The Problem of American Judaism

FEBRUARY, 1917

BY RALPH PHILIP BOAS

DESPITE the fact that we are ceasing to persecute people who disagree with us in religion or politics, we only dimly realize that one of the greatest evils of persecution is the fact that it saves its victims the trouble of justifying themselves. Persecution begets martyrdom, a glory as lacking in reason as its progenitor. Whether Sir Roger Casement was right or not is now only an academic question; his execution, by enshrining him forever in the Pantheon of Irish martyrs, makes the heart rather than the mind his judge. So it is with the Jews. Jews have not troubled themselves to justify, on any rational ground, the tenacious fight of their race against the storms of nineteen centuries of persecution. The fight has been its own justification. Obviously, a race that has endured what theirs has withstood must have some glorious mission to perform; to define that mission would be an element of positive weakness, since their enemies would then have a chance to meet them on the ground of reason, where their peculiar virtues, tenacity, single-mindedness, and pliant heroism, would avail them nothing.

It is, therefore, a happy chance for the American Jew that his age-long persecution has either ended or has degenerated into petty social discrimination. For he must now realize that the day has gone when he could justify himself by recalling his heroic miseries. In other days and other countries he faced only the problems of existence. New ideas and opportunities could not pass the walls of the ghetto; custom made adherence to old ceremonies and beliefs not only easy but imperative. The Sabbath was the one day on which the Jew could be a man instead of a thing; the recurrent holidays gave him his one outlet for the emotions rigidly suppressed in daily life; the study and analysis of the Law and the Talmud furnished the intellectual exercise that his eager mind was denied in t he schools and the learned circles of the country which tolerated him. The very fact that he was confined within a pale, therefore, made it easy for him to keep his race a distinct entity.

But now, if he is unable to find a rational ground for his religious and racial unity, he will meet a foe more insidious than persecution — the gradual disintegration of race and religious consciousness within the faith. Ironically enough, what pales, pogroms, and ghettos could not accomplish, freedom promises to bring to pass. So the time has come when the Jew in America must decide what he is going to do with and for himself; his enemies can no longer save him the effort of decision.

The issue is of as much concern to Christians as to Jews. For there exist in Judaism a great many kinds of energy, as the not inglorious roll of Jewish artists, merchants, musicians, philosophers, and men of letters indicates. What is true of Europe is true also of the United States: the Jew occupies a position the importance of which is out of all proportion to his numbers. Hence the problem of Judaism is of real interest in America, because the influence which the Jew can have upon social life and the current political and financial situation depends almost entirely upon his mode of life and manner of thought.

The problem is not, of course, recognized by every Jew; the great mass of Jews thinks as little as the great mass of Christians. It accepts its lot with the common fatalism of humanity and worries not at all about the reason for being. This carelessness is especially true of the foreign-born Jews who live in the ghettos of the great cities. They are so intensely preoccupied with the struggle for existence that they have no thought for problems of the adjustment of Judaism to American life. Yet, however passive they themselves may be, their children, like all men who wish to order their lives rather than submit to the shifting currents of the mass, must seek out their path. That path must begin at the intense self-consciousness which has always characterized Judaism — a self-consciousness which, firmly imbedded in the Jewish nature even in pre-Christian times, has for the last two thousand years been made practically inextricable.

A Jew’s first recognition of insulation comes in boyhood. The convention which exists in America, that one man is, or ought to be, as good as another, is accepted by a young person with the utter inability of youth to comprehend the shadings and equivocations of the use, in the adult vocabulary, of such words as democracy and equality. It is, therefore, a striking moment in a Jewish boy’s life when he first realizes that, though a potential American citizen, he is, nevertheless, not like others. The realization is the more acute inasmuch as peculiarity is the last mark of distinction that a youth craves. He wants to be like others, and though the level of the ‘others’ may be a low one, he prefers it to the experience of isolation which the atavistic savagery of youth can make so poignant.

The recognition of his peculiarity comes from two sources — his comrades, who bring forcibly to his attention that nineteen hundred years ago the mob preferred Barabbas to Jesus; and his parents, who strive to sweeten persecution by building up an appreciation of a striking history and a splendid mission. But the concrete experience of facing a ring of jeering schoolboys for five minutes is far more incisive than hours of instruction in a history which can make little appeal to the adolescent. For the Jew never ‘won’; his history is a record of patient martyrdom.

After all, neither the fact that Rabbi Akiba died at the hands of the Romans, crying the ‘Shema,’ the sacred formula of Judaism, nor that Jews, stripped to the skin, were forced to run races in the Italian carnival amid the jeers of the populace, affords much of that consciousness of heroism so dear to the youthful heart. And the splendid mission is so vague that even faithful adults experience some difficulty in defining it. Is it not true that sincerely religious men and women seldom attempt to interpret their religion in the cold terms of theology? To most of us religion comes from contact, habit, and example rather than from reason. Hence the Jewish parent, an adherent of one of the least dogmatic religions in the world, finds much difficulty in satisfactorily explaining to the literal youth this faith, the inevitable result of which seems to be pain and sorrow. The net result of the boyhood experience of the Jew who is sensitive to impressions, is an intense self-consciousness which, although thoroughly developed from without and within, rests upon no pleasant or satisfactory basis.

What the Jew is going to do with this self-consciousness may, to Christians, seem of little moment. It is not of that loyal kind which moves men to blow up munition factories, or to plant bombs in steamships. For others, doubtless, its implications arc not of great importance. For himself, however, they are everything. His self-consciousness colors his whole point of view. It is not a simple thing. It is compounded of many factors. It is both racial and religious; it makes him both hopeful and despondent; it gives cause both for pride and for a feeling of inferiority; it makes him clannish, and it makes him long for a wider field of acquaintance.

Judaism differs from Christianity in this — that while one chooses to be a Christian, one is born to be a Jew. An atheist born of Jewish parents is an atheist Jew, just as Disraeli, baptized in the Church of England, was nevertheless the ' Jew Premier.’ Judaism is not a state of mind, or a philosophy, or a conviction; it is a tie of blood. Yet it is also religious. The assumption is that every Jew will automatically subscribe to a certain religious point of view, vague though it is; at least, that he will attend the synagogue on the high holidays, and that he will continue such vital customs as circumcision and the ‘Kaddish,’ the service for the dead. Nevertheless, though he does none of these things, he is still a Jew. Moreover, this connection which is thrust upon him is of immense significance. It makes him heir to a history, to a tradition, and to a way of life. Most important of all, it determines for him, in no small measure, the reception which he will receive from the world. Though active and vehement opposition to Jews from mature men and women has practically disappeared in America, it is by no means true that the historical connotations of Jew have vanished. To even the best-intentioned man in the world, Jew has not the same quality of meaning that attaches to Lutheran, Congregationalist, or even Catholic.

Judaism is clannish. Jews undoubtedly hang together. The combination of persecution with its inevitable concomitant, self-justification, acts as a centripetal force in driving Jews upon themselves. Just as Jews have the almost grotesque notion that a man will make his philosophic and religious convictions ‘jibe’ with his birth, so they have the wholly grotesque notion that a man should choose his friends and his wife from the small group among whom he happens to be born, though later education and environment may move him a thousand miles away. The results of this clannishness are paradoxical. For instance, the average Jew is sure that the chief reason why Anti-Semitism is everywhere ready to show its ugly head, is jealousy of the splendid history and the extraordinary business ability of the race. At the same time he subconsciously assumes the inferiority which has long been attributed to him, covering his feelings, however, by uncalledfor justification and bitter opposition to all criticism. It is torture to him, for example, that The Merchant of Venice should be read in the public schools. Who can blame him? For Shylock, although undoubtedly an exaggerated character, nevertheless makes concrete those qualities the portrayal of which hurts because it bears the sting of truth.

The development of committees ‘On Purity of the Press’ in Jewish societies, and the extraordinary wire-pulling over the Russian treaty and the Immigration bill, show to what lengths this consciousness can go. It is impossible for the Jew to be entirely at ease in the world. He is introspective and suspicious, often unhappy, always sure that, for good or ill, he is a marked man among men.

There are three attitudes which Jews in this country take toward their problem — a few as a result of having thought it through, the majority as a result; of the forces of inertia, environment, or chance, forces of which they themselves are perhaps not aware. Some Jews attempt to get rid of their self-consciousness by separating from the group. They deliberately set out to convince themselves that there is no difference between them and other men, and that they can act and live in all respects like other American citizens. A second group find their fellow Jews entirely satisfactory. They are conscious of a difference between themselves and others, but, living as they do in large cities where the Jewish community numbers hundreds of thousands, they feel no need of association with nonJews other than that which they get in business. They are rich, or at least wellto-do; they have all the comforts that money can buy; they occupy fine streets and build expensive synagogues. They are willing, not only to accept their group-consciousness, but to develop it to the fullest extent by means of societies and fraternal orders. In the third place, there is a small group of Jews keenly conscious of their race, who would like to make Judaism vital as a great religion and a great tradition. They differ from the second group in that they not only accept their individuality but try to justify it. It is not sufficient for them that there should be enough Jewish organizations and undertakings to make a respectable yearbook: they are interested in showing why such organizations should exist. They not only are Jews, but they want to be Jews; they want to feel that Judaism really has a mission to fulfill and a message to carry to the questioning world.

The Jew who attempts to solve his problem by separating from his community must leave the great centres of Jewish life and go to some small town where he may make a fresh start. There he will find himself in an anomalous position. He will have neither the support that comes from rubbing elbows with one’s own kind, nor the mental and moral stiffening that comes from active opposition. He will be simply an odd fish, and as such will be subject, not to antagonism, but to curiosity. What cordiality he meets with is the cordiality of curiosity. He is a strange creature, similar — on a far lower scale of interest — to a Chinese traveler or a Hindu student. He is engaged in conversation on the ‘Jewish problem,’ or Jewish customs and history, until he sickens with trading on the race-consciousness that he is striving to forget. With cruel kindliness his friends impress upon him that his Judaism ‘makes no difference,’ with the result that he finds himself anticipating every imminent friendship by a clear statement of his race, lest the friendship be built upon the sands of prejudice. His social relations must be above reproach. A hasty word, an ill-considered action, in other men to be put down to idiosyncracy, in him is attributed to his birth. Even when there exists the frankest and most open friendship, he is continually seeing difficulties. The fathers have eaten a sour grape and the children’s teeth are set on edge. The self-consciousness that he learned in youth reappears in maturity. Whether he will or no, a Jew he remains.

If he finds his situation intolerable, he may, of course, utterly and completely deny his Jewish affiliation. He may consort with Christians, join a Christian church, marry a Christian wife, and tread under foot the old associations that will occasionally cast a disagreeable shadow across his life. Unfortunately for such a solution, a cloud still hangs about the idea of apostasy. Such a refuge seems to a man of honor despicable. It is a cowardly procedure, surely, to deny one’s birth and sail under false colors, the more so since, though it does no harm to others, it gains advantage for ones self. Why should it be treason for a Jew to abandon his religion and forget his birth any more than for a Frenchman or a Swede to do so? Probably for the reason that no one cares whether a man was born in France or not, whereas in certain circles it makes a great deal of difference if a man was born in Jewry. Furthermore, Christians feel strongly that the Jew who forsakes the religion into which he was born, does so, not because his eyes have been opened upon the truth, but because he sees in apostasy definite material advantages. The Jew who would take this means of obtaining peace, therefore, would find himself cursed by an irrational idealism which can disturb while it cannot fortify and achieve.

If, however, he returns to some great centre of Jewish life and attempts to affiliate with his own people, he is in a perilous position. He is more than likely to meet with distrust where he seeks sympathy. Jews are so extremely sensitive to criticism and so keenly conscious of the social discrimination which they encounter from Christians, that they can hardly believe that a man who seems to have lived for several years on an equal footing with Christians has not either denied his birth, in which case he has been a traitor, or has not certain qualities of mind which, since they have been palatable to Christians, must be severely critical of Jews.

And, indeed, they have, perhaps, a measure of justice in their position. It is impossible for a Jew to live apart from his race for several years without looking upon his people with a new light. For one thing, distance has enabled him to focus. He has learned to sympathize more than a little with those hotel-keepers whose ban upon Jews is a terrible thorn in the flesh of the man whose money ought to take him anywhere. He has come to see that the clannishness of Jews serves only to intensify what social discrimination may exist, and to make present in the imagination much that does not. He has realized that persecution is not necessarily justification, and that because a Jew was blackballed at a fashionable club does not prove that he was a man of first-rate calibre. And finally, he has perceived that there is an arrogance of endurance as well as an arrogance of persecution, and that for a man to be continually assuming that people are taking the trouble to despise him for his birth, is to postulate an importance that does not exist.

On the other hand, he has, because of his distance, idealized Judaism. In his retirement he studied the history of his people; he thrilled with their martyrdoms; he marveled at their tenacityand their fortitude. He built up for himself on the cobweb foundation of boyhood memories, visions of the simple nobility of Jewish ritual and ceremonies, and vague ideals of an inspiring religious faith. He may, perhaps, have met, far more frequently than ill-will, a sentimental and unbalanced adulation of Jews. The cult of the new is with us, and the history, the folk-lore, the literature, and the customs of Judaism have, for many people who pride themselves on their social liberality, the fascination of novelty. It is the easiest thing in the world for a Jew to yield to this sentimental tolerance, and to view his people in a rosy light.

It is, therefore, something of a shock to him when he reënters a great Jewish community, for he finds that the great mass of American Jews have sunk into a comfortable materialism. What persecution could not accomplish, success in business has brought to pass. The innate qualities of the Jew could not save him from t he fate of the Christian who has become rich in a hurry — grossness and self-conceit. That Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked is as true now as it ever was, and there is little reason to expect that the race which was hopelessly cankered by national prosperity in the days of Solomon can escape a similar fate in the twentieth century.

Moreover, the Jew in America finds, for the first time, a clear field for the qualities which twenty centuries have developed in him : shrewdness, tenacity, single-mindedness, patience, self-confidence — qualities without which he must long ago have perished. In America, with all the bars which restrain him in Europe lowered, these qualities have received abnormal development. In Europe they were checked, not only by persecution, but by the religious idealism of the synagogue and the intellectual idealism of the traditional Talmudic education.

The sad result is that in prosperity the Jewish self-consciousness ceases to be religious and becomes merely racial. The elements that add something of dignity, grace, and spiritual power to even the most sordid congregation of ghetto Jews disappear. And with the reverence of the traditional synagogue service has departed the discipline which strengthened the lives of the faithful. The minute regulations of the dietary laws, the diversity of the ancient formulas of worship, the tortuous and crabbed study of Talmudic lore, had this advantage: they stiffened the backbone and strengthened the faculties of a race which might otherwise have been crushed under the heaviest burden that a race has ever borne. But the discipline of the ancient law has departed. Spacious synagogues stand empty. Having outlived poverty and persecution, the well-to-do Jew is left in a state of good-natured and satisfied religious apathy. The Jew has always prided himself on his common sense; his common sense now does him the ill turn of banishing whatever mysticism Judaism may once have had. And without mysticism there can be no genuine religious enthusiasm; it takes more to see God than the ability to distinguish between profit and loss.

The time was when small groups of Jews could develop a truly admirable aristocracy of manners and of intellect, an aristocracy ennobled by religious zeal, humility, and devotion. Such groups are still to be found among English and Portuguese. Even in the United States many individuals continue the traditions of the groups whence they sprang. Such a coherent aristocracy is impossible, however, in this country, because the Jew in America is subject to an influence which is hardly so strong in any other group of people — the steady and resistless modification of his character and ideals by parvenus. The number of immigrants, or children of immigrants, from countries where for centuries they have been trained in an atmosphere of slavish cunning and worship of money, who become rich, is almost incredible. In Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, they cultivated a self-respect by rigid adherence to dignified and beautiful customs; in America the florid exuberance of newly acquired wealth cannot be dignified. Clannishness, exclusion from circles of good taste and good breeding, the infiltration of the parvenu East-European Jews, and imitation of the most obvious aspects of Americanism — its flamboyant and tasteless materialism — all combine to make the thoughtful Jew sadly question what hope lies in the bulk of the Jews who live in the great American cities.

There remains to him the small group of men who are trying to make the Jewish self-consciousness of real value. They are not content with prosperity and material growth; they realize that the past services and achievements of Judaism do not in themselves justify Judaism to-day. Nor do they feel that because college fraternities do not admit Jews, Judaism is sufficiently justified. They deplore social discrimination, but they realize that it is only an incident. To every thinking man comes sometimes the ringing question, ‘How can I justify my existence?’ That question they are willing and eager to answer. They understand that their only rational justification lies in their ability to show what there is now in Judaism which demands respect, and to demonstrate what Judaism is doing, either for the world or for itself, that it should maintain its integrity.

At this point one immediately thinks of Zionism. This is a concrete movement impelled by a genuine idealism. It knows what it wants to do: it has an organization; it is achieving definite results; and it is actuated by a spirit of helpfulness and by an ideal of racial unity. But what value has Zionism for the perplexed Jew who wishes to live in the United States? It may take his mind off his problem, but it offers no solution. Zionism is essentially a movement to help some one else. American Zionists do not propose to emigrate themselves; they aim at the establishment of a state where oppressed Jews will have peace.

The final refuge is the small group who are attempting to revivify American Judaism and fit it to modern conditions. Could their efforts be successful, the prosperous American Jew might be lifted out of his contented materialism and, by means of religion, be reborn to dignity, nobility, and spiritual power, he might make of Judaism a vital force. Here if anywhere lies the hope of American Judaism.

When one takes stock of conditions, however, it is hard to hope. The few men who are working fare but ill. They have no organization and no common aims. There is in sight no striking personality who can lead a revival; Judaism by its very nature tends to produce commentators and dialecticians rather than leaders fired with the zeal of religious awakening. The great Jewish leader in the nineteenth century was Isaac M. Wise, the founder in America of so-called ‘Reformed Judaism.’ The movement succeeded because it had a prosaic aim — to de-orientalize the practice of the synagogue and to remove the sacredness from the long-established customs entailed by observance of the dietary laws. Besides, it sailed on the current of the spirit of the time; what reforms it effected would probably have come about even without organized effort. But it made no attempt to give Judaism that which a religion must have if it is not to perish: elevation, imaginative insight, spiritual power, a realization of the majesty of God, a yearning for his love. A wellconducted Reformed congregation hardly differs from a body of agnostics. Two phenomena show pretty clearly where modern leadership is guiding Judaism: the large numbers of Jews who are professed agnostics, in all the senses of that convenient term, and the equal - ly large numbers who seek in various mystical sects the consolations of religious romanticism.

The present status of American Jude - ism makes its value as a religion by which men can live distinctly questionable. Aided by persecution and poverty, it furnished admirable discipline to a race naturally stubborn and tenacious. Persecution, poverty, and discipline gone, what is left? — an indistinct monotheism joined to an ethical tradition never formulated into a system, and only vaguely defined. None of the great Jewish philosophers ever succeeded in establishing a Jewish creed; indeed, there was no need of one when common suffering wrought so effectual a bond. Now a more searching test awaits Judaism, a test that may decide its existence. If it is to remain as a religion it must now show that it has power to restore the great bulk of prosperous American Jews to a state of religious activity. Whether after the lapse of centuries there are alive in Judaism any of the quickening impulses which will give it that power is a question that it is useless to debate — time must give the answer.

Meanwhile Jews must face their problem squarely. They must realize that they cannot live on their ancestors, and that when men point the finger of scorn they are not thereby justified in assuming that they have been chosen as the witnesses of Truth, to live forever on their wrongs. The fact is that, if Judaism must be a group of men without religious ideals, incapable of making their intricate self-consciousness meaningful and valuable, it is far better that Judaism should disappear.

Meanwhile, those who value the presence of religion in the world may hope that somewhere among the hundreds of Jewish young men in this country there is some one who will be fired with that spirit which came into the hearts of men centuries ago under the Judæan stars. Is the stream of spiritual energy that once flowed into the world from Palestine dried up, now that the folk of Palestine live in other countries? Those who are not Jews should remember that their attitude will have a profound effect upon the answer to this question. The United States is deeply concerned whether several millions of her most energetic citizens live in the clear light of religious sincerity, ennobling their lives and dignifying their actions by the lofty moral principles which their ancestors gave to the world, or whether they live in a crass materialism and are given over chiefly to the acquisition of wealth.

At all events it must be remembered that, since the problem of Judaism comes from intense self-consciousness, persecution and sentimental tolerance are both bad for the Jew. The one saves him the trouble of seeking out his reason for existence; the other flatters him into a belief that there is no necessity for the search. If men will treat Jews like other people, instead of nourishing their age-long notions of peculiarity, they will make it easier for time to settle the Jewish problem as it settles all others.