Two Dimensions of Jewish Peoplehood
Jews are a fractious people.
Rashi, the great eleventh century rabbinic commentator, notes that when the Israelites arrived in the wilderness of Sinai prior to receiving the Ten Commandments, the Torah’s description shifts from the plural to the singular: vayihan sham Yisrael, “Israel [singular] encamped there.” Rashi, always sensitive to the nuances of the biblical text, spells out the implication. At that moment, he writes, the people of Israel were “like one person with one heart.” They had been transformed from the plural to the singular. They were united.
However, he detects another nuance. It lies in the word “there.” There, within sight of Mount Sinai, within reach of revelation, about to receive their call and consummation as a people, they were united. “But all their other encampments were marked by dissension and division.” Rashi’s comment might almost be taken as the leitmotiv of Jewish history. To an unusual degree, it is a story of dissension and division.
The book of Genesis is a set of variations on the theme of arguments within the family. The stage is set by Cain and Abel, the archetypes of emergent humanity. Their story begins in brotherhood and ends in fratricide. The theme continues with the appearance of the children of Abraham, the family of the covenant. There is estrangement between Isaac and Ishmael, conflict between Esau and Jacob and rivalry between Joseph and Jacob’s other sons.
The book of Exodus confirms the proposition. It is only the presence of an external enemy, in the form of the persecuting Egyptians, that unites the Israelites and turns them for the first time into a nation. No sooner has the threat disappeared and the journey across the wilderness begun, than the Israelites revert to type as a quarrelsome, rebellious, “stiff-necked” people.
It is a scene that was to recur again and again in Jewish history. As a sovereign people in their own land, the Israelites rapidly lost the coherence they had under Moses and Joshua. The book of Judges describes a people that has dissolved into a loose confederation of disparate tribes, without strong leadership and with only the most sporadic sense of collective identity, usually at times of war. The book ends in anarchy: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
Even after establishing the formal framework of nationhood – the election of a king, the location of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, and the building of the Temple – almost immediately, with the death of Solomon, the people split into two, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, paving the way for the defeat of both, the loss of ten of the twelve tribes, and the destruction of the First Temple.
The lesson was not learned. Though it took many centuries for Israel to recover from the catastrophe of the first Commonwealth, it proceeded to repeat its errors in the second. The historian Josephus, an eyewitness of many of the events he describes, tells us how the Jewish people had become divided into Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and how, even within these groups, there was constant dissolution into factions. Even as Jerusalem was besieged by the Roman army, Jews within the city were fighting one another rather than the enemy at their gates. There is sad self-knowledge in the rabbinic verdict that in the last days of the Second Temple “Jerusalem was destroyed because of causeless internal animosity [sinat hinam].”
Even in the present century there were moments of division that almost defy belief. Within the Warsaw ghetto, until the very day that fighting began, the Jews planning the uprising were split among themselves into rival groups who shared neither weapons nor strategic plans with one another. In Israel’s War of Independence only a last-minute gesture of reconciliation on the part of Menachem Begin prevented armed conflict between the Irgun and David Ben-Gurion’s Haganah.
This history calls for reflection. Why is it that, at critical periods, Jews have come so close to schism and fragmentation? And why is it that, nonetheless, for the most part we have continued to be – in some real and not imagined sense – a single people? With these questions we venture into deep waters, for we are essentially asking about the underlying structure of Jewish identity. What makes us what we are as Jews, giving rise to this repeated rhythm of kinship and conflict, peoplehood and division, coherence and atomisation?
Through most of human history there have been two axes along which individuals have formed themselves into groups. The first is that of history. Individuals are bound to one another because they share the same ancestry, the same ethnic origins, and the sense of a shared past. They are, in effect, an extended family. When they look back they find ties of common origins and collective memory. They are what they are because of where they came from and what has happened to them. This is the unifying bond of peoples and ethnic groups. They are communities of fate.
But since the birth of monotheism there has been another axis. Individuals can be bound together as a group not because of where they came from but because of where they are going to. They share a set of religious convictions. They participate in a common life with shared rules, disciplines and codes of virtue. They constitute an assembly of fellow believers. They are linked not by history but by destiny, by the call to create a collaborative future. They are not communities of fate. Rather, they are communities of faith.
These affiliations are different, sometimes divergent. There can be a single people – the British, for example – containing many different faiths. There can be a single faith – Christianity or Islam for example – which comprises many different peoples whose origins, memories and national loyalties have nothing in common with one another. In Judaism, however, these two axes converge. Jews constitute a community of fate and also a community of faith. Indeed, in a famous dictum Saadia Gaon stated that “our people is only a people in virtue of our religious laws.” Faith defines Jewish peoplehood, and peoplehood defines Jewish faith. It is the shifting of these two great tectonic plates within Jewish identity that causes periodic earthquakes. For we are a group built not on a single rock formation but on two.
Consider two key passages in which the Torah speaks about the origins of the people of Israel. Both use the word goi, which means a nation. As the Vilna Gaon points out, goi is related to the word geviyah, meaning a body. When a group of individuals is described as a goi it means that it has coalesced into a single entity as limbs constitute a single body. When, where and under what circumstances did the Israelites become a nation, ceasing to be a mere group of individuals? To this, the Torah offers two apparently conflicting answers.
One occurs in the great declaration to be made by the Israelites on bringing their first-fruits to the Sanctuary. The passage has remained at the heart of Jewish experience, for it is a central text of the seder service on Passover:
A wandering Aramean was my father,
and he went down into Egypt,
and sojourned there, few in number;
and there he became a nation [vayehi sham le-goi]...
The other occurs in the wilderness of Sinai, immediately prior to the great revelation of the Ten Commandments and Israel’s acceptance of the covenant with God:
You have seen what I did to Egypt,
and how I carried you on eagles’ wings
and brought you to Myself.
Now if you obey Me fully
and keep My covenant,
then out of all the nations
you will be My treasured possession,
for all the earth is Mine.
You will be for Me a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation [goi kadosh]…
The force of these two passages is quite different. One suggests that Israel became a nation in Egypt. The other implies that Israel became a nation only after it had left Egypt, travelled into the desert, and been offered and accepted the Torah as the terms of its relationship with God and its constitution as a people. How are we to reconcile them?
In Egypt, the Israelites became a community of fate. They faced a common enemy in the form of an enslaving and tyrannical power. Their shared suffering forged them into a distinctive group. The Haggadah, commenting on the phrase “and there he became a nation,” explains that “this teaches that there the Israelites were distinctive.” The Torah provides intimations of how this was so. The Israelites were Hebrews, a word that has the connotations of “nomad,” “alien,” “outsider.” They were shepherds, an occupation which, as Joseph tells his brothers, was “detestable” to the Egyptians. They belonged to a caste regarded by the Egyptians as unclean. The Torah notes that when Joseph provided a meal for his brothers, they had to sit by themselves “because Egyptians could not eat with Hebrews, for that is detestable to Egyptians.” They were, in short, framed by their experiences of being like one another and different from those around them. They had the same ancestry and origins and now, transported into an alien environment, they shared the same fate. That, in one sense, is how they became a nation.
At Sinai they became a nation in a quite different sense. They became a body politic, with its own sovereign and constitution. Unlike other nations, however, their sovereign was God, creator of heaven and earth, and their constitution was to be His Torah. This revolutionary idea lies behind many of the most important Jewish contributions to world civilisation. It meant that in Israel, and for all those influenced by the faith of Israel, no earthly power could be absolute. Right could no longer be identified with might. Beyond Pharaohs, rulers, dictators and tyrants lay the supreme authority of God and His law. A prophet could justly criticise a king. All rulership was to be tempered and constrained by the demands of morality, the integrity of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the principles of justice and equality before the law, compassion and welfare in social relations. Israel, not as individuals but as a nation in its collective life, its social structures, its political institutions and its codes of conduct, was to become a living example of a society under the sovereignty of God governed by a Divine “constitution of liberty” called Torah. It was not merely a nation but goi kadosh, a holy nation. It was a community of faith.
Had it been a community of fate only, it would undoubtedly have disintegrated at some stage in the first centuries of the Common Era. Israel, as an autonomous political entity, had been defeated by the Romans. An unprecedented period of dispersion followed. For eighteen centuries Jews were scattered across the globe, without a political or geographical home. To the extent that they participated in the cultures around them, they were different from Jews elsewhere. Spanish Jews spoke Ladino. German Jews spoke Yiddish. When Rashi sought to explain a Hebrew or Aramaic word to his contemporaries, he translated it into medieval French. Maimonides wrote his responsa and philosophical works in Arabic.
To all intents and purposes Jews were no longer a community of fate. At the same time that Jews were being murdered in France and Germany in the Crusades, they were prospering in interludes of enlightenment in Spain. While they were being forcibly baptised in Portugal they were being tolerated in Poland. The situation of Jews in one part of the world bore no discernible relationship to their fate in some other country. To be sure, they still saw themselves as part of a single people and felt their destinies to be interlinked. Those who found themselves temporarily at ease still prayed each week for “our brethren, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress or captivity.” They preserved their sense of kinship with Jews elsewhere. But it is precisely this fact that cries out for explanation.
The answer is that they were also, and defined themselves as, a community of faith. They obeyed the same laws, celebrated the same festivals, worshipped the same God in the same language, and took the same book – the Torah – as holy. They saw fate in terms of faith. Refusing to define themselves in terms of the here-and-now, they saw their identity in terms of a distant past and an equally remote future. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than in the opening words of the seder service: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt... This year we are here, next year in the land of Israel; this year we are slaves, next year we will be free.” In a single declaration Jews identified themselves with the biblical past and the messianic future. Whether in third-century Babylon, eleventh-century France or nineteenth-century Lithuania, Jews were part of a story – the same story – which began in slavery and ended in redemption and brought all Jews together in a single collective narrative. Without that story, told as a religious obligation and celebrated as a religious act, Jews could not have withstood the normal laws of ethnic assimilation and loss of ancestral memory. At some stage or other they would, quite simply, have disappeared into their host cultures.
The key words in this context are am and edah. Am, literally “people,” refers to Jewry as an ethnic and historical entity and it has no religious connotations. Edah, literally “congregation” or “community,” refers to Jewry as a religious group. It means an assembly of all the people constituted as a body politic, and the event to which it refers is the gathering of the Israelites at Sinai and their acceptance of the sovereignty of God and the covenant of the Torah. When Ruth says to Naomi, “Your people will be my people and your God will be my God,” she is referring to the dual nature of the identity she is about to adopt. In joining the house of Israel she is about to enter both an am and an edah, a fate and a faith. For long periods these two dimensions of identity reinforced one another. It is when they begin to move in different directions that fault-lines start to appear across the surface of Jewish life. That is what happened throughout Ashkenazi Jewry in the nineteenth century.
Beginning with the Hamburg “Temple” in 1818, there were a series of radical departures from Jewish tradition which coalesced into a range of movements – Reform, Conservative and Liberal – whose common factor was a rejection of the binding force of rabbinic law. Most of these developments had their origins in Germany where the battle for emancipation was particularly fraught and where anti-Jewish sentiment ran high. An important motive for these changes was the feeling on the part of some Jews that they had to make concessions to emphasise their Germanness even if this meant rejection of significant elements of Jewish practice and belief. In countries where Reform spread, Jewish tradition, now called “Orthodoxy” by its opponents, was forced into defensive postures. Jews had known schisms before – the Samaritans of the biblical period, the Sadducees of the Second Temple and the Karaites of the middle ages – but not in this sudden profusion. It split the edah into a series of edot, subcommunities, whose differences were fundamental.
Towards the end of the century a second set of developments took place, in response not to emancipation but to antisemitism. The outbreak of pogroms in Russia, the rise of racist doctrines in Germany and the Dreyfus trial in France heightened awareness of Jewish existence as a community of fate, an am, and a series of movements now emerged around the theme of secular peoplehood. The most powerful of these was Zionism, but they also included proposals for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe, and for secular Judaisms based on Yiddish or Hebrew culture. In a sense they were the antithesis of Reform. They emphasised Jewish distinctiveness not social integration, and the failure of emancipation rather than its success, but they were equally radical departures from tradition. Jewry had thus become divided into those who saw identity in terms of edah and those who construed it as an am, and each was internally subdivided into different tributaries and streams.
The story of modern Jewry is the fragmentation of a once coherent people into contending sects, and I have told it in two books, sociologically in Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, theologically and halakhically in One People? More than a century later the divisions still remain. Yet, significantly, most Jews still feel the pull of both fate and faith. We understand, even if we do not agree with, the concept of a secular Jew, which means we are an am. But we feel that there is a contradiction in the concept of a Christian or Muslim Jew, which means we are still an edah. If we were only an ethnic group, there could be Jews of other faiths. And if we were only a religious group, there could by definition be no secular Jews. The combination of am and edah is a primal fact of our identity, and it survives despite all the rifts of the past two hundred years.
Against this background it is possible to gain a new understanding of the particular path taken by Anglo-Jewry in the nineteenth century, and one way of doing so is through a kind of historical experiment. History is written in terms of what was, not what might have been. But though we cannot know what might have happened had Anglo-Jewish leaders acted differently, we can trace the fate of other communities which did choose differently. I want now to go back in time to formative moments in the life of two Jewish communities, in Germany and the United States, to understand how they responded to these seismic changes. In one case, the response was Orthodox, in the other it was not. But together they illustrate with particular clarity the routes Anglo-Jewry did not take, and thus help us understand the path it chose.