American Judaism

by Nathan Glazer

Overview

First published in 1957, Nathan Glazer's classic, historical study of Judaism in America has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "a remarkable story . . . told briefly and clearly by an objective historical mind, yet with a fine combination of sociological insight and religious sensitivity."

Glazer's new introduction describes the drift away from the popular equation of American Judaism with liberalism during the last two decades and considers the threat of divisiveness within American Judaism. Glazer also discusses tensions between American Judaism and Israel as a result of a revivified Orthodoxy and the disillusionment with liberalism.

"American Judaism has been arguably the best known and most used introduction to the study of the Jewish religion in the United States. . . . It is an inordinately clear-sighted work that can be read with much profit to this day."—American Jewish History (1987)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226150475
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Series:	The Chicago History of American Civilization
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	244
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The American people are generally divided into three major religious groups: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Like all convenient divisions, this one coincides only approximately with reality. Important groups such as the adherents of the Eastern Orthodox churches fit easily into none of these categories. Moreover, the three groups differ greatly in strength and character, and to call them all "religions" is to obscure important distinctions among them.

Despite these difficulties, the division has taken hold, and one may expect nowadays to see rabbis, as well as ministers and priests, open sessions of political conventions and bless the deliberations of Congress. It would be an interesting essay in the history of ideas to determine just how the United States evolved in the popular mind from a "Christian" nation into a nation made up of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The most interesting part of such a study — which I do not plan to undertake here — would be to discover how it came about that the Jewish group, which through most of the history of the United States has formed an insignificant percentage of the American people, has come to be granted the status of a "most favored religion."

Certainly the impressive history of the Jews has played some role in giving them this position. Their numbers in America scarcely justify it. Jews at present make up about 3 per cent of the population of the United States, and this small percentage reflects the migration of Jews that took place between fifty and ninety years ago. Before the 1880's, Jews formed only a fraction of 1 per cent of the American people. There are today probably about six million Jews in the United States.

Since the United States government does not inquire about religious affiliation in its decennial censuses, the number of Jews in this country is arrived at by a series of educated and highly sophisticated guesses. Nevertheless, these guesses can be taken as not far from the fact. They are based on estimates made by local Jewish communities by various means: from miniature censuses to estimates based on the number of children absent from school on major Jewish holidays. It is the last method that is often used in the largest Jewish communities, in New York City for example. In 1957, for the first and only time, the United States Bureau of the Census asked a national sample of the American population a question on its religion. This was not in the regular decennial census but in one of the Census Bureau's Current Population Surveys. This has been an invaluable source of data on the Jewish population, and it reassured Jewish demographers that the estimates they had made by cruder means were not very far off.

Decennial censuses of religion have been conducted under government auspices (the last was in 1936), but these are conducted by the denominations themselves and are principally useful for giving us the number of church buildings, their money value, and similar facts. The number of members of each denomination is a figure largely determined by the theologically oriented definition of each group, and it is hazardous to use these figures. Thus, in 1936, every Jew in a community in which there was a congregation was considered a member of the Jewish denomination. This generous definition in effect meant that the number of Jews as given in the religious census was just about the number of Jews in the country; no distinction was made between Jews who were members of synagogues and Jews who were not. The Catholic definition of a church member approaches this Jewish one in comprehensiveness. Many Protestant denominations tend to limit members to adults and adolescents who specifically identify themselves with a church. For this reason, if one adds up the number of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants as given in lists of members of American religions (for example, in the Yearbook of American Churches), these differences of definition will be reflected, and Jews will form 4-1/2 per cent of all church members, and Catholics 37 per cent. Actually these are considerably inflated figures for both groups.

Aside from their relatively small numbers, the Jews diverge in other respects from the major religious groups in the United States. These divergences are the result of the original character of their religion, the particular history of the Jews before they arrived in America, and the nature of American society at the time of the major Jewish migrations to this country. Many of these divergences will emerge in the course of the present study. But there is one distinction between the Jews and the other major American religious groups that is so significant that we must consider it at the outset. As against the Christian churches — and even the non-Christian religions like Islam and Buddhism, which have some adherents in the United States — Judaism is tied up organically with a specific people, indeed, a nation. The tie is so intimate that the word "Jew" in common usage refers ambiguously both to an adherent of the religion of Judaism and to a member of the Jewish people.

The two categories are logically distinct, as is demonstrated by the existence of Jewish Christians (i.e., individuals of the Jewish nation and the Christian religion) in the early centuries of the Christian Era, and the Roman Jews (i.e., individuals of the Roman nation and the Jewish religion) of the same period. And today, too, one can find people who consider themselves Jews by religion and who are members of other national groups, as well as people who consider themselves Jews by race and who are adherents of other religions. In countries where the census asks not only for religion but for ethnic identification — as in Canada, and in Czechoslovakia between the wars — one can find a few individuals who belong to these odd categories. But despite this logical distinctness between Jews by race and Jews by religion, the two form, in history and in present-day actuality, a single entity, a nation-religion.

On the American scene, one might think, this is not so decisive a distinguishing characteristic as it would be in a more ethnically homogeneous country; for here in the United States there is a certain degree of coincidence between ethnic origin and religion. While many ethnic groups are divided among a number of religions, and many religions encompass a number of ethnic groups, there does tend to be a rough correlation between ethnic group and religion, and in some cases the coincidence is almost complete or exclusive. For example, there are Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox churches which minister to the immigrants (and their descendants) coming from a single national group; we may find special Lutheran churches for Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Slovaks, Icelanders, and others, and special Eastern Orthodox churches for Serbs, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Albanians, Czechs, and others. In what way, then, are the Jews especially to be distinguished?

In this: The ethnic element of their religion is essential to the Jews, while there is no essential relation between being a Norwegian and being a member of a Norwegian Lutheran church, or a Serbian and a member of a Serbian Orthodox church. If there happens to be no Norwegian or Serbian church in the neighborhood, one can go to another Lutheran or Eastern Orthodox church without any religious problem being raised.

In the ethnic churches, a universal religion is preached in a particular tongue. The minister or priest, it is true, often mixes up the maintenance of the ethnic group which forms his congregation with the maintenance of the religion and denounces the abandonment of the Old World tongue and customs as if this were the abandonment of the ancestral faith. In general, however, the ethnic churches in America must and do reconcile themselves to the prospect of ultimate extinction. In time, the pastor's use of a foreign language arouses more and more opposition. If the adherents of the church are concentrated in one section of the country and if they are isolated, for one reason or another, from other Americans, the old forms may be maintained for a number of generations. But, inevitably, there comes a time when the younger generation insists on English or, worse, joins a church of similar character and higher status. The adherents of the ethnic church eventually become part of one of the large American denominations. This is an inevitable by-product of the assimilation of ethnic groups in America.

In this process, no basic religious values are threatened. It is a matter of indifference to Lutheranism as a religion whether its doctrines are propagated in Norwegian, German, or English. One should not, of course, underestimate the feeling of estrangement and alienation produced in the older generation as the Americanized version of the religion spreads. But no serious thinker can contend that any threat to the religion is thereby involved. There is generally an older, fully Americanized church which maintains the same theology and polity as the declining ethnic church. The disappearance of Norwegian Lutheranism does not affect the position of Lutheranism as such.

The position of the Jews is entirely different. The addition of ethnic elements to Calvinism or Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism is fortuitous; the combination of ethnic elements with Judaism is essential. The point is almost too obvious for elaboration. Everyone knows that the Holy Scriptures of the Jewish people — what Christians know as the Old Testament — is the history of the Jews. A large part of the Jewish religion consists of ceremonies that celebrate and recall this national history. A good part of the rest consists of the customs of the Jewish people, once the cultural traits of a specific people but now become holy and incorporated into the religious code of law which is fundamental to Judaism. Judaism refers to an enormous body of practices, embracing one's entire life, more than it refers to a body of doctrine.

With such a character, it is inconceivable that Judaism could survive the disappearance of the Jewish people, except as a subject for scholarly study. And so the assimilation of Jews — that is, the disappearance of Jews as an identifiable and distinct people — is a real threat to the Jewish religion. Indeed, even the loss of specific ethnic characteristics short of complete assimilation (the process we may call acculturation), which to every other religion in America is — or should be — a matter of indifference, is of fundamental importance for the Jewish religion. Judaism is, in large measure, a historical creation of the way Jews have lived; while the way Jews have lived, and the way they live today, is, in large measure, a creation of Judaism. It seems impossible to divide the two.

Efforts have been made to do so. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under the influence of new tendencies in politics and religion, there were determined attempts to dissolve this relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. Jewish nationalists — Zionists and others, though not all of them — sought to dispense with the Jewish religion and make the Jewish nation like all other nations, one in which religion would be a matter of taste. Somewhat earlier, Jewish religious reformers tried to dispense with all the national elements in the Jewish religion and make it like other religions, indifferent to the fate and character of a single people. Both efforts, one may now safely say, failed. The antireligious tendencies of Zionism and the antinational tendencies of Reform Judaism have become muted. It tells us something about the nature of the Jewish religion that Reform, the most consciously rational and universalizing Jewish religious tendency, now incorporates in its educational practices Jewish folk customs which have no religious significance but which are nevertheless recognized as being essential to the continuance of Judaism.

At an earlier stage of human history, this close link between nation and religion was universal. The religions of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans made no clear distinctions between the two concepts. But today in America Judaism stands out as unique. In a world in which religion tends to be increasingly divorced from nationality, Judaism maintains the connection in so profound and organic a form that it makes the idea of a divorce incredible.

And since these two elements are always present, it is always possible for religious leaders and laymen to move in one or the other direction: toward the idea of a nation or a people, or toward the idea of a religion. At times, emphasis has been placed on the notion of a "pure" religion, divorced from peculiar national characteristics; at other times, the emphasis on the national character, istics, on the Jewish people, has become so strong within parts of American Judaism that it has obscured what seem to a modern mind the properly religious elements in Judaism — the relation to God, the idea of salvation, and the like.

A good part of this book will describe and analyze the movement in the United States between these two polar conceptions of the Jewish religion.

But there are other consequences of this distinctiveness of Judaism for American Jews. Judaism, we have pointed out, must resist the assimilation of American Jews. There are different branches of Judaism in America today, and they take somewhat different attitudes to assimilation, but even the most liberal interpretation of Judaism must fight the assimilation of Jews. Inevitably this leads to a certain embarrassment among American Jews — an embarrassment, I must hasten to add, that is today more potential than actual but that, our analysis of the nature of the Jewish religion must convince us, will always exist. In the United States — and indeed in most modern states — the Jews live in a society that expects to see their ethnic particularity ultimately abandoned. There has been much talk of the possibility of "cultural pluralism" in America, that is, of a state of affairs in which each ethnic group maintains, in large measure, a separate way of life, with its own customs, its own supplementary schools, its special organizations and periodicals, and perhaps even its favored secondary languages. This possibility will be discussed at greater length in chapter vi. For the moment, it is enough to say that most American ethnic groups do not seem to be moving in that direction and that the tendency of the modern state is to favor a high degree of homogeneity in its population. Where ethnic difference is of no great significance — as in the Soviet Union, after the ruthless destruction of independent leadership groups among the ethnic minorities, or in the United States, where most of the ethnic groups desire to become assimilated — then the state may look benignly upon the maintenance of folk customs and even encourage them. Where differences, however, are great, then the modern state does find it necessary to take measures to reduce them — as in the drive to Americanize the immigrants.

Indeed, Jews have been prominent in the fight to forward the assimilation of ethnic groups — to a certain extent. What is the effect of opening up occupational opportunities, educational opportunities, and residential areas to all groups but to forward their assimilation? Those religious groups most fearful of assimilation, knowing this well, limit themselves to a narrow range of occupations, do not send their children to public schools, live close together in a small area. Even among Jews this pattern is followed by extremely Orthodox groups. Most Jewish leaders press for the opening of all possible areas to Jews and other peoples, but they soon become aware of a limit beyond which Jews themselves will not press. There comes a time — and it is just about upon us — when American Jews become aware of a contradiction between the kind of society America wants to become — and indeed the kind of society most Jews want it to be — and the demands of the Jewish religion. This religion, after all, prohibits intermarriage, asserts that the Jews are a people apart, and insists that they consider themselves in exile until God restores them to the Land of Israel. The sociologist may intervene to ask whether these purely theological doctrines significantly affect Jewish behavior. We must answer that, as a matter of fact, despite their strong desire for integration into American society, Jews do not, on the whole, intermarry and do maintain themselves apart. How to resolve this contradiction is one of the major dilemmas of Judaism in America.

Judaism, as I have described it, is not at home in the modern world. Its difficulties, however, should be seen in context, for religion in general is not at home in the modern world. The problems of Judaism in part stem from the fact that it remains a nation-religion in a world in which religion and nationality have tended to become divorced. But more important than this, religion has lost in the modern world the major position it has held throughout history. I do not plan to go into this vast subject, except to point out that the flourishing state of theology, the building of churches, and high attendance at religious services must not blind us to the fact that religion has suffered crushing blows and plays a completely different role in the world today from that which it played only a hundred years ago.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction, 1989
I. Introduction
II. Beginnings of American Judaism, 1654-1825
III. The German Immigration and the Shaping of Reform, 1825-94
IV. Reformers and Conservatives, 1880-1900
V. The East European Migration, 1880-1900
VI. Judaism and Jewishness, 1920-45
VII. The Jewish Revival, 1945-56
VIII. The Religion of American Jews
IX. Epilogue
Appendix. Declaration of Principles Adopted by a Group of Reform Rabbis at Pittsburgh, 1885
Notes
Important Dates
Suggested Reading
Index