As a university student in America, I once read an article posing the question: When did the modern era in Jewish history begin? The author’s answer was to point out that the answer depends on who answers the question. A Zionist might say, for example, that modern Jewish history began in 1789 with the rise of modern nationalism and the eventual emancipation of Jews across Europe, while a socialist might say that modern Jewish history began in 1917, when that process was complete and when millions of Jews came under the shining sun of a socialist regime.
I found this whole debate to be rather a curious one, since it presupposed that Jewish history had already entered its modern phase. From where I sat, it appeared not to be true, or at least to be partially untrue. Jews who have left the exile and moved to Israel are modern; those who remain in the exile as Frenchmen or Americans of the Mosaic persuasion are clearly medieval. I brought my theory up in class, but it was ignored. I identified three things that would make a group modern:
- the ability to say what it means to be a member, and who is a member and who is not (ie, self-identification)
- the ability to secure itself as a distinct group (ie, Autoemancipation)
- the ability to rule itself in at least a limited fashion (ie, autonomy)
It’s very clear in the exile that Jews have no chance to achieve autoemancipation or autonomy, but what about self-identification?
The traditional understanding of what it means to be a Jew is that Jewishness is not a nation, not an ethnicity, not a religion, not a culture, not a tribe and not a way of life – but all of those things combined. Notwithstanding the Torah’s position that an Israelite’s tribal identity is patrilineal (I, for example, am from the tribe of Levi) or that the Torah and Talmud make it relatively easy to convert to Judaism, the traditional rabbinic Jewish definition is that a Jew is someone born to a Jewish mother or who has undergone a traditional Jewish conversion (understanding Jewish law, accepting Jewish law, undergoing circumcision and immersion in a mikvah).
It is a basic right of every people to say who is a member and who is not a member of that people. It is also a basic tenet of American and western European liberalism that Jews are a faith community and nothing more. This notion of Jews as merely a faith comes directly from Christianity; it is the Christian idea of what it means to be Jewish. This was conceived not entirely in malice: Christianity is itself a faith community. Because Jews are not Christians, Christians think that Jews are not-Christian in the same way that Christians are Christian.
Two centuries ago, a group of Jews decided that they would go along with this false definition. They accepted the Christian idea that Jews are just a bunch of French or German or American people who happen not to believe in the Christian messiah, but who are otherwise French or German or American in every other way. They created Reform, a sect of Protestant Christianity that retains some very distant symbolic connection to Judaism, but which is theologically not Jewish and which denied the ethnic-national-communal-tribal-territorial components of Jewishness. This definition has overwhelmingly dictated how Jews present themselves to Christians and eventually came to be how Jews in exile see themselves.
Some, of course, disagree. Zionists believe Jews are a nation and consequently created Israel; Haredim believe in something like the traditional definition of Jewishness and have retreated into ghettos and shtetls to try to insulate themselves from the modern world around them.
All this time, however, it has never been possible for Reform to erase completely the idea that Jews are not just a faith. My parents’ Conservative synagogue, for example, does not allow the non-Jewish spouses and children of its member families to be listed as members in its directory, and it defines the Jewishness of those individuals by Jewish law (in its Conservative incarnation). Similarly, the Jews’ Free School in London gives preferential admission to … you guessed it … Jews, and uses Jewish law to decide who is a Jew. In a long legal struggle, the British courts have now rules that JFS practices racial discrimination.
At first glance, this case is only about the difficult issue of one school’s admissions policy. But at its core, the underlying issue is how a group defines itself and whether it even gets to define itself or whether the courts of some foreign entity can say that so-and-so is a Jew or so-and-so is not a Jew, or that Jewish communal resources must be used for the benefit of non-Jews as they are used for the benefit of Jews. I see the case of JFS as a wake-up call for all Jews in Britain: if they want to be Jewish, and if they want being Jewish to have some meaning beyond whatever some court dictates, they can not do it where they currently are.
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Or to put it another way, the Reform movement will be self-liquidating since if the Reform believe that Jews are just Americans who practice a different religion then the next step is to leave Judaism altogether.
It seems that the Jewish community in America is at a dividing point, some will move to Israel, and some will assimilate entirely.
There are two simultaneous trends. First, the least committed to living a Jewish life (99% of Reform and 90% of Conservative) are very unlikely to have Jewish children with any knowledge of Judaism: assimilation and intermarriage are decimating the Jewish community at large. Second, the most committed to living a Jewish life (Orthodox, plus the Reform and Conservative elites) are growing in numbers absolutely and relatively, increasing their influence within the community and their ability to represent the community, and they are making the community more traditional in many ways. In a generation, the Jewish community in America will be much smaller but much more intense, focused and dedicated.
However, given the propensity of people of other faiths, esp. Christianity and Islam, to proselytize, and the relative lack of propensity of Jews to proselytize, unless the Conservative and Orthodox Jews have very large families, it doesn’t seem likely that, esp. given increasing levels of immigration (legal and otherwise) to America, the Jewish community will avoid seeing its percentage of the total population diminish, over time. Demographics is destiny.
Sure, the percentage of Jews who are identifiably Jewish will diminish (but it has nothing to do with Christian evangelism and Muslim dawa, since the only Jews converting to other religions are the absolutely least committed and least interested in being Jewish from the beginning). It’s probably already near 1% and will drop below that figure as my grandparents’ generation dies and as my generation doesn’t replace them.
It remains to be seen whether demographics is destiny for American Jews. Will their experience in America be any different when they’re 0.5% of the population than it was when they were 2-3%? They’re going to remain concentrated in certain industries and in certain geographical areas for a long time into the future. Meanwhile, the dominant Brahmin caste is so heavily Jewish that I actually observe Jews and Jewishness becoming more prominent in American life over time. This is something that should only be noticeable from one generation to the next, but I see it changing from one annual visit to the next.