Paths Not Taken: The American Model
Meanwhile in the United States of America a second response was being formulated. Between the 1850s and the 1880s American Jewry was struck by a wave of radical reform. The change was astonishingly swift. In the 1850s a European Jewish visitor to the United States reported that there were more than two hundred Orthodox congregations and eight Reform ones. Within a short period the situation was reversed. In 1880, a United States census showed that there were some two hundred Reform congregations and only six which were Orthodox.
How and why did it occur? There had been Jews in America since 1654, when twenty-three refugees arrived in New Amsterdam. As in England, where Jewish resettlement began a year later, the first Jews were mainly Sephardim, the descendants of marranos. The Jewish population grew slowly. There were some two hundred and fifty Jews by 1700 and three thousand by 1818. Gradually, though, the pace of immigration quickened, and until 1880 most of the newcomers came from Germany.
Many of them came from traditional backgrounds and they established communities along the lines of those they knew in Europe. But unlike their counterparts in Britain, they failed to build a strong communal infrastructure, a kehillah. Distances were too great. The Jewish population was too diffuse. The entire mood of the new land was against it. It was a country of non-conformism and individualism, one which valued religious freedom more than religious authority. As a matter of high constitutional principle, there was separation of Church and State. The mood of America militated against centralised religious structures, and Jews quickly adapted. It was a land of autonomous congregations. Time and again throughout the nineteenth century attempts were made by Jewish lay and religious leaders to create an overarching communal framework. Boards, synods and conventions were proposed and occasionally convened. Each time the effort failed, or lasted only as long as the particular emergency of the hour.
Nor did American Jewry have strong religious leaders. By the 1840s, of the sixty or so individuals serving as rabbis and chazans, only two were known to have received rabbinic ordination. Many of them, according to contemporary testimony, were unable to read unvocalised Hebrew script. It was a situation of potential religious anarchy. As memories of Europe faded, congregations felt free to adapt to the conditions of America with little reference to Jewish law or tradition. The transformation of American Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century took place according to no ideological programme or philosophy. It happened because there was no one with the power or knowledge to say otherwise. As Arthur Hertzberg puts it, “These changes were made by laymen on no authority except their own – not rabbis, but rather storekeepers in Memphis and clothing manufacturers in Rochester, New York, and their peers all over Jewish America.”
Nor was the mood of the immigrants, then or later, favourable to a sense of continuity. To them Judaism meant Europe, the old world, poverty and persecution. America was a tabula rasa, the slate swept clean, a land of new beginnings. The Jews who came were not motivated by religious considerations. Not until the 1930s, when the destruction of European Jewry was in sight, did a significant group of religious leaders arrive – rabbis, Hasidic Rebbes and yeshivah heads – determined to rebuild the structures of tradition. Until then, the first priority for most Jews was to Americanise as quickly as possible, whatever the cost to the Judaic content of their lives.
So, in America, sociology dictated theology rather than vice versa. When the time came for rabbis and scholars to give retrospective justification for what had occurred, it could not be other than revolutionary. By 1885 the Reform movement was sufficiently organised to do so, and it produced one of the most telling documents in American Jewish history, the “Pittsburgh Platform.” Among other things it declared:
We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization...
We hold that all such Mosaic and Rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas altogether foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our day is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation...
This was Reform at its most extreme, and it alarmed the more conservative figures within the community, among them the Sephardic rabbis Sabato Morais and H. Pereira Mendes and the scholar Alexander Kohut. In place of Reform, they proposed a modified traditionalism. Its home was to be a new rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, founded in 1887. It was to be dedicated, as its Articles of Incorporation stated, to “the preservation in America of the knowledge and practice of historical Judaism as ordained in the law of Moses expounded by the prophets and sages in Israel in Biblical and Talmudic writings.”
While the initiative was taking shape something occurred to change the composition and complexion of American Jewry: the massive influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe following the pogroms of the early 1880s, some two-and-a-half million in a period of forty years. Like Anglo-Jewry, the American Jewish community was faced with the sudden arrival of large numbers of still-traditional Jews for whom the institutions of Jewish life they found on their arrival – in this case, Reform – were remote, cold and alienating. The emerging Jewish movement, neither Reform nor Orthodoxy but something between, seemed ideally poised to fulfil the role of a new American synthesis. Thus was born what eventually took shape as Conservative Judaism.
Its early years were undramatic. It was a loose coalition of forces from the left wing of tradition and the right wing of Reform. As its early leaders died or retired, a search was mounted for a figure to give the movement shape and drive. He was found in the person of Solomon Schechter, a scholar from Romania who had spent twenty years in England, latterly as Reader of Rabbinics at Cambridge University. Arriving in New York in 1902, he reconstructed the Theological Seminary and in 1913 succeeded in bringing together an association of synagogues sympathetic to his views, the United Synagogue of America. Both the name of the new organisation and its general ambiance drew on the English model. Like the London United Synagogue it would “embrace all elements essentially loyal to traditional Judaism.” Its aim was “the maintenance of Jewish tradition in its historical continuity.” What, though, did this mean?
Schechter articulated his vision in a highly significant statement. The heart of Judaism, he maintained, is to be found not in texts or creeds but in the “living body” of the Jewish people itself:
This living body...is not represented by any section of the nation, or any corporate priesthood or rabbihood, but by the collective conscience of Catholic Israel as embodied in the Universal Synagogue. The Synagogue, with its continuous cry after God for more than twenty-three centuries, with its unremitting activity in teaching and developing the word of God, the only true witness to the past, and forming in all ages the sublimest expression of Israel’s religious life, must also retain its authority as the sole true guide for the present and the future... Another consequence of this conception of tradition is that it is neither Scripture nor primitive Judaism, but general custom, which forms the real rule of practice... The norm as well as the sanction of Judaism is the practice actually in vogue. Its consecration is the consecration of general use – or, in other words, of Catholic Israel.
The authority of Judaism was now to be neither the Talmud nor the Shulhan Arukh but “custom,” the “practice actually in vogue.” Schechter was not a systematic theologian and may not have thought through the implications of his remark, but it was very far from a restatement of classic Jewish belief. Jewish law does indeed recognise the force of custom, minhag, and of local ordinances, takkanot hakehal, whose authority derives not from biblical law or rabbinic enactment but from long established usage or collective decision. Custom is a source of authority in Judaism, but a limited one compared with halakhah, the set of rules which bind all Jews regardless of usage or decision. Schechter’s apparently conservative formulation – a loose defence of the status quo, leaving room for gradual change – was to prove fateful to the development of American Judaism.
What lay behind it was a specifically nineteenth-century idea, now generally abandoned, namely that history reveals its own laws. Within the history of a people or a social order lay an inexorable pattern of development, a law of progress, which unfolded over the course of time regardless of the intentions of individual agents. This theory, developed by Hegel in relation to the State, Marx in the context of the class struggle, and Darwin in the framework of biology, saw history as both tutor and master of events. Over the course of time one could discern a pattern of evolution from more primitive to more sophisticated forms, and the proper human response is to align oneself with this process of change. Sir Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism is one of the more famous works dedicated to the refutation of this idea.
Clearly Schechter had a limited intellectual agenda. He was giving expression to a school of thought represented in Europe by the rabbinical seminary in Breslau and its key figure, Zechariah Frankel. Frankel, an early sympathiser of Reform, had been scandalised by the sweeping nature of the changes proposed by the radical German conferences of the 1840s. He preferred evolution to revolution. In place of Reform, he therefore advocated a “positive historical Judaism” which would allow adjustment of Jewish law so long as it was gradual and imperceptible. Like the English writer Edmund Burke, Frankel believed that tradition carried its own authority by virtue of its age and general acceptance, and that to tamper with it usually brought more harm than good. This may or may not be true, but it is a secular rather than religious argument, far removed from the world of faith. Even the most modernising leaders of German Orthodoxy, Hirsch and Hildesheimer, were quick to see Frankel as someone who had broken with the classic terms of Judaism, and both sharply condemned his work. But to Schechter it seemed to represent an acceptable compromise between radical Reform and old-style Orthodoxy.
It was an unfortunate borrowing. Tradition has force in and of itself only in a traditional environment, which America at the turn of the century was not. Religious traditions are capable of renewal precisely because their authority rests on something beyond mere custom; in the case of Judaism, revelation and its authoritative interpretation. History as such has no moral force. For whenever we are faced with the question of how to respond to a new situation we need to know more than how people acted in the past. We need to know whether they were right or wrong. If, as Hume insisted, there is no leap from is to ought, still less is there a leap from was to ought.
Reflecting on this gap at the heart of Conservative theology, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the late Arthur A. Cohen, noted:
Schechter was painfully aware of the one problem which his view could not compel: as he defined Catholic Israel, history could educate consciousness and form conscience, but it could command neither. Catholic Israel has no apodictic force. It is that fitful, unpredictable, indeed on occasion, capricious response of the Jewish people to its collective history and obligation. Jewish catholicity too often degenerates into the vulgar response of mere collectivity – kinship feeling and camaraderie.
The problem was not immediately apparent. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the congregations of the United Synagogue of America were still traditional. They had fresh memories of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. But Schechter’s formula contained no guidance as to how the movement might evolve in the future. As time passed, it was caught in a set of equivocations. What was Jewish tradition? Was it what Jews had always done, or what Jews here-and-now felt comfortable doing? Who was Catholic Israel? All Jews, or Jews who belonged to synagogues, or Jews who belonged to Conservative synagogues, or Jews who regularly attended synagogue? Were there any limits on how far tradition could change without discontinuity, and if so where were they to be found? In the event, it followed a similar path of development to Reform, albeit more slowly. Traditional and untraditional at the same time, it was always unable to develop a consistent ideology or a clear criterion for change. Eventually it split into three: a radical or Reconstructionist wing, a traditionalist faction, and a centrist group that remained loyal to the Seminary.
There was, though, one thinker who carried Schechter’s statement to its logical conclusion. Unwittingly perhaps, by placing “Catholic Israel” at the centre of his system, Schechter had shifted authority in Judaism from heaven to earth. The “sole true guide for the present and the future” was no longer the word of God, sometimes obeyed and sometimes disobeyed by the Jewish people. It was to be the Jewish people itself, the “Universal Synagogue,” the living embodiment and “sublimest expression” of Israel’s religious life. This change, apparently slight, was in fact a Copernican revolution from a universe in which the Jewish people was in orbit around God to one in which God, as it were, circled the Jewish people.
The individual who spelled out the radical implications was a young scholar who graduated from the Seminary in the year Schechter arrived, in 1902. Mordechai Kaplan was born in Lithuania in 1881, and came from a long line of Orthodox rabbis. As a child he arrived in New York where his father had been appointed a dayan. Kaplan was a prodigious scholar, and by the age of twenty-one had graduated not only from the Seminary but also from City College of New York and Columbia University, where he studied sociology and anthropology and came into contact with a new way of thinking about religion which was to transform his understanding of Judaism.
Kaplan’s first involvements were with Orthodoxy. At that time, neither the Seminary nor its associated congregations had yet coalesced into a distinctive movement, and some still saw it as the matrix of a future American modern Orthodoxy. One of its first administrators was Bernard Drachman, a follower of Samson Raphael Hirsch, and among the members of its first graduating class was the young Joseph H. Hertz, later to become Chief Rabbi of Britain. Kaplan was appointed spiritual leader of the wealthiest East European congregation in New York, Kehillat Jeshurun. An argument ensued as to whether his ordination from the Seminary constituted semikhah, rabbinic ordination in the traditional sense, and the community duly appointed a more traditional figure, Rabbi Moses Margolis, as its rabbi while Kaplan remained as its “minister.” Kaplan later obtained semikhah from Rabbi Isaac Reines, the Lithuanian scholar and leader of Mizrachi. Active among the new generation of Orthodox youth, Kaplan played a key part in creating Young Israel, the first organisation to represent an indigenous American Orthodoxy.
His own reflections, however, were leading him far from Jewish tradition. For a thoughtful individual, these were extraordinary and tragic times. The immigrant experience in New York was producing story after story of conflict between the generations. The parents spoke Yiddish, the children American. Fathers studied Talmud while the children played baseball. A non-Jewish journalist of the time, Lincoln Steffens, described a typical scene:
We would pass a synagogue where a score or more of boys were sitting hatless in their old clothes, smoking cigarettes on the steps outside, and their fathers, all dressed in black, were going into their synagogues, tearing their hair and rending their garments. The reporters stopped to laugh; and it was comic; the old men, in their thrift, tore the lapels of their coat very carefully, a very little, but they wept tears, real tears.
“It was,” writes Steffens, “a revolution. Their sons were rebels against the law of Moses; they were lost souls, lost to God, the family, and to Israel of old... Two, three, thousand years of continuous devotion, courage, and suffering for a cause lost in a generation.”
Just such a breakdown had led a number of Jews in Europe to vest their hopes for renewal in Zionism. Kaplan shared their enthusiasm. But this was America. The Jews amongst whom he lived had already made their journey from the “old home” and were not about to contemplate another. Aliyah was not a realistic option. Nonetheless, he believed, some of the same principles that had guided Zionist thinkers like Ahad Ha-am could be applied to American Jewry as well. But this would involve taking the traditional understanding of the relationship between Judaism and the Jewish people and turning it upside down.
Through his study of sociology, Kaplan had become familiar with the work of Emile Durkheim. Durkheim saw religion as a natural rather than supernatural phenomenon. It was a product of society, not of revelation. It was an instrument of social cohesion, a way in which communities expressed the moral codes which gave them coherence and a shared sense of purpose. This perspective accorded well with Ahad Ha-am’s translation of Judaism from a religion into a culture. Kaplan fully understood the radical nature of the course on which he was now embarked, and it was he who applied the adjective “Copernican” to the shift in his thought.
The centre of the Jewish universe was, he believed, not God but the Jewish people. It was the people who had produced the narratives, legends, rituals and folk-practices that went by the name of Judaism. Indeed far more was involved in Jewish identity than religion. It included history, language, literature in its broadest sense, aesthetic values and popular customs – everything that made Jews distinctive as a social group. Nor were there any rules or standards which made one practice more authentic or correct than another. Judaism was what Jews did. It was, in his famous phrase, the “evolving religious civilisation” of the Jewish people. Even the word “religious” was an afterthought, added at the insistence of some of his disciples. Despite the overlay of religious terminology, Kaplan had effectively secularised the idea of Jewish identity. As Arthur Cohen notes, he was supremely a “natural” rather than a “supernatural” Jew.
Before anyone else, and more profoundly than anyone else, Kaplan had reached an important conclusion about Jewish life in America. Jews might not be attached to Judaism, but they remained attached to the Jewish people. Young Jews were unwilling to attend synagogue, keep the commandments, or subscribe to the tenets of Jewish faith. They were hostile to their fathers, and to their fathers’ God. But they were not – as some of their German and Austrian counterparts had done – about to convert to Christianity. They stayed Jews, even while remaining part ignorant, part ambivalent, about what that meant. Kaplan was the first to recognise this phenomenon, give it systematic expression, and take it as the basis for a sustainable American-Jewish community. Though he did not use the phrase, he was the supreme exponent of a new Jewish ethnicity.
Kaplan did not flinch from spelling out the extreme consequences of his view. It meant abandoning two of Judaism’s most central beliefs, in God and the chosen people. His system left no room for a personal God who reveals and commands. At most, for Kaplan, God was “the power in nature and in man which makes for man’s this-worldly salvation.” Equally, the traditional concept of election had to be abandoned. Jews could not be the chosen people, partly because Kaplan did not believe in a God who could choose, and partly because it conflicted with the American notion of equality. Election is a religious idea, and can only be secularised into a theory of racial superiority which Kaplan rightly found repugnant. Jews were therefore to be seen, not as chosen, but simply as different. Their “chosenness” amounted to nothing more than a collective commitment to the survival of the group.
In putting matters this way Kaplan was moving toward an important observation about American society, though it was a contemporary of his, Horace Kallen, who gave it its name. Kallen was the first to challenge the “melting-pot” theory of America, the idea that new immigrants would melt and merge into a distinctive American identity on the lines of the great nation-states elsewhere. Instead he believed that they would and should retain their distinctive characters as sub-communities. America would be a “commonwealth” on the basis of its common language. But within it would exist a variety of “nationalities” – today we would call them ethnic groups – each with “its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own individual and inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms.” Kallen called his theory “cultural pluralism,” and it has been one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century. Kaplan, whose thought had been running on similar lines, applied it to the Jewish context. Intuitively he sensed that Jews could survive as an ethnic group in America because there was no single dominant culture into which they were bound to assimilate, and they would survive, because they wanted to.
But ethnicity needed a home. Kaplan was quick to realise that the synagogue, at least as it had been constructed hitherto in America, was inadequate to the new terms of Jewish group-survival. It was a house of prayer. But prayer played only a small part in his vision of Jewishness as a “civilisation” or ethnic subculture. In its place, Kaplan proposed a new kind of institution, the Jewish community centre, whose “humanist-cultural function” would be to provide a home for Jewish activities of all kinds, thus creating a new fabric of community based on “neighbourliness” rather than religion. The typical centre, as he envisaged it, would contain:
Jewish elementary school facilities; boys’ and girls’ clubs; recreational facilities such as gymnasia, showers, bowling alleys, pool tables and games rooms; adult study and art groups; communal activities; religious services and festival pageants and plays; informal meetings of friends and associates.
Kaplan had by now moved away from the Orthodox Kehillat Jeshurun and returned to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Schechter had appointed him head of its Teachers’ Institute. Ironically, though, it was once again to be in an Orthodox context that he was to put his ideas into practice. In 1917 he founded the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s West Side, the first synagogue to incorporate an assembly hall, a gymnasium, meeting rooms, classrooms and a swimming pool as well as a place of worship – the “shul with a pool” as it became known.
Within a few years his radical views forced his departure and he left to establish, only a few yards away, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. This, as its name implied, was no longer a synagogue in the conventional sense and for many years Kaplan resisted the title “rabbi.” He was, he insisted, only its “leader,” a term borrowed from the Ethical Culture movement. From then on, Kaplan developed his ideas and programmes in an increasingly revolutionary fashion, gathering around him at the Seminary a group of like-minded disciples who, between the 1920s and 1940s, found in him the most congenial ideologue of a new American Judaism. The name he chose for it was Reconstructionism.
More significant was the name he gave to his new vision of a community centre. The Talmud (Shabbat 32a) mentions with disapproval the fact that during the Mishnaic period some individuals called the synagogue not a beit knesset but a beit am, a “house of the people.” It was this name that Kaplan now revived. He was too much of a talmudist to have chosen it without being fully aware of what he was doing. What was revolutionary in his proposal was not that the synagogue would extend its scope to encompass the full range of Jewish social and educational activities. That, after all, had been the classic role of the synagogue for more than two thousand years. But it had remained a beit knesset, which is to say, the home of the Jewish community as it stood in the presence of God. By proposing to call his new Jewish centre a beit am, Kaplan was consciously secularising the community into an ethnic group whose activities were no longer directed to God, but to itself.
With this last step the full significance of Kaplan’s journey is now clear. Like Hirsch in nineteenth-century Germany, Kaplan found himself in the midst of a seismic disturbance at the core of Jewish identity. Am and edah were splitting apart: on the one hand Jews as a people, a nationality, an ethnicity, on the other Jewry as a religious group, a community of faith. The two, so long inseparable, were now moving at speed in different directions and could no longer be held together. Faced with the choice, Hirsch chose edah and Kaplan chose am. Hirsch built Adath Yisrael. Kaplan devised the beit am. These were the institutional embodiments of their profoundly opposed views of the future of Jewish life in an age of discontinuity.
Superficially, Kaplan’s achievement is hard to assess. He was never sure as to whether Reconstructionism should become a separate religious movement, or a particular style of Conservatism, or a meta-theory of American Jewry as a whole. Eventually it became all three. But its real significance, as Charles Liebman has observed, is that more than any other account, it accurately described the Jewish “folk religion” of America. Jews did prove highly committed to group survival, but without any accompanying commitment to religious practice or belief. They did go on to build Jewish community centres on the Kaplan model where they could meet and form networks of belonging, but their Judaic content was tenuous and weak. The most characteristic expressions of American-Jewish commitment – supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism – had more to do with a sense of peoplehood than faith.
In 1955, Will Herberg in his insightful book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, suggested that Jews had simply become more American than anyone else. The relentless pragmatism of America had turned almost all religion into a means rather than an end. Joining a synagogue or church was the suburban way of signalling good citizenship. Religion itself had become an instrument of personal fulfillment, cultural enrichment or group cohesiveness. It was no longer the “wholly Other,” an embodiment of objective truth, a voice from Heaven. “Not God but man – man in his individual and corporate being – is the beginning and end of the spiritual system of much of present-day American religiosity. In this kind of religion there is no sense of transcendence, no sense of the nothingness of man and his works before a holy God... In this kind of religion it is not man who serves God, but God who is mobilised and made to serve man and his purposes – whether these purposes be economic prosperity, free enterprise, social reform, democracy, happiness, security or ‘peace of mind.’” It was Kaplan’s distinctive, if ambivalent, accomplishment to be the person who more than any other took the is for an ought. That was how things were, and that for him was how things ought to be. Judaism was nothing other than the sum total of the ways Jews behaved and thought. This was the final conclusion implicit in Schechter’s enthronement of “Catholic Israel.”
Kaplan’s influence within the Jewish Theological Seminary waned after the Second World War. But it remained dominant among Jewish sociologists and communal workers of various kinds, and it resurfaced at the heart of a major argument in American Jewry in the 1980s. As evidence began to accumulate of the decline of religious observance and synagogue affiliation, a number of observers put forward the theory – known as “transformationism” – that Jewish life was not waning in America, merely changing. Jews were no longer expressing their Jewishness in traditional ways, but they were still meeting and mixing, and they were still measurably different from others. The argument owed everything to Kaplan and to the view that Jewishness has no prescriptive content. By the early 1990s, however, with Jewish intermarriage rates approaching six in ten, even the most confirmed transformationists were expressing doubts about the prospect of long-term American-Jewish continuity. Jewish group survival could not succeed without some reason to survive, and it is just this that Kaplan’s theory fails to provide.
Charles Liebman, one of American Jewry’s most perceptive observers, has consistently questioned the secular basis of Jewish ethnicity. We are wrong, he argues, to think of assimilation only in terms of individual Jews abandoning their identity. There can be structural assimilation, in which the Jewish community as a whole slowly loses its character and content. Liebman does not use the words am and edah, but in an analysis he wrote in 1973 his intention is clear. A Jewish community, he argues, cannot be other than one based, however imperfectly, on Torah. “I understand Torah, at its least, to mean that a Jew must submit himself to a set of laws and practices which exist objectively or in a reality which is not of his construction. Torah is outside of us and calls upon us for an affirmation to which we must respond. If my community or I fail to respond, then we are bad Jews. But if the community, in its collective sense, denies the existence of Torah, then we are not Jews.” A Jewish community which has lost its sense of edah is on its way to ceasing to be an am.