Research, the University of Amsterdam, and the Sorbonne. He has taught at Smith College, Columbia, and the University of California. He is the author of Planned Mi- gration: The Social Determinants of the Dutch Canadian Movement and the editor of a recent Anchor book, American Social Patterns. He wrote on "The ‘Scientific’ Basis of our Immi- gration Policy," for our July 1955 number, and on "The American Family" in the issue of January 1956.
463 of British stock. A law passed in 1901 effectu- ally barred further Asian immigration, and the Chinese minority already in the country soon dwindled to a few thousands. Continental Europeans were discouraged from coming to Australia by the great distance, a difficulty miti- gated for British immigrants by their having the cost of their passage subsidized. In 1925 this physical isolation was reinforced by a law empowering the Governor General to deny entry to aliens of any nationality, race, class, or occupation that he specified.
During the recent war, however, the Japa- nese threat taught Australia what a liability her sparsely inhabited territory was in the face of the overcrowded countries within striking distance, and she proceeded in 1945 to launch the biggest immigration program of her history. Fully half her immigrants since then have been non-British in origin. Several large questions soon arose, which experts have been trying to answer. How would these new nationality groups adapt to "the Australian way of life"? Would the admission of Italians, Poles, Dutchmen, and Yugoslavs add to Aus- tralia’s national strength, as the sponsors of the program intended? Or would the rapid increase of population and the wide variety of "New Australians" have the contrary effect- which is what its opponents feared? One way of getting an answer to such ques- tions was to find out what happened to Aus- tralia’s non-British minorities, such as they were, before 1945. Wilfrid D. Borrie, the author of a number of excellent works on Australia’s population, studied the diverse fates of two such immigrant groups, and the re- sultant Italians and Germans in Australia: A Study of Assimilation (Melbourne: Cheshire, THE STUDYOF MAN N I_COMMENTARY 1954) makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of acculturation. Dr. Borrie com- bined census data with local history in a co- herent narrative and supplemented this with a field survey among the Italian immigrants and their second-generation school children. The fact that he studied two minority groups rather than one adds immeasurably to the value of his analysis, for some of his most interesting points concern the contrasts he found.
S IN the United States, one of the major differences between the two nationalities was in period of settlement, with the Germans beginning to immigrate before 1850 and the Italians several decades later. The first Germans were mainly pioneer agriculturists, and the culture they brought with them was trans- planted to an empty land. The Lutheran church-the dominant social force among them -set the pattern of their communities’ develop- ment, establishing German-language schools and other institutions whose conscious aim was to preserve Deutschtum.
Although later German immigrants were motivated by secular rather than religious fac- tors, once in Australia they were drawn into the religious life of the original settlements, or else intermarried with British Australians and disappeared from the social historian’s view.
The fact that the Lutheran church kept split- ting-eventually into six different synods-had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing its total influence, for the very emotion generated by these quarrels helped intensify and maintain allegiance to the various churches.
The dominant theme of the Germans in Australia, thus, was isolation-at first physical, then social. The original settlements worked out their own way of life, and it was this way of life rather than the general Australian pattern that most subsequent German immi- grants adapted to. Even when they moved to the cities, Germans in Australia retained some- thing of their isolation: being mostly shop- keepers or independent businessmen, they did not enter into competition with other Aus- tralians for jobs, or into contact with them in the trade unions.
In the early years, the Germans in Australia were universally praised for their sobriety, frugality, honesty-"a community remarkable for probity and respect for our laws." That they preserved their own language and customs, and even a dual political loyalty, was not found disturbing until Britain and Germany began to clash on the international scene around the turn of the century. In the years before 1914, the most important of Australia’s Ger- man-language newspapers, the Australische Zeitung, repeatedly expressed its sorrow at this "estrangement of the Teutonic races." But it took the war itself to make dual loyalty no longer possible. Later, in the 1930’s, the in- tensive Nazi propaganda carried on in Aus- tralia found some echo among German Aus- tralians in the cities, but, surprisingly enough, almost none in the rural areas, where German was still the domestic language of the third generation.
From the experience of the German Aus- tralians Dr. Borrie concludes, perhaps too hastily, that "where there is no conflict on economic grounds, the cultural persistence of a minority which forms only a fraction of the total population is unlikely to be a cause of tension unless that minority’s country of origin pursues a political or international policy whidh is opposed to the interests of the receiving country." HE pattern of Italian acculturation, ac- cording to the survey Dr. Borrie made among a group of Italian Australians in six shires of Queensland, was markedly different from the German. The Italian-born in Aus- tralia, fewer than 1,000 in 1871, increased slowly to 8,000 in 1921, and then very rapidly to 27,000 in 1933. These rather small numbers represent those who stayed; other Italians worked in Australia for a number of years and then returned to Italy, either permanently or to seek wives.
Most Italians began in Australia as field workers, but by the time of the survey about two-thirds of them (including 95 per cent of the Sicilians) had acquired their own farms.
"In the initial stages this was frequently achieved by two or three Italians operating on a share basis and carrying a much heavier load of debt than the individualistic Australian farmer was prepared to risk. Further, the Italians were not deterred by having to pay high prices for their properties, and in this situ- ation there were always Australian farmers who were willing to -sell." Thus, in contrast to the Germans, the Italians came into sharp economic competition with other Australians, and the reaction of the latter was "unsympa- thetic, and at times clearly hostile." 464IMMIGRATION AND ACCULTURATION Partly as a consequence of this hostility, Italians tended to establish themselves in in- sulated groups, some of them very tiny. Chil- dren brought up in such communities began school with no more than a rudimentary knowl- edge of English but, unlike the children of German immigrants a generation or two earlier, they went to the regular Australian schools.
The second-generation Italians, like their coun- terparts in American cities, learned to fit into a bicultural pattern that was Italian at home and Australian away from it.
This pattern had no institutional basis, how- ever: there were no special Italian schools or churches. To some degree, there was not even an "Italian" minority, for most of the immi- grants were peasants who felt that they were Piedmontese, Venetians, or Sicilians before they were members of the nation-state of Italy.
Although many had left Italy after Mussolini’s rise to power, most of them had no strong polit- ical sympathies, either Fascist or anti-Fascist, and most were also indifferent to religion. Once their vestigial ties -to Italy had been definitely broken by the Second World War, no cultural reasons seemed to remain why the differences between them and other Australians should not have begun to vanish rapidly.
That this has not happened is primarily due, in Dr. Borrie’s estimation, to the competitive and largely successful struggle of the Italians for economic survival: "The opposition to the southern European which still lingers in Australia, although fre- quently expressed in terms which may seem to have a racial content, is still basically eco- nomic. What the average Australian still fears first is the introduction of a minority who may threaten to undercut his material standard of life." I wonder, however, whether it would not be equally valid to say, "The opposition to the Southern European, although frequently ex- pressed in economic terms, is still basically re- lated to the fear of any minority that may threaten the higher status associated with Brit- ish stock." If it is true that several rather ugly anti,Italian riots took place during the 1930’s in the areas most affected by the depression, it is also true that even when there was no economic competition social contacts were in- hibited by the "suspicion on the part of Aus- tralians that Italians were inferior to British or Nordic stock." From this distance, the per- sistent determination to maintain a "White Australia" does not seem to be merely a ration- alization of the desire to preserve a high stand- ard of living.
Even so, Dr. Borrie’s attempt to analyze anti-foreign sentiment in terms of the actual behavior of immigrant groups is a useful cor- rective to many studies of acculturation. We typically assume that nativist attitudes are wholly irrational, with no necessary relation to the way immigrants act; and in many cases this assumption is certainly well based. Sometimes, however, newcomers are disliked because they work for less, because they may be "disloyal." To restrict the analysis a priori to the "authori- tarian personality," say, of the native popula- tion may be begging the question.
II A CCULTURATION has been described as the interaction between a constant and a vari- able-that is, between a stable receiving culture and an adapting immigrant group. Something like this relation has obtained in Australia, with its predominantly British population and minute ethnic minorities. The other extreme is represented by Israel, where one df the prob- lems is precisely how to define the "native" culture to which "immigrants" are to adapt.
The movement of Jews to Palestine-Israel has been, in proportion to the population of the receiving country, the largest migration in his- tory. Four out of five of the Jews in Israel are immigrants, and one out of two came in the eight years since the founding of the state.
In any other host country, the native-born dom- inate simply by reason of their numbers; but in Israel the native-born sabras, one ethnic minority among others, do not dominate even in a legal sense. Immigrants to all other coun- tries arrive as petitioners, admitted under con- ditions set down by the receiving country, while Israel’s Law of Return proclaims that "every Jew has the right to come to this coun- try as an immigrant." In principle, this is an unconditional right: the state that has declared itself the Jewish homeland can make no legit- imate demands on any Jew who wants to come "home." On the other hand, Israel will not become a nation in a meaningful sense unless her diverse peoples acquire some degree of homogeneity. Her polyglot population has a tremendous cultural range, from Viennese psychoanalysts and Frankfort judges to Yemen- 465COMMENTARY ite shepherds and Moroccan water-sellers. The strongest bond uniting these various ethnic groups is negative-resentment of the anti- Semitism many Jews had met in the Gentile world. Most of their positive bonds are not uni- versal, and within the confines of a single country can thus be divisive. Not all Israelis, for instance, are Zionists. Nor are all of them religious Jews, and some-like the "Canaanites" -even object to being called "Jews" altogether.
All are, indeed, "Israelis," but what is the cul- tural content of this designation? The Hebrew language is only beginning to acquire a secular literature, and Israel’s society is still in the process of evolving some of its basic institu- tions.
Under such conditions what does it mean to say that an immigrant is acculturated or, to use the term current in Israel, "absorbed"? Ac- cording to the ideology of Zionism, the assimila- tion of Jews to any national culture other than Israel’s is either impossible or, when it does take place, reprehensible. Acculturation to Israel, by this view, is not required of the real Jew, because he brings with him his "Jewish" culture, which is also the culture of Israel.
What seems to be happening is a struggle on the part of each minority to establish its own norms as the universals to which all other Israelis must conform. Four minorities can be distinguished as the most important in this connection: the pioneer settlers who came to Palestine as Zionists; the native-born, who speak Hebrew as their mother tongue and are the first heirs of the Zionist tradition; the ref- ugees from Nazism, the self-conscious carriers of Western culture, as contrasted with the rough-and-ready sabra; and the Middle Eastern immigrants, the latest arrivals, who represent a traditional Judaism relatively untouched by secularist influence. All four of these sub- cultures have a legitimate status in Israel, and while they share some features, their differences are important.
TN VIEW of its complexities, it is not surpris- ing that neither the problem of accultura- tion nor the broader one of Israel’s immigra- tion has yet been adequately analyzed. A recent work by Dr. S. N. Eisenstadt, chairman of the Sociology Department of the Hebrew Univer- sity in Jerusalem (The Absorption of Immi- grants: A Comparative Study Based Mainly on the Jewish Community in Palestine and the State of Israel. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1955) is largely a disappointment, and not only in this respect. Its data are thin, its struc- ture is uncertain, and its copy-editing extreme- ly careless.* It is less a work in social analysis than in social psychology, and while this is of course a legitimate emphasis, in the present case it is a regrettable one. Acculturation does take place in the human psyche, but in Israel the demographic and economic variables af- fecting the process are so important that one might have hoped for a more detailed examina- tion of these.
The main argument of Dr. Eisenstadt’s work can be summarized in three theses: (1) The core of the Israeli nation is the Hebrew-Zion- ist tradition. (2) The adaptation of other groups, therefore, can be indicated by measur- ing the degree to which they have accepted this tradition. (3) The range of cultural differences among the various sectors of the Israeli popula- tion is less wide than might appear on the sur- face, and the prospects of achieving a homo- geneous nation are good.
Let us examine eadh of these theses briefly.
One of the main points of the Zionist pro- gram, the use of Hebrew, is indeed becoming a universal of Israeli society, though more as a matter of principle than of fact. According to a survey by Roberto Bacdhi to which Dr. Eisen- *IM. J. Herskovits appears as "Herskovitz," Bronislaw Malinowski as both "Malinowsky" and "Malinovski." A. I. Hallowell has lost one of the l’s in his name, but this reappears in "Mill- bank," one of the spellings for the Milbank Memorial Fund. C. Wright Mills is listed as "C. W.," "W.," and ‘"W. E. A. Mills," and the co-authors of The Puerto Rican Journey (perhaps luckily for them) do not appear at all. If the work by Georges Mauco is the most complete illustrative casebook on this type of migration – which it is-then his name should not be given as "G. Manco." E. W. Hofstee was so mangled that I barely recognized him as "E. Hoffstree." On page 28 the number of Jewish migrants to the United States between 1881 and 1980 is given as 2,865,000; on page 30 the "ultimate" number (thus including the subsequent refugee migration) is given as ‘about 2 million." In the various tables sometimes the percentage columns add up to 100, sometimes they get no closer than, for example, 81.7. The index is so inept as to be laughable. The countries of Jewish emigration, for example, are listed in the following form: "Bulgaria, immigration from, see Immigrants from (to Israel)’; or, as a variant, "Iraq, immi- grants from (to Israel), see immigrants from." Under "Immigrants" the reader is then instructed to "see migrations." Under ‘SMigration," finally, there is a list of countries, but Bulgaria and Iraq are not among them.
466IMMIGRATION AND ACCULTURATION stadt refers, "even after some time in Israel only 10 per cent [of the "new" immigrants] used Hebrew in their family life, and only 25 per cent in other social contexts." The complex of ideas and convictions called Zionism, which is the other constant factor of Israeli culture in Dr. Eisenstadt’s view, is in a state of flux. Even without the dilution by non-Zionist immigration, much of the idealism of the early years would have been dissipated by the successful achievement of the main Zionist aim, the founding of the state. Halutziut (which can be translated as the mystique of the pioneer) and the glorification of manual labor no longer retain their former relevance, and as the kibbutzim decline in proportion to the rest of the economy, their values are being transformed from a guide to present action into a historical source of inspiration-some- what like -the "rugged individualism" of the American pioneer.
My impression is that Dr. Eisenstadt con- sistently overstates the present strength of the Zionist tradition, and he certainly contributes to the building of its legend by exaggerating the heroic aspect of the pioneer settlements.
Thus, in his discussion of the motives for Jew- ish emigration, he contrasts the "economic or other satisfactions" sought by those Jews from East Europe who went to America with the "social and cultural aspirations" that motivated those who went to Palestine. Actually, anti- Semitism was the main impetus of all Jewish emigration; each aliyah (migratory wave to Palestine) followed immediately on a major pogrom. And, on the positive side, migrants to the United States saw this country, too, as one where Jews might fulfill their "social and cul- tural aspirations." That Zionists (or at least Zionists outside the United States) believe this to be an empty hope is precisely the point I am making: that Dr. Eisenstadt’s account of the past seems colored by polemics.
T HE unconditional right of all Jews to enter and settle in Israel includes, as a necessary corollary, the moral right not to be absorbed into a culture different from that which the individual Jew chances to bring with him. Dr.
Eisenstadt, however, measures the acculturation of immigrants in Israel by comparing their be- havior with the Zionist standard; and this prac- ,tice leads to certain paradoxes, since other sub- cultures are in principle held by him to be equally legitimate.
For example, one index of absorption that he uses is whether or not children go to public school, which for the Middle Eastern immi- grants is a new and often disagreeable experi- ence. But if Dr. Eisenstadt had also asked whether the children go to cheder, then the secularized West Europeans and Zionists would have scored lowest. In contrast to Middle East- ern immigrants, who "adapt" less readily in part because they hold on to their traditional norms, Serbian and Bulgarian Jews are ad- judged as fitting into Israeli society without difficulty. This is in part because "their lack of traditional, non-formal Jewish identification [has] made this process much easier for them." Thus pious and Orthodox Jews, returning to Israel after long exile, are welcomed with a request to shed some of their "less assimilable" Jewishness. It is a measure of Dr. Eisenstadt’s partisanship that he appears to have no inkling of how strange this looks to the outsider.
Not only does Dr. Eisenstadt tend through- out to understate the wide range of cultural differences among the peoples making up Israel’s population and, consequently, the diffi- culty of absorbing them; he hardly mentions the intergroup hostility that, according to other sources, exists in Israel society.
Thus, according to his own data, European- Levantine, Ashkenazi-Sephardic, and even German-East European marriages are uncom- mon, which would seem to indicate that these sub-cultures are not only relatively stable but jealous of their particularity. We are told in a one-sentence footnote that "the Oriental groups usually identify European immigrants and the old Yishuv as ‘Yiddish."’ Such a char- acterization, I would say, is an important symptom of the Oriental Israelis’ attempt to deny the exclusive legitimacy of the Western version of Israeli society by reducing it to the status of one more sub-culture; this is a point which might well have been discussed at length.
An undue emphasis on homogeneity like- wise characterizes Dr. Eisenstadt’s cautious dis- cussion of Israel’s class structure. His conclu.
sion is that, all in all, "the picture is complex, and differs from place to place." Actually, this complexity is the consequence of a rather sim- ple conflict in values. As in the United States, Israel’s value system promises the immigrant a full equality that in practice he is seldom able to attain. The process of acculturation takes place in large part by a dynamic interaction 467COMMENTARY between this promissory note and the partial failure to pay it-the situation being much like what Gunnar Myrdal termed, with special reference to Negro-white relations, the "Amer- ican dilemma." According to the first moral principle of the Jewish homeland, all Jews are equal, but in actuality, some Jews there are more equal than others.
What will happen to the polyglot population of Israel no one knows, but one can point out three possibilities. It may be that, in line with Dr. Eisenstadt’s assumption, the Zionist tradi- tion will predominantly define Israel’s culture, and that all other groups will eventually adapt to it. Or it may be that this secular Western element will be swamped by Levantine ob- scurantism. Or it may be that a stable com- promise will be achieved somehow between these essentially incompatible ways of life.
Since Dr. Eisenstadt sees only the first of these possibilities, his work is less an analysis of group differences than an argument for one way of resolving them. In the United States of a generation ago, before the restriction of immigration started the trend toward increased cultural homogeneity, objectivity about accul- turation was similarly difficult to attain. Many of the limitations of these early American studies aae echoed in this study of present-day Israel, even though it has the benefit of data from public opinion polls and is analyzed with- in a sophisticated theoretical framework.
III R. EISENSTADT’S strong point is theory, and his first chapter is not only the best in his book, but one of the best general discus- sions of acculturation I have seen. The indices ordinarily used to measure this process, Dr.
Eisenstadt points out, are all inadequate-in large part because they were constructed as indices of full assimilation, which seldom or never takes place. Immigrant groups are not usually dispersed throughout the social struc- ture of the receiving country, but tend to con- gregate in one part of it, where they maintain some degree of separate identity. There thus arises a "pluralistic" society the various parts of which are different in both ethnic origin and social class. Whether an immigrant is able to adjust satisfactorily depends on what his de- sires ,and expectations are, and on how well these can be met in his new country.
This theoretical framework, which in bald outline may seem to be a bit on the obvious side, is nonetheless a rather recent develop- ment. The mass emigration from Europe during the century up to the First World War was never analyzed in such terms. Migration was then generally understood as part of the oper- ation of a vast, international labor market.
Migrants left their homes because of economic pressure, and went wherever there were better economic opportunities. Like any other market, this one was deemed to be self-regulating. Just as within each country the best men rose to the top by the "natural" process of competition, so the best among the potential migrants suc- ceeded in establishing themselves in new coun- tries. In both cases, the state had to intercede only to keep anti-social elements under control.
In such a context of ideas, cultural assimila- tion was more or less taken for granted. Ac- cording to a representative statement of twenty years ago (Maurice R. Davie in World Im- migration, 1936), assimilation "goes on wher- ever contact and communication exist between groups. Much of it takes place automatically, without formal or official interference. It is as inevitable as it is desirable. The process may be hastened or delayed; it cannot be stopped." This process of assimilation, then, was not only inevitable but, when completed, total.
The immigrant group would be spurlos versenkt in the receiving culture, which itself would remain as unchanged as the sea that swallowed up a foundered vessel. In the United States, the nativist’s demand that the immigrant be- come a "100 per cent American," and the immigrant’s own aspiration to lose himself in the American "melting pot," expressed essen- tially the same concept despite their different political overtones.
That immigrants in the pre- 1 914 period were defined primarily in terms of their economic function meant that their broader cultural at- tributes were, in theory at least, less impor- tant; prejudice against aliens, whatever its "real" causes, had -to be justified by economic arguments. The bar to Asian immigration, for example, was in both the United States and Australia the consequence principally of the trade unions’ demand for what might be termed a tariff on cut-rate foreign labor; and Dr. Borrie still writes in these terms. As I indicated in an earlier article in this magazine ("The-‘Scien- tific’ Basis of Our Immigration Policy," July 1955), in the United States it -took a full gen- eration of social scientists to shift the emphasis from immigrants as economic men operating in 468IMMIGRATION AND ACCULTURATION a free market to immigrants as carriers of alien cultures. The most important document in effecting this redefinition was the 42-volume Report of the Senate Immigration Commission of 1907-11, which classified immigrants by "race" and assessed the efficiency as workers of each "racial" group. Such an equation between "race" and efficiency enabled the authors of the Report to begin with the accepted notion that immigrants were to be judged by their economic contribution, and to argue from there that henceforth they should actually be accepted or rejected on the basis of their ethnic origins.
The revival of international migration since 1945 has not meant a renewal of the same type of movement from country to country that characterized the pre-1 9 1 4 period. All governments now take an active part in reg- ulating the migration process. The "natural" right of the person to move across borders with- out passport has been supplanted by the "nat- ural" right of the state to control such movement. This restriction of international mobility is, of course, only one expression of the over-all transformation of laissez-faire so- ciety. The 19th-century liberal’s faith that the uninhibited, "natural" operation of social in- stitutions like the market would automatically produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number has all but disappeared, to be super- seded by the demand that the state itself take all possible measures to further the good so- ciety.
Today countries that receive immigrants do not select merely good workers or permit their automatic selection by the operation of the market, but favor individuals who belong to ethnic groups that are considered easier to as- similate culturally. The difficulty, however, is how to define such "assimilability" in opera- tional terms.
THE shift in emphasis from the immigrant’s economic role to his total contribution to his new country has meant also a shift in con- ceptual framework from economics to anthro- pology. The very word that social scientists now use, acculturation, was taken over from the German and American anthropologists who coined it at about the time of the First World War. First by anthropologists and now more generally, acculturation has been seen as a continuum, with total assimilation at one ex- treme, total non-assimilation at the other, and most cases falling somewhere in between.
Perhaps the most satisfactory method of an- alyzing this continuum is in terms of a tri- partite typology devised by the American anthropologist Ralph Linton and adopted by Dr. Eisenstadt in his theoretical introduction.
Linton divided the social roles in any culture into "universals," "specialties," and "alterna- tives." If the behavior of immigrant groups is described in these terms, much sharper and more meaningful distinctions can be drawn than simply the answer, yes or no, to the ques- tion whether they have been assimilated.
Total conformity is expected of immigrants only with respect to those ideas and behavior patterns to which all natives must likewise conform. These are the "universals" of the so- ciety in question. In the United States, at least three things have been demanded of all immigrants-that they support themselves, that they learn the language, and pledge political allegiance to their new country. And while the norms of other countries differ to some degree, there, too, conformity to these three universals usually meets the minimum definition of accul- turation. In spite of the fact that Dr. Eisen- stadt objects to these indices on theoretical grounds, he also uses them in his study of Israel.
In even the most homogeneous culture, not all values are universal; there is always a legit- imate diversity of ideas, attitudes, and tastes.
In the United States today, those who prefer Bach to Bartok, or hiking to bowling, or bow- ties to cravats, have chosen certain "alterna- tives" over others. In the abstract, immigrants are free to make similar choices; and if they retain Old Country ways, they are often com- mended for "enriching" the culture of their new homeland. In practice, however, exotic tastes in such things as food are sometimes takqn as a sign of unreliability in more funda- mental respects. In the 1920’s, thus, the head of a ladies’ Americanization society asked her audience, with poorly restrained impatience, "What kind of American consciousness can grow in the atmosphere of sauerkraut and Lim- burger cheese, or in that of garlic?" More recently, the Immigration Service in San Francisco supported its charge that a certain alien advocated world Communism, and thus its petition for a deportation order, by eliciting the information that he had once served his guests beef Stroganoff. This same confusion is found in more important matters. The Amer- ican state is enjoined by its own fundamental 469COMMENTARY laws from trying to enforce religious con- formity on its population, but nativist opposi- tion to immigration has been shaped to a large degree both by anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic prejudice.
Linton’s third type of social role, "spe- cialties," pertains to the kind of work a man does. Specialties divide any population into sub-groups, both at the occupational level (stock brokers, stenographers, automobile work- ers) and at the more inclusive level of social class (businessmen, employees, wage-workers).
That is to say, the division of labor sets people apart not merely according to their economic function but also, to some degree, with respect to their average income, way of life, political attitudes, and so on. Even in democratic Amer- ica, a lawyer and an automobile mechanic, say, differ in their style of life almost as much as in their occupation.
This fact marks the principal limitation of the old melting-pot view of assimilation, for immigrant groups are typically congregated in only a few places in the receiving country’s social structure. The original differentiation by ethnic origin, though reduced by the general acceptance of universal cultural traits, is to some degree maintained by social class and region or neighborhood. It is true that immi- grants typically begin at the bottom and that their children, or they themselves, climb to higher positions, but different ethnic groups climb different ladders toward different goals.
Despite our high degree of social democracy, ethnic groups have not generally diffused throughout the American social structure. And ethnic differentiations are still more of a fac- tor in most spheres of American life than is commonly thought. As Samuel Lubell has pointed out, even in the oldest immigrant group in the United States, that of the New England Yankee, identification with the home country, even at a distance of a half-dozen generations, is strong enough to be discernible in the voting record whenever American policy toward Britain becomes a crucial issue.
IV I’ WE compare Borrie’s and Eisenstadt’s works in the light of the improved theory of ac- culturation that Linton’s typology exemplifies, the result is somewhat paradoxical.
As we have seen, Dr. Borrie still uses the economic market as his principal analytic model: in his view, people migrate mainly for economic motives, and the reaction in the host country is based mainly on the effects of their economic behavior. If natives seem to react most strongly to immigrants’ cultural traits (say, to the fact that they speak with a "funny" accent), such reactions can, in his opinion, usually still be interpreted as manifestations of underlying, now half-hidden economic factors.
In my view, this theory is quite inadequate, if not in dealing with 19th-century immigration, then certainly in dealing with that of the post- 1914 world. The Linton model that Dr. Eisen- stadt cites in his introductory chapter is in this respect a definite improvement over this version of economic determinism.
Yet Dr. Borrie’s is by far the better book.
The reason, I think, is in part personal: Dr.
Borrie is an experienced demographer, while Dr. Eisenstadt is a younger man, near the beginning of his professional career. The comn- parative complexity of the processes the two men analyzed is also relevant: the situation of the non-British minorities in Australia has an almost laboratory-like simplicity, while Pal- estine-Israel offers a picture which is consistent only in that it breaks with every precedent.
But the main reason for the discrepancy in quality between the two books is, in my opin- ion, Dr. Borrie’s greater objectivity. The trickle of non-British immigrants some decades ago had little effect for either good or ill on Aus- tralia, and Dr. Borrie’s identification with his country does not distort his view as a social scientist. For an Israeli to maintain the same detachment towards the current, and relatively enormous, immigration to his country, is much more difficult. Dr. Eisenstadt, as we have seen, has not achieved such detachment. His theory is better than Dr. Borrie’s, but it is no help to him, and only part of the explanation lies in his making so little use of it.
The main question in Israel is: which sub- culture will be established as the norm for the country? To treat the present struggle between sub-cultures as a process of adaptation to an already existent norm is to distort the picture.
It is rather as though one were to study British- French relations in 18th-century North Amer- ica, before the struggle for the continent was settled, in terms of French acculturation to the culture of the assumed future British victors.
Dr. Eisenstadt’s study does not fail in spite of its better theoretical structure; it fails in part because it lacks any theory at all suitable to the kind of problem he has analyzed.
