Survival Through Integration: American Reform Jewish Universalism And The Holocaust (Jewish Identities in a Changing World)

Survival Through Integration Jewish Identities in a Changing World General Editors Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yosef Gorn...

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Survival Through Integration

Jewish Identities in a Changing World

General Editors

Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yosef Gorny

VOLUME 4

Survival Through Integration American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust

By

Ofer Shiﬀ

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

This Series brings together contributions to the question of the unity versus conﬂict entrenched in the inﬁnite variety of collective identities illustrated by Jews in this era. The books of this series investigate the principles, narratives, visions and commands which constitute in diﬀerent places the essentials of Jewishness. They ask whether or not one is still allowed to speak, at the beginning of this new century, of one – single and singular – Jewish People. These investigations should yield an understanding of how far Judaism is still one while Jewishness is multifarious. The perspectives oﬀered may draw from sociology and the social sciences as well as from history and the humanities, in general. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available on the Library of Congress website: catalog.loc.gov LC control number: 2004057105

ISSN 1570-7997 ISBN 90 04 14109 X © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................ A. A Universalistic Perspective on Antisemitism and Zionism .............................................................................. B. The Modern Jewish Context ..........................................

1 1 5

PART I

INTEGRATION AND JEWISH SURVIVAL: THE FORMATIVE PERIOD IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Chapter One Before the Universalistic Coping Pattern Coalesced ................................................................................ A. Early Characteristics of the Universalistic American View .................................................................................. B. Universalistic Coping Patterns Start to Form ................ Chapter Two Transformation of the Universalistic Perspective into a Jewish Existential Ideology .................... A. The Reform Attitude toward the Traditional Identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel ........................................ B. The Eretz Israel Connection Aggravates an Internal Jewish Threat ....................................................................

11 11 19 33 33 41

PART II

VACILLATIONS BETWEEN ZIONISM AND ANTI-ZIONISM (1900–1930) Chapter Three Jewish Culture and Zionism as seen by “Veteran American” Jews .................................................... A. The Complex Challenge of the Zionist-Universalistic Ideology ............................................................................ B. Julian Morgenstern Encounters Jewish Culture and Zionism ............................................................................ C. An Escalating Threat to the Universalistic Jewish Sense of Belonging .......................................................... D. The Complexion of the Anti-Zionist Struggle Begins to Change ........................................................................

53 53 64 76 85

vi

contents PART III

COPING WITH THE CHALLENGES OF THE HOLOCAUST ERA: THE 1930S AND 1940S Chapter Four Intensifying Threats ........................................ A. Countering Particularistic Expressions of Jewish Valor and Solidarity .................................................................. B. The Dual Challenge of Ultra-Particularistic and Ultra-Universalistic Responses ........................................ C. In the Eye of the Storm ................................................ Chapter Five The Reform and American Jewish Context of the Universalistic Coping Pattern .................................... A. Investing Symbols of Jewish Solidarity with Universalistic Meaning .................................................... B. Americanizing the Response to Antisemitism ................ C. A Coping Pattern or an Escape Mechanism? ..............

99

125 139 147

Epilogue: The Universalistic Reform Pattern from a Historical Perspective ............................................................

159

Sources and Bibliography ..........................................................

169

Index of Names and Concepts ................................................

175

99 107 114 125

INTRODUCTION A. A Universalistic Perspective on Antisemitism and Zionism In October 1934 – twenty-one months after the Nazi accession in Germany – Hebrew Union College (HUC), the rabbinical academy of American Reform Judaism in Cincinnati, held its traditional annual lecture to inaugurate the academic year. The speaker that year, like every year since he had been chosen president of the college in 1922, was Dr. Julian Morgenstern. Morgenstern began by asking rhetorically whether the tragic events in Germany should change the universalistic Jewish worldview. In his response he inveighed against the conclusion adduced by the president of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Sokolow, who had claimed at the Zionist Congress the previous year that Hitlerism proved the Zionist claims, or as Morgenstern put it, that all Jews should now join “a deﬁnitely and positively particularistic interpretation of Judaism.” It was evident from the aggressive tenor of Morgenstern’s response that in his universalistic view the Zionist interpretation of the recent antisemitic events in Germany was the real challenge to Jewish survival, to some extent even more dangerous than the antisemitic events themselves.1 To substantiate his arguments, Morgenstern drew on his reputation as a world-renowned Bible scholar and likened the Zionist response to Nazism to the reforms carried out in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. As he construed the matter, these reforms – just like the Zionist response to Nazism – were an ultra-particularistic Jewish response to a physically and spiritually existential threat from hostile non-Jewish surroundings. According to Morgenstern, those reforms generally, and foremost the divorce of non-Jewish wives and banishment of their children, were “one of the blackest and most shameful incidents in our entire history.” In his view this was an expression of the nationalistic and particularistic principle, quite as drastic as present-day Nazism and with a not-altogether-diﬀerent purpose. He

1 Julian Morgenstern, “Judaism Accepts the Challenge,” October 1934, at the opening exercises of the Hebrew Union College Chapel, American Jewish Archives (AJA), MS Col. 30, 14/2.

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2

warned that Zionism might deteriorate into a similarly radical Jewish response and argued that it could not constitute an authentic and sustainable Jewish response to Nazism. Morgenstern, who continued to serve as president of HUC until 1947, remained true to these views and would repeat the comparison between the menace of the particularistic aspects of Zionism and Nazism, even after initial reports on the extermination of European Jews had begun to come in.2 Thus, Morgenstern regarded Jewish existence as threatened not only from without, by Nazism, but also, and equally, by a particularistic menace from within, i.e., a seclusionist Zionist response. In the 1930s and 1940s, he and colleagues of like mind in the American Reform Movement would consider it the principal Jewish existential challenge to formulate a universalistic Jewish response that could counter both types of threats concurrently. In the following chapters, we examine this point of view in terms of its origins and development over the hundred years preceding the Holocaust and the responses it produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Above all, we attempt to ﬁnd out why Zionism was perceived as a threat as severe as Nazism; how this perception developed; and what alternative non-Zionist responses were constructed to pave the way to a “positive” Jewish confrontation with the existential threat of the Holocaust. The premise underlying these questions is that the universalistic Reform response to the Holocaust was a spike in a continuum of attempts to confront escalating challenges of antisemitism and Jewish particularism. In other words, the Reform pattern of response during the Holocaust was part of an anti-particularistic ideological concept that had developed before the Holocaust,3 and sought in its own way to respond to modern challenges to Jewish survival and continuity. The ﬁrst methodological implication of this premise pertains to the periodization in this study. The ﬁrst part (Chapters 1 and 2)

2

Ibid., pp. 4–5; Julian Morgenstern, “Nation, People, Religion – What Are We,” an address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the College Chapel, before faculty and students, October 16, 1943 (reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 374–378). 3 For discussion of similar approaches that examine the 1930s and 1940s as part of ideological concepts that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 10, no. 3 (October 1990), pp. 355–356; Gulie Ne’eman Arad, America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 2000.

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3

brieﬂy explores the sociohistorical background and evolution of the “universalistic outlook,” primarily in the 1800s. The second section (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on the ﬁrst three decades of the twentieth century, explores the growing signiﬁcance of the dual threat of antisemitism and Jewish particularism, and examines the tools that the universalistic ideology developed to tackle this threat. Despite the importance of the ﬁrst two sections, they take up only about a third of the study and, unlike the third and central section, are based only on interpretations of known primary sources and existing studies. The third and main section (Chapters 5 and 6) focuses on the 1930s and 1940s, tests the relevance of the coping mechanisms that the universalistic ideology had developed by then, and examines how these tools confronted the twin threats of antisemitism and Zionism, both of which reached pinnacles at that time. The second methodological implication pertains to the focus of the third part of the study on Julian Morgenstern – who represented the most markedly universalistic ﬂank of the Reform Movement – and to the relative disregard of other well-known Reform leaders, especially those representing the more particularistic ﬂank and belonging to the Zionist movement. To explain this preoccupation with a universalistic leader like Morgenstern, one must ﬁrst note several universalistic characteristics of the Reform ideology. The Reform view – shared by all ﬂanks of the movement – treated the universalistic ideas ﬂowing from the monotheistic religious faith4 as the basis of Jewish survival. According to the Reform, the universalistic ideas represent the Jewish contribution to world civilization and deﬁne the perennial “Jewish mind” or “genius.” Thus, according to the Reform perception, universalism is the source of the creative dynamism that allowed Judaism to develop and cope with surrounding cultures without assimilating into them and without forfeiting its physical and spiritual uniqueness. The positive meaning that the Reform ideology lent to Jewish integration into the surrounding cultures and the threat that it attributed to anything that jeopardized this process are important components

4 One may wonder whether the principles termed “universalistic” by Reform thinkers are not in fact synonymous with the dominant values of the American Constitution and ways of life. From the standpoint of this study, this uncertainty is crucially important only for the question of how these “universalistic” or “American” principles became the basis of an ideology of Jewish continuity.

4

introduction

of this perception. From the standpoint of Reform ideology, social integration is a way of ensuring Jewish continuity as part of the “mission” that Judaism has been urged to pursue since the dawn of history, i.e., to spread the universalistic message to all humankind.5 According to this approach, the very existence of Judaism and the fulﬁllment of its spiritual purpose hinge on its ability to integrate into its surroundings willingly, to maintain relations of reciprocal trust with these surroundings, and to assimilate their culture and values actively. Exponents of this approach regard all challenges that might imperil the integration process, whether endogenous (e.g., particularistic Jewish outlooks) or exogenous (e.g., antisemitism), as the principal menace to Jewish continuity. In their view, these challenges threaten to sever Judaism from its sources of vitality, leaving it desiccated and unable to attain its spiritual and ethical goals. Morgenstern represented the nearly total reliance of Reform universalism on integration as the basis for Jewish existence. I maintain that one can best gauge the ideological hardship that the movement encountered in the 1930s and 1940s by viewing it through the prism of those who, like Morgenstern, regarded integration as crucial, even when it was most diﬃcult to cling to the optimistic belief in the possibility of relations of reciprocal trust between Jews and non-Jews, and when it was even harder to continue viewing integration and voluntary assimilation as sanctiﬁed principles of Jewish ideology. Moreover, as the Zionist movement gathered strength among American Jews and within the Reform Movement, it was almost impossible for Reform leaders to continue describing Zionism as no less a threat to Jewish survival than antisemitism and Nazism. In this respect, the study examines the point of view of the most conclusively defeated members of the Reform Movement, those whose basic universalistic assumptions were threatened by the Holocaust and who had maneuvered themselves into a cul-de-sac in their struggle with what they perceived as the growing threat of Zionism. The way they coped with the particularistic challenges may shed light on Reform groups that were less extreme in their universalistic beliefs.

5 For a detailed discussion of the importance of the “Mission” idea in Reform ideology, see Allon Gal, The Changing Concept of “Mission” in American Reform Judaism, Cincinnati, 1991.

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5

This study does not purport to judge how well Jewish universalism coped with the Holocaust.6 Rather, it contemplates that era from the subjective angle of the most pronounced exponent of the universalistic Reform ideology. Those who, like Morgenstern, attempted to maintain unquestioning fealty to universalistic Reform principles even in view of the disheartening events of the 1930s and 1940s are the heroes of the plot that unfolds here; their struggle for their beliefs is the focal point of this study. B. The Modern Jewish Context Despite their diﬀerences, the perceptions of the Reform Movement and the Zionist movement both reﬂected the quest for “normalization” that aspired to cope with the crisis of Jewish identity in the modern era. This crisis originated in the exposure of Jewish society in central and, subsequently, eastern Europe to the ideas of the Haskalah and hopes of emancipation, which left Jewish individuals torn between their particularistic Jewish identity and their universal civic identity. In the main, the crisis reﬂected the Jews’ modern desire to integrate into the surrounding society without having to repudiate their Jewish identity, or – to put it diﬀerently – to remain loyal to their Jewish identity without being forced to accept an inferior status as “outsiders” in their non-Jewish surroundings. The struggle to harmonize the Jewish-particularistic and civic-universal components of the modern Jewish identity was characteristic of both Reform and Zionism. A basic premise in this work is that all Jewish coping mechanisms that were based on profound faith in the Jews’ ability to achieve this harmonization should be considered part of one group. Their optimism distinguishes these approaches

6 Unlike many studies that explore the American Jewish response to the Holocaust, this study does not focus on the question of whether American Jews did “enough” in terms of rescue and relief actions. For some examples of studies on this subject, see: Henry L. Feingold, “Did American Jewry Do Enough during the Holocaust?” The B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies (April 1985); A Time for Searching – Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945, Baltimore and London, 1922, p. 225. For additional examples of research on this topic, see Raphael Medoﬀ, The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust, New York, 1987; Haskel Lookstein, Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938–1944, New York, 1985; Peter Novick, the Holocaust in American Life, Boston and New York, 1999, pp. 39–46; Gulie Ne’eman Arad, America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism.

6

introduction

from pessimistic approaches that chose to confront the crisis of modernity in one direction only, the universalistic or the particularistic. The latter attitudes, whether they wished to insulate Judaism from the eﬀects of modernity, as the haredim (“ultra-Orthodox”) did, or espoused assimilation and renunciation of Jewish identity, were materially diﬀerent from both Zionism and Reform in that they rejected the possibility of achieving the universalistic-particularistic harmonization. A brief discussion of terms coined by Yosef Gorny in his study The Search for National Identity7 may elucidate the emphasis on the optimism shared by Reform Judaism and Zionism. Gorny distinguishes among three concepts: “general normalization,” “particular normalization,” and “Jewish normalization.” The second concept expresses a complex aim: to synthesize the universalistic element of civil equality for individual Jews with the particularistic element of Jewish solidarity.8 In analyzing the universalistic Reform ideology, this study presumes that the Reform Movement, by virtue of its self-deﬁnition as an ideology of Jewish existence, had to anchor its integrationist aspirations in an eﬀort to harmonize the universalistic and the particularistic.9 Reform universalism was therefore inevitably immersed in a Sisyphean struggle to harmonize the twin aspirations of “particular normalization.” The ascendancy of Nazism and the agonies of European Jewry merely underscored this basic characteristic of the struggle.10

7 Yosef Gorny, The Search for Collective Identity, The Place of the State of Israel in Jewish Public Thinking 1945–1987, Tel Aviv, 1990 (Hebrew). 8 Ibid., pp. 21–56. For a somewhat similar conceptualization, see Gideon Shimoni, “Jewish Nationalism as an Ethnic Nationalism,” Jehuda Reinharz, Yosef Salmon, and Gideon Shimoni, eds., Jewish Nationalism and Politics, New Perspectives, Jerusalem, 1997 (Hebrew), pp. 81–92. Shimoni says that a Jewish intelligentsia that resides within a dual framework of reference – between an ethnic group and a modernizationagent state – has three options. The ﬁrst option is “assimilationist,” i.e., “integrationist.” The second option, the one that gives nationhood its contours, is “reformist” or, to use Shimoni’s term, “transformistic.” The third option is “neotraditional,” denoting a retreat to religious traditionalism. 9 For an example of a similar approach, see Charles Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew, Philadelphia, 1973, p. 26. Liebman argues that it would be unwise to deﬁne even the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism as an organization that aims solely to assimilate. Were this the Council’s only goal, Liebman asks, why did its members organize as a Jewish group? 10 The present study, as explained in the third and central part of this book, argues that the Reform Movement’s rapprochement with Zionist ideas in the 1930s and 1940s did not necessarily mark a substantive change in its basic universalistic ideology. Indeed, when one examines this development from the point of view of those, like Morgenstern, who continued to ﬁght for the principles of the universal-

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7

Furthermore, in this basic respect there was no substantive diﬀerence in the type of challenge that the Holocaust presented to American Reform Judaism and Zionism.11 In both cases, the antisemitic threat was identiﬁed with the danger of widening the particularistic-universalistic dichotomy. In both cases this threat stemmed not only from the exogenous Nazi challenge but also from pessimistic Jewish responses that saw the Holocaust as demonstrating the impossibility of universalistic-particularistic harmonization. Within both movements, ﬁerce opposition developed in response to such “extreme” particularistic Jewish trends that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, preached selfseclusion and the construction of a rampart between Judaism and the ideas of the Emancipation. Equally, voices in both movements categorically rejected “extreme” universalistic Jewish trends that aspired to obliterate Jewish singularity altogether; these were perceived as manifestations of Jewish self-hatred. In this light, the present study may be said to explore the pattern of coping with the particularistic-universalistic contrast created by the Holocaust – a contrast that aﬀected not only the Reform Movement but all currents that embraced the optimistic modern Jewish outlook. The way that Reform universalism coped with the Holocaust is a good illustration of this aspect, precisely because of its total reliance on Jewish-Gentile coexistence as the basis for Jewish existence. The way Reform Jews defended their optimistic belief may illuminate an important aspect of how all the optimistic modern Jewish currents, including Zionism, coped with the Holocaust. Thus, the general context of concern in this study is how the “modern Jewish optimistic believer” attempts, despite the Holocaust, to avoid choosing between separatism from non-Jewish surroundings

istic ideology, one may regard this rapprochement not as the “victory of Zionism” but as part of a Reform universalistic attempt, more than a century long, to neutralize the separatist-particularistic premises of rival Jewish survival doctrines and to oﬀer a universalistic identity model in their stead. 11 Although its doctrine set it in almost direct opposition to Zionism, the universalistic Reform perspective largely paralleled Zionism in its concern for the collective struggle for Jewish survival and continuity during the Holocaust. Following the terminology set forth by the historian and Holocaust scholar Dan Michman – the universalistic perspective that this study presents should be characterized as one that, like Zionism, took no issue with the belief that alongside individual rescue, one must give thought to collective deliverance and survival as well. See discussion in Dan Michman, The Holocaust and Holocaust Research, Tel Aviv, 1998, pp. 261–265 (Hebrew).

8

introduction

and total rejection of Jewish solidarity. To examine this, the discussion of the Reform Movement’s pattern of coping with the Holocaust focuses not on the imperative of physical struggle against Nazism, nor on the need to provide European Jewry with relief. Instead, the central concern of this study is the basic diﬃculty in crafting a Jewish response that can “prove” the vitality and the very possibility of the universalistic-particularistic harmonization in view of the ultra-reactionary nature of the Holocaust. The complex coping mechanism adopted by those who most audibly expressed the optimistic element of modern Jewish belief in response to the challenge of the Holocaust is the central theme of this study.

PART I

INTEGRATION AND JEWISH SURVIVAL: THE FORMATIVE PERIOD IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER ONE

BEFORE THE UNIVERSALISTIC COPING PATTERN COALESCED A. Early Characteristics of the Universalistic American View It was 1822 – election year in New York City. The oﬃce of municipal sheriﬀ was up for grabs, and the incumbent was a Jew, Mordecai Manuel Noah. When the votes were counted, it transpired that Noah, the most prominent Jewish leader in American public life at the time and the candidate-by-consensus of the coalition headed by the ruling Democratic Party, had received only 41 percent of the ballots and was turned out of oﬃce. One of the main reasons for his electoral failure was the opposition’s antisemitic campaign, which stressed the danger that “the Jew Noah” would impose his dominion on the Christian inhabitants of New York. Although Noah did not ﬂinch from confrontation with this campaign tactic, he chose to wage the confrontation in a way that would not further aggravate the diﬀerences between Jews and Christians. He used his position as editor of the Democratic Party newspaper, the National Advocate, to respond to the antisemitic charges from a general American point of view and not that of a beleaguered Jewish victim. He warned voters that charges of a religious nature might one day be turned against them, too – in fact, against each and every American: “Persecute a Jew today and the next day, you will commence with a Catholic and the third with a Quaker.”1 This was not the ﬁrst time that Noah had to defend himself against manipulative use of his Jewish origin. Seven years earlier, in 1815, the State Department had used his Jewishness as a reason to dismiss him as the American consul in Tunis. Then, too, he did not hesitate to transform this circumstance into a public debate over the principle of using religion to disqualify a candidate for public oﬃce. In both cases, Noah tackled the matter from an “Americanist” angle

1 Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew – The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah, New York and London, 1980, pp. 44–46.

12

chapter one

as the defender of sacred American principles of religious freedom and equal opportunity, and not as a member of a minority group. Another pronounced manifestation of this pattern was a protest letter to U.S. Secretary of State James Monroe from Isaac Harby, a Jewish journalist and playwright and one of the prominent ideologues in the ﬁrst American Jewish attempt at religious reform in Charleston, South Carolina. Harby wrote ﬁercely against Noah’s dismissal as consul and stated that his and Noah’s shared American civic aﬃliation, not the Jewish one, was the connection that mattered in this case. “I am not only Mr. Noah’s co-religionaire,” he noted; “I am his fellow citizen. The latter relation is, in my mind, inﬁnitely stronger than the former.”2 Thus, at this early juncture – the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, even before a cohesive universalistic Reform ideology developed – one may discern an American Jewish pattern of response based on belief in general American values as the best way to overcome antisemitism and anti-Jewish prejudice. Even in that early phase, this pattern was accompanied by an almost devotional attitude toward America as the bearer of values of freedom and pluralism and as the ideal environment for the assurance of long-term Jewish survival. The ﬁrst part of this study explores questions surrounding this outlook: Why and how did the American Jewish response to antisemitism, as invoked by Noah and Harby, become the basis of a universalistic ideology of Jewish existence, as occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century in American Reform Judaism? Why did the pattern of response chosen by Noah and Harby not develop into a totally universalistic abandonment of particularistic Jewish solidarity? Why, when faced with the threat of antisemitism, did those who espoused this pattern adopt a complex approach that sought to express two clashing goals concurrently – a general American point of view and particularistic Jewish identiﬁcation? The answer to these questions should be divided into two parts. At the ﬁrst level, the transformation of the American Jewish response to antisemitism into a “positive” ideology of Jewish existence should be explained within the context of the modern Jewish aspiration to integrate into the non-Jewish surroundings without repudiating one’s

2 Ibid., pp. 15–33; Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity – A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, New York and Oxford, 1990, pp. 229–230, n. 12.

before the coping pattern coalesced

13

Jewish identity. However, this broad context cannot explain the special role that faith in “America” played in the formation of the universalistic ideology of Jewish existence. One must still consider the extent to which the American surroundings inﬂuenced the development of a singular modern Jewish universalistic ideology. To deal with this second level, we have to focus on the singular nature of the Jewish experience in the United States and, especially, on characteristics that set it apart from the typical Jewish experience in Europe. It is these characteristics3 that transformed the trustful attitude toward America into something approximating religious faith, as was already evident in the outlooks of Noah and Harby. In the second half of the nineteenth century, these characteristics would become a focal point of the universalistic outlook on Jewish existence embraced by the American Reform doctrine. Especially noteworthy in this context are those American social traits that minimized what elsewhere was an impassable barrier to Jewish-Gentile relations. Notable among them were the relative absence of a medieval, pre-Emancipation heritage of “Jewish foreignness” in American society and, concurrently, the scarcity of powerful, authoritative ﬁgures within American Jewry who could defend the traditional patterns and frameworks. Alongside the relative weakness of factors that might impede the blurring of diﬀerences between Jews and non-Jews, there were also proactive indicators that fostered Jews’ hopes of integrating. Because America is an immigrant society; the Jews are only one stone in a mosaic of “foreignness” that they share with many diverse immigrant groups. Furthermore, the equal-opportunity ethos built into the U.S. Constitution was perceived by Jews, as well as other Americans, as a liberating factor from the opposing reality of the Old World. Moreover, no dominant group had managed to institutionalize the American way of life and cast it in its ﬁnal form. Therefore, the Jews, like other groups, could feel that they had the power to inﬂuence the contours of that way of life.

3 For an analysis of the historical and social factors on which the belief in the singularity of “America” are based, see Ben Halpern, The American Jew, New York, 1956, reprinted under the title “America is Diﬀerent” in The Jews – Social Patterns of an American Group, Marshall Sklare, ed., New York and London, 1958, pp. 23–39; Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 225–227.

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chapter one

Thus, the American milieu encouraged Jews to believe not only in the possibility of overcoming antisemitism and achieving integration, but also in the possibility of transforming the American values of freedom of religion and equal opportunity into a basis for Jewish continuity. As part of this faith, Jews sought to tailor their Jewish identity to American pluralism and equal opportunity and cleanse it of all residues of Old World separatism and foreignness. By the same token, however, allegiance to the American democratic worldview served as a powerful impediment to radical universalistic responses that might have been construed as expressing Jewish self-abnegation. The universalistic American pattern viewed ultra-assimilationist responses not only as betrayals of the Jewish heritage but also as a forfeit of the American dream of equal opportunity irrespective of religious aﬃliation. Consequently, whenever the universalism was perceived as so radical as to amount to a repudiation of Jewish identity, internal forces in American Jewry usually rose up, described the new leaning as a threat to their belief in America, and tried to fashion a particularistic counterweight to the threatening trend. This complexity in the universalistic American pattern was quite noticeable in relation to the traditional Jewish attachment to Eretz Israel (Palestine), especially when Jews perceived this attachment as the ultimate response to the hostility of non-Jewish society. From the universalistic American perspective, both encouragement and repudiation of the traditional connection with Eretz Israel were considered hazardous. On the one hand, the pessimistic implications of the traditional religious outlook posed a clear danger. In no way could the universalistic approach accept the use of Eretz Israel to preach against acculturation and integration in America. On the other hand, repudiation of the profound connection that had endured for generations was also impossible since it might be construed as repudiation of any connection to Jewish history and destiny. From the universalistic American angle, both approaches were perceived as pessimistic expressions of disbelief in the ability of America to serve as a basis for Jewish continuity. Since both adherence to and absolute rejection of the traditional conception were considered hazardous, it became necessary to devise a pattern of identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel that had an alternative, universalistic-Jewish meaning. At this early juncture, in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, only the ﬁrst indications of such attempts were visible. The diﬃculty of using the particularistic Jewish con-

before the coping pattern coalesced

15

nection with Eretz Israel to fashion a universalistic existential approach was daunting. This was evident as early as Noah’s 1825 attempt to establish a Jewish colony called Ararat in upstate New York.4 The idea behind this endeavor was to create a city of refuge and a basis for Jewish governance within the United States as an interim stage in preparing Jews for their return to Eretz Israel. The initiative was never fulﬁlled, apart from an impressive cornerstone-laying ceremony and the phrasing of a statement of principles by which the future Jewish government of the colony would operate. For the purposes of our discussion, the initiative is of interest mainly as the ﬁrst attempt to invest the traditional Jewish attachment to Eretz Israel with an alternative universalistic American meaning – basing Jewish identity on integration in America and on the internalization of American values. From the outset of his initiative, Noah had to contend with Harby’s claim that the establishment of the Jewish colony clashed with the universalistic faith in America. In his ﬁrst sermon after the establishment of the Reformed Society of Israelites in Charleston, Harby proclaimed America to be the “promised land” and, accordingly, delegitimized hopes of the formation of a Jewish state, be it in the “parched desert” of Palestine or the “marshes” of Grand Island, New York.5 To counter this assertion, Noah argued that his initiative advocated the dual goal of integration and separatism within American society at large. As the historian Jonathan Sarna noted correctly, Noah could not explain how he would resolve the serious internal contradictions that beset his plan. His promise to achieve integration and segregation simultaneously made Ararat the kind of utopia that seemed unlikely to pass the test of reality.6 However, his initiative had several important components that would be repeated in every future attempt to tackle this issue from a universalistic Jewish point of view.

4

Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, pp. 61–75. Harby gave his sermon in November 1825. Importantly, despite his opposition to Noah’s initiative, Harby himself was willing to view the Eretz Israel option favorably in case antisemitism in the United States proved insurmountable. See L. C. Moise, Biography of Isaac Harby, Macon, GA, 1931, pp. 99–121; Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 230. 6 Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, pp. 71–72. 5

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Particularly noteworthy was Noah’s claim that America was the ideal environment for an internal Jewish reform that would render the Jews worthy and capable of dominion in Palestine. This internal reform would productivize the Jews in the occupational sense and inculcate them with liberal American values. This faith in the favorable inﬂuence of America also explains why Noah regarded Ararat as the “new Jerusalem” – an American surrogate for Palestine – in his ﬁrst four years of eﬀorts to marshal support for his initiative, i.e., until 1824. Only in 1825, as the date of the cornerstone-laying ceremony approached, did he admit that the centrality of Eretz Israel as a focal point of Jewish identiﬁcation could not be ignored. Accordingly, he stipulated that Ararat would be merely a temporary training site in advance of future statehood in the Land of the Patriarchs. By so doing, Noah acknowledged not only the immutability of the traditional attachment to Eretz Israel but also the need to invest it with an alternative universalistic American meaning. He tried to reconcile the model of governance of the biblical judges with the democratic principles of the United States and, therefore, to bruit this model as a form of governance for the future Jewish state. (He reserved the oﬃce of “judge” for himself.) Noah’s repeated emphasis of the beneﬁt the United States would gain from the existence of a Jewish colony-state may also be viewed as an attempt to prove that the Ararat initiative and the Eretz Israel connection represent a harmonization of, and not a clash between, the particularistic Jewish interest and the general American interest. Finally, Noah’s accentuation of the philanthropic aspects of Ararat as a “city of refuge for the persecuted” – as he inscribed on its cornerstone – is noteworthy. This emphasis was predicated on the centrality of philanthropy in both American society and Jewish tradition. This dual tradition made philanthropy an important starting point for the development of an alternative universalistic American meaning for the traditional religious attachment to Eretz Israel. Philanthropy had the important advantage of facilitating the transformation of identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel from the separatist religious-traditional pattern to a modern universalistic pattern that placed greater emphasis on strengthening trust in and belonging to American society. Philanthropy was a major element in the traditional religious relationship between Diaspora Jewry and the Jews of Palestine, and as long as it retained this status, one could argue that the introduction of sweeping changes in the relationship was not a deviation from

before the coping pattern coalesced

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Jewish tradition. This also helps explain why many Jews of that era, both in America and in the Old World, whether loyal to traditional attitudes or eager to overturn them, participated in attempts to modify the traditional philanthropic patterns of halukka, i.e., the distribution of alms. This general framework, however, had an additional and uniquely American context: the various kinds of “reformed” philanthropic activity not only embodied traditional Jewish values but also exalted American values of civic responsibility and equal opportunity.7 Accordingly, philanthropic activity, whether on behalf of American or non-American Jews, quickly became one of the main ways of proving that the two value systems, the Jewish and the American, were harmonized and interdependent. It allowed American Jews to participate actively in building a ramiﬁed network of welfare institutions that quickly became the backbone of the Jewish community, and to express by this very action their adherence to the American way of life. Above all, it equipped American Jews to cope positively with antisemitism without allowing their struggle to underscore the distance between Jewish and general American solidarity. The earliest example of this use of philanthropy occurred in the embryonic stage of development of American Jewry, in 1655, or at least in the subsequent interpretation that American Jews lent to the account from that time. The ﬁrst group of twenty-three Jewish settlers in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (subsequently New York), needing to overcome the anti-Jewish hostility of the governor and the Christian settlers, had to pledge that the indigent among them would not become economic burdens on the Dutch settler society or the colony.8 In later years, American Jews presented this 7 An important characteristic of American philanthropy was the broad American public support of philanthropy as an expression of civic and community responsibility. In view of this outlook, the Jewish community could develop a ramiﬁed network of philanthropic institutions and depict this as an act of American civic responsibility. This network included welfare institutions such as hospitals, orphanages, old-age homes, and, no less important, benevolent societies for needy Jews anywhere, including Palestine. American philanthropy also enabled nouveaux riches to gain legitimacy and high social status by means of philanthropic activity on the community’s behalf, almost irrespective of their class origin or the way they obtained their wealth. This was especially important for American Jews who wished to overcome the stigmas that had beset them in the Old World and to earn esteem and legitimacy from American society at large. For discussion of the characteristics and values of American philanthropy, see Robert H. Bremner, American Philanthropy, Chicago, 1960, pp. 43–45. 8 Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875, New York, 1971, pp. 4–5.

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undertaking as a model of “American behavior” and cited it as evidence against the antisemitic depiction of Jews as parasites who exploit the Christian majority. More important, it marked the beginning of a pattern of “Jewish response” to antisemitism that relied on philanthropic activity. An interesting example of this trend of thought was a statement in 1880 in the American Hebrew, portraying philanthropy as the most eﬀective weapon against antisemitism: The Jew might take the clamorous antisemite by the hand, show him the hospitals, orphan homes, charity schools, founded and sustained by Jewish money, Jewish labor, Jewish public spirit . . . and say to him: “If you have any sick, and aged, any children who cannot ﬁnd help elsewhere, here we shall have room for them, and they are welcome.” What has the antisemite to answer? No, no, antisemitism cannot survive. It must perish in shame.9

A similar and even more conspicuous use of philanthropic activity as a demonstration of the underlying “American spirit” of Jewish solidarity can be seen in the eﬀort to give the Jewish connection with Eretz Israel an alternative universalistic meaning. Here again, the proponents of this approach had a double task: debunking the antisemitic charge that the Jews were disloyal foreign implants in the American body and, no less important, presenting a counterclaim that would demonstrate the American spirit embedded in Jewish identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel. Until this universalistic American approach materialized, however, the early American Jewish pattern of philanthropic support for Palestine was fundamentally no diﬀerent from the age-old traditional religious approach that all Diaspora communities accepted. Only gradually, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as American Jews found it increasingly necessary to lend the integration process positive Jewish existential meaning, did this pattern acquire its unique universalistic American interpretations. 9 The American Hebrew, March 5, 1880, quoted in Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, The German Jews in the United States 1830–1914, Philadelphia, 1984, pp. 116–117. For additional examples of philanthropy as an instrument in the war against antisemitism, see the sermons of the Reform rabbis Emil Hirsch and Kaufmann Kohler, as quoted in Naomi W. Cohen, “The Challenges of Darwinism and Biblical Criticism to American Judaism,” Modern Judaism 4 (May 1984), p. 139. For further discussion on this topic, see letter to the editor, published in the Boston Jewish Advocate, January 23, 1947, as quoted in Ofer Shiﬀ, “Survival Through Integration: American Jewish Responses to Antisemitism and Zionism,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Brandeis University, 1994, pp. 23–23.

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B. Universalistic Coping Patterns Start to Form The early American pattern of philanthropic support for Jews in Palestine was based on a clear contrast of two indicators: the sanctity and spiritual importance of Eretz Israel and the essential incompleteness of Jewish life in the Diaspora. From this traditional religious perspective, support for Jews in Palestine represents the observance of an important Jewish commandment that, in a sense, oﬀers a spiritual way of coping with the existential problems of exile. One of the earliest manifestations of this perception among American Jews was provided by Noah in 1848 in a sermon at Congregation She’erith Israel in honor of a fundraising emissary from Eretz Israel, Yechiel Hakohen: It has been said that the Jews at Jerusalem are indolent, disinclined to labor, are only employed in studying the law, and devoting all their hours to prayer, and prefer to lead a life of dependence and want to one of prosperous active industry. I thank them that they do so. Amid our worldly cares, [our] pursuit of gain, our limited knowledge of our holy faith . . . I am thankful that there is a holy band of brotherhood at Zion, whose nights and days are devoted to our sublime laws, our venerable institutions. . . . I think it our duty and our interest to share our means with them – to repay them with the bread of life, for aiding us with the bread of salvation.10

Clearly, Noah’s sermon aimed to defend the traditional pattern of halukka from criticism that had already become audible by then. In the second half of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth century, this favorable attitude toward halukka was unexceptional; it was manifested in the support that American Jews had been giving since 1759 to a dozen or so emissaries from Eretz Israel.11 10 Mordecai M. Noah, Address Delivered at the Hebrew Synagogue in Crosby-Street, NewYork, on Thanksgiving Day to Aid in the Erection of the Temple at Jerusalem, Kingston, Jamaica, 1849, p. 8, quoted in Jonathan D. Sarna, “A Projection of America as It Ought to Be: Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews,” Allon Gal, ed., Envisioning Israel, Jerusalem and Detroit, 1996, pp. 45–46. 11 The frequency of known fundraising trips by “rabbinical emissaries” to America shows that such trips were a widespread phenomenon. The “emissaries” and their visits included Moshe Malki (1759), Chaim Yitzhak Krigel (1771), Shmuel Hacohen (1772), Aharon Yehuda Korkus and Yisrael Ze’ev Ashkenazi (1823), Rabi Yitzhaki (1825), Hanoch Sondel (1832), Yechiel Cohen, Yosef Schwartz, Zadok Levi, and Aharon Selig (1848–1849), Nahum Cohen (1857), Avraham Nisan (1861), Aryeh Leib Cohen (1867), and Natan Netta Notkin (1867–1869, 1876–1879). See David De Sola Pool, “Early Relations between Palestine and American Jewry,” The Brandeis

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One of these emissaries’ most conspicuous supporters was Isaac Leeser, the founder and editor of the Jewish newspaper The Occident.12 Although personally lacking in systematic rabbinical schooling, Leeser was considered a spokesman of the Orthodox approach in the United States.13 In 1844, for example, he vocally criticized Noah’s call to help Christians establish a Jewish state in Palestine; one of his reasons was his opposition to actions that aimed to expedite the Redemption by human means. At the same time, however, he enthusiastically supported purely philanthropic enterprises. In 1849, he wrote a moving letter of recommendation in the log of the emissary Aharon Zelig, imploring American Jews to establish special societies that would remit annual donations to aid the poor in Palestine.14 This combination of fostering hopes of messianic redemption while also supporting philanthropic relief for Jews in Palestine reﬂected the traditional religious pattern. Although in the late 1850s Leeser toned down his opposition to practical action to reconstitute a Jewish state in Palestine, this combination still lay at the heart of his perception of the spiritual role of Eretz Israel in sustaining Jewish existence in the Diaspora.15 According to Leeser, the main role of the Eretz Israel connection was to serve the Jews as a beacon for a spiritual coping pattern that would enable them to survive the grim reality of foreignness and exile. Thus, the problem that Leeser was addressing was not the same as the typical dilemma of modern Jewish identity.

Avukah Annual of 1932, Joseph S. Shubow, ed., Boston, 1932, pp. 536–548; David De Sola Pool and Tamar De Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World, New York, 1955, pp. 396–405; Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, “Palestinian Messengers in America, 1948–79: A Record of Four Journeys,” Jewish Social Studies (Winter 1937), reprinted in S. W. Baron, Steeled by Adversity, Philadelphia, 1971, pp. 158–266. 12 The most recent and thorough study on Leeser’s life and endeavors is Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, Detroit, 1995. 13 For discussion on Leeser’s views as a representative of the Orthodox outlook, see Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 134–135, 162, 194–195, 246–247. 14 The Occident, Vol. II, no. 12 (March 1845), pp. 600–606; Maxine S. Seller, “Isaac Leeser’s View on the Restoration of a Jewish Palestine,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly ( June 1969), pp. 122–123; Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, ibid., pp. 125–126. 15 Lance Sussman argues that from the early phase of the debate with Noah, Leeser’s approach had a modern core that gathered strength after 1848. Even Sussman, however, admits that this “modern” approach was based on a traditional Jewish theology and that even later in his life Leeser continued to resist any change in the doctrine of believing in Messianic redemption. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 144–145, 165–166, 170–171.

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His was not an attempt to reconcile two clashing aspirations – integration and separatism – but an attempt to reconcile the aim of achieving a utopia of religious redemption with the misery and corporeality that typify the state of exile.16 Indeed, the traditional religious pattern that Leeser expressed at the beginning of his career was not a product of the modern era or the American milieu. It originated in the pre-Emancipation era, when hostility from non-Jews and antisemitic eruptions caused Jews to feel “disillusionment” on the religious plane but not on the sociopolitical one. By operating at the religious level, the traditional pattern sought to invest the concrete reality of the agonies of exile with the greater signiﬁcance of hope and Redemption. As Gershom Scholem, the noted scholar of Jewish mysticism, explained it, the veriﬁcation of the historical experience did not attenuate the religious virtue of the perception of exile.17 This trend of thinking was particularly salient with respect to Eretz Israel. The messianic hopes that reﬂected the religious and spiritual relationship with Eretz Israel invested the corporeality and misery of Jewish life in exile with a meaning that ameliorated this reality, if it did not negate it. In many senses, however, the messianic religious hopes were a silver lining in a cloud: though crucial for Jewish survival in the Diaspora, they could sow immense destruction. The very process of strengthening faith in messianic religious redemption carried tremendous potential danger. It was liable to whet the believers’ motivation to try to fulﬁll the hope of Redemption by means of actions that might undermine the traditional community way of life. Accordingly, for the sake of stability in Jewish life, the traditional religious Jewish community had to erect defenses that would strike a balance between the two clashing imperatives: that of fostering the messianic religious faith in imminent Redemption and that of neutralizing the destructive potential of action meant to fulﬁll this hope. Here, then, is the

16 For an explanation using the cognitive dissonance mechanism of believers in Jewish religious Redemption coped with the disheartening reality, see Ofer Shiﬀ, “The Messianic Drive and Its Realization in the Sermons of Rabbi Klonimus Shappiro during the Holocaust”, thesis for the degree of Master of Arts in the Humanities, Tel Aviv University, 1987 (Hebrew), pp. 11–30. 17 Gershom Scholem, “The Diaspora Today Has Been Voided of Flickers of Redemption,” Explications and Implications, Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance, Tel Aviv: 1982 (Hebrew), p. 218.

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background for the principal Jewish existential dilemma of the preEmancipation era: not a dichotomy of two clashing aspirations, integration and segregation, but rather a dichotomy of two contrasting needs: to foster and to restrain messianic religious hope.18 Consequently, according to the traditional pattern – which Leeser represented – the Eretz Israel connection must make the long-term goal of Redemption dependent on reinforcing the signiﬁcance of practical survival of the Jewish religious and community way of life in exile. Philanthropy for Jews in Eretz Israel was one of the main traditional manifestations of this balancing mechanism. On the one hand, it enabled individual Jews to express the messianic urge by allowing them to feel that their ﬁnancial donations were nurturing the Jewish spiritual element; by so doing, they could, so to speak, play an active role in the Redemption process. On the other hand, philanthropic activity by its very nature did not encourage individual Jews to fulﬁll their messianic hopes. The long-term need to support the Jewish community in Eretz Israel repeatedly underscored the deprivation and penury that typiﬁed that community.19 This ruled out any view of Eretz Israel as a realistic destination for mass migration. In fact, the philanthropic model encouraged Jews to view Eretz Israel very diﬀerently: as a place to which only the exceptionally pious, who were willing to sacriﬁce life in the here-and-now, or elderly people whose only wish was to be buried in the holy soil of the Land of the Patriarchs, might wish to emigrate. Furthermore, the philanthropy was administered by fundraising confraternities that operated within and through community institutions. Thus, the messianic drive became an important mechanism in reinforcing the existential foun18 Gershom Scholem assessed this pattern in detail, chieﬂy in his commentary on religious actions designed to advance the Redemption, such as tiqun in Lurianic kabbala or devequt in Hasidism. Scholem also described the waves of disillusionment that followed the failure of Shabbetai Tsevi’s mission and his conversion as a salient example of the danger that has always existed in attempts to realize the messianic urge and to “solve,” in one stroke, the contradiction between Messianic hope and the “disheartening” reality of exile. See, for example, the discussion in G. Scholem, “Kabbala and Myth,” Chapter 3 in Basic Chapters in Understanding of Kabbala and Its Symbols, Jerusalem 1980 (Hebrew), and ibid., articles, “The redemption idea in Kabbala” and “The Diaspora Today Has Been Voided of Flickers of Redemption,” Explications and Implications (A). 19 See, for example, letter of March 29, 1838, asking the Jews of Charleston to make donations for Eretz Israel, quoted in Moshe Davis, “The Amsterdam Peqidim and Amarkalim,” in the Hebrew section of Salo W. Baron Jubilee Volume, 1974, Jerusalem, 1975, p. 95; also in Sarna, Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews, pp. 42–46.

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dations of communal institutions in the Diaspora. In fact, it became an important focal point of Jewish solidarity at both the intra- and intercommunal levels. This aspect was especially important for early American Jewry. Most American Jews lived in small communities that were distant from each other, let alone from centers of Jewish culture in Europe. These communities were voluntary in nature and, for the most part, lacked legal or spiritual authority to work toward religious and cultural uniqueness within American society.20 This may explain why philanthropic activity on behalf of Eretz Israel – operating through societies that aggregated several communities in nearby towns, or even countrywide organizations for American Jewry at large – became an important focal point of Jewish solidarity in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. The ﬁrst evidence of such an organizational attempt dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1763, two American Jewish leaders, Hyman Levy and Daniel Gomez, were appointed to administer a philanthropic society for the Jews of Hebron. Seven years later, this society received a report about funds gathered from communities in New York, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia. By 1832, when the Hevrat Terumat Hakodesh confraternity was established to raise funds “for our suﬀering brethren in the Holy Land,” a rather large number of intercommunal and even countrywide organizations were acting on behalf of the Jewish community in Palestine. In 1849, Leeser sought to establish a society for the Jews of Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed that would gather small donations – from ﬁfty cents on up – from every American Jew in every community. A year later, he took part in a conference of representatives of seven congregations in Philadelphia and New York, who set themselves the goal of establishing a permanent countrywide organization for the Jews in Eretz Israel. In 1853, Leeser was involved in an additional gambit of this kind when, together with Samuel Mayer Isaacs, editor of the Jewish Messenger, he founded the North American Relief Society for the Indigent Jews in Jerusalem. In its ﬁrst three years, this confraternity managed to raise $5,000 and to forward this sum to Palestine via Moses Monteﬁore. Later, after 20 For discussion of the hardships that early American Jewry faced in maintaining a religious way of life and recruiting religious leadership of stature, see Leon A. Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870, Hanover, 1976, especially Chapters 1 and 2.

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receiving a large donation ($10,000) from the philanthropist Judah Touro, the Society established a foundation that pledged its revenues to the poor in Palestine in the form of an annual donation. Although these societies rarely existed on a permanent basis and almost always failed to operate on a large national scale, they represented a widespread trend of using philanthropic activity on behalf of Palestine as a means of strengthening internal solidarity among American Jewry.21 The main lesson to be learned from this has to do with the importance of the religious connection with Eretz Israel for American Jews. This importance is actually most perceptible in the vast distance between the separatist religious meaning that, at the time, still characterized the philanthropic pattern of relations with Eretz Israel and the aspiration of most American Jews to integrate into America. Although this diﬀerence may have been one of the reasons why few societies for Eretz Israel survived for long, the fact that so many attempts were made to cultivate intercommunal and countrywide Jewish solidarity on the basis of these societies may attest to the vast importance of the traditional religious connection with Eretz Israel as an indispensable component of the early American Jewish identity. It is also clear, however, that the centrality of Eretz Israel made it impossible to refrain for long from attempting to modify the pattern of support for Eretz Israel so as to tackle the universalistic-particularistic dilemma. It was especially hard to disregard the underlying premise of the traditional philanthropic support for Eretz Israel: that the Jews were outsiders in their non-Jewish surroundings. The more eager American Jews were to integrate into their surroundings, the more they tended to repress the separatist meanings of the traditional pattern and instead to adopt a universalistic interpretation. This tendency even aﬀected Jews such as Leeser who were unable or unwilling to relinquish their traditional religious worldview. Even such American

21 Apart from attempts to establish national organizations, numerous less pretentious eﬀorts were made to establish organizations embracing several neighboring communities or even one community. This attests to the importance of support of Eretz Israel not only in creating intercommunal Jewish solidarity but also in reinforcing intracommunal Jewish solidarity. The Jewish communities that established fundraising societies for Eretz Israel include Baltimore, Rochester, San Francisco, Cincinnati, New York, and New Orleans. National and local initiatives in this regard are discussed in David De Sola Pool, “Early Relations between Palestine and American Jewry,” pp. 539–540; Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, p. 138; Maxine S. Seller, pp. 124–136, 239.

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Jews who still considered America a place of exile in which Jews are destined to remain outsiders could hardly cloister themselves from the eﬀects of the American milieu of the time: the ideas of Protestantism, the upturn in American patriotism following the Civil War, and the general climate of religious crisis, brought about by Enlightenment ideas and the teaching of physical science.22 This inevitable inﬂuence of the American surroundings greatly intensiﬁed the challenge facing those who sought to remain loyal to the traditional religious pattern. Instead of totally rejecting the separatist basis of this pattern, as adherents of the Reform outlook would do within a few years, Orthodox leaders such as Leeser attempted to sustain it alongside the contrasting integrationist trend. They had to maneuver between a view that considered Eretz Israel a response to the ubiquitous dangers and the axiomatic hostility of exile and the contrasting view, which regarded integration in America as a solution to the long-term problems of Jewish survival. Early American Orthodoxy (in the second half of the nineteenth century) was unable to come up with a systematic ideology that could reconcile the two clashing views. Leeser’s doctrine is an excellent case in point. On the one hand, he espoused a traditional religious outlook that deﬁned America as a place of Jewish exile. On the other hand, he embraced an “American” belief in the values of freedom and equal opportunity for all, irrespective of religious aﬃliation. In fact, Leeser’s worldview may be seen as an attempt to be a “Jew” in one context and an “American” in another, without attempting to resolve the contradiction between the two. For example, in 1840, in a sermon after the Damascus blood libel, he proclaimed that, as citizens, Jews belong to the country in which they live but, as believers in one God, they regard all Jews everywhere as brethren. Ignoring the inner tension between the two segments of this statement, Leeser continued to hold the two contradictory views concurrently. On the one hand, he made recurrent statements, in 1854 and again in 1864, reiterating that even in America “we are in exile.” He repeatedly argued that even if in theory Jews had equal rights, in practice the application of these rights depended on the goodwill of the Christian

22 Lance J. Sussman, “Isaac Leeser and the Protestantization of American Judaism,” American Jewish Archives, 38 (April 1986), pp. 1–21; Naomi W. Cohen, “The Challenges of Darwinism and Biblical Criticism to American Judaism,” p. 126.

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majority, and even if the Jews bragged about their privileges, they would always remain “strangers in a strange land.” On the other hand, as a warrior for Jews’ civil rights, Leeser adhered to a belief in the pluralistic nature of American society. Thus, in 1845 and again in 1848 he stressed that the U.S. Constitution does not distinguish between Jews and Christians and that, for this reason, it makes no diﬀerence whether America has a Christian or a Jewish majority. Jews and Christians have identical and equal rights in the United States and religious equality is a fundamental American social value.23 In the absence of a systematic ideological worldview, philanthropic activity evolved into almost the only mechanism that enabled Leeser to sustain the Jewish connection with Eretz Israel in its traditional construction, without allowing it to conﬂict with his belief in the assured civil equality of American Jews. American society’s generally favorable regard for philanthropy allowed Leeser to treat the underlying separatist manifestations of the traditional pattern of identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel as a legitimate American expression of Jewish identity. Indeed, from 1841 until his death in 1868, Leeser was involved repeatedly in attempts to unite American Jews in umbrella organizations that supported Jews in Palestine. In 1863, for example, he urged Jews to provide ﬁnancial support for the construction of homes for the indigent there. In 1866, he was among the initiators of B’nai B’rith’s national fundraising campaign for Palestine. In 1867 he wrote an emotional letter of recommendation for an emissary from Eretz Israel, Nathan Notkin, expressing the hope that anyone who shared his profound anguish about the crisis in Zion would contribute.24 The most salient example of Leeser’s use of philanthropy to tackle the universalistic-particularistic dilemma was his criticism of the halukka method, even though he did not contest the basic separatist premises

23

Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, The Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History, III, New York, 1963, p. 936; Isaac Leeser, Discourses Argumentative and Devotional on the Subject of Jewish Religion III, Philadelphia, 1867–1868, pp. 391– 393; Occident (April 1864), pp. 12–13; Occident ( January 1845), pp. 497–498; Maxine S. Seller, p. 126; Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, pp. 78, 85. 24 Maxine S. Seller, p. 133; Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, p. 232; Joseph Buchler, “The Struggle for Unity – Attempts at Union in American Jewish Life, 1654–1868,” American Jewish Archives II (1949), pp. 39–44; Leon A. Jick, p. 105; Sussman, Isaac Lesser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 111–112, 147–149, 226.

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that underlay it. Much of his criticism of halukka focused on its corrupt and ineﬃcient collection mechanism, which kept most of the money out of indigents’ hands and apportioned the rest of the funds unequally and unjustly. In keeping with his desire to adapt Judaism to American ways of life, he was also critical of the very essence of the halukka method, which encouraged and perpetuated the dependency of Jews in Palestine on philanthropy instead of inspiring them to be more productive and economically independent.25 This criticism was undoubtedly related to the modern American Jewish intention to reform the image of the Old World Jew to accommodate the requirements of American social acceptability. Instead of the model of the cloistered Jew who inhabits the fringes of society and avoids productive occupations, Leeser and his contemporaries wished to promote the opposite image: a “normal” Jew who could set an example of useful citizenship and contribution to society at large. Leeser attributed great importance to agricultural development among Jews in Palestine. The ideas of modern agricultural development and “return to the soil” reﬂected a widely held nineteenthcentury belief in the curative powers of agriculture. Working the land was perceived as a nobler and healthier occupation than urban vocations such as trade or even industry. Accordingly, agriculture was considered a way to redeem Jews from those lowly, depraved features of the exilic way of life that kept them from becoming useful citizens worthy of integration in American society. The eﬀorts to productivize the Jews’ occupations in Eretz Israel were viewed by American Jews as an “American response” to antisemitic allegations of Jewish foreignness and parasitism – even as they, the American Jews, continued to settle in urban centers and practice the “lowly” pursuits of trade and retailing.26 Inspired by such ideas, Leeser supported innumerable agricultural and industrial projects in Eretz Israel. In an article in October 1852 he proclaimed his ambition to enhance Jewish tradition with modern agricultural methods that would enable destitute Jews in Palestine to make a living from the soil. That year, he also supported an initiative by Warder Cresson, a Quaker who had converted to Judaism, 25 Occident 11 (December 1853), p. 432; Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, p. 138; Maxine S. Seller, p. 129. 26 Sarna, “Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews,” pp. 46–51; Uri D. Herscher, Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880–1910, Detroit, 1981.

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to establish a modern farm near Jerusalem. In 1853, he urged American Jews to support the eﬀorts of an English organization to establish farming colonies near Tiberias, and in 1862 he expressed support for a similar initiative sponsored by a society in Prussia, explaining to readers of his newspaper that farming projects were the best way to tackle the problem of poverty in Palestine. In 1866, two years before his death, he expressed this idea vehemently and clearly: The common people must be lifted up; work must be provided for them. . . . The government should become energetic and secure to agriculturists the fruits of their toil and if this be done, we are sure there would be no more poverty in Hebron than in St. Louis.27

Thus, the attempt to modernize the philanthropic pattern of support for the Jews of Palestine allowed American Jews to remain loyal to the particularistic-separatist interpretations of the Eretz Israel connection while avoiding any conﬂict with allegiance to American social values. Leeser’s hope that Eretz Israel would help solve the problem of antisemitism is an excellent example of this perspective. Although he did not think Jews should expect antisemitism to vanish altogether as long as they lived in American exile, he did not encourage American Jews to emigrate to Palestine or to be totally pessimistic about the prospects of integration in America. Rather, he urged American Jews to adopt a proto-American-Zionist outlook, arguing that once the Jews had their own state, their status in American society would change: Once we had our agriculturists, our statesmen, our public teachers, equal to the best found anywhere, who would dare to insult us by stating that “he knows us only as peddlers, bankers, and merchants,” and class us as a whole among smugglers, petty traders and men of low pursuits?28

Just the same, the exhortation to modernize patterns of philanthropic activity could not oﬀer anything but a solution-by-negation that might 27 Occident 10 (October 1852), p. 361; (February 1853), p. 608; 20 (October 1862), p. 334; 24 (April 1866), p. 36; Maxine S. Seller, pp. 118–120, 134; Abraham J. Karp, “The Zionism of Warder Cresson,” Isidore S. Meyer, ed., Early History of Zionism in America, New York, 1958, pp. 9–12; Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 144–145, 207. 28 Occident 22 (April 1864), p. 12; Rose G. Jacobs, “Beginning of Hadassah,” Early History of Zionism in America, p. 231.

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soften the internal tension between Leeser’s American civic views and his religious separatist outlook. The modernization of philanthropic activity could not in itself oﬀer a systematic worldview that would lend positive Jewish meaning to the growing desire of most American Jews, including Leeser himself, to achieve social integration and consider America their home. In fact, had Leeser’s traditional religious outlook remained the only model of Jewish identity in America, it might have emphasized the irrelevance of the Eretz Israel connection to daily Jewish existence in American society, especially in terms of the modern Jewish dilemma of integration versus Jewish continuity. From this standpoint, it is interesting to compare Leeser’s approach with the attitude of Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874), a European Orthodox leader and a contemporary of Leeser’s. It was a time of burgeoning liberalism in Europe; optimistic faith in the possibility of Jewish integration was still almost universal. Kalischer, like Leeser, acknowledged and accepted the reality of the Emancipation without agreeing to modify his traditional religious views on exile and Redemption. Unlike Leeser, however, Kalischer developed a comprehensive Orthodox Jewish doctrine to cope with the internal tension between the ideas of the Emancipation and the traditional view of Jewish foreignness and exile. In Kalischer’s construction, the Emancipation itself contained Jewish religious signiﬁcance and was the ﬁrst stage in a Divine plan that would culminate in full Redemption from exile.29 One can only speculate about why American Jews did not attempt at the time to develop inclusive, modern Orthodox doctrines like Kalischer’s. It may be due to the relatively paltry religious scholarship of American rabbis at the time. Until 1840 there had been no Jewish leader anywhere in the United States with rabbinical ordination, let alone enough schooling and authority to tackle the diverse interpretations of the halakhic outlook.30 The answer may also have

29

For discussion of Kalischer, see Jacob Katz, “The Historical Image of Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer,” Jewish Nationalism, pp. 22–23, 285–307 (Hebrew). Additional Jewish leaders in Europe who remained loyal to the traditional religious pattern expressed similar views. Examples are Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who stipulated the principle of Torah ’im derekh erets (harmonization of religious and secular life) and Rabbi Tsvi Yehuda Kook, who coined the phrase He-hadash yitqadesh veha-qadosh yit’hadesh (Sanctify what is new and renovate what is he sacred).” 30 The ﬁrst ordained rabbi known to have reached America was Abraham Rice, who settled in Baltimore in 1840. For discussion of the arrival of the ﬁrst ordained

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to do with the powerful inﬂuence of Americanization and secularization on American Jews, who could no longer identify with the traditional religious basis of the Redemption idea. Be this as it may, the escalating power of Americanization among American Jews underscored the need to formulate an outlook that would use the Eretz Israel connection to invest the integrationist aspirations of American Jews with positive Jewish meaning. The failure to transform the Eretz Israel connection into a major component of the integrationist urge posed a real danger, since it might have forced American Jews to make an impossible choice between their Jewish and American aﬃliations. A debate between Leeser and the Jewish journalist and businessman Isidor Busch regarding enrollment of Jewish children in American public schools is a case in point. Leeser argued that public schools would expose the children to Christian inﬂuences and might thereby exacerbate assimilation. The “remedy” that Leeser proposed – separate Jewish schools – was criticized by Busch, who feared that it would sharpen the diﬀerences between Jews and non-Jews, thus precluding integration and exacerbating discrimination and antisemitism. The fact that American Jewry actually adopted Busch’s way of thinking at the time may indicate a signiﬁcant internal ﬂaw in Leeser’s Jewish worldview. The concept proposed by Leeser did not give American Jews a practical way of nurturing their Jewish identity while still being seen as adhering to the principle of integration in American society. Similarly, the philanthropic reforms that Leeser advocated did not suﬃce to lend positive Jewish meaning to his aspiration – which most of his Jewish contemporaries shared – to integrate in American society and consider it their home.31 About ﬁfty years later, at the end of the nineteenth century, American Zionism would seek to ﬁll this void by interpreting the Eretz Israel connection, viewed through a universalistic American prism, as a way to safeguard Jewish identity. First, however, the universalistic religious outlook of the American Reform Movement would

rabbis in America, see Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 127, 161; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism – A History, New Haven and London, 2004, p. 91. 31 Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, pp. 91–94; Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, Philadelphia, 1963, p. 133.

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take shape and become dominant among American Jews.32 Unlike the traditional perspective that Leeser represented, the Reform outlook would focus on transforming the Eretz Israel connection into a major component of its attempt to invest the integrationist aspirations of American Jews with positive Jewish meaning. Obviously, this perception could not accept, even partly, the traditional separatist premise that America was a place of exile. It had to create coping patterns that would detach this premise from its foundations.

32 A good indication of the dominance of the Reform movement during this time may be found in an 1880 government survey of religious organizations in the United States. Among 553 synagogues, 40.7 percent were registered as Reform. In terms of recorded membership, 54.9 percent were Reform. The property value of Reform congregations was 2.5 times that of Orthodox congregations. See Uriah Zvi Engelman, “Jewish Statistics in the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies,” Jewish Social Studies 2 (April 1947), p. 136.

CHAPTER TWO

TRANSFORMATION OF THE UNIVERSALISTIC PERSPECTIVE INTO A JEWISH EXISTENTIAL IDEOLOGY A. The Reform Attitude toward the Traditional Identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel The coalescence of the universalistic Reform coping pattern in the second half of the nineteenth century reﬂected two developments in American Jewry: a growing wish to integrate into American society at large and a corresponding concern about anything that might impede the fulﬁllment of this aim. Various factors converged to make this emphasis dominant at precisely this time. One important factor was exogenous: the development of similar universalistic ideas in the German Reform Movement. This directly aﬀected American Jewry, which at the time was composed largely of immigrants from Germany, some of whom had been exposed to Reform ideas there.1 A second important factor was essentially endogenous: the wave of patriotism that swept the United States after the Civil War. The wish to create a single, cohesive American nation and to obscure the diﬀerences among its constituent groups was one of the salient manifestations of the patriotic tide. Another factor that strengthened this trend was the economic prosperity and expansion that followed the Civil War. This seemed to conﬁrm the optimistic faith in America’s absorptive capacity and in the equal economic and social opportunities available to even the poorest immigrants. This last factor had a clear and direct eﬀect on the integration of German-Jewish immigrants in American society. Within twenty years, between the 1830s and the 1850s, large-scale Jewish emigration from Germany transformed American Jewry in terms of both size – from

1 Direct inﬂuence of the German Reform Movement was usually evident among Jewish immigrants from Germany who arrived in the 1840s and the 1850s. Unlike the earlier immigrants, a large majority of whom had come from villages and small towns in southern Germany and had hardly been exposed to secular culture, the later immigrants included a considerable number of maskilim who had come into direct contact with the innovations of the Reform Movement in Germany.

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15,000 persons to approximately 150,0002 – and culture, which until then had been largely Sephardic. These immigrants, most of whom had reached American shores in destitute condition from small towns in southern Germany, blended adroitly into the ﬂourishing economy. They spread throughout the frontier areas as peddlers and petty merchants and played an active role in the rapid development of these regions. Soon they became owners of shops and businesses and, within less than a generation, established themselves as an integral part of the upper-middle class. Their dispersion in small communities across the United States made them susceptible to the social and cultural inﬂuences of the non-Jewish environment. Their vigorous economic mobility strengthened their resolve to achieve social integration and gain acceptance. It also reinforced their perception that they had to adjust their patterns of religious faith to conform to accepted conduct among their middle-class Protestant neighbors. Thus, the changes introduced by the American Reform Movement reﬂected a dominant Jewish aim at the time: to conform to “respectable American behavior” and, concurrently, to relinquish any practice that might single out Jews as diﬀerent and foreign. As Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, one of the most prominent Reform leaders and the person considered to be the founding father of the movement, expressed it, “Whatever makes us ridiculous before the world . . . may safely be and should be abolished.” Obviously, this trend of thought directly aﬀected Reform Jews’ attitude toward the particularistic premises on which the traditional attachment to Eretz Israel was based. Especially problematic from their standpoint was the idea that Jews were foreigners in exile. In place of this traditional view, the Reform leaders converted the Jews’ wish to regard America as their home into a Jewish imperative of the highest order. For example, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler described the Fourth of July as the spiritual “oﬀspring” of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, the anniversary of the granting of the Torah to Israel. Some years earlier, Wise had proclaimed that the American Revolution and the Divine revelation at Mount Sinai were “the twin poles of the axis of freedom.” Wise went even farther in

2 The American Jewish population, about 50,000 in 1850, tripled within a decade. In the late 1870s, shortly before the onset of on mass Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, there were 250,000 Jews in America, a large majority of whom were of German origin.

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his book History of the Israelitish Nation, arguing that the ancient Israelite nation should be considered the original model of American democracy and that loyalty to Judaism was therefore an exalted manifestation of Americanism.3 In a striking reﬂection of this tendency to sanctify all things American, the United States itself was viewed as the “new Zion.” One of the earliest examples of this transposition occurred in 1841, when Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (“Holy Congregation House of God”) laid the cornerstone of its synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. At the ceremony, the cantor of the congregation, Gustav Poznanski, proclaimed: “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine.” In much the same vein, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch announced, “We modern Jews do not wish to be restored to Palestine . . . The country wherein we live is our Palestine.” Similarly, in 1857 Rabbi Wise depicted prayers for the restoration of Jewish rule in Eretz Israel as sinful and contrary to Judaism! In 1868, in response to a question about the possibility of the Jews’ returning to Palestine, Wise explained that “American Jews feel no desire to return to Palestine.” He also stressed the opposite and worthier essence of universalistic American Jewish belonging. “The inhabited world must become one holy land, every house a temple, and every man a priest; that is God’s promise to Israel.”4 As the last of these quotations shows, it was not enough for the exponents of the Reform approach to reject the traditional Eretz Israel–exile dichotomy. They linked their view of America as the promised land with the “mission” idea that had developed in Europe – the idea that “exile” had a Jewishly positive connotation as part of a Divine plan to assure the universal dissemination of Judaism. As

3 The Israelite 28 ( July 1854); Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, pp. 163–170; Leon A. Jick, pp. 181–194; Michael A. Meyer, “Christian Inﬂuence on Early German Reform Judaism,” Charles Berlin, ed., Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature in Honor of I. Edward Kiev, New York, 1971, pp. 289–303. 4 Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, p. 170; Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1620–1948, Lanham, New York, Jerusalem, 1994, pp. 260–265; Reform Advocate ( July 31, 1891); The Israelite 3 (March 6, 1857); The Israelite 14 (May 1, 1868); Yaakov Ariel, “An American Initiative for a Jewish State: William Blackstone and the Petition of 1891,” Studies in Zionism 10 (1989), p. 131; Melvin Weinman, “The Attitude of Isaac Mayer Wise toward Zionism and Palestine,” Jacob R. Marcus, ed., Critical Studies in American Jewish History I, Cincinnati, 1971, pp. 245, 248, 254.

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Rabbi Wise put it, the Jews would meet their destiny not through physical redemption in Eretz Israel but through the spiritual mission of spreading the universal values of truth, justice, equality, and liberty: We look upon the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth not as a punishment for the sinfulness of Israel but as the result of the divine purposes revealed to Abraham, which as had become ever clearer in the world’s history, consist in the dispersion of the Jew to all parts of the earth, for the realization of its high priestly mission, to lead the nations to the true knowledge and worship of God.5

This perception of a universal Jewish destiny pertained not only to the spiritual meaning of Redemption but also to the religious and a-national essence of the Jews who were to perform this mission. For example, Rabbi David Philipson denied the existence of a Jewish nation and declared that there was merely a “Jewish religious community” whose members were diﬀerent from their neighbors only in the manner of their religious life. Rabbi Wise disavowed nationality as a substantive part of Judaism and deﬁned it as a wholly intellectual and ethical concern, utterly unrelated to external matters such as land or climate. This attitude gradually evolved into a universalistic historiographical outlook that was presented most coherently by David Einhorn, the leading ideologue of the Reform Movement at the time. According to Einhorn, the pure universalistic and humanistic core of Judaism predates the Jewish people and actually traces to the dawn of humankind. The Jewish entity created at Mount Sinai was destined from the outset to be a religious conduit for the articulation and dissemination of the ideas of universalism and humanism; therefore, Jewry in its very essence is not a nation but a “religious people.” In this spirit, Einhorn sought to invest the Ninth of Av (the day that traditionally commemorates the destruction of the two Temples) with new, “positive” meaning. Although in his prayerbook he did express sorrow over the destruction of the Temples, he also rendered the Ninth of Av into a day of joy, a point of departure for the true universalistic mission of building the “new Jerusalem,” which would eventually embrace all of humanity.6

5 James G. Heller, Isaac Mayer Wise, New York, 1965, p. 536. See also discussion in Allon Gal (The Changing Concept of Mission, p. 2) of Wise’s 1877 article, “The Wandering Jew.” 6 American Israelite (April 29, 1887); ( January 24, 1879); David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism, rev. edition, New York, 1967, p. 356; Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 246–247, 387–388.

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This was also the tenor of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the basic statement of principles of the Reform Movement. According to the ﬁfth of eight principles in the Platform: We recognize in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and, therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacriﬁcial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.7

The Pittsburgh Platform went on to stress that it would not suﬃce for Reform Judaism to stop deﬁning American Jews as foreigners living in exile. The Platform sought to invest the principle of cultural integration with positive Jewish meaning. In fact, it presented this principle as the true spiritual essence of Judaism and a basic element that would assure Jewish continuity in the modern era. Paragraph 6 of the Platform expresses this view candidly: We recognize in Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason. . . . We acknowledge that the spirit of broad humanity of our age is our ally in the fulﬁllment of our mission, and, therefore, we extend the hand of fellowship to all who cooperate with us in the establishment of the reign of truth and righteousness among men.

Arguably, in view of these remarks, to regard hope of messianic redemption in Eretz Israel as anything but a historical phase irrelevant to American Jews’ current lives might clash with the Reform belief in America as the ideal environment for Judaism. From this perspective, it would seem that the traditional religious Jewish perception of Eretz Israel, even in a watered-down version, could not have any signiﬁcant place in the universalistic Reform doctrine. Indeed, many Reform prayerbooks omitted those parts of the liturgy that mention the Jewish attachment to Zion. This omission occurred in the prayerbook published in the early and still-ﬂuid phase of the Reformed Society of Israelites in Charleston and in Reform prayerbooks in the late 1850s, such as Einhorn’s ideological Olat Tamid (apart from one reference) and Wise’s pragmatic Minhag America, which in other traditional matters (e.g., belief in resurrection of the

7

Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 387–388.

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dead and blessings over the prayer shawl and teﬁllin) allowed choice and ﬂexibility.8 However, despite the perception of a signiﬁcant clash between the traditional attachment to Eretz Israel and the Reform belief in America, Eretz Israel remained central to the Reform Jewish identity. The Reform Movement could not possibly repudiate such an essential and rooted basis of Judaism. Instead of totally negating the traditional Jewish attachment to Eretz Israel, Reform Judaism had to invest it with an alternative meaning – a meaning not only cleansed of the separatist connotations of exile but also invested with an opposite, universalistic-American, conception of Jewish identity and solidarity. Thus, the Reform way of coping with the issue of Eretz Israel was riddled with internal contradictions between the desire to perpetuate the age-old connection with Eretz Israel – indeed, to grant it a central religious role – and the desire to transform totally, if not to abolish altogether, the religious and emotional connotations of this connection. Although this internal contradiction already existed in Leeser’s and even Noah’s time, it became especially acute in view of the Reform outlook. Unlike Noah, who limited himself to only a partial confrontation with this conﬂict, and Leeser, who used philanthropy to soften the internal conﬂict, Reform Judaism sought to oﬀer a comprehensive response that would resolve the contradiction totally. It took some time for the distinction between the traditional views of Noah and Leeser and the Reform views to become clear. The delay traced mainly to internal evolution of the views of some Reform leaders from the more traditional outlooks that they had brought from Europe to new “American” outlooks. A striking example of this was Wise, who reached America in 1846 and began to modify the prayer service before the end of that decade. In that early phase, when Wise abolished prayers to reestablish the Temple in Jerusalem,9 he still upheld some portion of the traditional perception of Eretz Israel. Evidence of this is his emotional recommendation of an emissary from Palestine on February 5, 1850, in which he wrote explic-

8 Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 254–255. An exceptional positive reference in Wise’s Minhag America to the return to Eretz Israel appears on p. 85. 9 For reportage on Wise’s early reforms and the inception of the schism with Leeser, see Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism, pp. 165–166, 170–172.

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itly about his faith in the Redemption that God would bring to Eretz Israel. He expressed his intention to establish a philanthropic confraternity for the poor in Jerusalem and urged other congregations to do the same. He even appealed to wealthy Jews, calling on their sense of Jewish pride, to help their needy brethren in Eretz Israel, whom he described as the “watchmen, that God’s mercy allowed to remain in his sacred vineyard.”10 Indeed, in the late 1840s the outlooks of Leeser and Wise were not substantially diﬀerent. Both men stressed the importance of Americanization and Jewish integration in America, and neither saw any necessary contradiction between this tendency and the traditional religious attachment to Eretz Israel. Their commonality of views was most evident in their criticism of the halukka method. Wise, largely mirroring Leeser’s critique of halukka, argued that this depraved system made the Jews of Palestine “a degraded set of idle paupers . . . [who] are content to live on a miserable dole rather than labor for their bread.” Like Leeser, he supported numerous agricultural projects in Eretz Israel in order to productivize the Yishuv and free it of economic dependency. Wise’s support in this matter was consistent and lasting; observers who are unfamiliar with his universalistic and anti-nationalist views might even mistake it for a proto-Zionism of sorts. Thus, in 1860 he urged wealthy Jews to invest in agricultural settlements in Palestine for the resettlement of Jewish refugees in Morocco, where riots had occurred. In 1863, he called on all American Jewish communities to raise funds for the construction of an economically self-suﬃcient settlement in Palestine. He also supported agricultural, industrial, and educational projects that would modernize the Yishuv, including a project sponsored by the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Jerusalem and a fundraising campaign for a B’nai B’rith educational project. Especially surprising was Wise’s ambitious proposal in 1892 – prompted by the pogroms in Russia but bruited after the anti-nationalistic Pittsburgh Platform – that Baron Hirsch’s fund purchase farmland in Palestine for the settlement of a million Jews. Wise even proclaimed that were he not so heavily taxed with other aﬀairs, he would devote all his time to the establishment of confraternities across America to set this project in motion.11

10 11

Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, p. 138; Maxine S. Seller, p. 133. The Israelite 6 ( January 20, 1860), 9 (April 17, 1863), American Israelite 34 (October

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The support by Wise and Leeser for philanthropic projects that would modernize and “Americanize” Jewish life in Palestine may attest to the centrality that both men attributed to the Eretz Israel connection and to their shared need to prevent this connection from clashing with their faith in America. Nevertheless, they interpreted their philanthropic endeavors in very diﬀerent ways. In contrast to Noah and Leeser, who were willing to tolerate a clash between the wish to integrate and their view of America as a place of exile, classical Reform Judaism regarded the reform of Jewish life in Eretz Israel as a way of eliminating the clash altogether. Leeser did favor social reform of the Yishuv and saw it as a worthy goal that might help deﬂect the antisemitic threat in America, but under no circumstances did he deem such reform to be the sole basis for the attachment to Eretz Israel or as crucial for coping with the challenges of Jewish existence in America. Wise, in contrast, could favor such reform only as a means of draining all separatist meaning from the deﬁnition of America as a place of physical or spiritual exile. This diﬀerence between the two approaches was strongly reﬂected in an altercation between Leeser and Wise in 1854, following Leeser’s initiative to convene a national conference in support of the establishment of vocational and agricultural training projects in Palestine. Although the principles of Leeser’s plan seemed similar to Wise’s intentions to reform the living patterns of the Yishuv, Wise opposed it vehemently, reminding his readers that Leeser represented the separatist belief in Messianic redemption. In contrast, Leeser expressed his sincere sorrow about “the foolish call for religious reforms” that thwarted unity of action in the matter of Eretz Israel.12 To sum up, advocates of the universalistic Jewish perspective no longer automatically accepted philanthropic support for the Yishuv as a focal point of Jewish identity in general. This support now came with “strings attached.” To many American Jews, the separatist connotation of the traditional connection with Eretz Israel was a potential threat. However, due to the powerful centrality of the Eretz Israel connection, the threat could not be overcome by negating it totally. Instead, it had to be continually redeﬁned, i.e., invested with

7, 1887); 38 (March 17, 1892); 39 (October 13, 1892); Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron, p. 138; Melvin Weinman, pp. 256–259. 12 The Asmonean 9 (February 10, 1854), p. 133, Occident 11 (February 1854), pp. 551–552; Maxine S. Seller, pp. 131–132.

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an alternative meaning that would “prove” the possibility of harmonizing the particularistic and universalistic elements of Judaism. B. The Eretz Israel Connection Aggravates an Internal Jewish Threat A furious letter from Wise in 1883 to the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, in response to several proto-Zionist articles, plays, and poems that Lazarus had published, may illustrate the sense of encroaching threat from Eretz Israel that many Reform Jews felt at the time. Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 to a family that traced its lineage to the ﬁrst Portuguese-Jewish refugees who had settled in America. She had been inﬂuenced by the philosemitic British author George Eliot and Eliot’s “Zionist” book, Daniel Deronda. Only at a relatively late stage in her life, at the age of thirty-three (she died of cancer at age of thirty-eight), did Lazarus become involved in Jewish aﬀairs. For the next two years, until her disease disabled her, she was a fervent exponent of a pre-Herzlian “Zionist” outlook. Thus, in the early 1880s, inﬂuenced by the pogroms in Russia and Pinsker’s Autoemancipation, she began to support the “Zionist” idea and urged Jews to arise and restore the splendor of the Maccabean era.13 In response to these ideas, Wise inveighed against the “pervert[ed] notions of distinctions between a man and a citizen who believes in Moses and the Prophets, and another who believes in Jesus and his Apostles.” Above all, he warned against pessimistic separatist Jewish responses to antisemitism, both in Russia and in the United States. To counter these “dangerous hypotheses,” he expressed an optimistic, universalistic message of total faith in America: We, citizens of the United States, [are] an integral element of this nation, and of no other, with no earthly interests or aspiration diﬀerent from those who believe in Jesus and his Apostles.14

Importantly, despite Wise’s criticism of Lazarus, they shared a very broad universalistic American common denominator. The verses of Lazarus’s famous sonnet that promise shelter in America to all the

13 Allen Lesser, “Emma Lazarus, Poet and Zionist Pioneer,” The Menorah Journal 26 (April–June 1938), pp. 212–226; Arthur Zeiger, “Emma Lazarus and Pre-Herzlian Zionism,” Early History of Zionism, p. 96; Morris U. Schappes, Emma Lazarus, Selection from Her Poetry and Prose, New York, 1967. 14 American Israelite 29 (March 16, 1883).

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world’s “huddled masses” were considered so worthy of representing the “American dream” that they were inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. As for Lazarus’s “Zionist” vision, she unequivocally reserved it for persecuted Jews in eastern Europe; like Wise, she stressed the role of Eretz Israel in the redemption and productivization of the “Russian Jew.” Thus, in 1893 Wise expressed disappointment with America for its failure to cure the Russian Jews and rescue them from the Old World superstitions and way of life – a task that he believed could be performed only by enlisting them in projects involving productive labor and modern agriculture. Similarly, Lazarus stated that the emigration of Russian Jews to the United States would inevitably result in their ghettoization or total assimilation; only in Palestine, she argued, could they fulﬁll the universalistic vision of internalizing the values and inﬂuences of modern society without forfeiting their Jewish identity.15 In fact, more than it reﬂected substantive ideological diﬀerences, the Wise-Lazarus dispute presaged the cul-de-sac in which the Reform Jewish outlook gradually found itself with respect to the role of Eretz Israel. On the one hand, Wise, like Lazarus, felt it his duty to reserve a central place for the historical and religious connection with Eretz Israel in his universalistic Jewish vision. On the other hand, the more important and substantive the Eretz Israel connection became, the more concerned Wise was about internal dissonance with the sense of belonging and loyalty that he wished to cultivate toward America. Since the upturn in support for Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel had only just begun, we can easily understand that the conﬂict in which the universalistic Reform ideology found itself would only gain in ferocity until it peaked in the 1930s and 1940s – when identiﬁcation with Zionism became a matter of broad American Jewish consensus. Another early example of the conﬂict that beset Reform Judaism was the internal Reform debate that erupted in response to an initiative by William F. Blackstone in 1891. Blackstone, a Christian cleric from Chicago, oﬀered to marshal American political support for the resettlement of two million Russian Jews in Palestine. His memorandum on this topic attracted broad non-Jewish support. It

15 Emma Lazarus, “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” American Hebrew (November 3, 1882) and (February 9, 1883); American Israelite 39 (April 27, 1893); Schappes, p. 87; Weinman, p. 258.

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was sent to President Benjamin Harrison and signed by 413 prominent public ﬁgures, including members of Congress, judges, and church oﬃcials. In contrast to this broad non-Jewish support, the Reform Movement exhibited two clashing approaches. Reform rabbis such as Emil Hirsch and Anglo-American newspapers such as the Jewish Messenger and the American Israelite ﬁercely objected to this program, citing the imperative of total loyalty to America on the part of American Jews. However, a group of ﬁfteen supporters came together, including, surprisingly, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, who later was known for his disapproval of Zionism.16 The members of this group agreed to aﬃx their signatures to Blackstone’s memorandum on the basis of an appendix that stressed the prospects of “reforming” the Russian Jews upon their arrival in Palestine. They went out of their way to stress that the socially and economically derogatory traits of Russian Jewry should not be deemed indicative of Jewish character ﬂaws. Instead, they assigned Palestine the role of “proving” that even Russian Jews might become useful and productive citizens under the appropriate social and economic conditions.17 This internal Reform dispute aptly reﬂects the internal conﬂict between conditional support and total rejection of the Eretz Israel connection, a conﬂict in which the latter attitude was on the ascent. Alongside the powerful need to use Eretz Israel to prove the universalistic elements of Judaism, several factors gained strength at this time (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that led to an increase in Reform disapproval of the Eretz Israel connection altogether. Two simultaneous developments were especially important: an upturn in antisemitism and the spread of Zionist views, particularly among Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. From the universalistic-Jewish point of view, these developments threatened to reinforce the idea that Jewish separatism is the only possible basis for Jewish-Gentile relations. In reaction, most Reform Jews came to equate the external menace of antisemitism with what they perceived as an internal Jewish threat rising from the direction of Zionism.

16 Within a few years, Kohler would become one of the most conspicuous antiZionist leaders – foremost as the second president of Hebrew Union College, after Wise’s death. 17 Yaakov Ariel, pp. 125–137, 167; Anita Libman Lebeson, “Zionism Comes to Chicago,” Early History of Zionism, pp. 165–173.

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The rising tide of antisemitism probably did the most to create this negative dynamic by aggravating Reform Jews’ concern that Jewish foreignness would become a permanent factor in JewishGentile relations even in the open, tolerant society of the United States. One of the most painful aspects of this wave of American antisemitism was the social rejection in schools and recreation sites frequented by the non-Jewish American middle class. Another aspect was the ascendancy of several particularistic Christian religious denominations that advocated the reinforcement of “Christian America,” mainly in response to the religious crisis touched oﬀ by Darwinism and biblical criticism. Furthermore, several focal points of antisemitism erupted abroad. The awakening of antisemitism in Germany had an especially strong impact, since many American Jews of German extraction still considered Germany the conceptual birthplace of the universalistic Reform philosophy. Additionally, pogroms in Russia fueled concern that antisemitism and the concomitant presumption of an unbridgeable chasm between Jews and non-Jews would not disappear and might even gather strength.18 The most important aspect of the upturn in antisemitism in America, however, was a general wave of xenophobia in response to mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The fact that a considerable proportion of these immigrants were Jews, and the tendency of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to establish conspicuous ethnic enclaves in the centers of big cities, seemed – in the eyes of Jews of German extraction – to magnify the threat represented by the xenophobia. Jewish nationalism and Zionism, which made major inroads among recent Jewish immigrants in America, seemed to “veteran American Jews” to be “un-American behavior” that might widen the gap between the Jewish and the generalAmerican identities. Even more important, “immigrant Zionism” was viewed from this perspective as a defeatist and un-American response to the resurgent antisemitism. In contrast to a general American point of view, Zionism was perceived as a philosophy that reinforced the particularistic basic premises of antisemitism. Therefore, it is no surprise that at this time (the late nineteenth century) the Reform Movement issued a series of blunt anti-Zionist 18 John Higham, Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925, New Brunswick, NJ, 1955, pp. 128–129; Naomi W. Cohen, “The Challenges of Darwinism,” pp. 121–157.

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resolutions. At the 1897 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) – several weeks before the First Zionist Congress in Basel – the movement declared its categorical opposition to any attempt to establish a Jewish state, considering this a deviation from the universalistic Jewish destiny. A year later, a conference of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) announced that: We are unalterably opposed to political Zionism. The Jews are not a nation, but a religious community . . . America is our Zion. Here, in the home of religious liberty, we have aided in founding a new Zion.19

Alongside the growing tendency to reject Zionism out of hand, several factors led to the coalescence of an opposite trend in the Reform Movement. Total repudiation of Zionism might have been perceived, especially at a time when Judaism faced an exogenous antisemitic threat, as a manifestation of defeatist dissociation from the sense of Jewish solidarity. It was Kaufmann Kohler who stated in the early 1890s: “Our duty today [in view of the upturn in antisemitism] is to maintain our Jewish identity and to preserve our Jewish institutions without faltering, without yielding.” At that time, Kohler, like most of his colleagues in the Reform leadership, was still unwilling to apply this exhortation to Zionism; he was referring to the Sabbath. “Dare we, in the face of such great disappointments [with the hopes of the Jewish Enlightenment era],” he asked, “recognize the predominance of Christian culture, by accepting the Christian Sunday as our day of rest, in place of the ancient Sabbath?” Unlike Kohler, who remained true to his anti-Zionist beliefs, several Reform rabbis – such as Bernhard Felsenthal, Gustav Gottheil, and the latter’s son, Dr. Richard Gottheil – extended to Zionism Kohler’s conception regarding the Sabbath. Thus, in 1898, Richard Gottheil wrote that, in view of the phenomenon of social discrimination, e.g., quotas restricting the admission of Jews to prestigious schools, American Jews must be roused from their indiﬀerence to Zionism and implanted with “a sense of their own dignity and . . . an understanding of the real position which they occupy.”20

19

CCARY (1898), p. 28, quoted in Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 293–294. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement,” Zionism and Religion, Shmuel Almog. Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, eds., Hanover, NH, 1998, pp. 188–203. Studies in Jewish Literature, Issued in Honor of Professor 20

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As Zionism gathered strength and became entrenched as a recognized element of mainstream opinion, it became increasingly necessary to devise a positive, universalistic Reform reference to it. Anything else, i.e., outright rejection or disregard, might be perceived as a message of Jewish self-abnegation. The ﬁrst few decades of the twentieth century – until the 1930s and 1940s, when Zionism reached its peak strength – may therefore be described as a period of internal Reform conﬂict between total rejection of Zionism and numerous attempts to come up with positive, universalistic references to Zionist symbols and identiﬁcation. Even Kaufmann Kohler, who during his term as president of Hebrew Union College fought Zionism as a “subversive” doctrine, would, after the Balfour Declaration, express noncommittal support for Zionism: Let Palestine, our ancient home, under the protection of the great nations . . . again become a center of Jewish culture and a safe refuge for the homeless. We shall all welcome it and aid in the promotion of its work . . . to build up a commonwealth broad and liberal in spirit to serve as a school for international and interdenominational humanity. We shall all hail the undertaking and pray for its prosperity.21

Another factor that encouraged greater moderation in anti-Zionist tendencies was the “ultra-universalistic” ideology, to the extent of abandoning Judaism, that surfaced at this time among members of the radical wing of the movement. Most Reform leaders considered this ideology a menace at least as severe as the separatist tendency that they saw in Zionism. The ultra-universalistic point of view was ﬁrst expressed by Felix Adler, who founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1876. Adler saw no further need for the separate existence of Judaism and, in fact, regarded it as an obstacle. He attacked Reform Judaism as a manifestation of compromise and inability to choose between two consistent doctrines, inward-facing Orthodoxy and absolute universalism. Adler was not alone in this view; in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was joined by Reform leaders such as Solomon Schindler and Charles Fleischer of Boston, who also abandoned Judaism in

Kaufmann Kohler, Berlin, 1913, pp. 35–39; Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 291– 292; letter from Gottheil to Herzl, October 5, 1898, quoted in Marnin Feinstein, American Zionism 1884–1904, New York, 1965, p. 161. 21 CCARY (1919), p. 287, quoted in Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 295.

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order to embrace the universalistic faith. One may also place in this category the rather large number of Reform leaders and synagogue oﬃcials who were attracted to the Unitarian Church – an essentially rationalistic and tolerant denomination – and who even hoped that it and Reform Judaism might merge. Later on, a similar tendency developed with respect to Christian Science, which also attracted many Reform Jews. Precisely because it purported to oﬀer an ideology of Jewish existence and not of total assimilation, the Reform Movement had to respond to these trends of radical universalism and embrace of Christianity. It had to strengthen its particularistic historical foundations and present them as a vital factor. This made it even more diﬃcult to repudiate the Zionist identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the combined strength of these trends suﬃced only to attenuate the anti-Zionist universalistic perspective but not to create (except among a few Reform leaders) a positive Reform method of coping with Zionism. Reform Judaism preferred to buttress its particularistic historical foundations by tackling the religious meaning of Judaism. As we have seen in Kohler’s reference to the Sabbath issue, it was Jewish religious solidarity, not national solidarity, that the Reform Movement presented as its response to the existential challenges to Jewishness. Instead of attempting to reinterpret Zionism in a universalistic spirit, most eﬀorts were invested in promoting religious solidarity as the only basis on which Jewish particular existence could be furnished with a universalistic American meaning. This attempt to stress the speciﬁc underlying religious characteristics of the universalistic Reform perspective was already visible in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform22 and became more vehement in response to the Zionist challenge. The 1904 CCAR convention, for example, attempted unsuccessfully to forge a consensus in favor of the establishment of a Jewish-American synod that would exercise supreme religious authority, as an alternative to the World Zionist Congress. Rabbi Hyman Enelow, who headed a committee tasked with drawing up a proposal in this matter, stated: “The Jew needs a central institution. If Israel is a Nation, it must be Zion. If Israel is a church,

22 The Pittsburgh Platform, for example, sought to emphasize the uniqueness of the Jewish perception of God in both religious and historical-development terms.

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it must be a Synod.”23 The failure to establish the synod may illustrate the diﬃculty that the Reform Movement faced in preparing a positive universalistic-religious response to Zionism. Along with the typical American Reform concern about overcentralization, the failure reﬂected the increasing diﬃculty in basing American Jewish identity on theology. Indeed, secularization and Americanization were steadily vitiating the importance of religion in the daily lives of most Reform Jews. The Reform Movement’s pretentious goal of predicating American Jewish solidarity on religion only was further undermined by the ranks of the movement itself in 1906, when the American Jewish Committee was established to defend Jewish civil rights – a function that had previously been the CCAR’s. The fact that the American Jewish Committee was based almost entirely on Reform Jews of German origin underscored even more emphatically the growing challenge to the Reform pretense to represent, as a religious movement, the ultimate solution to the problem of American Jewish solidarity. This challenge would intensify after World War I, when additional countrywide organizations, foremost the American Jewish Congress, came into being. In view of these challenges, and as part of the attempt to invest the Jewish religious commitment with relevant meaning, the Reform Movement exhorted Jews to become active in various issues of social justice as an integral part of the universalistic-mission idea. It was no coincidence that the Reform Movement drew up its ﬁrst platform on social justice in 1918, almost twenty years before it adopted an aﬃrmative and consensual platform on Zionism. This platform included many planks, from a call for greater justice in apportioning industrial proﬁts to miscellaneous matters concerning the rights of workers and non-working mothers.24 This preoccupation of the Reform conventions with various means of Jewish solidarity actually underscored with even greater vehemence the movement’s inability to give the Zionist outlook an alternative universalistic-religious interpretation. Although several Reform rabbis

23 CCARY (1914), pp. 116, 146–161, quoted in Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 278. 24 CCARY (1918), pp. 101–103; W. Gunther Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism, New York,1965, pp. 123–124; Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 288.

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opted for Zionism as a Jewish religious response to the rising tide of individualism or as a Jewish response to antisemitism, overall the Eretz Israel connection in any form, Zionist or other, was not central to the Reform theology of the time. As Zionism continued to gather momentum, the relative absence of favorable reference to the issue was a daunting ideological failure. With no such reference, adherents of the universalistic Reform outlook might be forced into the impossible situation (in terms of their own principles) of having to choose between a radical universalism that repudiates a central means of Jewish solidarity and what was perceived as the particularistic-separatist premises of Zionism. In the 1930s, as the Zionist enterprise increasingly became perceived as the only way to save European Jewry from the growing threat of Nazism, the failure to invest the Zionist conception with universalistic religious meaning might force Reform believers to choose not only between Zionism and anti-Zionism but also between two radical alternatives – separatism and suspicion vis-à-vis the non-Jewish surroundings or total estrangement from Jewish solidarity. These two alternatives represented an intolerable threat to the Reform notion of universalistic identity. Only the transformation of Zionism into an integral part of the universalistic religious doctrine might solve this internal Reform dilemma.

PART TWO

VACILLATIONS BETWEEN ZIONISM AND ANTI-ZIONISM (1900–1930)

CHAPTER THREE

JEWISH CULTURE AND ZIONISM AS SEEN BY “VETERAN AMERICAN” JEWS A. The Complex Challenge of the Zionist-Universalistic Ideology Who were the early Reform Zionists?1 What were the main features of their Zionist outlook and how exceptional were they in the Reform Movement? To what extent may this group be regarded as portenders of the “Zionization” that would embrace many of their nonZionist and anti-Zionist Reform colleagues in the 1930s and 1940s? The early Reform Zionists, like most Reform Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wished to think of themselves as “real Americans,” or, as we will call them here, “veteran Americans.” From their standpoint, the function of Zionism was to prevent the formation of an unendurable gap between the Jewish and American segments of their identity. Like their anti-Zionist “veteran American” colleagues, they considered themselves on the verge of fulﬁlling the American promise of social integration. Like their non-Zionist and anti-Zionist colleagues, they saw the twin threats of antisemitism and of the alienness associated with Jewish immigration as a cause of severe disillusionment that threatened to return them to the “ghetto” from which they had extricated themselves. As early as 1891, the Reform leader and ideologue Kaufmann Kohler expressed this disillusionment bluntly and painfully: How rudely have we all been roused from our dream! How shockingly were all the illusions of the beginning of the nineteenth century

1

The following studies on early Zionist expressions in Reform Judaism are noteworthy: Evyatar Frizel, The Zionist Movement in the United States 1897–1914, Tel Aviv, 1970 (Hebrew), pp. 90–108. David Polish, Renew Our Days, The Zionist Issue in Reform Judaism, New York, 1978; Cyrus Arfa, “Attitudes of the American Reform Rabbinate Toward Zionism 1885–1948,” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1978; Michael A. Meyer, “American Reform Judaism and Zionism: Early Eﬀorts at Ideological Rapprochement,” Studies in Zionism (Spring 1983); Allon Gal, The Changing Concept of “Mission” in American Reform Judaism; Jonathan D. Sarna, “Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement.”

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chapter three destroyed by the facts developed at its close! . . . What a shame and a fraud has this era of tolerance and enlightenment become.2

Kohler’s disappointment did not lead him to Zionist conclusions. The universalistic ideology instructed him, like most Reform Jews at the time, to consider Zionism a form of surrender and an internal Jewish threat to universalistic hopes. Nevertheless, a minority group among Reform Jews, though sharing Kohler’s disillusionment, chose to embrace Zionism. One notable example was Richard Gottheil, the ﬁrst president of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), who described the crisis that caused him to become a Zionist. Gradually, but surely, we are being forced back into a physical and moral ghetto. Private schools are being closed against our children one by one; we are practically boycotted from all summer hotels and our social life runs as far apart from those of our neighbors as it did in the worst days of our European degradation.3

Gottheil, who drew diﬀerent conclusions from those adduced by Kohler and most Reform Jews, did not think he was betraying the optimistic Reform faith in America. In 1899, he expressed the hope that the reconstitution of a Jewish Palestine would present American Jews as equal in status to other American ethnic groups who had homelands in the Old World. Moreover, according to Gottheil, a Jewish state would transform American Jews’ status not only in their neighbors’ eyes but in their own as well.4 Stephen Wise, a young Reform rabbi at the time and subsequently one of the most important leaders of American Jewry and the American Zionist movement, expressed a similar hope. After attending the Second Zionist Congress (1898), he described Zionism as a solution to the menace of internal ghettoization that, in his opinion, threatened to engulf American Jewry: Suddenly, and as if by magic, I came upon a company of Jews who were not victims, nor refugees, nor beggars, but proud and educated

2 Studies in Jewish Literature, Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler, Berlin, 1913, pp. 35–39. See also disscussion in Chapter 2, note no. 63. 3 Richard Gottheil, “On Zionism,” The American Hebrew, December 10, 1897, p. 163; Shapiro, p. 31. (R. Gottheil was an American Jew of German origin, the son of a Reform Rabbi, and himself a professor of Semitic languages at Columbia University in New York.) 4 Richard Gottheil, The Aims of Zionism, New York, 1899, pp. 14–21, reprinted in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, New York, 1959, pp. 496–500.

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men. . . . Thrilled and grateful, I caught a ﬁrst glimpse of the power and pride and the nobleness of the Jewish people, which my American upbringing and even service to New York Jewry [as a rabbi] had not in any degree given me.5

Thus, the distinguishing factor between the two groups of “veteran American” Jews, the Zionists and the anti-Zionists, was not the purity of their universalistic faith but the role each of them assigned to Eretz Israel in fulﬁlling it. From this perspective, the diﬀerence between the two groups may be described as one of emphasis. While most Reform leaders did not believe it possible to neutralize the separatist meaning of identiﬁcation with Palestine, the Zionist group thought that Eretz Israel could become the focal point of the universalistic faith. While most Reform leaders saw the Zionist identiﬁcation with Palestine as a threat to their optimistic modern Jewish belief, the early Reform Zionists believed that Palestine could become a major tool for attaining harmonization between Judaism and Americanism. Interestingly, the two groups shared a similar ambivalence toward Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, especially toward the Zionists among them. “Veteran American” Jews, whether Zionist or antiZionist, were suspicious of the Zionist immigrants and even hoped to neutralize what they considered the internal Jewish threat posed by their “dangerous” particularism. Thus Gottheil, in a debate at Congregation Shaarey Teﬁla in New York, linked the hope for a Jewish state in Palestine to the need to prevent Jewish immigration to the United States – immigration that might aggravate antisemitism and anti-Jewish prejudice in America. In 1900, he argued that only Zionism might thwart the disastrous results of continued Jewish immigration from eastern Europe to the United States. He predicted that the Romanian Jews who were arriving in large numbers would never manage to reconcile their Judaism with the American way. Accordingly, he said, they would have to choose between total assimilation and segregation from American society in a physical and spiritual ghetto.6

5 Stephen S. Wise, “The Beginnings of American Zionism,” Jewish Frontier 14 (August 1947), p. 7. 6 The New York Times, February 5, 1899; Marnin Feinstein, American Zionism 1884–1904, New York, 1965, pp. 141, 190. For a similar perspective on Emma Lazarus regarding the role of “Zionism”, see Chapter 2, note no. 58.

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Gottheil and his “veteran American” colleagues within the Zionist movement expressed their reservations even more bluntly in their references to immigrants who had already reached the United States – especially those who had joined the Zionist movement. The FAZ leadership, composed mostly of “veteran Americans,” labored in various ways to lend the Zionist Movement an “American nature” and, of course, resisted any “un-American” trend within the movement. Thus Phillip Cowen, editor of the American Hebrew, the newspaper that represented the traditional Orthodox view among “veteran American” Jews, stated as early as 1897 that it was high time for the Zionist movement to develop “past 14th Street,” i.e., outside the boundaries of the immigrants’ quarter in New York. Indeed, the FAZ leadership placed its oﬃces in central Manhattan, far from the immigrant enclaves on the Lower East Side, even though most members of the movement were immigrants. Similarly, the activities initiated by the movement leadership were given an “American” orientation and almost deliberately ignored the Yiddish culture of the movement’s immigrant rank and ﬁle. A striking example was the movement organ, the Maccabean. Although the debut edition of the newspaper included a supplement in Yiddish, it was quickly terminated when the paper’s second editor, Jacob de Haas, came aboard. In fact, publication of the paper was held back for some two years due to a lengthy hunt, starting in 1898, for an editor who was ﬂuent in English.7 For the “veteran Americans” in the Zionist leadership, it was not enough to disregard the immigrants’ culture; often they considered it their duty to ﬁght this culture head-on. Gottheil’s confrontation with the Landsmannschaften and the immigrant fraternities is a salient example. The person who ushered these organizations into the FAZ was Joseph Bluestone, formerly known by his European name, Blaustein. Bluestone, originally from Lithuania, immigrated to the United States in 1880 and in 1884 was a founding member of the American Hovevey Zion Society. In 1898, he was chosen president of the New York Federation of Zionists, and soon afterwards he took 7 Feinstein, pp. 206–208, 229; Yonathan Shapiro, Leadership of the American Zionist Organization 1897–1930, Urbana, 1971, p. 35. Notably, the ﬁrst editor, Louis Lipsky, was born in the United States to a family of Eastern European immigrants and, for this reason, was ﬂuent in both Yiddish and English. The second editor, Jacob De Haas, came from London, where he had edited the local Anglo-Jewish newspaper The Jewish World. As stated, he discontinued the Yiddish supplement of the Zionist journal as soon as he became editor.

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an initiative to establish the Free Sons of Zion, a Zionist association based on mutual assistance among its immigrant members. The impressive success of his initiative quickly became apparent, and within a few months the Free Sons of Zion opened four branches, established its own burial society, and launched contacts with additional Landsmannschaften that wanted to join its ranks as autonomous branches.8 The vast popularity of Bluestone’s Zionist association sparked a great deal of resistance among “veteran American” Jews, especially FAZ president Richard Gottheil. Gottheil told Bluestone that his association was harming the FAZ and that in time it might “absorb the entire Federation” and endanger its American character. At a conference of the FAZ held that year in Baltimore ( June 18–19, 1898), the national Zionist leadership managed to block the membership of additional Landsmannschaften and immigrant fraternities. In the long run, however, it was hard to thwart the popularity of these societies among the immigrants. At that same conference, Bluestone reported that eight synagogues and Landsmannschaften of Romanian, Austrian, Galician, and Russian Jews had joined the FAZ, as had a group made up of former settlers in Palestine. Even more impressive was the success of the Knights of Zion Order, established in October 1898 in Chicago and based on mutual-assistance groups that operated among immigrants from eastern Europe. The Knights did so well that by their third anniversary, at the national Zionist conference in Philadelphia in June 1901, they had more than 1,000 members and were oﬃcially recognized as the Western Zionist Federation, embracing the states of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kentucky.9

8 H. B. Grinstein, “The Memoirs and Scrapbooks of the Late Dr. Joseph Isaac Bluestone of New York City,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 35 (1939), pp. 53–64; Bluestone’s Memoirs and Scrapbook, American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) Archives, Waltham, Massachusetts. Belated evidence of the popularity of the Landsmanschaften may be found in the memoirs of Louis Lipsky, who became president of the American Zionist movement in the early 1920s (Louis Lipsky, Memoirs in Proﬁle, Philadelphia, 1975, p. 52). For discussion of the role and function of the Landsmanschaften among American Jews, see Nathan M. Kaganhoﬀ, “The Jewish Landsmanschaftn in New York History,” American Jewish History (September 1986), pp. 61–62). For an updated study on the subject see: Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939, Cambridge, Mass, 1997. 9 Feinstein, pp. 150–153, 173, 20; American Hebrew, 45 ( June 23, 1899), p. 231;

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As several historians of American Jewry have noted, the popularity of these associations was not due to a desire among newly landed immigrants to cloister themselves oﬀ from America. The complex web of immigrant organizations served the recent immigrants as essential mediators in their eﬀorts to acclimate themselves to the new and strange environment.10 However, the early Reform Zionists, like most of their “veteran American” colleagues, were seldom able to regard the Landsmannschaften and the immigrants’ culture as anything but manifestations of anti-American self-seclusion and separatism. In fact, they considered them undesirable entities that endangered the very goals of Zionism as they construed them. Evidence of this is found in a letter sent by Gottheil to Herzl in 1901, in which he complained about Joseph Zeﬀ, a Zionist orator recently arrived from eastern Europe, who was “running down America and American people.” From Gottheil’s perspective, Zeﬀ ’s remarks were an intolerable attack on the main function of Zionism, and he demanded that Herzl call Zeﬀ to order.11 Gottheil was also perturbed by eﬀorts to create a Jewish lobby that would pressure parties and candidates to support Zionist goals. In his opinion, such gambits might underscore the narrow ethnic and non-American interests of Zionism, an outcome he considered very dangerous. In 1899, in response to Herzl’s proposal in the matter, he explained to the latter that any attempt to establish a Jewish

Philip Bregstone, Chicago and Its Jews: A Cultural History (privately printed, 1933), pp. 89–90; Shapiro, p. 27; Evyatar Frizel, “The Nights of Zion Order in Chicago and Its Relations with the Zionist Federation of American Zionists, 1898–1916,” Zionism I (1970) (Hebrew), pp. 121–149. 10 The role and the American characteristics of the immigrants’ Zionism are discussed in the following studies: Judd L. Teller, “America’s Two Zionist Traditions,” Commentary, XX, 4 (October, 1955), pp. 343–352; Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Chicago, 1983, pp. 6–45; 182–195. (First editions published in 1955); Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust, New York, 1975; Ben Halpern, “The Americanization of Zionism, 1880–1930,” American Jewish History, LXIX (September, 1979), pp. 15–33; Irving Howe, “Pluralism in the Immigrant World,” in David Berger, ed., The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, New York, 1983, p. 152; Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism, New York and London, 1998. See also Ofer Shiﬀ, “A New Perspective on the Americanization of Zionism,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, Studeis in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel, 10 (2000), pp. 180–206 (Hebrew). 11 Abraham Goldberg, “American Zionism up to the Brandeis Era,” The Brandeis Avukah Annual of 1932: A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Zionist Thought, Dedicated to Louis D. Brandeis, J. S. Shubow, ed., Boston, 1932, p. 550; Feinstein, pp. 169, 198; Shapiro, pp. 35, 112–113.

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lobby would be severely injurious to the goal of American Zionism. In another case, in response to attempted political intervention by the Knights of Zion Order in Chicago, Gottheil stated that Zionism must not be involved in local politics: “Zionism must not be made use of to further the interests of any political body here. The moment such a state of things arise it would absolutely kill all our work in this country.”12 Thus, Gottheil represented an American Zionist point of view that regarded identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel as an important way to neutralize any particularistic focal point that might threaten the American nature of Judaism. Gottheil continued to evince this concern even after he resigned from all active roles in the Zionist movement. During World War I he ﬁercely criticized the intention to appoint Israel Friedlander as a representative of Zionist organizations in their work with the Red Cross. Friedlander, a lecturer at the Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS) and a senior member of the Zionist movement, was suspected by Gottheil of pro-German sympathies at a time when the United States had already joined the war against Germany. From Gottheil’s perspective, this suspicion suﬃced to impugn Friedlander’s patriotism and disqualify him as an American Zionist representative.13 Gottheil’s views on the “American” nature and function of Zionism remained an important aspect of the “veteran American” Zionist outlook. It would also become one of the most important characteristics of the universalistic Reform method of coping with Zionism during the Holocaust, by which time formerly anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Reform Jews had undergone a major rapprochement with Zionist ideas. Nevertheless, the universalistic Zionist outlook of Gottheil and his “veteran American” colleagues could not be fully applied merely by striving to neutralize the ethnocultural and un-American characteristics of Old World Judaism. The universalistic aspiration sought not to obliterate the singular Jewish identity but to harmonize it with the American identity. It could not favor such a rapid and radical Americanization as might consign the Old World Jewish culture to total oblivion. Instead, it perceived Zionism as a moderating force

12 Naomi W. Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea, New York, 1975, p. 12; Feinstein, pp. 172–173. 13 Shapiro, pp. 112–113.

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that might allow a constructive Americanization to take shape – the sort that would not force American Jews to choose between a separatist, cloistered Jewish identity and an assimilated American identity in which their Jewish roots would be totally displaced. The most salient exponent of this outlook was Judah Magnes, who in 1908 provocatively declared himself a Hovev Zion. By so doing, he wished to stress that the main goal of Zionism was not the attainment of a political charter to Palestine but the preservation and eﬄorescence of Diaspora Jewry. Magnes had to leave his teaching position at the anti-Zionist bastion of Hebrew Union College due to friction occasioned by his Zionist beliefs. Subsequently he resigned his prestigious position at Temple Emanu-El in New York because of his Zionist activity and his proposals for greater emphasis on traditional Jewish rituals. Another exponent of this outlook was Israel Friedlander, who opposed the negation-of-the-Diaspora doctrine. Friedlander, who translated the writings of Simon Dubnow and Ahad Ha’am into English, believed it the duty of Zionism to maintain Diaspora Jewish centers, foremost the United States, alongside the center in Palestine, and to assure the vibrant cultural development of these centers. Magnes and Friedlander also believed in “cultural pluralism,” the most salient proponent of which was Horace M. Kallen. Kallen depicted American society as an orchestra and Americanism as a “harmony” that can be attained only if all the diﬀerent “instruments” – the social and ethnic sectors that constitute the great American ensemble – make their contribution. The function of Zionism, according to this view, was to make it possible to preserve and nurture the special “Jewish melody” so that it might take part in and contribute to the general American harmony. This complex approach to Zionism was not exclusive to the early Reform Zionists; many “veteran American” Jews – including nonZionists and even anti-Zionists – shared it. A standout personality in this respect was the Jewish banker and leader Jacob Schiﬀ. Schiﬀ, a member of the Reform congregation Temple Emanu-El in New York, favored bringing the Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter from Cambridge, England, to New York, so that he could head and revive the Jewish Theological Seminary. Schiﬀ hoped that Conservative Judaism, which was more kindred in spirit to the eastern European immigrants than Reform, might expose the immigrants to a more moderate and constructive Americanization process. In the same vein, Schiﬀ and his colleagues favored various activities that would pro-

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mote Yiddish culture and even Zionist ideology among immigrants, although personally they opposed these activities in principle. In 1908, Schiﬀ and his colleague in Jewish public activity, Louis Marshall, also supported an initiative by Magnes to set the ghetto culture of Jewish immigrants in New York within a modern American framework.14 The complex challenge of preserving the vitality of Old World Judaism while contending with the threat posed by this heritage became especially diﬃcult when it had to address itself not to the immigrants’ culture, which was perceived as a “temporary phase” in the Americanization process, but to the Americanized Zionist views of the second-generation oﬀspring of eastern European immigrants. These people rarely exhibited “un-American” ways of life, and some of their leaders, such as Abba Hillel Silver, even joined the Reform Movement. Their views were therefore considered more dangerous, and it was more urgent to tackle the complex challenge that they presented. The main “danger” originated in the second generation’s conception of the all-embracing nature of the immigrant culture as an important component of the desired harmonization of Judaism and Americanism. Personalities such as Louis Lipsky, Mordecai M. Kaplan, and Abba Hillel Silver represented a growing group of “secondgeneration” Zionists who wished to preserve the comprehensive Jewish commitment of the immigrant ghetto as an integral part of their American identity. This group belonged to the leadership echelon that began to form among the immigrants’ oﬀspring. Many members of the group had graduated from American universities and, in the economic sense, belonged to the American middle class. As this group saw things, the “American role” of Zionism had to go beyond neutralizing the ramparts separating the immigrants’ ghetto from American society. They based their hope for the harmonization for Judaism and Americanism on a combination of two equivalent factors: their parents’ immigrant culture and general American culture. Zionism and the embryonic Yishuv in Palestine were important means

14 Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, Philadelphia, 1963, pp. 233–274, 311–326; Cyrus Adler, Jacob H. Schiﬀ: His Life and Letters, Vol. II, New York, 1929, pp. 50–54; Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism, An American Religious Movement, New York, 1985, pp. 161–166; Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922, New York, 1970.

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to this end. They were perceived as a model for a Jewish culture that was as intensively Jewish and all-embracing as the immigrants’ ghetto culture, but also reﬂected an ability to integrate into general modern culture.15 This second-generation conception of Zionism seemed to many “veteran American” Jews to be an internal Jewish menace that had to be fought. However, the growing strength and legitimacy of this view were part of a process that gradually made Zionism a focal point of internal Jewish identiﬁcation that could not be dismissed or ignored without risking estrangement from Jewish identity and solidarity. This process forced many “veteran American” Reform non-Zionists and anti-Zionists to change their method of confronting Zionism. Instead of opposing it, as many of them had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of them, in the course of the 1930s and 1940s, adopted an approach to the immigrants’ Zionism that was similar to that of the early Reform Zionists: an attempt to cope positively with the particularistic attributes of Zionism that were typical of the second generation. Zionism owed its improved status and legitimation among “veteran American” Jews to a series of developments in the United States and overseas. The decision by Louis D. Brandeis, the “embodiment” of Americanism,16 to subscribe to the Zionist movement; the Balfour and San Marino declarations; and the recognition of these documents by the U.S. Administration enhanced the stature of Zionism in the eyes of American Jewry, and especially “veteran American”

15

Louis Lipsky’s lecture in 1909 to the Nordau Zionist Society provides an example of this Zionist perspective. In a critique of the Reform outlook, Lipsky stated that the authentic Jewish grasp is not limited to the theological realm but embraces all ﬁelds of life, from criminal and civil law to matters of health, charity, philanthropy, and education. He regarded the attempt of the Universalistic Reform ideology to conﬁne Judaism to religious-theological aﬀairs as a manifestation of estrangement from and repudiation of the Jewish heritage and way of life. In contrast, he believed, Zionism wishes not to ﬂee from Jewish identiﬁcation and way of life but to allow them to exist as a legitimate and integral part of American society. Louis Lipsky, “The Duty of American Jews,” Memoirs in Proﬁle, Philadelphia, 1975, pp. 238–335. 16 Brandeis accepted the leadership of the American Zionist Movement in 1914; his stature in American society lent the movement an added dimension of dignity and reinforced its American image. Brandeis had earned a reputation as a jurist and was considered a close associate and conﬁdant of President Woodrow Wilson. In 1916, he became the ﬁrst Jew to be named to the United States Supreme Court.

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Reform Jews. Once Zionism was considered a mainstream Jewish movement, even Jews who wished to disregard it found that the nonJews around them identiﬁed them with Palestine and the growing Zionist enterprise. Gradually Zionism came to be perceived as a major factor in Jewish identity and consequently one that required a positive approach even from those who regarded their Jewish identity as subordinate to their commitment to America. The most salient proponent of this outlook was the non-Zionist leader Louis Marshall, one of the most prominent leaders of the American Jewish Committee and a stalwart representative of the non-Zionist “veteran Americans.” In 1918 Marshall turned down an invitation from the Reform rabbi David Philipson to participate in an anti-Zionist conference against the Balfour Declaration. “Now that the English and French Governments have made a declaration which removes the Palestinian question out of the domain of theory,” he explained, “I am anxious that . . . there shall arise no bitter conﬂict among the Jews.” In a letter to another anti-Zionist leader, Max Senior, Marshall took matters a step further by expressing his assessment of any attack on Zionism as a betrayal of the general Jewish interest. He repeated this claim in a letter to the Jewish owner of the New York Times, Adolph S. Ochs. He explained his objection to drafting an anti-Zionist petition for President Wilson by stating that such a petition would merely serve the goals of antisemites and enemies of the Jews.17 In Marshall’s eyes, it was now anti-Zionism, not pro-Zionism, that might strengthen antisemitism and emphasize the Judaism-Americanism gap. The impact of this development on the Reform universalists became clearer in the 1930s, when American Zionism made important inroads in the erstwhile anti-Zionist Reform Movement, and even more so in the 1940s, when the struggle to establish the State of Israel made identiﬁcation with Zionism the reﬂection of a “general American Jewish consensus” almost irrespective of one’s point of view or Jewish commitment. This growing Zionist identiﬁcation, coupled with the wave of antisemitism that swept America and Europe in the 1930s

17 Charles Reznikoﬀ, ed., Louis Marshall, Champion of Liberty, Vol. II, Philadelphia, 1957, pp. 716–718, 722, 724–725; Charles Israel Goldblatt, “The Impact of the Balfour Declaration in America,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 4 ( June 1968), pp. 479–480.

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and 1940s, would prompt many “veteran American” Reform Jews who previously had been non-Zionists if not anti-Zionists to change their minds and delegitimize those who attacked and rejected Zionism. Many members of this last-mentioned group found themselves caught up in a paradox: the only way to contend with the internal threat of Zionism was to make a positive, universalistic Jewish reference to it. Like the early Reform Zionists who preceded them, they found themselves in a complex confrontation with this internal Jewish threat: unable to reject Zionist identiﬁcation, they found it necessary to transform this identiﬁcation into a component with universalistic Jewish signiﬁcance that did not clash with their principal American commitment. Thus, the early Reform Zionists were “portenders” in two senses: in their treatment of Zionism as an internal Jewish threat and in their recognition of the need to contend with this threat by making Zionism a component of the universalistic ideology with positive Jewish meaning. One of the most representative exemplars of this coping pattern was Julian Morgenstern, a leading Reform ideologue in the 1930s and the 1940s. The development and coalescence of Morgenstern’s universalistic Jewish identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may shed light on non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Reform Jews who found themselves in the dilemma of having to face the internal Jewish threat posed by Zionist identiﬁcation and the equally urgent need to infuse this identiﬁcation with positive Jewish universalistic meaning. B. Julian Morgenstern Encounters Jewish Culture and Zionism Julian Morgenstern was born in 1881 in a small town in Illinois, far from the pogroms that were raging at the time in eastern Europe. These pogroms would instigate an immense tide of Jewish emigration from eastern Europe to the United States, transforming the demographic makeup of American Jewry. As an adult, Morgenstern would spend most of his career – as a Bible scholar and as president of Hebrew Union College – contending with the eﬀects of these developments. In the late nineteenth century, however, in the small towns of Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas where he was raised, the pogroms were perceived as nothing more than a faint and inconsequential echo. This distance, not only from Russian Jewry but also

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from anything related to Jewish culture, was a conspicuous characteristic of Morgenstern’s youth. In subsequent years, it would leave a clear imprint on his universalistic Jewish outlook as a whole.18 Morgenstern was born to a family of immigrants from western Germany. Until he was seven, his family lived in states that had no Jewish centers of consequence; usually his was the only Jewish family in town. For a brief period of about one year, when Morgenstern was ﬁve years old, his family lived in Vincennes, Indiana, where there was an impromptu synagogue, and the local rabbi, who lived in their home, tutored him in Hebrew and English. Apart from this, the Jewish tradition and way of life played hardly any meaningful role in his early childhood. Morgenstern’s entire exposure to Judaism during those years boiled down to fasting on Yom Kippur and eating matzo on Passover – the only two elements of Jewish ritual that his family practiced. When he was seven, Morgenstern’s family moved to Cincinnati. Here the boy was exposed to somewhat more intensive Jewish experiences. He was now part of a relatively large extended maternal family and the town’s sizable Jewish community. Here Morgenstern received his ﬁrst formal Jewish education, albeit not intensive: for ﬁve years he attended a Reform Sunday school, which prepared him for a conﬁrmation that included a traditional reading of the Torah. After ﬁnishing Sunday school, he enrolled in Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical seminary. He spent the next eight years there, along with regular studies in a local public school and, afterwards, at the University of Cincinnati, until he was ordained a rabbi in 1901. Although he was more intensively exposed to Judaism during

18 No thoroughgoing scholarly work has yet been written about J. Morgenstern. The main biographical details concerning this personality, presented in this book, are based on the autobiographical article cited below and several additional incomplete sources that follow it: Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, 1949, AJA, MS Col. 30, 14/10. Published in Religion and Civilization Series, Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies, Louis Finkelstein, ed., New York and London, 1953; AJA, Small Collection SC-8455; Joshua L. Liebman, “Kindler of a Mental Light,” Liberal Judaism (November, 1945), pp. 18–23; B. J. Bamberger, “The Impact of Julian Morgenstern on American Jewish Life,” CCARY (April 1957), pp. 1–4; M. Lieberman, “Julian Morgenstern, Scholar, Teacher and Leader, HUCA (1961), pp. 1–9; M. A. Meyer and Sheldon H. Blank, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years (1976), pp. 68–316; Sheldon H. Blank, “Julian Morgenstern: A Memorial Tribute,” CCARY (1977), pp. 267–268; Sheldon H. Blank, “Julian Morgenstern,” CCARY (1978), pp. 267–268.

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this time, Morgenstern’s formative experiences were still very remote, if not estranged, from Jewish customs and traditions. Almost ﬁfty years later, writing about this period in his autobiography, Morgenstern described his childhood home as a “typical” American Reform Jewish home, in which religious rituals were not practiced and were even regarded as fossilized and irrelevant relics of a bygone era.19 This attitude toward religious rituals was consistent with the prevailing outlook at HUC at the time.20 Morgenstern’s program of rabbinical studies included only one course on Jewish rituals, and even that course, as he himself pointed out, was oﬀered due to an initiative by several students who felt ill at ease with their total ignorance of the topic. Only after he was ordained, after eight years of studies at HUC, did Morgenstern attend his ﬁrst Passover seder with a family in Cincinnati! Years later, he recalled the experience of his ﬁrst seder as a perplexing event: “I remember that upon that occasion I thought the Seder a quaint and interesting ceremony, but also that I felt towards it more as a spectator than as a participant.” In fact, even when he penned these remarks in 1949, after having held major positions in Jewish leadership for nearly half a century, Morgenstern still described his inability to overcome the distance he felt from Jewish ceremonies. To a large extent, he confessed, he was still a spectator and not a participant.21 In contrast to Jewish culture, the non-Jewish environment had a strong inﬂuence on him. In fact, he himself often noted the diﬀerence between his inability as a student to exploit his studies at HUC, due to his scanty Jewish knowledge, and the profound inﬂuence he absorbed from two teachers at the University of Cincinnati, one in English literature and the other in history. His account of his graduate studies stresses the same situation. After completing his studies in Cincinnati, he almost immediately set out for Germany. There, at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, he completed his doctoral

19 Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 4–5. In regard to Morgenstern’s deﬁnition of a “typical” Reform Jewish home as a place where religious rituals are considered irrelevant, fossilized relics, see also Ezra Spicehandler and Theodore Wiener, “Bernhard Felsenthal’s Letters to Osias Schorr,” Essays in American Jewish History, Cincinnati, 1958, pp. 394–396; Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 262. 20 For discussion of the attitude toward Jewish ceremonies and rituals at HUC in its early years, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 262–263, 270, 273, 275. 21 Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 4–6.

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studies in Semitic languages in two years, summa cum laude, with a dissertation on the doctrine of sin in the Babylonian religion. Here, too, although he had a profound intellectual experience at the German universities and formed close relationships with lecturers there, he did not connect emotionally at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (High Institute for Jewish Studies), and some time later he summed up the courses he had taken there as “dull and unrewarding.” He also noted that most of his friends in Heidelberg were non-Jewish students. As he attested later, his superﬁcial Jewish background spared him from “Jewishly self-conscious inhibitions, and all my fellow students accepted me readily for what I was, an American student of positively Jewish religious convictions and aﬃliations.”22 As these remarks show, the dominance of Morgenstern’s American background would have a perceptible inﬂuence on his views on how to deﬁne a “positive” Jewish aﬃliation. Such an aﬃliation, he believed, should be based on universalistic religious values, in contrast to a “negative” Jewish aﬃliation, i.e., one predicated on intensive Jewish culture and traditions. Evidently Morgenstern’s Jewish self-awareness, which took shape rather late in his life, remained largely at the cold, alienated level of the intellect and lacked an emotional sense of belonging that exists irrespective of reasons and rationales. As Morgenstern explained in his autobiography, it was only as a doctoral student in Germany that he began to give thought to his Jewish identity. In his eight years of study at HUC, he treated this identity as virtually inconsequential and, in fact, never even considered what it meant in terms of his future career as a rabbi. It took him another year, after he began to study the Assyrian language in Germany, to reach a watershed in his Jewish self-awareness. Morgenstern’s Assyrian studies acquainted him with the myths of the ancient east. This revelation called his attention to the possibility that some biblical accounts are historically inaccurate and, in any case, show clear traces of ancient eastern cultural inﬂuences. Although Morgenstern had been aware of this possibility back at Hebrew Union College, he had not given it much thought until his doctoral studies. Now he spent many weeks reﬂecting on its implications for the veracity of the Jewish religious doctrine and, above all, for his

22

Ibid., pp. 9, 11–13.

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own Jewish identity. Eventually, he concluded that Judaism is a religion that strives to progress in continual dialogue with the cultures around it, and its diﬀerent phases of development are cemented together solely by the universal elements of monotheism and social justice. One may say that in the absence of an emotional basis of Jewish aﬃliation, Morgenstern’s intellectual quest for a unifying element in Jewish history became essential to his attempt to understand his own Jewish identity. Morgenstern also manifested this quest in his decision to devote his doctoral studies and his entire academic career to studying the origins of ancient Jewish rituals – again, as a surrogate of sorts for his inability to identify with these rituals on an intimate, emotional, and practical basis. It is important to emphasize that Morgenstern was rarely an original thinker. His views represent the development of previous eﬀorts by European Jewish savants such as Abraham Geiger and American Reform thinkers, foremost Kaufmann Kohler and Emil Hirsch, to contend with the philosophies of biblical criticism and Darwinism.23 Like them, Morgenstern used biblical criticism to trace Jewish rites to ancient Semitic pagan origins. Mainly following Kohler, he based himself on Darwinistic theory to describe Judaism as the outgrowth of protracted interaction with its surroundings; at each stage, he believed, it assimilates rites and conceptions from the surroundings and reﬁnes them to attain a higher stage in its own evolution. Kohler had already invoked this perspective to debunk Orthodoxy’s pretense of representing Judaism in its uncorrupted form and to make an opposite claim: that it is Reform Judaism that constitutes the ﬁnal and most advanced phase in the lengthy evolutionary chain of Judaism. Furthermore, Kohler had preceded Morgenstern in using Darwinistic perspectives to juxtapose Orthodoxy’s seclusive and stagnant approach with the Reform perspective of Jewish existence as being dependent on integration and continual change.24 Morgenstern’s main contribution evidently lies in his minutely detailed and scientiﬁcally grounded analysis of the developmental

23 Morgenstern declared himself a successor to Geiger in his 1915 article, “The Foundations of Israel’s History,” CCARY (1915), reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As A Mighty Stream, p. 27. 24 Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 270–276; Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology Systematically and Historically Considered, New York, 1918.

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phases of Judaism, from Joshua’s conquests to the Second Temple period, and his subsequent work in consolidating his ﬁndings to create a universalistic Jewish historiography contrary to that of Zionism. For the purposes of the current discussion, Morgenstern is important mainly as a representative of a Reform Jewish group that, on the basis of its dominant American aﬃliation, considered it the principal challenge to construct a positive view of Jewish identity that is neither seclusive, like the Orthodox approach, nor based on an emotional connection with the Jewish “Old World.” These attributes of the universalistic Reform identity, represented by Morgenstern, come into clearer focus when compared with the identity traits of the second-generation American Jews who were joining the Reform Movement. Morgenstern’s path was nothing like one that might be taken by a person whose Jewish identity is anchored in intimate familiarity with the intensive Old World Jewish way of life, and for whom the main challenge was how to reconcile equal commitments to Jewish culture and American society.25 Such a person was Abba Hillel Silver, who, though also a Reform universalist, placed his emphases elsewhere.26 Silver, unlike Morgenstern, had been exposed from childhood not only to general American culture but also to the rich and intensive culture of the Jewish immigrants’ quarter in New York, where he was raised. In his memoirs, he describes this Jewish environment as “bubbling over with the ferment of the old world ideas in their new world bottles.” Silver’s education typiﬁes this integration of new and old; he spent his mornings in a public school that exposed him to American culture and his afternoons in a Jewish school (Yeshivat Etz Chaim). Consequently, his Jewish identity was not a matter of impersonal intellectual comprehension of Jewish culture. By its very essence, his identity was inseparable both from the all-embracing

25 Late evidence of Morgenstern’s “Americanism” may be adduced from his daughter’s letter to Sheldon H. Blank, who wrote a brief biography of her father. In this letter, she attests that although both of her parents were of German origin and spoke ﬂuent German, she could not remember their ever having spoken German at home. (AJA, Biographical Details from Small Collection, SC-8455.) 26 Among the studies that discuss Silver’s Zionist views, the following are noteworthy: Marc Lee Raphael, Abba Hillel Silver – A Proﬁle in American Judaism, New York, 1989; Mark A. Raider, ed., Abba Hillel Silver and Ameircan Zionism, London, 1997; Allon Gal, “The United States in Abba Hillel Silver’s World View,” Michael 15 (2000) (Hebrew), pp. 9–25.

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Jewish life in the immigrants’ ghetto and the American way of life. In his later years Silver described his childhood in the immigrants’ ghetto in New York as a formative experience in an environment that not only encouraged him to integrate into American society, but also taught him a prerequisite for attaining this goal: “loyalty to a revered [ Jewish] way of life.”27 This commitment to the Jewish culture of the immigrants’ ghetto is also the context in which to understand Silver’s decision in 1911, at the age of eighteen, to embark on a Reform rabbinical career and enroll at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. By joining the Reform Movement, Silver was not expressing alienation from the intensive Jewish culture of his childhood. On the contrary, he regarded joining the Reform Movement as his way of remaining loyal to the Old World Jewish ways of life without having to dissociate from the perceptions of American culture. He described his choice to become a Reform rabbi as the continuation of his father’s and grandfather’s careers as Orthodox rabbis. He stressed that he had decided to enroll in Hebrew Union College “because of my love for the home of my childhood and the religious way of life of my parents.” I had then and still have a warm aﬀection for Orthodox Judaism, but I felt no strong intellectual commitment to it, either as to its practice or doctrine. I and my young friends were reaching out, quite unconsciously, for a more liberal type of Judaism.28

In contrast to Silver, Morgenstern and other Reform Jews of predominantly American upbringing were estranged from Jewish rites and the intensive Jewish way of life. Morgenstern made extensive use of biblical criticism to stress the foreign and non-Jewish origins of Jewish rituals and to deﬁne the universal-value angle as the only substantive factor that might invest these customs with authentic Jewish meaning. The use of intellectual and scientiﬁc analysis to arrive at the spiritual and universalistic essence of Judaism became, in Morgenstern’s hands, almost the only element that gave him a sense of Jewish belonging. From his standpoint, it became the sole indicator for judging the value of various customs and an almost exclusive indicator of the possibility of modern Jewish existence. 27 Silver, Autobiography/Memoirs, Book 1, pp. 1–3 [c. 1963?], Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Ben-Gurion Research Ctr., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, Series VII/A, Roll 211/1. 28 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

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Morgenstern expressed this outlook clearly in an article he wrote in 1904, shortly after returning from his studies in Germany, about the state of Judaism in that country.29 He began by criticizing rural German Jews for stubbornly insulating themselves from German society by observing rituals that had long since lost their universalistic meaning and disregarding those parts of the rituals that still have some universalistic meanings, such as the theme of freedom in the Passover seder and the ethical values expressed by Yom Kippur. Morgenstern also inveighed against the assimilationist leanings that he encountered among members of the Reform Temple in Berlin. He termed the ritual changes introduced at the temple “artiﬁcial” because they were motivated by negation – not to uncover the universalistic signiﬁcance of the rituals but solely to mimic Christian society. He cited the temple’s decision to move the Sabbath services to Sunday as an example of a change motivated solely by the wish to resemble the Gentiles. According to Morgenstern, the problem was not the act of moving the Sabbath to a diﬀerent day but the meaninglessness of the change in universal-value terms. For Reform Judaism to succeed, Morgenstern argued, it must embark on a gradual process of educating Jews in the ethical-universalistic meaning of all rituals. Gradual exposure to the inner universal-value essence of Judaism, he claimed, is the key to developing a “positive” Jewish identity that would obviate the need for “negative” actions such as the rural Jews’ seclusionism or the assimilation that typiﬁed the members of the Berlin Temple.30 In Morgenstern’s thinking, both separatism and assimilation were “negative” outlooks that repudiated Judaism’s ability to maintain a continual dialogue with its surroundings. In this vein, Morgenstern also criticized both assimilated Jews and the Zionists for their attitude toward antisemitism. He criticized the members of the Berlin Temple who thought they could satisfy antisemites’ demands by renouncing anything Jewish that antisemites might dislike. According to Morgenstern, their actions were distinct from those of “authentic” Reform Jews in that they constituted “a comical aping of Christianity, a stepping stone, as it were, to conversion.” He predicted that many adherents of this approach, or

29 Julian Morgenstern, “The Condition of Judaism in Germany,” The Jewish Conservator 2/22 (November 25, 1904), pp. 7–8; 2/23 (December 2, 1904), pp. 6–8. 30 Ibid., 2/22, pp. 7–8; 2/23, p. 6.

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their children, would undoubtedly leave the Jewish fold in due course. Interestingly, his criticism of the Zionist response to antisemitism was based on similar grounds: Zionism . . . is founded on a policy of despair and submission, on disbelief in the improvement of mankind. . . . The treatment of the Jew by his neighbors will never improve. . . . The only way to stop all persecution is for the Jew to yield gracefully, to admit that all that antisemitism maintains is right . . . and humbly . . . retire to a little corner of the world.

Morgenstern considered Zionism a defeatist response that, like the “Assimilationist Party,” accepted the particularistic assumptions of antisemitism. Furthermore, Zionism, from Morgenstern’s viewpoint, represented a sort of Jewish identity “by negation” in that it reﬂected a particularistic ethnic perspective that undermined the universalistic foundations of the “authentic” Jewish identity and aﬃliation. “I am a Jew,” to say this before the world, regardless of consequences. This is much, and yet not so much as it seems. When the Zionist is proud of being a Jew, it is not so much in the religious as in the national sense. He is prouder of Juda Maccabee than of Moses, prouder of the battle of Beth-Horon than of the Ten Commandments, prouder of his blind faith in Herzl than of the fact that his religion was the ﬁrst to proclaim and does still proclaim the unity of God.31

At that time (the early twentieth century), Morgenstern believed that American Jewry was more threatened by the pro-Zionists’ propensity for separatism than by the risk of assimilation faced by German Jewry. His views on this topic became even more signiﬁcant after World War I, when America was swept by a wave of isolationism and xenophobia aimed against “Jews” and “Bolsheviks,” and in view of the danger that “negative” Jewish responses to this wave, such as Zionism, would gather momentum. The isolationism and xenophobic tendencies gathered strength, especially in the 1920s, and were manifested in various ways: restrictive immigration laws aimed to a large extent against Jews; the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which preached hatred of Catholics, blacks, and Jews; dissemination by Henry Ford of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion; and strenuous eﬀorts by Christian missionary

31

Ibid., 2/23, pp. 7–8.

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movements that purported to act in the name of American values. In response to this increase in manifestations of anti-Jewish hostility, Morgenstern felt it his duty to predicate his relations with the nonJewish world not on a “defeatist” credo representing “narrow” Jewish interests but on a “positive” outlook that emanated from a universalistic American perspective. From his earliest years of activity in the United States – ﬁrst for three years (1904–1907) as a rabbi in Lafayette, Indiana, and afterwards as a teacher at Hebrew Union College – Morgenstern strove to demonstrate the possibility of maintaining a positive pattern of relations with the Christian world. Thus, in several of his sermons and lectures, he repeatedly mentioned the joint ceremonies he had held with American Protestant clergymen during his ﬁrst sea voyage as a young rabbi en route to his doctoral studies in Europe. He retold this story as an example of the liberalism and tolerance that typiﬁed American society and as a way of substantiating the possibility of placing Jewish-Christian relations on equal footing. By virtue of this approach, he became the ﬁrst non-Protestant to be admitted to the local association of clergymen in Lafayette, in which capacity he did not hesitate to oppose fundamentalist views of the association’s members. He took care to wage his struggle not as a representative of the Jewish doctrine but as the proponent of a scientiﬁc viewpoint of biblical criticism that probed various issues, such as the plausibility of the New Testament account of the birth of Jesus. In another instance, this time in 1909, he helped a young pastor overcome a crisis of faith that beset him when he “discovered” that the Jesus story in the New Testament could not be historically accurate. Morgenstern took care to base his arguments on universalistic developmental criteria and explained to the pastor that the only justiﬁable reason for the existence, observance and preaching of Christianity, or for that matter of any religion, lies, not in the historical correctness of the traditions regarding its origin and the life of its founder, but rather in the truth, strength, eternity and universality of its beliefs and teaching.32 32 Julian Morgenstern, “The Religion of American Democracy,” Moral and Spiritual Foundations for the World Tomorrow, The Centenary Series of Addresses and Others Papers Prepared for the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of Congregation Emanu-El, New York, 1945; Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 16–18; Julian Morgenstern, “Behind Closed Doors,” Hebrew Union College Monthly, IV (1918), reprinted in As a Mighty Stream, pp. 70–71.

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Morgenstern also used biblical criticism to prove that universalistic principles are manifestations of authentic Judaism, whereas the seclusive attitudes of Orthodoxy and Zionism are but regrettable deviations from the legitimate Jewish mainstream. In order to inculcate this view, Morgenstern, immediately after receiving his appointment to the HUC faculty in 1907, pushed for a more central place in the curriculum for the doctrine of biblical criticism, which espoused scientiﬁc analysis of Scripture. This discipline had become part of the HUC curriculum several years before Morgenstern joined the faculty – after Kaufmann Kohler was appointed president in 1903 – but for several years many Reform rabbis still feared and resisted it, considering it a potential threat to the very underpinnings of the Jewish faith. Morgenstern made strenuous eﬀorts to overcome this resistance, trying to convince his colleagues that only through the mediation of biblical criticism could a modern Jew discern and choose between “positive” religious reforms, those ﬂowing from the authentic universalistic Jewish tradition, and “negative” reforms meant solely to facilitate assimilation.33 Two years after he joined the HUC faculty, in an address at the 1909 CCAR convention, Morgenstern gave a further explanation of the centrality of universalistic principles in constructing a positive and viable Reform Jewish identity. He argued that the Torah was revealed not on one occasion and to one person but in a lengthy, protracted process that progressed from the simplest and most elementary phases to more exalted and advanced ones. This process will reach its climax, Morgenstern said, only after the universalistic vision is fully realized. He stressed that in the absence of this historical principle of the development of Judaism around its universalistic core, Reform Judaism is not Judaism at all and should be considered nothing but an ethical system, akin to Felix Adler’s New York Society for Ethical Culture.34 Morgenstern’s ﬁrst systematic lecture on the topic, titled “The Foundations of Israel’s History,” was delivered at the 1915 CCAR convention and published in an expanded version in the conference proceedings. In fact, it was the ﬁrst time that Morgenstern presented

33 Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 6, 18–19; AJA, Biographical Details from Small Collection, SC-8455. 34 Julian Morgenstern, “The Signiﬁcance of the Bible for Reform Judaism in the Light of Modern Scientiﬁc Research,” CCARY (1909), pp. 10–20.

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a systematic universalistic interpretation of Jewish history. He described prophecy as the highest rung that Judaism had managed to attain in its eﬀorts to approach the Divine truth. This development peaked at the time of the Babylonian exile and the prophecies of DeuteroIsaiah, which constituted the loftiest manifestation of recognition of God’s supra-national nature and the universalistic signiﬁcance of the Jews’ role in disseminating the Divine truth. In contrast, the era of Ezra and Nehemiah resulted in a retreat from the advanced, universalistic prophetic outlooks. It led to a strengthening of the status of the priesthood and the emphasis on law and ritual as means of self-seclusion from the non-Jewish environment. This conceptual retreat was also reﬂected in a re-editing of the biblical canon in a legalistic and ritualistic spirit, e.g., by elevating the giving of Torah laws to Moses to the highest level of sanctity in Revelation and placing various prophetic revelations at a lower level, with their main purpose being not to proclaim the Divine truth but to re-emphasize the importance of observing the laws and rituals of the holy Torah.35 Morgenstern’s analysis was neither innovative nor original. Some even argued that his approach was “overinterpretative,” i.e., that he had subordinated the text to his religious worldview.36 Its importance lies in deﬁning the methods of biblical criticism as the only legitimate way for Reform Jews to invest their sense of Jewish aﬃliation with positive meaning. Morgenstern’s aforementioned 1915 lecture, for example, devoted an entire section to the era of Joshua’s conquests and attempted to prove that it was the universalistic religious idea stemming from the primitive desert religion, and not the “late” ritual or legalistic element, that underlay the tribes’ coalescence into a single entity. Disclosure of the universalistic basis of early Judaism proved, Morgenstern claimed, that the universalistic Reform ideology, and not the teachings of Orthodoxy or Zionism, represents authentic Judaism.

35

Julian Morgenstern, “The Foundations of Israel’s History,” pp. 3–67. For another example, see Morgenstern’s 1913 article on Genesis 14, at the account of Abraham’s encounter with Malkizedeq, King of Shalem: “Genesis 14,” Studies in Jewish Literature, Issued in Honor of Professor Kaufmann Kohler, on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, Berlin, 1913, pp. 223–236. 36 For example, Morgenstern allegedly ignored Medieval commentators and even Talmudic sources who, in his opinion, represented the “negative” legalistic-ritualistic approach that, he said, rose to dominance in Judaism after the era of Ezra and Nehemiah.

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chapter three We must have faith in ourselves . . . that we are not destroying the foundation of our Judaism, as many short-sighted and timorous traditionalists fear. We are not questioning the existence of God, nor denying nor abrogating a single one of the vital, spiritual truths of Judaism. . . . We are returning, as it were, to the concept of revelation and of religion which was held by the prophets; we are interpreting all our history, from its beginning unto the present day, in the same spirit as they interpreted it.37

C. An Escalating Threat to the Universalistic Jewish Sense of Belonging Gradually, the particularistic challenge that Morgenstern had fought since the beginning of his career evolved from a Jewish threat lying outside the Reform Movement to a menace from within, animated mainly by members of the second generation, who were joining the movement in large numbers. Silver’s memoirs provide evidence of the challenge that the new members presented. He earned rabbinical ordination in 1915 and was the valedictorian of his graduating class.38 At ﬁrst glance, his speech attested to the inﬂuence of the classical Reform perspective on HUC students, especially those who had come from the intensive Jewish background of the immigrants’ ghetto. At second glance, however, it is clear that in Silver’s thinking the universalistic doctrine functions as an intellectual framework that would safeguard the ethnocultural sense of belonging and make it a legitimate part of the American Jewish identity. Moreover, the very use of universalistic terminology is what made this ethnocultural challenge more daunting and complex for Reform Jews like Morgenstern, whose background was predominantly American. In his speech, Silver diﬀerentiated between two concepts: “vision” and “dream.” All great religions, including Judaism, began with a vision, the creative and revolutionary phase of the religion, at which “the holy fervor . . . purges them of all that is sordid and false.” However, like all great religions, Judaism experienced a phase of aging and institutionalization, in which the vision was replaced by a “dream.” The dream, representing an attempt to preserve the past, enslaves

37

Julian Morgenstern, “The Foundations of Israel’s History,” pp. 34; 42–43. Abba Hillel Silver, “Dreams and Visions,” Valedictory Address Delivered in the College Chapel, HUC, June 12, 1915, Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series V, Roll 171/15. 38

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the future and makes the religion, which was originally meant to enrich and deepen the human experience, a tool that limits it and threatens to strangle it. The correct response to this pitfall is to return to the universal-value signiﬁcance that, according to Silver, remained an inseparable part of each evolutionary stage of Jewish history. It is this core signiﬁcance that allows Judaism to absorb new truths from all ﬁelds of human experience and to invest them with a “high” universalistic-Jewish interpretation of its own. Judaism found matter and gave it form. It took the superstitions of primitive man and transformed them. . . . It gave to the nature festivals which it inherited from the agricultural Canaanites greater signiﬁcance by investing them with an ethical-historical character. It elevated the Festival of Unleavened Bread by making it a Festival of Freedom. . . . It took divination and transformed it into prophecy. It seized upon the soul of sacriﬁce and called it prayer.39

Like Morgenstern but unlike most European Zionist thinkers, Silver put forward the universalistic element, not the national one, as the permanent and unifying core of Jewish history. Unlike Morgenstern, however, Silver’s universalistic interpretation reﬂected not estrangement from the intensive and “un-American” Jewish heritage of the immigrants’ ghetto but rather the basic Jewish “vision” that might reinvigorate and enrich that heritage. In total contrast to Morgenstern, Silver regarded adherence to universalistic values as an “envelope” that might protect the traditional intensive Jewish culture and allow it to reach new heights as a legitimate part of general American culture: We wish to be true to this vision of our fathers by dedicating ourselves to a Judaism which shall ever echo the highest ideals of the human soul, the loftiest truths of the human mind; a Judaism which shall be the implacable foe of all reaction, the friend of all progress.40

Attempting to ﬁght the centrality that Silver and other second-generation leaders assigned to the ethnocultural component, Morgenstern struggled to present Reform universalism as an alternative to the

39 Ibid., pp. 1–4. Notably, Silver also developed this idea in a thesis he wrote in the course of his rabbinical ordination. There he depicted the universalistic fundamental of Judaism as the factor responsible for the change that Judaism injected into primitive phenomena of witchcraft and clairvoyance until it managed to develop and promote them to the higher rung of “prophecy”. 40 Ibid., p. 6.

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Old World culture not only conceptually but also in the sense of belonging that it could oﬀer the committed Reform Jew. For this purpose, he called for a “living Judaism in America” that would evolve from Reform Judaism. He expressed this outlook very clearly in a 1919 lecture on the legacy of Isaac Mayer Wise. The challenge that contemporary Jewry faces, Morgenstern said, lies in the need to create a Judaism that is equally and fully compatible with both American life and the timeless principles of Jewish history. Morgenstern asserted that Judaism’s ability to attain this goal would determine the likelihood of its survival as a religion that gives American Jews a sense of belonging and relevance. He mentioned two directions in which the struggle to attain the goal might be waged: enhancing American Jews’ familiarity with the universalistic meaning of Jewish customs and rituals; and making the universalistic Reform ideology relevant to the main issues on the agenda of American society.41 These two directions reﬂected real areas of activity that Morgenstern and his colleagues were attempting to promote within the Reform Movement. In the ﬁrst case, in 1921, after he succeeded Kaufmann Kohler as president of HUC, Morgenstern sought to introduce a program of study that would explore the positive, universalistic meanings of Jewish rites and customs. For the same purpose, he repeatedly argued in his speeches that Reform Judaism in its ﬁrst ﬁfty years had acquired only a thin shell of Americanism, whereas its body and soul were still aﬀected by the German environment. German Reform, he said, was deﬁcient in its “negative” emphasis on destroying the ritualistic Jewish way of life and in the nearly total absence of “positive” reforms that would infuse these rites with new universal-value meaning. This trend had produced a Judaism that could not cope with the committed Reform Jew’s growing need for a sense of belonging. Morgenstern expanded the discussion to include the distress of many American Jews who, due to the failure of the Reform Movement, had turned to Christian Science for the sense of belonging that “German-style” Reform Judaism could no longer provide.42

41 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today: A Program for Judaism in America,” CCARY (1919), pp. 224–258. 42 Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, p. 6; “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” pp. 31–32; Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism,” AJA, Series B, Box 13/13, no date; Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College,” 1922, AJA, MS Col. 30, 14/9, p. 5.

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The second path on which Morgenstern proposed to attain the goal of establishing a “living Judaism in America” focused on the call to “translate” the universal values of Judaism into a language relevant to the social and ethical challenges that American society faced. To a large extent, this endeavor reﬂected a general change that the Reform agenda was undergoing in the second decade of the twentieth century, a change related to a general American social trend. Its hallmarks were the inﬂuence of the Progressive Movement, which advocated greater governmental and political involvement in the capitalistic economic system, and the inﬂuence of the Christian Social Gospel movement, which was making inroads among liberal churches. Taking part in this general American trend, Reform rabbis urged their congregants to display greater social involvement; the idea was to give their Jewish religious commitment a relevant “American” basis.43 This new trend is evident in the issues discussed at CCAR conventions in the second decade of the twentieth century. The debates focused increasingly on the practical daily responsibilities of Reform Jews in core issues on the American socioeconomic agenda, such as child labor, employees’ social beneﬁts, juvenile delinquency, and venereal disease. The process peaked in 1918, when the Reform Movement issued its ﬁrst platform on social justice.44 This platform, made up of various planks, began with a call for a more equitable division of industrial proﬁts and ended with miscellaneous statements on the rights of workers and non-working mothers. It expressed the same need that Morgenstern’s thinking evinced: to invest Judaism with a new level of American social relevance and, by so doing, to make it an integral part of the American Jew’s daily life. One may also discern this trend of thought in Morgenstern’s half-question, halfobservation in his lecture on Isaac Mayer Wise: Where in our entire prayer book do we ﬁnd a single prayer for divine guidance in the solution of the speciﬁc problem of creative justice in the social and economic life of America? . . . Although Judaism ﬁrst voiced for the world the unalterable principle of social justice, American Israel does not yet pray for it.45

43

Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 287–288. CCARY, 28 (1918), pp. 101–103; W. Gunther Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism, New York, 1965, pp. 123–124; Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 288. 45 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” p. 231. 44

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Morgenstern’s call was part of an attempt to stand in the breach against an internal Reform trend that was being expressed both organizationally and ideologically. A salient reﬂection of this internal Reform “threat” was the attempt to bring various types of social and cultural activity under the umbrella of the Synagogue Center movement inaugurated back in 1901. After World War I, this movement was infused with new momentum and focus in line with the views of Mordecai Kaplan, then a Conservative rabbi and subsequently the founder of the Reconstructionist Movement. Kaplan considered Judaism a culture that reﬂects not only a religious outlook but also an all-inclusive way of life. His approach, based on his own interpretation of cultural pluralism, became increasingly popular in the Reform Movement. In contrast to the melting pot, this philosophy stressed the need to preserve and develop ethnic Jewish culture as the best way to assure genuine social integration.46 The inﬂuence of this outlook on the Reform Movement was manifested conspicuously in 1917, when Silver delivered a sermon in favor of preserving Jewish culture.47 The focal point of the sermon was his explanation of why “the Jew in this age of great universalism [should] insist upon his social and religious particularism.” He started his response with a provocative argument, stating that the criterion for any value judgment of assimilation is the extent of its contribution to society. “If it is established that the Jew will beneﬁt the world, culturally and religiously by assimilation,” he explained, “then we must be ready to acknowledge that assimilation is the great,

46

For discussion of Kallen and Kaplan’s outlooks, see also Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” The Nation (February 18 and 25, 1915); Judaism At Bay. New York, 1932; Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life, New York, 1934. 47 Abba Hillel Silver, “Assimilation,” November 25, 1917, Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series IV, Roll 145/19. It is noteworthy that Silver gave this sermon at a time after had taken up the pulpit at Congregation Tifereth Israel, known as “The Temple” of Cleveland. This was a large and important Reform congregation, most of whose members came from an American Reform background; until that time, it had been headed by an anti-Zionist and anti-ritual Reform rabbi, Moses J. Greis. Until Silver replaced Greis that year, the members of the congregation objected to basing Judaism on Jewish culture, and to implement this resistance they had done away with the Friday night and Sabbath morning services and abolished study of Hebrew in the synagogue’s Jewish school. These were the American Reform Jews to whom Silver delivered his sermon in favor of preserving and nurturing Jewish culture. Thus, we may easily imagine the magnitude of the challenge that he presented to Jewish leaders such as Morgenstern.

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desirable thing.” Although this focus on the “Jewish contribution” to society at large sounds like an updated version of the classical Reform philosophy of a universalistic mission, it was actually anchored in cultural pluralism. Silver explained the importance of Judaism’s sociocultural contribution by describing the drawbacks of the meltingpot theory, which aims to blend all cultures into a state of cultural homogeneity. Like Kallen, who likened American society to an orchestra, Silver depicted the world as a garden of diverse ﬂowers and argued that human society needed not the degeneration resulting from homogeneity but the unique contribution of each and every culture. “The greatest contribution that [the Jew] can make to the world,” he stated, “is to retain his cultural life.” Silver added another aspect, emphasizing that just as Jews cannot contribute to American society by assimilating, so American society can contribute to the Jews nothing but comfort and material amenities unless the Jews develop the cultural components of their Jewish identity. A Jew who fails to do so may remain alienated and cut oﬀ not only from Jewish society but from American society as well. To avert this menace, Silver said, an American Judaism is needed that will combine both the universalistic Reform ideas and the cultural manifestations of ethnic Judaism. Silver developed this idea in a 1918 sermon on the “American Judaism of tomorrow.” The Judaism he envisaged would be diﬀerent from Orthodox Judaism, which underemphasizes the prophetic and rationalistic elements in Judaism, but also very diﬀerent from the “American Judaism” that Morgenstern advocated. “The soul must be kept pure – free from all superstition and falsehood, and the body – the people, must be kept strong.” He wished to persuade the “veteran American” members of his congregation in Temple Tifereth-Israel of Cleveland that the Old World cultural pattern of Jewish aﬃliation did not reﬂect a “negative,” separatist attitude. On the contrary, fostering a Jewish way of life expresses trust in Judaism’s genuine ability to integrate in America.48 Another example of the rising inﬂuence of cultural pluralism in the Reform Movement was the appointment of Emanuel Gamoran as director of the movement’s education department in 1923. Gamoran, the scion of a hasidic family who reached the United States at the age of twelve, received this appointment despite his declared support for

48

Abba Hillel Silver, “Assimilation,” p. 19.

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Zionism and even though he was clearly inﬂuenced by Mordecai Kaplan’s thinking. Like Kaplan, Gamoran considered Judaism a culture that reﬂects not only a religious outlook but an all-embracing way of life. He introduced a new educational policy predicated on the notion that theological principles can only be taught within the context of a Jewish experience of rituals, the study of Hebrew, and involvement in events in the Jewish world. This educational approach was intrinsically related to the advocacy of Zionism. The connection was demonstrated several years before Gamoran took up his position, in a symposium on Jewish education that the movement held in 1916. Silver, discussing the importance of Jewish community life in the education of Jewish children, argued that the main role of the community was manifested in adolescence and that the Jewish community should utilize adolescent sensitivity to peer pressure to enhance the internalization of its religious ideals. Silver stressed that precisely because this adolescent sensitivity could also be used for negative purposes, positive focal points of identiﬁcation, such as Zionism, acquire even greater importance, as they give the youngsters exalted Jewish ideals that may lead to the development of positive Jewish loyalty and solidarity.49 Thus, according to the educational approach of Silver and Gamoran, Zionism was an instrumentality that might enable Jewish children reared in American surroundings to internalize Jewish feelings that were considered self-evident in the immigrants’ ghetto. This trend of thought, which was becoming increasingly inﬂuential in the Reform Movement, was based on a kind of Jewish commitment that Morgenstern and those of like mind perceived as un-American and threatening. Thus, in a lecture in 1919, Morgenstern stressed that an “American Judaism” could be made a reality only by Jews who had fully internalized the American values and way of life. Contrasting this “ideal” Judaism with the all-embracing ethnic Judaism of the eastern European Jewish immigrants, he depicted the latter as an

49 Robert J. Wechman, “Emanuel Gamoran: Pioneer in Jewish Religious Education” Ph.D. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1970; Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 299–301. Abba Hillel Silver, “The American Jew of Tomorrow,” Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series IV, Roll 145/36. As for the war on antisemitism, Silver explained that when Jews maintain their faith and pride, discrimination and antisemitism cannot cause any harm. In contrast, antisemitism will hurt and immiserate Jews who wish to imitate the Gentiles.

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imported product of an intolerant environment and, accordingly, a foreign implant that could not survive for long in the progressive and democratic American milieu. He quoted Isaac Mayer Wise and repeated his exhortation: “We must become American Jews as speedily as possible . . . we can not aﬀord to continue as aliens one day longer.” To attain this goal, he even advocated government control of the immigrants’ Americanization. “We welcome all foreigners,” he explained, “but we refuse to allow them to continue too long as semi-foreigners. And even more, we refuse to allow a hyphenated Americanism to exist in this country.”50 The criticism of Morgenstern’s remarks by the Zionist Reform rabbi Max Heller may demonstrate the extent of the Zionist challenge to Morgenstern’s views in the Reform movement. Heller described himself as a “child of the ghetto” who, having experienced the Sabbath in the ghetto, recognized the basic Jewish spiritual signiﬁcance that it expressed. Equipped with this formative childhood experience, he described as “shallow” Morgenstern’s contempt for the Old World way of life and the Zionist ideology. He also criticized Morgenstern for overemphasizing Americanism and “exalting it as the ideal of perfection and above all other national loyalties.” Unlike Morgenstern, Heller regarded a return to the sense of belonging that the Sabbath in the ghetto once imparted as the mechanism most likely to revitalize Judaism.51 In fact, Heller oﬀered an alternative to Morgenstern’s outlook on Jewish belonging in American society. Although both thinkers advocated full Jewish social integration, Heller argued that only modernization of the spiritual world of the ghetto by means of Zionism might provide a genuine basis for this integration. Like Silver, Heller believed that the ability to renew the spiritual basis that the ghetto had imparted constituted the diﬀerence between assimilation and positive integration. Thus, leading Reform thinkers fashioned two almost opposite deﬁnitions of positive Jewish aﬃliation. Heller and Silver regarded the fundamentals of the ethnic Jewish way of life, especially the modern manifestation that Zionism gave them, as crucial elements of this

50 Abba Hillel Silver, “How Can the Communal and Social Life be Made to Help?” Symposium, CCARY, June 30–July 7, 1916, Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series V, Roll 171/25, pp. 1–16. 51 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” pp. 224, 239.

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aﬃliation, while Morgenstern wished to reinvigorate the concept of a universalistic Jewish aﬃliation that “can live and perpetuate itself and expand here in America entirely without the need of foreign stimuli, whether from Palestine or elsewhere.”52 In his 1919 lecture on the legacy of Isaac Mayer Wise, Morgenstern depicted the success of Zionism as totally dependent on its foreign and segregationist outlooks. These outlooks, he alleged, served eastern European Jewish immigrants as a surrogate of sorts for the Orthodox way of life that they had failed to sustain in the American environment. Thus, he charged, Zionism was but a reﬂection of their unfamiliarity with America and their inability to internalize its values. The main challenge of Zionism for American Jewry, Morgenstern claimed, was not the issue of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine but rather the question of whether American Judaism had endogenous vitality or whether it might disintegrate the moment it failed to receive its injection of exogenous vitality, that of the Jewish commitment to Palestine.53 In another lecture that year, at the annual conference of the American Oriental Society, of which he was president, Morgenstern attacked nationalism and portrayed it as antithetical to the Jewish spirit. Morgenstern focused on the German aim in World War I, which, he said, was rooted in national egoism and a desire to glorify physical power and national honor. He drew a direct line between this national aspiration and the coercive nature of various world empires, foremost that of Sennacherib, king of Assyria. According to Morgenstern, the Jewish prophets had, throughout history, positioned themselves against the coercive philosophy of Assyria and similar states. The prophets understood that the gloriﬁcation of physical power or the occupation of other countries was unlikely to enhance Jewish strength and pride. They also realized that Israel’s mission – the reason for its chosenness – was to spread the universal divine truth of world peace and justice. Therefore, they called on the People Israel to serve as the paramount representative of the philosophy of brotherhood of mankind and universal commitment as against the philosophy of national force and egoism.

52 Ibid., pp. 299–300. Morgenstern and Heller conducted a similar dispute in 1915, following Morgenstern’s lecture on the fundamentals of Jewish history: CCARY (1915), pp. 287–299. For the most recent study on Heller’s personality and views, see Bobbie Malone, Rabbi Max Heller – Reformer, Zionist, Southerner, 1860 –1929, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1997. 53 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” p. 237.

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Although this lecture did not mention Zionism explicitly – perhaps because it was meant for a largely non-Jewish audience – Morgenstern’s general critique of nationalism may be viewed as part of his attempt to challenge the idea that the resurrection of Jewish nationalism was the principal solution to the Jewish problem. Morgenstern oﬀered an alternative historiographical outlook that depicted the universal element, not the national one, as the true and timeless heritage of Judaism. He stressed that only by virtue of loyalty to this heritage had Judaism outlasted all its enemies, such as the Assyrian Empire, that had chosen the opposite path of coercive national egoism. He sought to persuade his audience that, in the present, only a positive Jewish aﬃliation based on the universal heritage might assure Jewish perpetuity.54 D. The Complexion of the Anti-Zionist Struggle Begins to Change The year 1919 marked a watershed in the intensity and severity of Morgenstern’s criticism of Zionism. Previously, during his studies in Germany and his ﬁrst years back in the United States, Morgenstern treated Zionism with contempt and plainly did not consider it a major challenge. In his 1904 article on German Jewry, for example, he dismissed the Zionists derisively as a small, noisy group that 99 percent of German Jews treated with indiﬀerence or utter ignorance – “the story of the little ﬂy in the bottle making a great noise.” At that time, Morgenstern also gave Zionism rather scanty consequence in determining his attitude toward Zionist colleagues like Judah Magnes, whom he met during his doctoral studies in Heidelberg. Magnes had graduated from HUC two years before Morgenstern and had already received an appointment to the college faculty and resigned it because of his Zionist views. Magnes’s Zionism, however, had no eﬀect on Morgenstern’s attitude toward him. In no way did it diminish his great appreciation of the man and even his willingness to accept his spiritual supremacy and leadership. He had many passionate conversations with Magnes and years later credited to Magnes’s advice his choice to study Semitic languages and, perhaps, his very decision to pursue an academic career.55 54 Julian Morgenstern, “World Empire and World Brotherhood,” The Menorah Journal, V (1919), pp. 82–92, reprinted in As a Mighty Stream, pp. 97–119. 55 Julian Morgenstern, “The Condition of Judaism in Germany,” The Jewish

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Disregard of Zionism, however, became increasingly unfeasible as the movement rose in stature in the international arena and among American Jews. This process reached important milestones during and after World War I, when Louis D. Brandeis joined the Zionist Executive; when the Balfour Declaration was adopted in 1917; and subsequently, when the Zionist Movement obtained international and American recognition. Gradually, this rising inﬂuence of Zionism became evident in the general American Jewish scene, for example in the series of measures that led to the formation of the American Jewish Congress as a democratically elected representative of American Jewry at the Paris Peace Conference, as well as in the Reform Movement itself, in a pro-Zionist crescendo among Reform students and rabbis.56 The trend reverberated further when four of ten rabbis who responded to Morgenstern’s 1919 attack on Zionism declared their sympathy for Zionism. Although this did not yet signal an upheaval in the attitude of most Reform rabbis toward Zionism, the trend was already evident. Rabbi Bernard Kaplan of San Francisco, who declared his neutrality toward Zionism, was a case in point. He responded to Morgenstern’s lecture by proclaiming himself equally loyal to both ideologies, Zionism and Reform, and expressed his intent to bequeath his estate to both in equal measure.57 This change in the stature of Zionism handed Morgenstern and his colleagues of like mind a new and more threatening challenge, and in response many of them radicalized their anti-Zionist views. A conspicuous example was a memorandum written for the Paris Peace Conference at the initiative of Julius Kahn, a Congressman from California. Intending his memo to serve as a counterweight to the Balfour Declaration, Kahn called for the internationalization of Palestine. His missive, supported by well-known Reform leaders such as Rabbi Henry Berkowitz and Professor Morris Jastrow and carrying the signatures of 299 leading Jews in thirty-one American cities, reﬂected the intensiﬁcation of the anti-Zionist attitudes of those loyal to the classical Reform perspective.58 Conservator 2/23 (December 2, 1904), p. 8; Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 10–11. 56 Importantly, this was just the beginning of a trend. By 1930, 69 percent of students at HUC expressed sympathy for Zionism and only 9 percent deﬁned themselves as anti-Zionists. 57 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” pp. 299–305. 58 Stuart E. Knee, The Concept of Zionist Dissent in The American Mind 1917–1941, New York, 1979, pp. 50–52.

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At the same time, however, many Reform leaders, including Morgenstern, developed a more complex attitude toward Zionism. As Zionism gathered momentum, they now believed it their movement’s main challenge not to reject it categorically but to combat its ethnocultural model of Jewish aﬃliation and to uncover its “true” universalistic basis. Morgenstern, for example, advocated a Jewishnational consciousness that would exist mainly on the intellectual plane, disconnected from the Old World experiences. Initially, in the early 1920s, he sought to achieve this goal by uncoupling the JewishZionist connection with Palestine from its ethnocultural context. Later, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he attempted to demonstrate the possibility of harmonizing Zionism, in its “pure” universalistic interpretation, with a positive American Jewish aﬃliation. Be this as it may, Morgenstern moderated his contemptuous attitude toward Zionism even before this process came to fruition. By early 1919, he no longer vehemently rejected the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine; his only proviso was that such a state not give expression to separatist and self-protective Jewish attitudes vis-à-vis the American environment. Morgenstern was even willing to regard Zionism as a legitimate movement within American Jewry if it strove to develop a Jew who is “primarily an American, and only secondarily and altruistically a Zionist.” In Morgenstern’s view, the American Zionist must have faith, not only in America and Americanism, but also in Judaism in America. . . . As a Jew whose life in every way centers in America, he must integrate himself completely . . . with the spirit and works of Americanism.59

Morgenstern was not alone in professing the goal of Americanizing and universalizing Zionism. In the Reform Movement, the most salient reﬂection of this aim was the increasing willingness to support economic development in Palestine despite disapproval of the political aspirations of the Zionist movement. The Reform Movement ﬁrst expressed this trend oﬃcially in 1920, when the president of the CCAR, Rabbi Leo M. Franklin, declared the Reform Movement willing to support the revitalization of Palestine but, in the same breath, rejected the Balfour Declaration as an ideological framework for this support. In July 1922, the CCAR even announced its willingness to cooperate with Brandeis’s Palestine Development League.

59

Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” pp. 236–238.

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It reaﬃrmed this cooperation at its 1924 convention, although it was careful to express disapproval of the Zionist political aim of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Over the years, until the Jewish Agency for Palestine (which included Zionists and nonZionists) was founded in 1929, the Reform Movement, by means of Brandeis’s League, took part in various projects in Palestine, including the construction of Rutenberg’s power plant and completion of the construction of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.60 This new composite Reform stance focused its main criticism on the type of ethnocultural aﬃliation advocated by Zionist members of the “second generation.” Morgenstern’s 1922 lecture “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College” may serve as a good example of this trend. The main theme of the lecture was a polemic with Ahad Ha’am over the signiﬁcance of the collapse of the “ghetto” ramparts in eastern Europe. Although Morgenstern agreed with Ahad Ha’am that this collapse would cause Jewish unity to disintegrate, he disagreed about whether this process is a “danger.” It is anything but, Morgenstern claimed: Achad Haam . . . assumes that there is only one absolutely pure and true Judaism . . . that this absolutely pure Judaism . . . was transmitted in a relatively pure, unadulterated form during the centuries . . . and that it ﬁnally found lodgment in the Ghetto. . . . His fear is that when this Judaism steps forth from the protection of the Ghetto walls it must succumb to this debasing environmental inﬂuence and degenerate and split up into various national types of Judaism. His remedy is to establish a strong, spiritual and cultural Jewish center in Palestine, where this one true and pure Judaism may live and grow, undisturbed by alien environmental inﬂuences. . . . His hope is that from this center such spiritual power and quickening may radiate to the Jews in the Diaspora that will enable them, too, to resist . . . the debasing inﬂuences of their environment. . . . His basic, misleading error, lies . . . in failing to realize that if such a spiritual and cultural center shall ever be established in Palestine, what will take root and grow and ﬂourish there will be not the only imaginary, true, one hundred per cent, unadjectived Judaism of all the ages, but modern Palestinian Judaism and naught else.

Instead of merely rejecting Ahad Ha’am’s outlook on Jewish history, Morgenstern oﬀered an alternative, universalistic historiographical approach. He argued that Judaism, as a concrete historical reality, 60

Stuart E. Knee, pp. 58, 70–72.

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is always the product of time and place and that, for this reason, only the universalistic element can bind the diverse manifestations of Jewishness into an inclusive whole. Then, taking matters further, Morgenstern portrayed Jewish nationalism as the speciﬁc product of Russian Jewry, which had withdrawn into itself to protect itself from a hostile and intolerant environment. “Certainly had this environment been at all diﬀerent,” he explained, “Russian Judaism in turn would have diﬀered correspondingly from what it is today.”61 Thus, in the early 1920s, Morgenstern’s opposition to Zionism was focused on ﬁghting the “exaggerated” weight given to Jewish nationalism as a permanent and unifying element in Jewish history. In this sense, Morgenstern was almost indistinguishable from early Reform Zionists who had come from a dominant American background like his. Most conspicuously, his criticism of Zionism resembled Brandeis’s attitude in the crisis over the “Diaspora Nationalism” policy of Weizmann and Lipsky, which split the American Zionist movement in 1921. Brandeis resisted the ostensible conclusion that the development of Palestine must be based on an awakening of Jewish selfawareness in the Diaspora and on cultural and educational activities such as revival of the Hebrew language and culture among Diaspora Jews. He considered this policy a dangerous concept that threatened to resurrect the immigrants’ ghetto and, thereby, to erect barriers between American Jews and their surroundings. Instead, his group focused on reorganizing the Zionist movement as an organization that would devote itself solely to economic activity for the development of Eretz Israel.62 Gradually, this debate over the type of Zionist activity in the United States, and not the political issue of reestablishing Jewish statehood in Palestine, would become the main point of disputation between Zionists and non-Zionists in the Reform Movement.

61

Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College,” 1922, AJA, MS Col. 30, 14/9, pp. 2–3, 6–7. 62 For discussion of the crisis between Brandeis and Weizmann, see George L. Berlin, “The Brandeis-Weizmann Dispute,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 40 (September, 1970); Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Louis Lipsky and the Emergence of Opposition to Brandeis, 1917–1920,” Melvin I. Urofsky, ed., Essays in American Zionism, 1917–1948, Vol. 8 (New York: Herzl Press, 1978), pp. 37–60; Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann and American Zionism, New York and Oxford, 1987.

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An echo of this internal Reform dispute can be found in Morgenstern’s attitude toward the generational conﬂict between immigrants and their oﬀspring. In contrast to Zionist members of the second generation, who called for an American Jewish aﬃliation based on loyalty to the traditions of their parents’ generation, Morgenstern considered the abandonment of parents’ traditions a welcome process: The old folks shake their heads sadly and say to themselves: “The children don’t want to be Jews. With us Judaism must die; it cannot live in America.” And the old folks are right. What they call Judaism . . . cannot live in America. . . . Here there are no . . . protecting ghetto walls, and the inﬂuence of the American environment cannot be withstood. And this American environment and the American spirit are progressive, liberal, tolerant, open-minded, impatient of tradition and formalism and ritual. . . . It rejects and resents the European idea of separate nationalities and racial groups within the American nation.

Continuing, Morgenstern asserted that only the abandonment of Old World traditions would allow American Jewry to survive and ﬂourish. If the young generation stopped pushing ahead in search of new truth, he warned, Judaism – like any organism – would stagnate and die. The younger generation of Jews in America are pressing on . . . because they are living not in the 16th nor yet in the 19th century, and not in Spain nor in Germany nor in Russia but in the 20th century and here in America.63

In a lecture to HUC students in 1926, Morgenstern repeated this view in even more radical form with respect to the intrinsic utility of abandoning bygone traditions. He interpreted the biblical account of the Israelites’ mourning for Moses as an event that expresses joy and a wish to disengage from the past. True, he [Moses] was their leader and they . . . were grateful to him. But he was an old man, very old, and belonged to the past generation. . . . And they were a young generation and strong and eager and warlike. And they had a mission and call from God and were impatient to set forth and achieve. . . . As soon as the thirty days of mourning would be ended they would set out. Even these days, sacred to the memory of the old leader, could not pass too quickly. . . . A young people, conscious of its mission, conﬁdent in its strength, assured of

63 Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College,” pp. 9–12.

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divine help . . . what happier, ﬁner and more inspiring picture could there be?64

Although Morgenstern seemed unaware of it, his blunt rejection of past traditions was in many senses reminiscent of the “negation of the Old World Diaspora” outlook of many European and Palestinian Zionists, whose philosophy he so strongly opposed. Like them, Morgenstern spoke about Old World Jews as a desert generation that, unﬁt to fulﬁll the Divine mission, is correctly being allowed to die oﬀ: The generation of slaves which had come forth from Egypt, which . . . thought only of ﬁlling its miserable belly, and looked back regretfully upon the land of its bondage, such a generation, of course, was unequal to God’s task. . . . Rightly had it perished in the desert.

This approach, like Zionism’s negation of exile, would be tragically tested when Old World Jewry was physically exterminated in the Holocaust. In the 1920s, however, Morgenstern and most of his colleagues saw the main danger to Jewish existence not in hostility from non-Jews but in what they construed as a growing Zionist tendency to reinforce the ramparts of the eastern European immigrants’ ghetto, thereby thwarting any possibility of fruitful dialogue between Judaism and its social milieu.65 Morgenstern expressed this view in historiographical terms in a 1924 lecture marking the centenary of the Reform Movement. He deﬁned the “ghetto period” as an era of self-seclusion that was an aberration in Jewish history and that lasted for about three centuries, starting with the expulsion from Spain. He described this era as the result of exogenous circumstances – i.e., persecution – and as a deviation from the previous norm in which the Jews had developed in continual dialogue with their surroundings. This exceptional period of self-seclusion caused Judaism to degenerate, and thus, at the dawn of the Emancipation, Judaism found itself rather far behind the philosophical and scientiﬁc worldviews of its time. The Reform Movement – ﬁrst in Germany and later in the United States – was, according to Morgenstern, an attempt to close the gap that had formed between Judaism and its surroundings in the “ghetto period.” In fact, this

64 Julian Morgenstern, “Self-Discipline and Self-Preparation,” The Hebrew Union College Monthly, XIV/1 (October 1926), pp. 1–5. 65 Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College,” pp. 16–17.

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attempt was the only possible way of sparing Judaism from having to choose between total assimilation and a return to the stagnation and decline of the ghetto era. Here, too, lay the main danger in Zionism, which purported to return Judaism to the “non-normative” ghetto philosophy of self-seclusion. According to Morgenstern, the Old World inﬂuence of the immigrants – a combination of deeprooted Orthodoxy and militant Zionism – presented a real threat to the universalistic Reform attempt to ﬁght the ghetto heritage. The result was that Reform Judaism “was put on the defensive and its progress for a time materially impeded.”66 At the same time, however, Morgenstern expressed great conﬁdence in the ability of Reform Judaism to surmount the Zionist challenge. This optimistic view was predicated on two arguments. First, it was widely believed in Reform circles that the changes in British policy would dash the Zionists’ hopes for a Jewish nation-state or, at least, render these hopes unrealistic for the foreseeable future.67 Second, and much more important, it was believed that the irresistible force of the American surroundings would inevitably have a positive impact on the Jewish immigrants and the Zionist views they had brought from the Old World. Morgenstern believed that for Reform Judaism to advance and develop, the immigrants’ children would have to be fully Americanized. Accordingly, the strategy should focus on educating the next generation. To this end, he proposed a new vision of broadening the functions of the Reform rabbinical college. For its ﬁrst ﬁfty years, since its founding in 1875, HUC had focused on training American-born rabbis (apart from an aﬃliated teacher-training institute, a small facility established in 1909). Now Morgenstern promised that HUC would also serve as an academy training Jewish thinkers, teachers, educational inspectors, and social workers in the spirit of the “positive” American Jewish religion.68 In the same breath Morgenstern warned that until the process matured, the Reform Movement must not confront Zionism head-on, lest it become an isolated sect and doom itself to being cut oﬀ from the Jewish masses that were not yet fully Americanized. 66 Julian Morgenstern, “The Achievements of Reform Judaism,” (in a symposium on “A Re-evaluation of Reform Judaism”), CCARY, (1924), reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, p. 153. 67 Stuart E. Knee, pp. 68, 73–74. 68 Julian Morgenstern, “The Achievements of Reform Judaism,” pp. 157–158; Autobiography, p. 22.

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But Morgenstern was convinced that the process of Americanizing the Jewish masses was on the verge of consummation. “Today the battle is almost at an end and the victory is assured,” he proclaimed. World War I and immigration restrictions that the U.S. imposed in 1921 and 1924 had attenuated the inﬂux of immigrants, thus naturally strengthening the “veteran American” component of American Jewry. Morgenstern expected this process to give rise to a “new and larger American Israel.” To assure the realization of this process, he urged the Reform Movement to focus its “battle” on a positive educational campaign that would eventually allow Reform Jews and Zionists to cooperate on the basis of universalism. In fact, in a manner reminiscent of the early Reform Zionists, Morgenstern sought to place Zionism on a universalistic ideological foundation in order to give the Jewish masses a new American Jewish identity rooted in the universalistic, prophetic vision.69 Inspired by this outlook, Morgenstern worked in the second half of the 1920s on creating a partnership between Zionists and nonZionists. In 1928, he was one of seven leaders whom Louis Marshall invited to collaborate with the Zionists in the Jewish Agency. At a conference of non-Zionists convened to ratify the agreement between Marshall and Chaim Weizmann, Morgenstern belittled the importance of the diﬀerence between Zionists and anti-Zionists, arguing that the Old World aspects of Zionism were doomed to vanish as a consequence of Americanization. Morgenstern – like several prominent proponents of the classical Reform policy at the conference, including Louis Wolsey, David Philipson, and CCAR president Hyman Enelow – agreed to cooperate with the Zionists in the Jewish Agency provided it was apolitical and eschewed the national-cultural aspirations of Zionism.70 A year later, in an article in the American Zionist journal New Palestine, Morgenstern took another preparatory step toward Zionist-Reform cooperation. He declared his recognition of Zionism as a legitimate movement that does not repudiate the universal element in Judaism. In return he wished to persuade

69 Julian Morgenstern, “The Achievements of Reform Judaism,” pp. 155–159. An example of similar “veteran American” Zionist outlook may be found in Brandeis’ views. See Allon Gal, “Brandeis’ View on the Upbuilding of Palestine, 1914–1923,” Studies in Zionism, 6, (Autumn 1982), pp. 211–240. 70 Non-Zionist Conference Concerning Palestine: Verbatim Report of Proceedings, October 20–21, 1928, New York, 1928, pp. 41–66, 93–94; Stuart E. Knee, pp. 73–74.

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American Zionists to regard the universalistic Reform ideology as the only possible basis for their Zionist identity. Thus, his article, which was ostensibly conciliatory toward Zionism, actually presented the universalistic outlook as the only basis for future Reform-Zionist cooperation. Such cooperation, Morgenstern maintained, should be considered a direct continuation of 2,500 years of incessant Jewish eﬀorts to coordinate the two conﬂicting components: universalism and Jewish particularism. All attempts throughout history to insist on “narrow” particularism have been doomed to fail. Reform Judaism and Zionism could achieve harmony only on a universalistic basis. In fact, he argued, the desired harmonization might become a reality only if the Zionists accepted the main tenets of the universalistic approach.71 Morgenstern’s article undoubtedly expressed a genuine need of many “veteran American” Jews to view the ascendant Zionist ideology in a positive, universalistic manner. Two enthusiastic letters by Reform rabbis in response to Morgenstern’s article give direct evidence of this. Rabbi Harry S. Margolis of St. Paul, Minnesota “saluted” Morgenstern, describing his article as “one of the clearest and most direct utterances upon the Reform Jewish position in regard to Zionism.” He criticized the hostile anti-Zionist attitude of Reform leaders such as Rabbi Wolsey, which might lead the Reform Movement into a cul-de-sac, and expressed his conviction that Morgenstern’s position would “clear the air and satisfy those, who heretofore have been severely criticizing our position.” Rabbi J. B. Menkes of Newcastle, Pennsylvania, outdid Margolis by oﬀering to translate Morgenstern’s “brilliant” article into Yiddish so that the message would reach nonReform Jewish readers. “Given proper publicity,” Menkes asserted, “[the article] will prove of very far reaching inﬂuence both in strengthening Liberal Judaism and bringing about the Universal Unity in Judaism we dream of and labor for.”72 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Morgenstern and many of his colleagues genuinely

71 Julian Morgenstern, “Nationalism and Universalism, Both Essentially, even Prophetically Jewish,” The New Palestine, December 20, 1929, Vol. XVII, no. 6, pp. 554–559. 72 Letter to Morgenstern from Rabbi J. B. Menkes, Dec. 27, 1929; Letter to Morgenstern from Rabbi Harry S. Margolis, October 23, 1930, AJA, MS. Col. 30, 8/1.

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believed that a conciliatory Reform attitude toward Zionism would expedite the inevitable universalization of Zionism, at least in the United States.73 In an article he wrote in 1929, he predicated this likelihood mainly on internal American Jewish processes. Fifty years after the onset of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, he claimed, the immigrants’ oﬀspring had matured suﬃciently to internalize the American spirit.74 In a speech in 1931, he based the likelihood of moderating the particularistic nature of the Zionist ideology on international processes. This time he advocated fundraising for Palestine in the belief that the restrictive British “Passﬁeld White Paper” of October 22, 1930, dashed the Zionists’ hopes for a Jewish nationstate. “All of us, Zionist and non-Zionist . . . realize now,” Morgenstern declared, “that there will never be a distinctive Jewish state and government in Palestine of the character of which Zionists used to dream so fondly, and anti-Zionists used to oppose and denounce so uncompromisingly.” Now, he believed, Zionists and anti-Zionists had an opportunity to reach agreement about support for a binational state, in which Jews, Arabs, and perhaps even the British would coexist with equal rights and mutual respect. On the basis of this “soothing” prediction, Morgenstern ﬁnally felt able to state that Palestine today, in its larger aspect, has ceased to be a Zionist question. It has become an all-Jewish question. . . . I am, this year, giving more than ever before to the cause of Palestine. . . . I challenge all my fellow Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, and even anti-Zionists, yes especially non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, to do the same.75

73

In his book Response to Modernity, (p. 64, n. 97) Michael Meyer notes the irony in the eﬀorts of non-Zionists to institutionalize the principles of Reform Judaism among members of the Yishuv in Palestine, while conspicuous Zionists such as Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver did not advocate this. 74 Morgenstern may have based his hopes on the results of a 1939 survey showing that more than three-fourths of school-age Jewish children in New York neither knew the Hebrew alphabet nor received any kind of Jewish education. See Uriah Zevi Engelman, “The Jewish Synagogue in the United States,” The American Journal of sociology, 41 (1935/36), pp. 50–51; Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 296. 75 Julian Morgenstern, “Another Drive For Palestine! Why?” (1930–1) AJA, MS Col. 30, 14/9. For additional examples of an attempt to de-Zionize Jews’ identiﬁcation with the building of Eretz Israel, see Stuart Knee, pp. 73–78. For example, in a speech at the CCAR conference in June 1929, the president of the conference, Dr. Hyman Enelow, asserted that one could be indiﬀerent to Zionism without being indiﬀerent to the fate of Palestine. In a speech following the Western Wall riots in 1929, Rabbi Samuel Shulman made the same claim.

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Reality, however, clashed head-on with Morgenstern’s optimistic predictions. At the time of the Nazis’ rise to power and the Holocaust, it was the particularistic attitudes of Zionism that made inroads among American Jews and the Reform movement. Notwithstanding his defeated hopes, Morgenstern fought this “threat” mainly using the same patterns he had developed in the 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, he and his colleagues invested their principal eﬀorts in cultivating a model of “positive” Jewish aﬃliation as an alternative to the type of ethnic and cultural aﬃliation that Zionism seemed to oﬀer.

PART III

COPING WITH THE CHALLENGES OF THE HOLOCAUST ERA: THE 1930S AND 1940S

CHAPTER FOUR

INTENSIFYING THREATS A. Countering Particularistic Expressions of Jewish Valor and Solidarity By the time of the Nazi accession in Germany, Julian Morgenstern had been president of Hebrew Union College for more than a decade. He would remain in this oﬃce throughout the 1930s and most of the 1940s. When he resigned in 1947, the Jewish people faced a situation vastly diﬀerent from the one Morgenstern had known at the beginning of his public career. By then, the results of the Holocaust were acknowledged if not fully digested. It would also be the peak period of Zionism, as the processes leading to the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine were about to mature. Throughout this era, Morgenstern felt it his duty to counter the new challenges posed by this change. He considered this a necessity in his leadership capacity as a Reform rabbi and the president of HUC. He believed himself responsible for the education, training, and even personal placement of generations of Reform rabbis, HUC alumni, who in turn would have to face their congregations across the United States and provide a spiritual response to the change that had occurred during these years.1 Even in the 1930s, before World War II, Morgenstern felt that he must defend the Reform belief against a reality that had ostensibly rendered it irrelevant. He believed it his duty to respond to the disillusionment, humiliation, and helplessness that many of his students and colleagues felt as they contemplated the worsening plight of European Jewry and, no less, the world’s indiﬀerence to that plight. To cope with these feelings – to defend the optimistic core of the universalistic ideology – Morgenstern came to the conclusion

1 Morgenstern’s extensive correspondence with former students, as kept in Morgenstern’s archives, may give an impression of his sense of personal responsibility for spiritual shepherding of students even after their graduation and their appointments as congregational rabbis. For further evidence of how he regarded his spiritual responsibility toward his former students see, Julian Morgenstern, Autobiography, pp. 19–21.

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that it was not enough to continue interpreting Jewish history through the prism of universalistic Reform principles; the universalistic ethos had to be transformed into a focal point of Jewish solidarity and pride. Repeatedly, he asserted that the universalistic Jewish heritage reﬂects not only the authentic Jewish spirit of mission in the service of humankind but also feelings of Jewish uprightness and pride. It was a dual-edged response, meant to counter not only the degraded image of the Jew as portrayed by Nazi ideology but also the increasingly popular Zionist ethos of valor. This strategy marked a salient change from Morgenstern’s early criticism of the Zionist “overemphasis” on power-centric Jewish pride.2 Now, he sought to turn the symbols of universalism into models of Jewish heroism, pride, and solidarity, fashioning a Jewish identity antithetical to that of the helpless Diaspora Jews acquiescing in their fate. Morgenstern’s ﬁrst salvo in this struggle may have been his lecture marking the beginning of the 1934 academic year at HUC. As in many previous universalistic historical analyses, he depicted the two centuries between the prophet Amos and the exile to Babylon as the peak era in the development of the universalistic outlook in Judaism. Now, however, he added a new emphasis, describing this formative era as a golden age of Judaism. According to Morgenstern, this grand era of prophecy should ﬁll Jews with dignity and pride and serve as the antithesis of the helplessness and humiliation that aﬄict Jews in the present. Then, taking this line of thinking a step further, Morgenstern asserted that the true Jewish heroism may be achieved only through unconditional loyalty to the Jewish universalistic mission. He bluntly attacked what he considered manifestations of Jewish particularism, from the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah up to Zionism. He argued that they were a form of cowardice and submission to the basic premises of power-centric particularistic outlooks that represented the historical foes and oppressors of Judaism. He attempted to convince his listeners that Jews could cope with the Nazi threat courageously and heroically only by adhering to the “authentic” Jewish universalistic heritage:

2 For example, in 1904 Morgenstern criticized the Zionists for being “prouder of Juda Maccabee than of Moses, prouder of the battle of Beth-Horon than of the Ten Commandments.” Julian Morgenstern, “The Condition of Judaism in Germany,” The Jewish Conservator (December 2, 1904) 2/23, p. 8.

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Judaism versus Germanism or Hitlerism! the antithesis is complete and antipodal. The struggle is titanic and beyond all compromise. The stake is the world and the continued life of humanity and the progress of human culture. . . . Intuitively, perhaps with the unreasoning instinct of the beast, Nazism has rightly singled out the Jew and Judaism as it truest, basic, uncompromising antagonist. . . . Very well! Judaism takes up the challenge. . . . The battle will be long and bitter and the suﬀering great. But again we are enlisted in the cause which our fathers hallowed; again we bear our heritage proudly and with heads erect. We go forward conﬁdently, eagerly, and to arrogant Hitlerism . . . we return the traditional answer “Let not him who girdeth on the armor exult, as him that putteth it oﬀ.”3

The eﬀort to introduce “universalistic heroism” took on added signiﬁcance as anti-Jewish persecution mounted. This was reﬂected clearly two years later in another lecture that Morgenstern delivered for the beginning of the HUC academic year. The lecture centered on the question, “What must the Jews do . . . when our very existence as people and as religion hangs in the balance?” Must Israel ever remain the innocent, helpless, unresisting victim of the world’s hatred and the world’s bestial impulse to wreak its savage lust upon a weak and powerless scapegoat? Must it be beaten and driven from place to place, passively, resignedly, hopelessly? Or, accepting for itself the philosophy, the program and the instruments of its oppressors, must it rise, even in its weakness and futility, and seek to defend itself, to resist, to return taunt for taunt, blow for blow, hatred for hatred, until at last it fall, but fall proudly, deﬁantly, heroically, crushed by sheer weight and numbers? Or is there perhaps still a third way?4

The “third way,” Morgenstern’s response to the Nazi ideology, purported to reject the Zionist model of Jewish heroism. It sought to show that even at this time of overt Gentile hostility, a creed of active, intrepid defense of Jewish existence must remain an intrinsic part of a universalistic view of openness to its non-Jewish surroundings. This thesis was presented most comprehensively in a lecture on September 30, 1939, about a month after World War II began.5 As

3

Julian Morgenstern, “Judaism Accepts the Challenge,” pp. 2, 11–15. Julian Morgenstern, “At the Crossroads,” address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the college chapel, before faculty and students, October 3, 1936 (reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 201–214). 5 Julian Morgenstern, “The Reform Process in Jewish History,” address delivered 4

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in his previous lectures since Nazism had begun its ascent, Morgenstern centered his speech on the same critical question: “how, in the midst of a strange, if not a hostile, environment, it [ Judaism] may best be preserved.” According to Morgenstern, this question became ever more critical and threatening because of its similarity to the pessimistic questions of Zionism. Is there truth in the Zionist interpretation of Jewish history, and should one accept the practically unanimous assumption . . . that the environment in the lands of the Diaspora, so-called, is always strange and inimical to Jewish culture and that only in Palestine and speciﬁcally in a Jewish Palestine, would the environment be native, sympathetic and conductive to spontaneous growth and development?

Rather than answering this pessimistic question directly, Morgenstern oﬀered an alternative universalistic analysis of Jewish history from Joshua’s conquests to the twentieth century. Jewish history, according to Morgenstern, is typiﬁed by continual struggle between a “positive” force, which seeks to integrate into non-Jewish culture and assimilate its values, and a “negative” force, which strives to sever relations with non-Jewish cultures and arrest the inﬂuences and changes that such relations create. The secret of Jewish survival has always been to maintain equilibrium between these two forces. Had the negative (conservative) force achieved total victory during Joshua’s time, the Jews would have remained a bunch of semi-nomadic tribes on the southern and eastern frontiers of Palestine. Had the positive (syncretistic) force attained total victory, the Jewish entity would have become but one of many small kingdoms in western Asia and, like them, would have vanished from the stage of history more than two millennia ago. The secret that sustained the equilibrium between the conservative and syncretistic forces was the Jews’ fealty to a solid core of “desert religion” principles that reﬂect the universalistic message of social justice and equality. Only by maintaining this fealty to the universalistic core of the “desert religion” could the Jews assimilate the assets of neighboring cultures and invest them with new Jewish meaning.6

at the opening exercises of the HUC in the college chapel, before faculty and students, October 3, 1936 (reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 215–318). 6 Ibid., pp. 222–229.

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This principle, Morgenstern continued, is especially important when Judaism faces existential threats. Such threats heighten the danger of a particularistic, power-centric, seclusionist response or the menace of surrender to ultra-universalistic trends of thought that would lead to total assimilation. Morgenstern analyzed a large number of historical confrontations of this kind to show how Jews should cope with the contemporary existential challenge of Nazism. One of his historical analyses pertained to the ascendancy of Assyria as the ﬁrst world empire in history. According to Morgenstern, the Jews in this case had to contend not only with the existential menace of superior physical force but also with the spiritual threat of a new theology that assigned the deity Ashur the role of a supreme world ruler to whom all local deities were subordinate. In Morgenstern’s view, the positive, courageous way to meet this challenge was neither physical struggle nor a self-imposed spiritual quarantine. The positive coping model is exempliﬁed by the prophet Amos, who, Morgenstern said, adopted the doctrine of one God as the world’s supreme sovereign and reﬁned it with new Jewish meaning. The supreme single Deity was no longer a local god who defeated other people’s gods, and He was guided not by the particularistic interests of his chosen people but by the standard of universal justice and ethical relations among all nations.7 By so describing matters, Morgenstern also expressed his main message regarding the confrontation with Nazism: The process of discriminative assimilation alone is what has preserved Judaism and enabled it to adapt itself to changing environments, conditions and programs and to live and ﬂourish therein . . . It is only [discriminative] assimilation . . . which can save, and in saving can stimulate growth and progress . . . which alone spell life and strength and the joy of being.8

This attempt to point to an “appropriate” universalistic Jewish response to existential danger from a hostile non-Jewish society became much more diﬃcult once it was extended from the theoretical sphere of historical interpretation to the speciﬁc antisemitic threats that emerged at this time. The endeavor was even more complex when it had to take account of the urgent need to launch relief and rescue operations for European Jewry. The mobilization of American Jews for

7 8

Ibid., pp. 237–239. Ibid., pp. 250–254, 312–313.

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relief actions might underscore the reality of non-Jewish hostility and indiﬀerence to the desperate, hopeless plight of European Jewry. Above all, it might emphasize the unchanging fact of U.S. immigration quotas and the disappointing results of the Evian Conference. In view of these realities, Morgenstern and his fellow universalists became increasingly fearful that the rescue eﬀorts would evolve into a negative emotional model based on self-defense against the hostility and indiﬀerence of the non-Jewish surroundings.9 An example of this anxiety can be found in the book Overcoming Anti-Semitism, by the Reform rabbi Solomon Andhil Fineberg, whom the American Jewish Committee had tasked with prosecuting the war on antisemitism. Fineberg presented, as a negative model, the response of an American Jew who, so traumatized by America’s indiﬀerence to the suﬀering of European Jewry, proposed to pique the conscience of his Christian neighbors by urging all American Jews to don sackcloth and ashes and, at the time of Sunday mass, march unannounced into churches across the United States. Fineberg found this proposal so problematic and “un-American” that he concealed the real name of its advocate and called him “Mr. Abeloﬀ,” in a critical allusion to his “over-identiﬁcation” with the victim-image of the biblical Abel. “The trouble with Mr. Abeloﬀ,” Fineberg explained, “was that he was completely absorbed in . . . the suﬀering of the Jews in Europe – so absorbed, in fact,” that he had placed himself, practically speaking, in the service of forces which sought to cripple the normal life of the nation, create conﬂict, and disrupt national unity. . . . Whoever is out to save the Jews performs an errand of mercy . . . but even more important is the saving of those principles of human conduct which assure to everyone – Jew and non-Jew alike – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.10

Like Fineberg, Morgenstern also disapproved of such a strong emotional identiﬁcation with the Jews’ persecution and suﬀering that 9

One may gauge this reluctance by studying Julian Morgenstern’s correspondence with his brother, Irving, concerning the choice of a name for a collection of articles that would eventually be published under the title As a Mighty Stream. One of the names not accepted, Judaism Lives!, was rejected on the grounds that, in view of the Holocaust, it might be construed provocatively as an evangelistic sermon. Letter from Irving to Julian Morgenstern, December 9, 1948, AJA, MS. Col. 30, 13/12. 10 Solomon Andhil Fineberg, Overcoming Anti-Semitism, New York and London, 1943, pp. 51, 85, 107–111.

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would transform produce a negative model of Jewish identity. In this vein, he inveighed against a proposal to establish a network of Jewish day schools that would “strengthen the morale” of young American Jews against the possibility of an upsurge of antisemitism and Nazism in the United States. This is a doctrine to which I not only do not subscribe, but which, as a loyal Jew, born in America, and educated in the public schools of America, I bitterly resent as a libel upon my nation and my fellow American citizens.11

For the same reason, Morgenstern could not but be concerned about the growing acceptance, even within the Reform Movement, of Zionism as the only realistic model for the rescue of European Jewry. There were several salient examples of the coalescence of this “ominous” conviction among Reform Jews: One of the main clauses of the Columbus Platform, adopted by the CCAR in 1937, expressed support for Jewish immigration to Palestine as almost the only haven for Jewish refugees. In 1939, the CCAR adopted a resolution expressing almost unanimous opposition to the British policy of limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, as manifested in a White Paper.12 Finally, Zionists and non-Zionists had begun to cooperate in the United Jewish Appeal. Against this background, universalists such as Morgenstern were increasingly fearful of a general reinforcement of particularistic attitudes among American Jews – not only regarding the future of Palestine but also with respect to the future of Jews and Judaism in America.13 To cope with this challenge, Morgenstern tried to promote an alternative universalistic model of rescue. His eﬀorts to rescue GermanJewish scholars illustrate this stratagem. Since the mid-1930s, Morgenstern had been laboring to admit students and scholars from the

11 Dr. Julian Morgenstern, Letter to Mr. Stephen Klein, President of Barton’s Bohbonniere, Inc., Jan. 3, 1951, AJA, MS Col. 30, 6/13. 12 An exception to this rule was the Reform Rabbi Morris Lazeron, who urged Jews to accept the White Paper policy and to renounce the political aspirations of the Jewish Agency. It is possible that Lazaron’s failure to mobilize Reform support for his views prompted him, three years later, to establish the American Council for Judaism. 13 This concern was reﬂected in a meeting between Zionists and non Zionists at the Commodore Hotel on October 21, 1941, the latter seeking to assure the cessation Zionist national propaganda outside of Palestine after the establishment of a Jewish national home. See Knee, p. 115.

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Liberal seminaries in Berlin and Vienna to HUC and to ﬁnance their stay. To accomplish this, he clashed unﬂinchingly and tenaciously with State Department oﬃcials and promised Jewish scholars from Germany teaching positions at HUC. Ultimately, he managed to circumvent the immigration-quota regulations and furnish his protégés with entry visas. He also strove to arrange positions for Jewish scholars at other universities. He deﬁnitely played an important role in the rescue of noted Jewish scholars, including Abraham J. Heschel. Furthermore, Morgenstern invested considerable eﬀort and funds in salvaging Jewish libraries and bringing them to the United States.14 Whether Morgenstern did everything he could for the victims of the Holocaust is beyond the purview of this book. One may certainly criticize his paradigm of rescue as insuﬃcient in view of actual needs during the Holocaust. The purpose of this discussion, however, is to understand why Morgenstern chose the alternative that he did. Morgenstern’s rescue eﬀorts should be regarded as a model that sought to express solidarity with the suﬀering of European Jewry without being based on withdrawal from the hostility and indiﬀerence of the non-Jewish surroundings. Two points deserve attention in this context. First, much of Morgenstern’s eﬀort to bring the Jewish scholars to the United States took place after the scholars had settled safely in Britain and escaped mortal danger; this may indicate that he considered it symbolically important that they reach HUC. Second, Morgenstern’s concurrent extensive eﬀorts to extricate his many relatives from Germany hardly attracted any publicity. One may suspect that the reasons for the secrecy may have included concern that this type of rescue might accentuate the diﬀerences between Jewish and non-Jewish interests, thereby promoting a negative model of Jewish solidarity.15

14 AJA, MS Col. 30½; 1/13; 5/7; 5/8; 5/23; 5/24; 7/13; 7/15; 7/27; 9/34; 10/27; 11/7; 12/22; 12/24; 12/25; Floyd S. Fierman, “The Eﬀort to Rescue Jewish Scholars from Nazi Germany,” The El Paso Jewish Historical Review, Volume IV, (February, 1987), pp. 1–30; Michael A. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in Bertram Wallace Korn, ed., A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, Waltham, Mass., 1976, pp. 359–375; Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 313–314. 15 In fact, these eﬀorts were reported only many years later in a letter by Morgenstern’s daughter after his death: Letter from Mrs. William A. Greenebaum to Mr. Sheldon H. Blank (not dated, probably 1977), AJA, Small Collection, SC8455.

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B. The Dual Challenge of Ultra-Particularistic and Ultra-Universalistic Responses Morgenstern embarked on yet another attempt to fashion a model of positive solidarity with European Jewry in a lecture in late 1941, about a month before the United States entered the war.16 Insisting that there was no contradiction between American Jews’ feelings of solidarity with European Jewry and the universalistic outlook, Morgenstern ﬁercely criticized some of his colleagues for having gone so far in trying to defend their universalistic Reform beliefs as to disregard the sentiments of solidarity that were so widespread among American Jews at the time. He argued that this type of opposition to Jewish solidarity should not be considered part of the universalistic Reform creed. On the contrary, As American Jews we will treasure our Jewish history and tradition . . . maintain zealously our bond of kinship with our Jewish brethren in all lands. Even to a Jewish state in Palestine we will not be indiﬀerent or unsympathetic; we will never cease to hope and to labor for the safe and expanding settlement of our brethren in the land of our fathers.17

As he criticized his “ultra”-universalistic colleagues, Morgenstern also struggled uncompromisingly against responses of Jewish “ultra”-particularism. Thus, in the same lecture, he criticized the seclusionist response of Jewish ethnoculturalism in the United States, terming it “a barrier to human . . . progress . . . a crime against society and a sin against God.” Above all, he attacked the adherents of cultural pluralism as representatives of an ultra-particularistic attitude, a new version of “Diaspora nationalism” that sought to perpetuate the ethnic and cultural diﬀerences between Jews and non-Jews in America. He considered this approach alien to the American spirit and alleged that, were it to permeate society, it would become an incurable illness that would polarize American social and racial groups, just as it had back in the Old World.18

16 Julian Morgenstern, “‘Melting Pot’, ‘Cultural Pluralism’, or what?” address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the College Chapel, October 19, 1941 (reprinted under the title, “Assimilation, Isolation or Reform?” in Contemporary Jewish Record, April 1942, and in As a Mighty Stream, pp. 319–334). 17 Ibid., pp. 332–334. 18 Ibid., pp. 327–329. Morgenstern’s ambivalence about including Jewish culture

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While waging a ﬁerce struggle against all “extreme” Jewish manifestations, Morgenstern could not disregard the widening internal gap between the ultra-universalistic and ultra-particularistic doctrines. This may be why he was willing to postpone the realization of what he himself advocated – investing manifestations of Jewish solidarity with positive, universalistic meaning – to the distant future. In his 1941 lecture, he stated that the real answer to the question of Jewish solidarity was a long-term process that would end with the obliteration of all national and racial diﬀerences in American society. In this vision, future American Jews would constitute a religious community only; no longer would they consider themselves members of a separate ethnic or cultural group. This would not only solve the Jewish problem once and for all but would make American Judaism attractive to many non-Jewish Americans, who by conversion would join the Jewish community.19 Until then, however, Morgenstern had to cope with a widening gap between the prevailing particularistic views on Jewish solidarity and his own principles of universalism. He was aware of this growing diﬃculty, as indicated in a letter he sent in early 1943 to one of the most prominent Reform exponents of the classical universalistic ideology, Rabbi Louis Wolsey of Philadelphia. In his letter, Morgenstern admitted: “The overwhelming majority of American Jews today do not interpret Judaism as we do.” This, he believed, was not surprising, since most of them were immigrants or immigrants’ children who had not yet internalized the American way of life. To “convert” these Jews to the universalistic Reform persuasion, a lengthy and slow process of education was needed, not a path of confrontation that might only cause them to barricade themselves even more ﬁrmly behind the rampart of their “un-American views.” In his letter, Morgenstern also stressed the emotional inﬂuence of the fate of European Jewry on the American Jewish masses. “You cannot appeal to reason,” he wrote to Wolsey. “The Jewish people as a whole is beside itself, is frenetic, is emotionally unbalanced.” Thus, advocates of the universalistic interpretation of Judaism, which “seeks to eﬀect a proper balance between emotion and reason,” must

in Reform Jewish education is also noteworthy in this context. This matter, however, oversteps the limits of this study and should be explored in further research. For an initial discussion, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 301, 304(r). 19 Ibid., pp. 330, 333–334.

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be patient and avoid tactics that would further aggravate the polarization and the emotional tumult.20 As this letter indicates, Morgenstern realized that preaching a universalistic model of Jewish identity might accentuate the distance between the rationalistic Jewish aﬃliation that he wanted and the pattern of emotional-particularistic solidarity that was on the ascent at the time. From his standpoint, the exacerbation of this internal contradiction was tantamount to an admission that the universalistic ideology was irrelevant precisely at a time of crisis in Judaism. Accordingly, he braced himself for the Sisyphean task of acting in two contradictory directions: advocacy of a model of positive, universalistic aﬃliation and indefatigable eﬀorts to prevent, or at least attenuate, the internal Jewish disagreements that this advocacy might aggravate. Morgenstern’s attitude toward the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism in 1942–1945 is striking evidence of this ambivalence. Basically, Morgenstern shared the views and fears of the Council members. Like most of them, he belonged to the more radical, universalistic wing of the Reform Movement21 and feared the growing inﬂuence of Zionist and particularistic sentiments among American Jews. At the same time, however, he was aware that advocacy of the Council’s views could turn the universalistic trend into a shunned and uninﬂuential minority group within American Jewry and, perhaps, even within the Reform Movement. Morgenstern’s ambivalence toward the American Council for Judaism became evident in the very ﬁrst stages of its coalescence. This followed the CCAR resolution in 1941 to favor the establishment of a Jewish army – a pro-Zionist resolution that enraged the anti-Zionists – and preceded the ﬁrst organizing conference (in Atlantic City in early June 1942) of the group that would subsequently found the Council. During that interval, Morgenstern and the initiator of the conference, Rabbi Louis Wolsey, engaged in lively correspondence.22 20 Letter from Morgenstern to Louis Wolsey, Jan. 8, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. 21 Perusal of Morgenstern’s regular correspondence shows that he maintained amiable and close relations with many members of the more radical universalistic wing of the movement. Interestingly, he continued to correspond with many members of the American Council for Judaism long after he resigned from the group. See, for example, Morgenstern’s correspondence with David Wise, Tarshish, Henry Cohen, William H. Fineshriber, and David Lefkowitz, Jr. 22 Letters between Morgenstern and Louis Wolsey, April 23, 1942–January 26, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10.

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The wording of Morgenstern’s letters, although indicative of a basic identiﬁcation with the views of Wolsey and his associates, show dissatisfaction with the initiative. For example, Morgenstern noted his vehement opposition to the CCAR’s vote of support for a Jewish army; in the same breath, however, he took issue with Wolsey and his associates for having turned the resolution into grounds for an internal American Jewish standoﬀ. Had they not behaved this way, he said, the whole matter would have died down and been forgotten.23 His letters to Wolsey make it clear that he perceived the issues of establishing an army or even a Jewish state as secondary to the inherent riskiness of debating them. His great fear was that such a controversy would delegitimate the universalistic ideology in the eyes of the Jewish masses. He criticized the eﬀorts of Wolsey and his associates, who in a desperate rear-guard battle still struggled against the acceptance of Palestine as the only refuge for Jews ﬂeeing the Holocaust.24 He argued that, at this time, Jews at large would perceive any such opposition to Palestine as a betrayal of Jewish solidarity and interests. Morgenstern sought to persuade Wolsey and his colleagues that by avoiding an ideological and political struggle against Zionism they might be able to focus American Jewry’s attention on the positive, universalistic solution to the challenges to Jewish survival. In his opinion, only this course of action might assure the long-term prospects of developing a universalistic common denominator for all of American Jewry.25 Within a few years, most members of the universalistic ﬂank of the Reform Movement would ﬁnd Morgenstern’s approach amenable. By September 1943, about half of the Reform rabbis who had participated in the Atlantic City conference had resigned from the antiZionist Council. By 1946, fewer than twelve rabbis remained in it. Even Wolsey quit as vice-president of the Council in 1946 due to its attempts to obstruct Holocaust survivors’ immigration to Palestine.

23

Letter from Morgenstern to Wolsey, April 30, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. In his letter of June 10, 1942, for example, Wolsey describes the Zionists’ attempt to proﬁt from the function of Palestine as a country of refuge and to use this role of Palestine as a “Trojan Horse” that will sow confusion among American Jews. In another letter, dated January 8, 1943, Wolsey quotes a report from the American Jewish Conference, to the eﬀect that Russia had received 1,600,000 Jewish refugees, as proof that Palestine was not the only location where victims of Nazism hoped to ﬁnd refuge. 25 See, for example, Morgenstern to Wolsey, January 8, 1943. 24

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Morgenstern was one of the ﬁrst members of this group to object to the very existence of the Council. His consent to participate in the Atlantic City conference, obtained under severe duress by Wolsey and his associates,26 was not a reﬂection of support for this move by the anti-Zionist camp. On the contrary: Morgenstern hoped to shift the focus of Jewish public attention from the Zionism issue to discussion of the principles of the universalistic ideology. He therefore labored to change the “negative” divisive tendency of the Council and rechannel it in a “positive” direction. But for a brief time it seemed, at least to Morgenstern, that he had attained his goal. In a letter to Wolsey on June 4, 1942, Morgenstern described the Atlantic City conference that had ended two days earlier as a resounding success and declared that all his apprehensions had been disproved. He believed he had managed to redirect the group’s sphere of activity from anti-Zionism to a “positive” struggle to stipulate the universalistic principles of American Judaism. In the same vein, he urged the members of the Council to demand that the CCAR place several basic issues of Reform Jewish doctrine on its agenda. Only one of these issues pertained to relations between Zionists and non-Zionists, and even this item was couched in general terms and made no direct reference to the provocative resolution concerning the Jewish army. All the other issues, such as the movement’s attitude toward Jewish culture, intermarriage, and conversion, were “neutral.” Morgenstern recommended that each subsequent CCAR convention debate only one issue, so that for the next ten years the movement would focus not on disputation over Zionism but on working out a positive, universalistic Reform attitude toward the important problems of Jewish aﬃliation and solidarity.27

26 To pressure Morgenstern to attend the Atlantic City conference, Wolsely threatened to hold a “very critical” discussion about Hebrew Union College during the conference. Letter from Wolsey to Morgenstern, April 23, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. Morgenstern himself mentioned the planned discussion about HUC as the main reasons for his decision. Letter from Morgenstern to Wolsey, May 28, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. 27 In his letter of June 4, Morgenstern argued vehemently that the summarizing decision should be publicized not immediately after the conference but only after all its signatories could examine it painstakingly. A copy of the concluding resolution of the Atlantic City conference, signed by Morgenstern is attached to a letter sent by Wolsey on June 25, 1942: Letter from Morgenstern to Louis Wolsey, June 25, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10.

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Soon, however, Morgenstern discovered that he was being pulled inexorably onto a collision course with the pro-Zionists. A striking example of this was the controversy touched oﬀ by the Atlantic City resolution, disclosed several days after the conference adjourned. At ﬁrst, before responses to the resolution began to come in, Morgenstern approved of the resolution as an expression of positive principles of Jewish aﬃliation. To his surprise, however, he found that in view of the upturn in pro-Zionist sentiment among American Jews and, especially, the adoption of the Biltmore Program a month earlier, even “moderate” universalistic phrasings were perceived as having objectionable anti-Zionist connotations. For example, the ﬁrst paragraph of the resolution asserted that the Jewish problem might be solved only as part of a response to the totality of human and social problems worldwide. This paragraph, which in previous years might not have been considered anti-Zionist, was perceived now as particularistic opposition to the Biltmore Program’s statement that no new social, moral, and political order was conceivable until the particularistic Jewish problem of establishing a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine was solved. The uptrend in pro-Zionist sympathies also applied the stain of radical “anti-Zionism” to the second and third paragraphs of the resolution, which merely criticized Zionism’s pretense to have a monopoly on solutions to the Jewish problem.28 The wording of the Atlantic City summations evoked voluminous criticism from more than 700 rabbis in all three Jewish religious currents. To his surprise, even HUC faculty members took exception to cautious locutions that were meant to create a basis for common ground among all American Jews. By the end of July, the criticism made him feel duty-bound to disapprove of the resolution and to refuse to disseminate it.29 At the same time, however, the resolution was too moderate to satisfy the members of the Atlantic City group, who convened several months later in New York to declare, against Morgenstern’s counsel, the formation of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. This prompted Morgenstern to announce, in

28 It should be noted that the eight-paragraph Biltmore plan marked the ascendancy of a much more militant Zionist line than its precursor. As the resolutions of the August 1943 American Jewish Conference show, this line quickly reﬂected a broad consensus among American Jews. 29 Letters from Morgenstern to Louis Wolsey, June 25, and July 30, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10.

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December of the same year, his disapproval of the Council and its resolutions. He proclaimed that the Council, just by being established, was helping to inﬂate the Zionist issue to a level of importance that far exceeded its due and, by so doing, increased the risk of irreparable isolation of Reform Judaism.30 However, Morgenstern did not stop his Sisyphean eﬀorts to change the “negative” divisive tendency of the Council. Several days before announcing his ﬁnal decision not to join the Council, he took the initiative to call a meeting between representatives of the Council and of the Zionists in the Reform Movement. The meeting took place on January 5, 1943, at the Baltimore home of Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron. Although Morgenstern attended the encounter as a representative of the Council, he informed the other participants that his aim was to conclude an agreement that would make it possible to disband the Council as an independent entity. The president of the CCAR, the Zionist Reform rabbi James Heller, introduced a compromise proposal: to reaﬃrm the statement of neutrality (regarding Zionism) that the CCAR had adopted in 1935 as a regulation that would be binding on the Reform Movement. Morgenstern was satisﬁed with this. It was consistent with his belief that the dispute over Zionist views in political aﬀairs should be neutralized as quickly as possible. Predictably, however, Rabbis Wolsey and Lazaron found the proposal unsatisfactory. They attacked Morgenstern for having surrendered to the exponents of particularistic Zionism, which, they said, had become dominant even among students at HUC – the erstwhile bastion of the classical universalistic ideology.31 Even after his oﬃcial and ﬁnal disengagement from the Council on January 8, 1943, Morgenstern continued trying to persuade the heads of the Council to refocus their activity. He argued that many American Jews identiﬁed more strongly with Zionism at that time not due to a substantive change in ideology but because of frustration over their inability to help their Jewish brethren in Europe. He called on the Council to support the demand to allow Jews to immigrate to Palestine and expressed conﬁdence that, once the community

30 Letter from Morgenstern to Louis Wolsey, December 10, 1942, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. 31 Letters between Morgenstern, Louis Wolsey, Morris S. Lazaron, Emil W. Leipziger, Samuel Goldenson and James Heller, from December 10, 1942 until January 11, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10.

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of nations accepted this demand, the identiﬁcation with Zionism would almost totally disappear. He also expressed his assurance that the next generation of American Jews, unlike their immigrant parents, would not be inﬂuenced by Zionist ideology. In the meantime, he counseled, one should do nothing that would be construed as an assault on solidarity with the victims of Nazism in Europe.32 Morgenstern also attempted to inﬂuence his “ultra”-universalist colleagues in a case known as the “Houston Aﬀair.” Members of the Reform congregation of Beth Israel in that city unveiled a set of principles in the spirit of Pittsburgh Platform universalism and stipulated its acceptance as a prerequisite for membership with voting rights. Two of the terms attracted much criticism within the Reform Movement and elsewhere: candidates for membership had to sign a statement of opposition to Zionism and total rejection of the Jewish dietary laws. Morgenstern launched a special mediation campaign to explain to the members of the congregation how dangerous their attitude was: “It behooves us all in the Reform Movement,” he explained, “to step carefully and not lose our contacts with the great household of American Judaism.”33 In fact, Morgenstern’s activity during the entire period from late 1941, when the U.S. entered the war, to shortly before the end of the war may be characterized as a Sisyphean eﬀort to present the principles of Jewish universalism to American Jewry in a “positive”, non-divisive way. Notwithstanding his unceasing eﬀorts, Morgenstern had to contend with a widening chasm between his universalistic beliefs and the surging particularistic sentiment among American Jews. The more cognizant American Jews became of the fate of European Jewry, the more acute this contradiction was, and internal American Jewish developments in early 1943 brought it to a climax. C. In the Eye of the Storm Early 1943 was a time of tumult in American Jewry’s eﬀorts to organize. The Allies gained momentum in the war and lifted the threat of invasion of Palestine in late 1942, but the annihilation of European

32 Letter from Morgenstern to Louis Wolsey, January 26, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 15, 3/10. 33 Letter from Morgenstern to Solomon B. Freehof, February 1, 1944, AJA MS. Col. 13 8/6.

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Jewry still proceeded. Moreover, the horrifying magnitude of the annihilation came into sharper focus in the course of 1943, eliciting a crescendo of voices calling for united and organized action by American Jewry. Thus, as Morgenstern labored to conclude an agreement that would avert schism within the Reform Movement, B’nai B’rith president Henry Monsky invited thirty-ﬁve American Jewish organizations, including the Reform Movement, to send delegates to the founding assembly of an umbrella agency that would within a few months be called the American Jewish Conference. Eventually the Conference would proclaim unequivocal support for the Zionists’ political demands. This pro-Zionist resolution, by an organization that represented American Jewish unity and solidarity, would make Morgenstern’s struggle to prevent internal polarization between universalists and particularists even more complex and diﬃcult than it had been before. On the internal Reform front, Morgenstern’s main struggle was to prevent the Reform Movement from staying away from the assembly. In debates within the movement that preceded the assembly, Morgenstern lent his name to a moderate statement of principles adopted in Philadelphia on May 30, 1943. The statement favored Jewish immigration to Palestine but refrained from demanding a Jewish majority and Jewish control of immigration. The resolution was designed to create common ground that would allow the Reform Movement to take part in the upcoming assembly. However, even after the Reform eﬀorts to line up a majority of delegates behind their stance failed, and after the assembly in August adopted a resolution that clearly favored the “extreme” principles of the Biltmore Program, Morgenstern continued trying to forestall the secession of the Reform Movement. An example of his eﬀorts may be seen in a Reform conference held in Cincinnati at the initiative of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC). The gathering was convened after anti-Zionist rabbis and lay members urged the movement to respond to the Conference’s pro-Zionist resolutions by seceding. Morgenstern, one of the main speakers at this meeting, attempted to forestall radical decisions by striving to convince his colleagues that active participation in American Jewish public life was a major condition for a constructive and long-term Reform inﬂuence on American Jewry.34 34

Minutes of Informal Meeting of Rabbis Held in the Netherland Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati, on November 30, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 13, 8/6, p. 5.

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Notwithstanding his attempts to restrain his movement’s ultra-universalistic wing, Morgenstern found himself unwillingly dragged into the heart of the confrontation between Zionists and anti-Zionists. With Zionism increasingly inclined to express “extreme” particularistic demands, Morgenstern’s “moderate” approach was criticized vehemently from both sides. The Cincinnati meeting is a good example. A preliminary polling of all Reform rabbis by the head of the UAHC, Rabbi Maurice Nathan Eisendrath, showed that a majority of rabbis agreed with Morgenstern that their movement should remain neutral on the Zionism issue. Sensing this general mood, Morgenstern persuaded his colleagues to go one step further and adopt a “prouniversalist” resolution (rather than merely avoiding an anti-Zionist statement). The Cincinnati meeting accepted this approach; its summarizing resolution stressed several principles that added up to a universalistic Reform statement on Palestine: support for large-scale Jewish immigration, support for continuation of the British Mandate, and a call to base the principles of the Yishuv on justice, equality, democracy, and avoidance of injury to the local non-Jewish population. Morgenstern soon discovered that both Zionists and antiZionists were ﬁercely critical of this approach. Silver, for example, regarded it as a retreat from Zionist positions that the CCAR had already adopted. The American Council for Judaism also took exception to it; Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson, for instance, termed it an expression of moderate Zionism.35 The most salient example of Morgenstern’s reluctant involvement in the Zionist–anti-Zionist struggle was his controversial speech in October 1943 on the occasion of the beginning of the HUC academic year.36 The main criticism of the speech focused on his likening of the ultranationalist wing in Zionism to Nazism and his rejection of the belief that the future sovereign Jewish state might portend a new era for Judaism – a counterweight to the Diaspora and the unbroken cycle of persecutions and destruction.

35 Letter from Maurice N. Eisendrath to Solomon B. Freehof, December 10, 1943; letter from Abba Hillel Silver to Solomon B. Freehof, December 19, 1943, AJA, MS. Col. 13, 8/6. 36 Julian Morgenstern, “Nation, People, Religion – What Are We,” address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the College Chapel, before faculty and students, October 16, 1943 (reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 349–382).

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A twentieth-century, restored Jewish state, be its existence long or brief, would be merely another nationalistic episode in the life of the Jewish people. . . . Despite the oft-repeated, high-sounding asseverations of the beneﬁcent role which a restored Jewish state or commonwealth in Palestine may play or will play in setting a happy pattern of equitable social relations for all other nations to emulate, the fact, incontestable and established by history . . . [is] that the true genius and destiny of Israel ﬁnd expression only in its role as a religious people, the bearers of a spiritual heritage.37

Most of the criticism of Morgenstern’s speech came from Reform leaders who resisted their movement’s identiﬁcation with anything that they considered markedly anti-Zionist.38 However, a thorough examination of the speech may show that its underlying theme was an attempt to adopt a “moderate” approach favoring the “core” universalistic fundamentals of Zionism and avoiding a frontal assault on Zionist political aspirations. Moreover, most of the lecture did not deal with the dangers or beneﬁts of Zionism but focused instead on presenting the universalistic lesson of Jewish history. According to Morgenstern, obstacles such as the Holocaust naturally reinforced particularistic and seclusionist tendencies among Jews but could never totally thwart the prophetic message that sought to transform Jewish suﬀering into a basis for the universalistic hope of a better world – one of justice, freedom, and equality.39 This method of analyzing Jewish history reﬂected Morgenstern’s desire to consider himself not a “prophet of rage” who incites confrontation, but rather a DeuteroIsaiah type of prophet ﬁgure who encourages his people not to lose faith in its universalistic mission. We are a people distinct and unique, unlike all other peoples; for our constant, abiding hope and goal are not . . . merely national survival and national restoration. . . . We are a people with a God-appointed destiny, which we cannot avert through fear or through frenzied choice.

37

Ibid., pp. 376–378. Forty-nine Reform rabbis, headed by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman of Boston, signed a sharply worded censure of Morgenstern. Similarly, Rabbi Samuel J. B. Wolk wrote an opposing article to refute Morgenstern’s views. AJA, small collection, SC-13376; American Israelite (November 11, 1943), p. 1; Richard Keith Harkavy, “Non-Zionists Within Reform Judaism: 1917–1948”, Ordination Thesis, Hebrew Union College, 1984, pp. 125–126. 39 Julian Morgenstern, “Nation, People, Religion – What Are We,” pp. 350, 353, 363–369. 38

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Indeed, Morgenstern concluded his speech not by assailing the “negative,” destructive tendencies in Jewish nationalism, but by quoting verses from Deutero-Isaiah that aim to sustain the Jews’ faith in their universalistic Divine mission, even in view of the destruction of European Jewry: “But thou, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen . . . fear not, for I am with thee, be not dismayed, for thy God am I; I do strengthen thee, yea, I do support thee, yea, I do uphold thee with My sure right hand” (Isa. 41:8–10).40 As on previous occasions, however, Morgenstern quickly discovered that the public at large perceived his “moderate” views as a condescending form of anti-Zionism. In particular, his statement regarding the proper “neutralistic” attitude toward the importance of Jewish nationalism attracted massive criticism. Morgenstern asserted that “There is nothing whatever un-Jewish . . . in the recrudescence of nationalism” (as long as it does not spill over into ultra-particularism, which he considered analogous to Nazism). In the same breath, however, he added: “There is absolutely nothing speciﬁcally Jewish in nationalism.” He further stated that even though “moderate” nationalism was a legitimate trend in Jewish history, Israel played the role of a nation for no more than approximately onesixth of its somewhat more than three thousand years of existence as a people. For a full three-fourths of this relatively brief period its role as a nation was inglorious, unhappy and dominated by a persistent and unavertable threat of doom. As a nation, as a self-governing political entity, Israel contributed little, perhaps nothing at all, to the content and progress of civilization. . . . Nothing whatever suggests that today, restored to national existence, Israel would be aught diﬀerent from the many little, insigniﬁcant racial states which struggle desperately to maintain and to justify their existence.41

The widespread criticism that Morgenstern absorbed after his lecture in 1943 forced him to re-examine his views, or at least his tactics. It convinced him beyond doubt that identiﬁcation with Zionist goals had become American Jewry’s main response to the tragic helplessness represented by the Holocaust, and that from now on any attempt at American Jewish unity must accept or at least use the main symbols of the Zionist ethos. Morgenstern expressed his

40 41

Ibid., pp. 379–382. Ibid., pp. 351–352, 376–378.

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awareness of the new situation in two ways. First, he stepped up his disapproval of his ultra-universalistic colleagues’ anti-Zionist statements; second, he modiﬁed his erstwhile elitist attitude toward the growing particularistic identiﬁcation with the victims of the Holocaust among Jews at large. An example of the former was his unequivocal condemnation of the American Council for Judaism as “a divisive and mischievous organization . . . [that] would destroy, if left to its own devices, the very thing which it claims to endeavor and protect.”42 This condemnation was not based, as in previous cases, on a tactical necessity of appeasing the Jewish masses. Instead, it was now based on Morgenstern’s admission that he himself identiﬁed with the basic emotion and consensus that Zionism represented among the Jewish masses. Only one year after his controversial lecture in 1943, Morgenstern admitted that he shared the feelings of anger that underlay the rising popularity of the Zionist demands: There have been moments when . . . my blood has boiled too because of Israel’s oppression. I too have asked myself whether Israel could not assert itself better as a nation in its own land. I too believe in Israel’s will to live and to express its genius. And I too have asked myself whether Israel could not live more truly and give its genius freer rein and create more largely and with more abundant blessing as a nation in its own land.43

However, while placing himself on the same emotional and anguished plane as the Jewish masses, Morgenstern was not about to change his universalistic ideology. On the contrary, it was this very act that allowed him to preach his basic universalistic approach even more adamantly. Thus, immediately after the foregoing confession, Morgenstern proclaimed that the ultimate answer to all his questions and vacillations about the “Zionist solution” was an unqualiﬁed “No!”

42 Letter from Morgenstern to Rev. Dr. Ariel Goldburg, May 12, 1947, AJA, MS. Col. 30, 4/23. 43 Julian Morgenstern, “Neither Zionist nor Anti-Zionist” (not dated, probably 1944), AJA, MS. Col. No. 30, 14/7. One may judge how convincing Morgenstern’s emotional identiﬁcation was, by noting the many attacks on him by anti-Zionists, who believed he had changed his stripes and enlisted in the Zionist cause, and in other cases by noting the error of pro-Zionists who considered Morgenstern one of their number. For an example, see letter from Rev. Dr. Ariel Goldburg to Morgenstern, May 5, 1945 , AJA, MS. Col. 30, 4/23; letter from Harry Scherman to Morgenstern, November 7, 1951, AJA, MS. Col. 30, 10/3.

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chapter four Migration to Palestine may relieve Jewish suﬀering and persecution somewhat. . . . But I cannot convince myself that . . . Judaism in America is decadent or too weak for self-propagation and spiritual creation. I do not believe that it needs the power that will supposedly radiate from a Jewish cultural center in Palestine in order to merely continue to exist. . . . I have full faith in Judaism in America, in its power to live and grow and create new spiritual values, worthy of all Israel’s traditions.44

Morgenstern expressed a similar approach in a journalistic interview in August 1945 by announcing a change from his anti-Zionist position to non-Zionism. In view of the public reverberations and criticisms of his “anti-Zionist” lecture in 1943, the Anglo-Jewish press depicted this interview and its more moderate contents as “sensational news.” Morgenstern used this opportunity to express identiﬁcation with and support for Zionism. He admitted that there had been a time when he was a pretty strong anti-Zionist, but declared that he had changed his mind. “Today I am deﬁnitely non-Zionist,” he said, “with . . . a sympathetic understanding and appreciation of Zionism.” He made it clear, however, that even if his emotional attitude toward Zionism had changed, his basic universalistic ideology had not. While identifying with the Zionist enterprise and hoping for its success, Morgenstern fearlessly declared himself a bitter and ﬁerce opponent of “centering everything in American Jewish life on nationalism” and stated that he regards it as exceedingly dangerous, “for it runs contrary to the fundamental principles of Americanism.”45 Morgenstern developed this view further in his lecture at the inauguration of the HUC academic year in 1945, shortly after the war ended.46 He distinguished between two concepts, Zeitgeist and environment, which together should represent the dominant culture of the times. He admitted that since the Zeitgeist of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century tended toward national identiﬁcation, it made Zionism a main and legitimate part of the American Jewish identity. However, he said, only a given country’s “environment” could

44

Julian Morgenstern, “Neither Zionist nor Anti-Zionist.” “Morgenstern: Not Terriﬁed at all, Even Pleased a Little Bit, by Prospect of Jewish State,” The Jewish Post, August 17, 1945. 46 Julian Morgenstern, “Unity in American Judaism – How and When?” address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the College Chapel, before faculty and students, September 22, 1945 (reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 383–404). 45

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determine whether the Zeitgeist in each individual community would head in a universalistic or a particularistic direction. In other words, only the democratic and universalistic nature of the American environment should determine the type of Jewish-Zionist identiﬁcation that American Jews ought to develop. Morgenstern went one step further and claimed that the occurrence of the Holocaust in the Old World and the American victory in the war conﬁrmed the supremacy of the universalistic values of the American environment. He concluded that Jewish survival is dependent on American universalistic values and that American Reform Judaism must therefore assume responsibility for leadership of the Jewish world at large: “Our inﬂuence is far-reaching, our opportunity for service to the household of Jacob immeasurable, our responsibility immediate and pressing.”47 This perception of the American Jewish mission and leadership was an attempt of sorts to come up with a positive Reform response to the pessimistic, particularistic messages of the Holocaust – this time not by rejecting the Zionist demands but by accepting them. Emphasizing the glorious future and exalted moral mission of American Jewry, it manifested unbounded faith in the “diﬀerent” nature of the American environment, where a second Holocaust could not occur. Thus, “Judaism and Democracy,” a statement of principles adopted in 1945 at the end of HUC’s seventieth-anniversary festivities, proclaimed that American democracy and Judaism maintained a “natural synthesis” and expressed faith that the American “heart” would remain sound despite the presence of subversive and antisemitic forces in it. The statement ended with a proclamation of “unswerving faith in the reality and vitality of American Democracy and in its manifest destiny to bring to all mankind a realization of the blessings of liberty and justice.”48 Similarly, in his 1945 address Morgenstern advocated the formation of an American Judaism that would develop the leadership responsibility that American Jewry must assume visà-vis world Jewry: “There must be a positive American Judaism. . . . Only as such can Judaism perpetuate itself in the midst of our unique American culture.”49

47

Ibid., p. 383. “Judaism and Democracy,” Liberal Judaism (November 1945), pp. 58–60. 49 Julian Morgenstern, “Unity in American Judaism,” As a Mighty Stream, pp. 390–391. 48

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The main innovation in Morgenstern’s remarks was his hopeful, self-conﬁdent tone. Suddenly, it seemed, he had found a way to preach positive, universalistic values without being perceived as condescending and alienated from the feelings of Jewish solidarity and shared fate epitomized by Zionism. Ironically, it was his open and emotional identiﬁcation with the catastrophe of the Holocaust that enabled Morgenstern to present his universalistic outlook as a positive message about the development of Jewish life. Symbolically, the Reform Movement at large reﬂected this trend by appointing Silver, the militant Zionist leader, to the CCAR presidency in 1946. By demonstrating that the Reform Movement was in line with Jews at large, this appointment enabled the CCAR that year to come out with a conﬁdent and optimistic pledge of allegiance to America and the principles of universalism. All through the [CCAR] convention in Chicago . . . beginning with the magniﬁcent message of the president, Abba Hillel Silver, through all the papers and many of the speeches from the ﬂoor ran the conviction that . . . Reform Judaism has a magniﬁcent opportunity in American Jewish life. These ideas were expressed not in a mood of smiling optimism; it went much deeper than that. There was a solemn sense of responsibility and an urgent awareness of opportunity. There was an impatience to get on with the task of helping to give the world the moral foundation on which alone it can now stand ﬁrm and of rebuilding for Israel a new and creative life.50

Morgenstern’s October 1946 speech followed a similar pattern. He spoke approvingly of “the hopes and yearnings of millions of our people [turning] passionately to the land of our fathers,” and described it as an awakening of the Jewish will to live after the destruction and devastation of the Holocaust. However, as with a person’s life, Morgenstern explained, the will to live per se cannot determine the quality and meaning of life. Similarly, the Zionist form of Jewish identiﬁcation, which reﬂects an awakening of the drive to live after the devastation of the Holocaust, cannot be a goal in itself. It can be only a means toward the loftier goal of the universalistic Divine mission.51

50 “Reform Rabbis – A Convention Assembled,” Liberal Judaism (August 1946), pp. 1–2. 51 Julian Morgenstern, “A Program for Judaism and the Jewish People,” address delivered at the opening exercises of the HUC in the College Chapel, before fac-

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By 1947, Morgenstern seemed willing to express his feelings of identiﬁcation with Zionism in more meaningful terms. “At heart we are all Zionists,” he asserted. He cited the tragedy that befell European Jewry after the Nazi accession and the world’s callousness to the Jews’ fate as facts that should prompt every self-respecting Jew to identify with the Zionist demands. In a speech at the CCAR convention, Morgenstern explained the change in his attitude toward Zionism, stating that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he had become cognizant of the main weakness of the Pittsburgh Platform – the cradle of the universalistic Reform ideology. According to Morgenstern, the Platform was overly optimistic and universalistic; its authors, back in the nineteenth century, had mistakenly assumed that the universalistic idealism that typiﬁed their era would last forever. A few among us, reluctant to face history in its stark reality, may delude themselves into believing that the Age of Enlightenment and universalism still exists, or that it can be restored if only they persist in their unconditioned universalistic faith and doctrine. But to most of us history brings a message of unavertible truth, of a sad and tragic realism. We are living . . . in a new and an unhappy age, and for our Jewish people doubly unhappy.52

Morgenstern’s “Zionist” conclusion can be misleading, especially when coupled with his sense of disillusionment and sober awakening from “excessive” hope for nineteenth-century universalism. Ironically, these changes pointed to a sense of conﬁdence and inner ideological conviction that typiﬁed Reform Judaism at the time. America’s defeat of Nazism was perceived as a triumph of the American universalistic creed over the reactionary, particularistic forces that had reigned in the Old World. Although the disillusionment and sadness that Morgenstern expressed over the fate of European Jewry were sincere and heartfelt, they were articulated by a man who believed that his basic outlook and worldview had been proven correct and entitled him to lead the Jewish people at this time of crisis. This interpretation is corroborated by Morgenstern’s own remarks, in his 1946 lecture, about the “proper” future relationship between universalism and Zionism. After reaﬃrming American Jewry’s identiﬁcation with the Yishuv, Morgenstern expressed the hope that once ulty and students, October 12, 1946. (Reprinted in Julian Morgenstern, As a Mighty Stream, pp. 412–413). 52 Julian Morgenstern, “With History as Our Guide,” CCARY 1947, pp. 282–283.

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the Jewish state came into being, American Jewry would delete Zionism from its public agenda in favor of more important and substantive issues related to the positive, universalistic meaning of Jewish existence and belonging: And when that day [of the establishment of the Jewish state] comes – and may it come speedily – it will, or at least should, mark the end of Jewish bickering and party strife and disunity upon the issue of Jewish nationalism here in America. For us the question of Palestine and of Jewish nationalism there will then have become only academic at the very most. . . . This will enable our American Jewish community to concentrate its thoughts and eﬀorts upon its own problems, duties and destiny.53

Morgenstern considered the dispute over the future of the Yishuv a temporary, short-term obstacle to the formulation of a positive American Jewish aﬃliation.54 He believed that, once that longed-for day ﬁnally came, American Jewry would be able to give its universalistic religious mission full, free, and unrestricted expression. Unlike the Yishuv, which would be preoccupied with the problems of Jewish sovereignty, American Jewry would be the only major Jewish community in all the world today which may assume this God-imposed task consciously and wholeheartedly. . . . A high and sacred role thus falls to our American Jewish community. . . . Our is the faith, the exhilarating faith, that Judaism’s message is not exhausted. . . . We are committed to our custody. We are the keepers of Israel’s destiny.55

53 Julian Morgenstern, “A Program for Judaism and the Jewish People,” pp. 415–422. 54 For discussion of the early phase of this outlook in the Reform Movement, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 297–298. 55 Julian Morgenstern, “A Program for Judaism and the Jewish People,” p. 422.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE REFORM AND AMERICAN JEWISH CONTEXT OF THE UNIVERSALISTIC COPING PATTERN A. Investing Symbols of Jewish Solidarity with Universalistic Meaning When we explore the importance of the universalistic coping pattern in the 1940s, we should ask to what extent this pattern reﬂected a general creed among Reform Jews and American Jews at large. Had the Holocaust destroyed the legitimacy of the universalistic faith in the eyes of most American Jews? Was this merely a case of a minority group that continued to adhere dogmatically to outmoded principles of classical nineteenth-century universalism? Or was the universalistic coping pattern represented by Morgenstern truly meaningful and relevant for large Reform congregations and other American Jews? The abundant evidence of internal Reform eﬀorts – like those of Julian Morgenstern – to sustain the universalistic creed in the face of the Holocaust may provide a partial answer to these questions. It may attest to the centrality that many members of the Reform Movement attributed to the attempt to invest their own feelings of disappointment and particularistic isolationism with universalistic meaning. The deliberations of the 1942 CCAR convention are an interesting example.1 Among the lectures were two keynote addresses on “the state of liberal Judaism in a reactionary world.” The ﬁrst lecture, by Rabbi William G. Braude, the Lithuanian-born rabbi of the Reform congregation in Providence, Rhode Island, touched oﬀ wide controversy. Braude warned his listeners not to “soothe ourselves with false hopes.” He noted that “the lice and typhus ghettoes of Warsaw and Lublin are not remote. Though we are not in them, we are of them.” In a departure from the optimistic faith in America, he noted that “even if our statutory position remains unaﬀected . . . our social position has already been shaken.” In conclusion he recommended that Reform Jews abandon their universalistic emphasis and 1

CCARY (1942), pp. 276–332.

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instead adopt a new codex with particularistic Jewish emphases: meritorious deeds that focus on Jews, compulsory fasting by Reform rabbis on the Ninth of Av and Yom Kippur, eschewing of pork, and prohibition of travel on the Sabbath except for worship purposes.2 The CCAR participants who responded to Braude fell into two groups. One group, representing the ultra-universalistic line of thinking, unequivocally criticized Braude’s “defeatist” trend of thought as seclusionist. The second and larger group was composed of moderate and pragmatic universalists and advocated positions somewhat similar to Morgenstern’s. Ephraim Frisch gave a response typical of the ﬁrst, more dogmatic group, reproaching Braude for his separatist tendencies and pessimism about the possibility of building a better world: He [Rabbi Braude] wants the Jews and Judaism to withdraw from the world, because after the war we are going to have the same kind or perhaps a worse world than we have. I do not believe it. I look for a more beautiful world. . . . I think this is only a temporary set-back. . . . I have faith in humanity . . . and in the possibilities of the human heart and the human mind to emancipate themselves from these terrible surroundings.3

Unlike Frisch, most of the discussants agreed with Braude about the impossibility, at that phase of the Holocaust, of dogmatic adherence to the optimistic liberal beliefs of the nineteenth century.4 However, despite their painful acceptance of this pessimistic assessment, they criticized the ostensible conclusion that their aspiration for universal social justice might be incompatible with the imperative of particularistic Jewish solidarity. The second keynote speaker, Rabbi Levi A. Olan of Dallas, Texas, shared most of the discussants’ disillusionment with the non-Jewish world but, unlike Braude, did not concede his belief in the universalistic Jewish mission. He admitted, painfully, that Germany, which had been so important in advancing nineteenth-century idealism, was now controlled by the most violent opponents of this idealism. However, he asserted, “The faith of a liberal is undying. . . . It is at this moment in history, [when] the forces of

2

Ibid., pp. 284, 287, 293–295. CCARY (1942), pp. 314–315. 4 See quotation from Morgenstern’s 1947 lecture on disillusionment with the utopian universalism of the nineteenth century, Chapter 5, note no. 194. 3

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darkness are rampant, [that] the liberal sets about to . . . reaﬃrm his determination.” In contrast to Braude, he stressed the menace that Nazism and Fascism represented not only to Jewry but to the foundations of all democratic societies and to the general liberal philosophy of which the Reform Movement was only a part. He therefore urged Reform Judaism to contend with the Nazi challenge not through social seclusionism and spiritual introversion but by participating in a shared Jewish-Gentile struggle for liberalism and democracy.5 Obviously, Olan’s less dogmatic approach underscored with greater vehemence the dilemma in which the universalistic Reform enthusiasts were entangled. On the one hand, various speakers belonging to this group expressed disappointment, anguish, and sometimes even an instinctive need to protect against the increasing hostility of the non-Jewish world. On the other hand, their remarks conspicuously reﬂected the need to defend their universalistic faith in integration and acculturation as the only basis for Jewish existence. To resolve the dilemma, the members of this second group searched for a pragmatic mode of expressing their disillusionment – a way that would not stress Jewish isolationism and withdrawal from American society at large and instead would invest these feelings with a positive, universalistic slant. For example, the Zionist rabbi Philip Bernstein, while welcoming Braude’s call for the reinforcement of Jewish morale at that diﬃcult hour of “mass violence . . . and darkness,” warned about the danger of construing Braude’s words as a call for collective Jewish seclusion and indiﬀerence to general American social problems such as discrimination against American blacks. Rabbi Herbert I. Bloom tackled the same issue in a manner reminiscent of the cultural-pluralism approach. Instead of criticizing Braude’s views, he depicted the focus on Jewish tradition and sanctity as a factor that allows American Jews to contribute to the general American culture the “reinforcing power which comes from saturating our lives and pervading our spirits with a sense of the central tradition of Judaism.” Similarly, Rabbi Ephraim M. Rosenzweig stated that Braude “articulates . . . the fundamental cry of humanity today . . . to begin the work of spiritual regeneration.” Rabbis Samuel Goldenson and Samuel J. B. Wolk articulated a diﬀerent type of this same pragmatic coping pattern:

5

CCARY (1942), pp. 297–298, 304–305, 311–312.

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while basically accepting Braude’s call for an emphasis on the sense of sanctity in Judaism, they criticized him for arguing that this sanctity may be attained only by observing the religious commandments and adopting a non-scientiﬁc and uncritical attitude toward Torah study.6 Another discussant was Rabbi Solomon Freehof, undoubtedly the most outstanding representative of the second and more pragmatic group. Freehof wielded a great deal of inﬂuence as the author of books on Reform practice and as the chief editor of the Newly Revised Union Prayerbook. He upheld Braude’s call to enrich Reform customs and base them on Jewish tradition, but deliberately focused only on such customs and rituals that he considered suitable for American society. Although his approach was based on an understanding of and even empathy with Braude’s emotional motives, it also reﬂected staunch opposition to the idea that one must choose between the warm, protective feelings that Jewish solidarity and tradition impart and the more rational and disengaged universalistic point of view. Freehof noted that, as Reform Jews, “We are not free to choose,” and termed the choice of a seclusionist and defensive posture against the hostility of the non-Jewish world an aristocratic ideal that clashed with the Reform Jewish way of thinking. “We will always belong to that search for objective truth. We will always yearn also for that emotional warmth which is inherent in the tradition of Judaism,” he concluded.7 Freehof ’s last-mentioned comment recalled Morgenstern’s approach and reﬂected the views of most of the discussants at the convention. Almost without exception, these discussants could not but share Braude’s disillusionment and anguish. Unlike Braude, however, they believed that Judaism’s main challenge was to avoid turning these feelings into particularistic isolationism and withdrawal from American society at large. Instead, they sought to invest these feelings with universalistic meaning. This attempt may be said to have expressed an inner need of many members of the Reform Movement and American Jews in general, who adopted this as their major coping pattern.

6

Ibid., pp. 313–316, 318, 321–323. CCARY (1942), pp. 318–319. Notably, Freehof expressed this attitude much more cohesively two years later in his book, Reform Jewish Practice and Its Rabbinic Background. In his response to Braude, one already ﬁnds the basic components of this attitude. 7

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The universalistic interpretation of Zionism was one of several salient examples of the Reform Movement’s coping pattern. Much like the various responses to Braude’s particularistic conclusions at the 1942 CCAR convention, the Reform approach to Zionism reﬂected an attempt to reconcile the optimistic underpinnings of the universalistic creed with the disappointment and anguish caused by the contradictory reality of the Holocaust. It reﬂected a way of expressing in positive, universalistic terms the feelings of particularistic Jewish solidarity that were on the ascent at this time and attempted to use these feelings to strengthen the belief in the possibility of basing Jewish existence on general social integration. One example of an approach that subjected Palestine-related symbols of identiﬁcation to a universalistic interpretation was articulated by Rabbi Victor E. Reichert of Cincinnati in a poem he wrote about the Western Wall in 1946. Reichert treated the Western Wall as a device that allows American Jews to vent their feelings of anguish, trauma, and Jewish solidarity in response to the Jewish fate in the Holocaust. However, he rejected the particularistic, seclusive meanings that usually surfaced as derivatives of the religious and Zionist identiﬁcation with Eretz Israel. He presented the Western Wall from the standpoint of a “Western Jew [who is] deep rooted in the democratic soil . . . [and] for whom Torquemada [head of the Spanish Inquisition] is a name and Kishneﬀ [sic, Kishinev, site of the 1903 pogroms in Russia] only an idiot’s tale.” For this Jew – in contrast to refugees from the Inquisition and pogroms – the Western Wall should be not only an emblem of bygone national grandeur or hope for the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty (“not for the glories of a vanished state, or to rebuild the nation’s shrine again do these tears ﬂow”), but a bridge between the Jewish fate in the past and the present.8 Reichert’s treatment of the Western Wall was quite reminiscent of Julian Morgenstern’s proclamation at the 1947 CCAR convention: “At heart we are all Zionists.” Although this type of “Zionist” assertion reﬂected genuine feelings, in no way did it signal renunciation of the basic principles of the universalistic doctrine. On the

8 Victor E. Reichert, “Wailing Wall” (Dedicated to Rev. Dr. Samuel Schulman, Rabbi Emeritus, Congregation. Emanu-El, Cincinnati) Liberal Judaism, Synagogue Section, ( July 1946), p. 48.

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contrary, precisely because Morgenstern and Reichert felt that the Holocaust had threatened the very basis of the Pittsburgh Platform’s universalistic idealism, they believed it necessary to use Zionist and traditional Jewish symbols to give positive, universalistic expression to the feelings of Jewish solidarity that had set in. The “Zionism” that Morgenstern and Reichert favored did not reach a particularistic conclusion or rule out the possibility of basing Jewish existence on social and cultural integration. Indeed, in the same breath with their guarded support for Zionism, they stated that only universalism could assure Jewish survival and continuity in the long term.9 “Zionist” views like Morgenstern’s and Reichert’s were not held only by those Reform Jews who had moderated their anti-Zionist outlooks due to the Holocaust. The early Reform Zionists had held similar views, and now, due to the Holocaust, they were shared by erstwhile anti-Zionist Reform Jews and maximalist Reform Zionists such as Abba Hillel Silver. Two speeches by Silver in the 1940s illustrate this. The ﬁrst (1940) discussed the spiritual Zionism of Ahad Ha’am and was devoted to what Silver described as the universalistic crux of Zionism. According to Silver, the correct interpretation of Ahad Ha am’s philosophy was that the aspiration for a sovereign state cannot reﬂect the pinnacle of Jewish aspirations: Two thousand years of heroic suﬀering and martyrdom cannot ﬁnd their compensation in the right to play the role of a pitifully small state in a world of political intrigue, a pawn in the hands of scheming international diplomats. . . . The universal humanitarian ideal has been and must continue always to be an integral part of the ideal of Jewish nationalism. . . . The new Jewish State must be an expression of the historic social idealism of the race. . . . Palestine must become the workshop of our people’s highest ethical aspirations and mankind’s experimental laboratory for social reconstruction.10

Silver explained that at a time of antisemitic attacks, Jews at large had one immediate thought: how to escape, not how to build a longterm basis for Jewish existence. However, while he understood this internal Jewish trend of thought, he did not hesitate to criticize it.

9

Julian Morgenstern, “With History As Our Guide,” pp. 257–287. Abba Hillel Silver, “Beyond the Jewish State,” Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series V, Roll 180/567, pp. 1–2. Allon Gal (The Changing Concept of “Mission,” pp. 14–15) quotes speeches by Silver in 1926 and 1929 that had similar content. 10

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Amidst antisemitic assaults in the United States and Nazism in Europe, Silver warned against the inﬂated importance that the concept of nationalism had taken on. Especially when Judaism faces severe antisemitic and Nazi attacks, he said, one must not forget that nationalism is a means and not an end. In the future, after the Jewish state comes into being, he hoped, “we shall not have to lay so much stress . . . on the importance of nationalism.” Hitherto wanting the full complement of the attributes of nationalism, we were constrained to over-emphasize its virtues. Many of the spokesmen of our cause were driven to extol nationalism, per se, which is after all a quite recent and, demonstrably, a quite inadequate human concept. It is not mankind’s ultimate vision. Certainly it is not the substance of our ancestral tradition, whose motif is not nationalism but prophetism. Nationalism is not enough. It is a minimum requirement, not a maximum program. . . . After the national life is secure, Israel must push on to the frontiers of the new world – the world of internationalism, of economic freedom, of brotherhood and of peace.11

Silver’s second speech, delivered in 1948, shortly after the state for which he had fought uncompromisingly had been established, provides another example of this same universalistic outlook. Silver, who had not ﬂinched from stressing particularistic Jewish interests to the U.S. Administration, to the displeasure of “moderate” American Jewish leaders,12 also inveighed against a possible seclusive interpretation of Zionism. To disprove the notion that Jews can exist only in their own separate state, he presented historical examples, foremost the Jews of Alexandria, who maintained a ramiﬁed Jewish culture even though they “could assimilate if they wished to, much easier than in our day.” In a similar vein, Silver stated vehemently that the future of American Jewry could not rest solely on identiﬁcation

11

Silver, “Beyond the Jewish State,” pp. 2–3. Silver demonstrated his maximalist Zionist view in May 1942, when he, together with Ben-Gurion, spearheaded the demand for Jewish sovereignty at the Biltmore conference. A few months later, in a speech before the American Jewish Conference in August 1943, he inspired the delegates to support Jewish sovereignty in the spirit of the Biltmore declaration. In contrast, “moderate” Zionist leaders such as Stephen Wise attempted to form a consensus between Zionists and non-Zionists around the demand to repeal the White Paper restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Silver’s militancy stood out also with the American Administration. He is remembered for his interview at the White House in July 1946, where he angrily pounded President Truman’s desk – a meeting after which the president refused to meet with him again. 12

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with the State of Israel, notwithstanding the tremendous importance that he personally attributed to this identiﬁcation. He issued a hopeful prediction that American Jews would soon no longer have to invest all their energies in trying to ensure the very existence of the State of Israel; instead, they would focus on reinforcing a pattern of Jewish existence based on integration into American society and culture.13 This universalistic use of Zionist symbols by even an ardent Zionist like Silver reﬂected the culmination of a lengthy, successful campaign – since the nineteenth century – by the universalistic ideology to use these symbols to cope “positively” with the pessimistic messages of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Contrary to the image of helplessness and abnormality that the Jewish fate in the Holocaust symbolized, the nascent Zionist Yishuv in Palestine represented the possibility of creating a counterweight of modern, healthy, and normal Jewish life, not only in Eretz Israel but also in the United States. Admittedly, this view of Zionism as an alternative to the Jewish fate in the European Old World was not new; it had appeared in various incarnations since the dawn of American Zionism.14 Now, however, it became widespread, even among erstwhile non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. The studies of Marshall Sklare, considered the founder of sociological research on American Jewry, provide important evidence of the broad inroads that this view made among American Jews – far beyond the Reform Movement. Sklare looked at the Jewish residents of a new suburb of Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s and found that most respondents felt that the establishment of the State of Israel did not contradict their aspiration to Americanize and integrate into the middle class. Instead, it actually reinforced their status as part of the American mainstream.15 Further evidence of the penetration of this attitude emerges from the discussion of the concept of “Jewish normalization” in Yosef 13 Abba Hillel Silver, “Liberal Judaism in Relation to the State of Israel – 1948–1949,” (November, 1948) Papers of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Microﬁlm Ed., Series V, Roll 182/752. See almost identical phrasing in Morgenstern’s 1946 “A Program for Judaism and the Jewish People,” pp. 415–422. 14 See for example note no. 60, concerning the appendix that Kaufmann Kohler and ﬁfteen additional Jews sought to attach to Blackstone’s memorandum and note no. 73, concerning Gottheil’s lecture at Congregation Shaarey Teﬁla in New York. 15 Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier, Chicago, 1979, p. 223; Herbert J. Gans, “The Origin and Growth of a Jewish Community in the Suburbs: A study of the Jews of Park Forest,” in Marshall Sklare, The Jews, pp. 205–248.

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Gorny’s book The Quest for National Identity. Gorny discusses leaders and intellectuals from various groups in American Jewry who believed that Zionism had created a counterweight to the pessimistic separatism that was liable to result from the Holocaust and might portray the twin challenges of integration and Jewishness as mutually exclusive.16 One of the most prominent ﬁgures mentioned by Gorny is Mordecai Kaplan, by then the founder of the Reconstructionist Movement. In his book A New Zionism, Kaplan asserted that once Jewish statehood became a reality, it would be American Zionism’s main function to “become a means for Jewish survival within American society.” Another personality who aptly described this outlook was the American Jewish playwright and author Arthur Miller, who portrayed the triumph of Zionism among American Jews in terms of release from the role of victim and pariah that might result from the Holocaust. Such a role, he believed, might prevent Jews from fulﬁlling their wish to integrate into American society as equal and proud citizens. The Jew was no longer a shadowy, ghettoized mystery, but a farmer, a pilot, a worker. Throwing oﬀ the role of victim . . . he was like everybody else now and for a time it would be diﬃcult to imagine the traditional anti-Semitic attitudes feeding themselves on warriors rather than passive victims.17

The universalistic use of Zionist symbols was only one of a series of similar trends that commanded growing popularity among Reform Jews and American Jews in general in an attempt to create a positive alternative to the pessimistic and particularistic signiﬁcance of the Jewish fate in the Holocaust. Especially conspicuous was the increasing focus on Jewish heroism as far back as the Hasmonean era, and including current Jewish heroes such as members of the anti-Nazi resistance, Warsaw ghetto ﬁghters, and American Jewish

16

Gorny, The Quest for Collective Identity, pp. 30–46. Mordecai M. Kaplan, A New Zionism, New York, 1955; Arthur Miller, introduction to the 1985 paperback edition of his book Focus (ﬁrst edition, New York, 1945). Another example of this approach may be found in an article by the Zionist Rabbi Philip Bernstein that depicted the inhabitants of the Yishuv as a new breed of Jews, diﬀerent from their brethren in the “Old World” and similar to the ﬁrst settlers in America. Bernstein explained that it is Eretz Israel that gives the “new Jew” the strength and courage that the homeless European Jews lacked. Philip Bernstein, “The Jews of Europe: The Case for Zionism,” The Nation, February 6, 1943, pp. 196–200. 17

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soldiers. Thus, according to a lead article in the Reform Movement’s journal Liberal Judaism, “the despair that there is no way to oppose the severe methods of brutal totalitarians has been and still is being disproved” by these Jewish ﬁghters.18 The Jewish heroes played a role similar to that of Zionism: they gave American Jews the opportunity for a positive, universalistic Jewish identiﬁcation, congruent with the spirit of the Maccabees and not with the image of victims who were considered unﬁt to be equal members of society. The adoption of symbols of Jewish valor, albeit with a positive, universalistic interpretation, marked the crossing of an important watershed with respect to the Reform Movement’s principled opposition to any manifestation of militarism. The movement’s traditional paciﬁsm was a consequence of the “mission” idea and it was promoted by the horrors of World War I. The public undertaking of the Reform Zionist leader Stephen Wise in 1932 to withhold his support from any sort of war was typical. Almost until the end of the 1930s, most internal Reform debates over this issue revolved around whether the principle of paciﬁsm should be applied dogmatically and unconditionally or waived in cases such as self-defense, when war may be considered moral. During most of that era, the CCAR dismissed the legitimacy of any war as a tool in international relations and even supported conscientious objection on the basis of the universalistic principles of the Jewish faith. This stance began to change only in 1939, when the CCAR adopted a resolution distinguishing between aggressor states and their victims, and in 1940, when the conference withheld its support for actions that might be construed as encouraging objection to war on a Jewish religious basis.19 Even so, a few Reform leaders remained sworn paciﬁsts categorically opposed to belligerence under any circumstances. A prominent ﬁgure in this group was Rabbi Abraham Cronbach, a professor of social sciences at HUC since 1922. In 1924, Cronbach had attempted to establish a Jewish paciﬁst organization, and in subsequent years, even after the Nazi accession to power in Germany, he continued adamantly to oppose any action that smacked of war. In 1935, he went so far as to call for a Jewish-Nazi conciliation conference to

18 19

“Light in Darkness,” Liberal Judaism, Editorial (May 1944), p. 3. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 313.

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take place in Florida. During the war, he supported conscientious objectors and in 1942 was involved in the establishment of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, which stressed the futility and brutality of any war.20 However, Cronbach and his group were exceptions. Most Reform leaders who before World War II had expressed principled opposition to any form of war gradually changed their minds. When the United States entered the war, they began to support the antiNazi struggle fervently and to laud manifestations of Jewish valor. Thus, Reform Judaism, many of whose adherents had previously impugned the Zionists’ “overemphasis” on symbols of struggle and rebellion, now adopted these symbols itself – although it tried to invest them with positive, universalistic Jewish meaning. This may have been an attempt to create a universalistic alternative to the Zionist use of Jewish heroism to emphasize the relentless and timeless struggle between Judaism and a hostile non-Jewish environment. A study by Morgenstern of the origins of the festival of Hanukkah provides an example of this attempt. In the study, published in the late 1940s, Morgenstern traced the Hanukkah tradition to reciprocal inﬂuences between the ancient Jewish-Israelite society and its non-Jewish surroundings. He maintained that Judaism had chosen to commemorate the Hasmonean victory by adopting a pagan religious festival that had been celebrated on the same date, one year previously, at the Temple in Jerusalem, and that continued to be celebrated afterwards in many other religious centers in the ancient East. According to his interpretation, the Jews commemorated their heroic victory not by abolishing the pagan festival and cloistering themselves to resist the inﬂuences of the high culture of their day, but by adding universalistic symbols of religious freedom that injected new, universalistic-Jewish meaning into the festival, despite its alien origins.21 Morgenstern’s study was part of a broader trend of the growing popularity of Hanukkah symbols in the Reform Movement. Although there were already special Reform services for Hanukkah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new trend marked a

20 Shlomo Shaﬁr, “The View of a Maverick Paciﬁst and Universalist: Rabbi Abraham Cronbach’s Plea for Clemency for Nazi War Criminals in 1945,” American Jewish Archives XLIL (Fall–Winter), 1990, pp. 147–154. 21 Julian Morgenstern, “The Chanukkah Festival and the Calendar of Ancient Israel,” Cincinnati, Part 1, Hebrew Union College Annual XX (1947); Part 2, Hebrew Union College Annual, XXI (1948).

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departure from the ethnocultural educational approach of Emmanuel Gamoran. Now, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, it increasingly reﬂected a general Reform quest to give a positive, universalistic interpretation to symbols of Jewish valor. Starting in 1942, for example, all thirty-two Reform synagogues in New York held similar Hanukkah services that sought to showcase the Jews’ heroism and love of freedom. Synagogue sanctuaries were festooned with American ﬂags. The ceremonies themselves began with a procession headed by the Torah scrolls and followed by U.S. army banners and pennants carried aloft by American Jewish soldiers dressed in medalbedecked uniforms. The keynote message, written especially for these ceremonies, emphasized that “the ﬁrst organized struggle against tyranny in the history of humanity was made under the leadership of the Maccabees . . . [and that] the Maccabean Festival has a signiﬁcance for us today as Americans and as Jews.” It went on to depict the valor of the Maccabees not as a symbol of Jewish struggle against a hostile environment, but as an inseparable part of the American patriotic struggle against the Nazis. The message ended: “May our prayers . . . bring to our children in the service of our country and its allies a message of blessing in their consecrated mission.”22 Statistical evidence provided by the Reform Movement also illustrates the rising popularity of Hanukkah celebrations at this time. A 1950 survey from the Committee on Reform Practice reported that 90 percent of Reform synagogues celebrated Hanukkah.23 Bulletins of Reform congregations in the 1940s allow us to examine the contents of these ceremonies, which served as a counterweight of sorts to the threatening conclusions that might result from exclusive emphasis on collective Jewish helplessness in the Holocaust. Many Reform congregations placed greater emphasis than before on Hanukkah and

22 Gustave Falk (Director of the New York Federation of Reform Synagogues), “For Victory and Peace,” Liberal Judaism, (October 1944), pp. 81–84. For additional examples of use of Hanukkah symbols as couterweights to collective passivity and helplessness in the Holocaust, see “Marquis and Maccabees,” Liberal Judaism, Editorial, (December 1944), pp. 1–3; Mamie G. Gamoran, “The Fighting Priest,” Liberal Judaism, (December 1944), pp. 26–30; “Light in Darkness,” Liberal Judaism, Editorial (May 1944), p. 1. For discussion of early 19th century Hanukka services see, Sarna, American Judaism, pp. 136, 151. 23 Morton M. Berman, “Whither Trending? Experts from Report of Committee on Reform Practice,” Liberal Judaism, (December 1950), pp. 52–56. For discussion of the increase in popularity of Hanukkah rituals before the Holocaust, see Feingold, A Time for Searching, p. 100.

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on the signiﬁcance of lighting Hanukkah candles as a composite symbol of universalistic optimism and Jewish heroism. When the United States entered the war, Rabbi Morton M. Berman of Chicago urged his congregation to “kindle your Hanukkah Lights . . . as a token of your Maccabean courage and conﬁdence that under God, light will again illumine the universal darkness and liberty become at long last the eternal heritage of all the children of God.”24 The recitation for the lighting of the candles, published shortly after the war in the Reform journal Liberal Judaism, made the same point: Though the midnight of sorrow is past, the hours are long until the dawn. Our eyes are weary of the dark and we long for light and warmth, courage and hope. To withhold our feet from the bog of disillusion, to press onward. . . . This is our Maccabean task.25

It is in view of this attempt to give a universalistic interpretation to the symbols of Jewish heroism that one should understand the myth that took shape at this time around the Reform rabbi Alexander Goode. Goode was a military chaplain, an alumnus of HUC, and, brieﬂy, a congregational rabbi in York, Pennsylvania. He served on an American cargo vessel that took part in the expeditionary force to North Africa and was killed when the vessel was struck by a torpedo in the Atlantic Ocean in February 1943. The myth about the way he perished, spun and fostered by the Bureau of War Records (part of the Jewish Welfare Board) and various Reform spokespeople, sheds light on the hero image with which Reform Jews were asked to identify.26 As described by Nelson Glueck, a professor of Bible and archeology who in 1947 would replace Morgenstern as president of HUC:

24 Morton M. Berman, “A Message on Hanukkah,” Chicago Isaiah Temple Tidings Bulletin, December 11, 1941. 25 Amy K. Blank, “We Long for the Light, A Chanuko Ceremony for Adults in the Synagogue,” Liberal Judaism, (November 1946), p. 53. 26 For an indication of the initial phases in the formation of the myth of valor surrounding Rabbi Goode, one may consider the eulogy that Morgenstern gave a month after Goode’s death became known. The eulogy made no mention of the account of heroism of Goode and his three Christian cleric colleagues, as appeared later. On the contrary: Morgenstern noted that although he was sure of Goode’s courage and devotion, the exact details of his behavior in those critical moments as the vessel was sinking would never be known. Julian Morgenstern, “An Eulogy on Alexander D. Goode,” AJA, MS. Col. 30, 14/1.

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chapter five Alexander Goode, and his three brother ministers of the word of God, three Christian [two Protestant, one Catholic] together with a Jew, handed their life-belts to the companions on the torpedoed ship sinking rapidly in the icy water of the North Atlantic, and then knelt in prayer to the God of humanity. They were lost to us in the silence of death.27

The popularity of the myth of Goode’s death far exceeded the relatively small target audience of members of Reform congregations. The image of the four clerics became one of the most popular symbols of the war in the Jewish press, it was commemorated on a postage stamp, and a monument in their memory was erected in New York.28 Their valorous conduct even inspired several works of ﬁction that shared the theme of Jewish-Christian fraternity. One of the best known was Three Pals, Comrades in Life and Death, a book that tells the story of three friends – a Jew, a Protestant, and a Catholic – who grew up together in the same neighborhood, attended the same school, played on the same basketball team, and ultimately died together on the battleﬁeld. Another novel, Three Pals in a Foxhole, describes a Jew, a Protestant, and a Catholic who fought and perished together in an attempt to stanch a Japanese counteroﬀensive on the Solomon Islands. Another salient example in a similar vein was the collection of information on service by Jews in the U.S. Armed Forces, conducted during and immediately following World War II by the Bureau of War Records. The ﬁgures, gathered and published in various books and newspapers, focused attention on the high proportion of Jewish soldiers – surpassing the share of Jews in the American population – who took part in the war, received citations for valor, and were wounded or killed in combat.29 A conspicuous motif recurs in all the aforementioned examples: a form of heroism that combines Jewish-Christian fraternity with American patriotism. This motif, in fact, reﬂected an attempt to ﬁght a dual particularistic challenge, external and internal, that American Jews faced. In contrast to antisemitic and Nazi propaganda that

27

Nelson Glueck, “Adding Link to Link,” Liberal Judaism, ( January 1946), p. 10. I thank Professor Ra’ anana Meridor of the Department of Classical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for calling my attention to the monument and for sending me a photograph of the monument and a copy of its dedication. 29 Time for Searching, p. 259; Louis I. Dublin and Samuel C. Kohs, American Jews in World War II: The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom, 2 vols, New York, 1947. 28

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stressed an image of Jewish cowardice and avoidance of the war eﬀort, the model fostered here emphasized the valor and patriotism of American Jews. In contrast to particularistic Jewish responses that construed the Holocaust as a continuation of a relentless and timeless struggle between the Jews and their hostile surroundings, these examples presented a model of heroism that expressed Jews’ integration into their surroundings and treated them as equal and full citizens. Along with the eﬀorts to universalize Zionist symbols, this American universalistic model of Jewish heroism reﬂected an ambition to prove – despite the Holocaust – that Jewishness could be “positive” and that Jewish solidarity could be based on reciprocal relations of trust and equality with the surroundings. B. Americanizing the Response to Antisemitism During World War II and in the years immediately following it, Jews entertained rising expectations of acceptance in American society. Consequently, the challenge of fashioning a “proper American response” to antisemitism was even more urgent and complex than the challenge of investing Zionism and the symbols of Jewish valor with positive, universalistic meaning. Several factors reinforced these expectations of acceptance.30 American Jewry, which for nearly a century – until the immigration restrictions of the 1920s – had been ﬂooded with waves of Jewish immigrants, was now mainly an American-born community.31 The socioeconomic changes that this community experienced, together with the growing tendency to move out of urban Jewish neighborhoods, were transforming it into a suburban, Americanized, middle-class community.32

30 The statistics provided in the following notes (no. 228–230) are based on Ben B. Seligman, “Some Aspects of Jewish Demography,” in Marshall Sklare, The Jews, New York, 1958, pp. 49–93; Nathan Glazer, “Social Characteristic of American Jews, 1654–1954,” American Jewish Year Book, 1955, pp. 25–33; M. L. Hansen, “The Third Generation in America,” Commentary 14 (1952), pp. 492–500. 31 The American-born proportion of Jews in the U.S. ranged during that time, the 1940s and 1950s, from 67.9 percent to 83.1 percent. 32 For example, in comparison to American Jewry in the 1930s, that was still typiﬁed by more than 50 percent participation blue-collar and low-white-collar occupations, the share of practitioners of liberal professions and high-white-collar workers among American Jews in the 1940s and 1950s ranged from 75 percent to 96 percent!

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When one also bears in mind the 550,000 Jewish soldiers who had served in the American armed forces during the war and the increasing numbers of Jews admitted to institutions of higher education,33 one may understand why American-born Jews – new suburbanites, army veterans, and college graduates – harbored great expectations of full social acceptance in American society. Paradoxically, it was the very upturn in expectations of acceptance that heightened American Jews’ sensitivity to the gap between their social status as “Jews” and their economic and intellectual accomplishments as “Americans.” American Jews became painfully aware that as their expectations of acceptance escalated, the social barriers gained in intensity and height. Especially signiﬁcant was fear of local American antisemitism, which threatened to resurface shortly after the war. American Jews, highly sensitive about their newly acquired Americanism, perceived the antisemitic menace as an intolerable development that might force them back to the social and cultural ghetto of the generations of immigrants who preceded them.34 The president of the CCAR, Rabbi Solomon Freehof, expressed these concerns in a 1944 speech, noting in anguish that “our country could not possibly have been kept entirely free from the infection of race and religious hatred.” Rabbi Joseph X. Cohen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress Commission on Economic Discrimination, reacted similarly at a meeting of the AJCongress Administrative Committee on June 23, 1945. He predicted that in the post-war era, “the race tensions which are in force today will be released from the controls which bind them under wartime conditions.” He feared that when those prejudices and tensions were unbound, “we will face one of the most diﬃcult periods in the economic and social history of America . . . [and if ] our authorities . . . do 33 To substantiate this trend, one may note that in the ﬁrst years after World War II, an absolute majority of candidates for all types of higher education institutions in the New York area were Jewish. 34 Ofer Shiﬀ, “The Americanization of Responses to Antisemitism in World War II and Thereafter,” Gesher, 129 (summer 1994) (Hebrew), pp. 45–58. Stuart Svonkin claims that it was actually the decline in antisemitism that prompted various American Jewish organizations to adopt universalistic policies. Svonkin’s argument does not necessary contradict the argument regarding the importance of discrimination and social barriers in the coalescence of the universalistic pattern of Jewish response to the Holocaust. Both explanations are rooted in American Jews’ rising expectations of acceptance. See Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice – American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties, New York, 1997.

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not maintain and keep in existence every possible measure of supervision . . . [there will] be a letdown and a breaking of controls from which we and other minority groups in this country are likely to suﬀer.”35 This sense of danger and uncertainty regarding their status in American society played an important role in reinforcing American Jews’ desire for a pattern of response to antisemitism based almost solely on a general American point of view. This trend of thought was reﬂected in a substantial increase in scholarly research that attempted to trace the psychological and social roots of antisemitism to the general phenomenon of discrimination and prejudice. Two concurrent enterprises of this sort were funded by the more particularistic American Jewish Congress and the mostly universalistic American Jewish Committee. This trend of scholarly research on antisemitism reﬂected a shared American Jewish aspiration to ﬁght antisemitism in a way that would reinforce the Jews’ status and selfimage as rank-and-ﬁle Americans instead of accentuating their marginal status as a persecuted minority group. To accomplish this, the Jewish researchers who participated in these two projects sought to contemplate antisemitism “objectively,” in the light of “scientiﬁc” criteria, and not from the subjective perspective of the Jewish victims and their relations with the hostile non-Jewish surroundings. One of the most noted exponents of this approach was Bruno Bettelheim, an American Jewish psychologist of German origin. Bettelheim’s philosophy sought to cleanse the “antisemitism-stricken” American Jews of their self-image as victims and to encourage them to exhibit “normal” American behavior. Based on his personal experiences in two concentration camps (Dachau and Buchenwald), before he was released and reached the United States in 1939, Bettelheim claimed that many Jews were enslaved to internal psychological mechanisms that a protracted state of discrimination had instilled in them. To cope with this discrimination, they had developed a stereotyped view of the antisemite – a view that was actually an internalization of the antisemitic-ethnocentric worldview that sought to create schisms and conﬂicts among diﬀerent groups and societies.36 Bettelheim also 35 Solomon B. Freehof, “President’s Message,” CCARY (1944), pp. 164–167; Minutes of Administrative Committee Meeting of the AJCongress, AJHS Archives, June 23, 1945. 36 Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situation,” Journal

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participated in the American Jewish Committee’s research enterprise, Studies in Prejudice. The project began in May 1944 and was published in a series of ﬁve books in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The best-known study in the series was The Authoritarian Personality, carried out under the direction of Theodor W. Adorno; it explores the psychological and personality roots of the antisemite. Typically, the study made hardly any reference to Jewish-Gentile relations. In fact, most of the participating researchers avoided the word “antisemitism,” preferring instead terms denoting general social phenomena, such as “prejudice,” “bigotry,” or “ethnocentric ideology.”37 The corresponding enterprise of the American Jewish Congress, led by Kurt Lewin, may also be regarded as part of this outlook. One of its projects, the “Incident Control Study,” consisted of workshops that sought to provide an “objective American” response to antisemitism.38 After conducting several event analyses of antisemitic incidents, the project directors concluded that the most eﬀective response to antisemitism should be based on the all-American tradition of equality and tolerance. Workshop participants were taught to select responses with which any American, Jewish or non-Jewish, might identify, and were coached in avoiding direct or emotional reference to antisemitic charges leveled at them as “Jews.” Unwittingly, the workshop organizers “widened” the path that Noah had created in the early nineteenth century, explaining that “the prejudice can

of Abnormal and Social Psychology (October 1943); “The Dynamism of Anti-Semitism in Gentile and Jew,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (April 1947); “The Victim’s Image of the Anti-Semite – The Danger of Stereotyping the Adversary,” Commentary (1948); The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, New York, 1960. 37 Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt R. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, New York, 1950, pp. 2–3, 173. For discussion of the cultural and intellectual background of this group of scholars, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950, Boston and Toronto, 1973; Permanent Exiles, Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, New York, 1985. 38 The research group headed by Kurt Lewin deﬁned the sphere of its concern not only as the “narrow” ﬁeld of antisemitism but also as the more comprehensive ﬁeld of intergroup relations. For this reason, it called itself the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI). Documentation on its work is available at the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), in the American Jewish Congress ﬁles. For information on the activities of Lewin and CCI, see Alfred J. Marrow, The Practical Theorist, The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin, New York and London, 1969; Frank W. Baldau, “Intergroup Relations and Action Programs,” Journal of Social Issues (November 1946).

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be directed at Negroes, Catholics, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, Hungarians, Poles. It can be directed against any minority group in our American population.” Taking matters a step further, they stated that their goal was not to combat antisemitism but to create a climate in which public opinion would oppose, quarantine, and delegitimate any sort of discrimination.39 The Victim, a novel by the renowned American Jewish author Saul Bellow, was also part of this trend. The American Jewish hero of the novel, Leventhal, entangles himself in a complex relationship with a young antisemite, a mentally disturbed alcoholic named Allbee. Leventhal’s self-image as a “victim” leads him into the antisemitic trap of trying to persuade Allbee that the charges he has leveled against the Jews are groundless. In so doing, Leventhal actually accepts the basic antisemitic premise that the diﬀerence between Jews and Christians should be a matter of central and decisive importance in social relations between Jews and those around them. The longer Leventhal clings to this approach, the more he ﬁnds himself trapped in a vicious cycle of escalating suspicion. However, once he extricates himself from the “ghetto mentality,” he manages to adopt a “healthy perspective” and views Allbee as a mentally unstable drunkard rather than a representative of the anti-Jewish hostility that supposedly typiﬁes the entire non-Jewish environment. Only then can he re-establish relations with his non-Jewish friends on a “normal” and “healthy” basis, in which Judaism is only one of many components. Several years later, even Allbee realizes how absurd his accusations were. The message that Bellow wished to convey is clear. As he scolds his hero with something verging on impatience, he also prods his American Jewish readers to jettison their paranoid “Jewish” pattern of behavior and adopt a “normal,” balanced point of view:

39

Abraham F. Citron and John Harding, Answering the Bigot: A Summary of the Incident Control Project, New York, not dated, p. 1 (AJHS Archives, American Jewish Congress Files/CCI); Kurt Lewin, “Philosophy and Broader Goals of the Commission on Community Interrelation,” in Kurt Lewin, Alfred J. Marrow, and Charles E. Hendry, Accent on Action: A New Approach to Minority Group Problems in America, Mimeograph, New York, 1945, p. 5 (AJHS Archives, American Jewish Congress Files/CCI); Isidor Chein, “The Problem of Belongingness: An Action Research Perspective,” The Jewish Center Worker (May 1948); Ofer Shiﬀ, “Survival Through Integration,” pp. 299–312.

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chapter five There are bound to be some people who don’t think well of you. . . . Why, isn’t it enough for you that some do? Why can’t you accept the fact that others never will? . . . Experience has taught me to expect this once in a while. But you’re so upset when somebody doesn’t like you, or says this or that about you. A little independence, boy; it’s a weakness, positively.40

To a large extent, the Reform Movement spearheaded this attempt to formulate an all-American, “healthy” response to antisemitism. An early example was the CCAR resolution in 1934, immediately after the Nazi accession in Germany, that depicted Hitlerism as “not only the foe of Israel, but also the foe of mankind.” Stressing that Nazism menaced the American population at large, the CCAR urged “our fellow-Americans to unite with us in a campaign of education and enlightenment in defense of the basic American principles of freedom, equality and fairness to all men regardless of race or creed.” Two years later, at the initiative of the Reform Movement, a conference against antisemitism for all of American Jewry was held in Chicago. Remarkably, it was one of the few occasions on which diverse Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, managed to transcend their ideological and social rivalries. The joint statement recommended fostering equality in Jewish-Gentile relations as the best way to ﬁght antisemitism.41 One of the most conspicuous initiatives that reﬂected this trend of thought was the “quarantine treatment” approach, sponsored and directed during the war by the Reform rabbi Solomon Andhil Fineberg and adopted after the war by most Jewish organizations. Its underlying principle was that the war on antisemitism should be prosecuted in a way that would shift attention from the Jewish victims to the antisemitic aggressors and the menace they present to American citizens at large. The recommended way to pursue this goal was to resist responding as victims of antisemitism. Fineberg urged American Jews not to react emotionally to antisemitism, as people who view the world from the narrow perspective of victims typically do. He

40

Saul Bellow, The Victim, New York, 1947. Morris Frommer, “The American Jewish Congress, A History, 1914–1950,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1978, pp. 509–511; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free To Desist, The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966, Philadelphia, 1972, p. 221. 41

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implored his listeners to consider antisemitism a social illness that has nothing necessarily to do with Jews. The antisemite, Fineberg claimed, should be depicted as a person who deserves ostracism not because of his views toward Jews but because of the damage he inﬂicts on society at large: Let him be revealed as a common law-breaker. . . . Let him go to jail rebuked for striking a human being, regardless of the victim’s religious background. . . . He didn’t hit a Jew. In this country, when you punch or stab or shoot, you hit a human being.42

The “quarantine treatment” approach was meant to allow American Jews to respond to antisemitism not as members of a tolerated minority group but as representatives of the general American perspective. “It is perfectly apparent,” Fineberg explained, “that if Jews take a defensive position and whimper that they are not the black-hearted wretches that their defamers picture them to be, they will come oﬀ worse than if they lay their emphasis upon the savagely destructive eﬀect anti-Semitism has upon the whole nation.” It was therefore apparent, according to Fineberg, that American Jews should take the opposite “American” position: How much better it is to announce the truth in a positive objective way than to take a defensive, special pleading stand! Let us not take the stand as people on trial. If there is any apologizing to be done, let the anti-Semites do it.43

Since the Reform Movement did not have an oﬃcial institution to prosecute the war on antisemitism, it did not declare the “quarantine treatment” its oﬃcial policy. However, it became the policy of the American Jewish Committee, most of whose members belonged to the Reform Movement, and it undoubtedly expressed a widely held view among members of Reform congregations. A poem published in the movement’s journal in response to an antisemitic incident at Harvard University attests to the popularity of this trend among Reform Jews. The poem called it “strange” that two student victims of assault had been asked whether they were Jews. In typical

42 Fineberg, Overcoming Anti-Semitism, pp. 15–16; 64–67; 69–70; Richard C. Rothchild, “Are American Jews Falling into the Nazi Trap?” Contemporary Jewish Record III ( January–February, 1940), pp. 4–14; N. A. Pelcovits, “What About Jewish AntiSemitism? – A Prescription to Cure Self-Hatred,” Commentary (1947). 43 Fineberg, Overcoming Anti-Semitism, p. 173.

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fashion, the poem dealt not with antisemitism per se, and certainly not with the Jewish victims’ feelings of anger and pain, but with the “American” response that the antisemitic aggressors deserved. This American response cautioned against antisemitism as a social disease that can strike anyone, Jew or Gentile: The weakness of minorities has always tempted the sadist. The provocation of diﬀerences has sharpened the assassin’s knife. . . . In the noisy streets of Rome . . . the dreaded question was: “Are you a Christian?” . . . Recall Quakers in . . . Massachusetts . . . Catholics in the clutches of Know Nothing gangs . . . Negroes asking for bread and receiving a stone. . . . Some day bells of liberation will be tolling throughout all lands. They will announce joyously that the Father of one of us is the Father of all of us. People will go everywhere, unchallenged by strange questions.44

An article by Rabbi David Schoenberger of Chicago, published in November 1946, took this reasoning a step further by ﬁercely criticizing Jewish responses based on “over-identiﬁcation” with the Jews’ fate as victims. According to Schoenberger, post-war American Jewry was poised between two worlds – despair over the annihilation of European Jewry and fear that a wave of racism and antisemitism might erupt after the war. He warned American Jews to avoid the temptation of adopting a response pattern of heroic suicide, like the ﬁghters in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who “fought to the bitter end because they had no other choice.” Schoenberger portrayed those American Jews who identiﬁed with this type of “extreme and defeatist” response as zealots who “try to overcome war by war.” As a counterweight to this model, he bruited the optimistic Reform belief in the Jews’ ability to earn the acceptance of American society at large: A new world of interdependence will be born out of the agonizing pregnancy of the global war. Those who fear this tremendous task, worship the evil power of despotism. Jews who see Judaism only in the aspect of their fear of anti-Semitism respect anti-Semitism more than their own people. . . . We Jews need this conviction more than ever before. We must overcome those among us who would escape by resignation or by suicide.45

44 Elias Lieberman, “Strange Questions,” Liberal Judaism, (October 1944), pp. 30–31. 45 David Schoenberger, “Our In Between,” Liberal Judaism, (November 1946), pp. 38–39.

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C. A Coping Pattern or an Escape Mechanism? When we survey the eﬀorts to universalize the symbols of Jewish valor, Zionism, and the response to antisemitism, two alternative questions come up: Was the result in fact a positive Jewish pattern of coping with the Holocaust? Or were the universalists so eager to adopt an “American” perspective that they had cut themselves oﬀ, intellectually and ideologically, from Jewish history and suﬀering?46 In some cases, the desire to adopt a general American perspective certainly tended to disregard the reality of antisemitism, Nazism, and Jewish suﬀering. One example was the November 1945 conference of the CCAR Commission on Justice and Peace, held in New York and entitled “Judaism and Race Relations.” Despite the date and theme of the conference, only the non-Jewish well-wishers explicitly mentioned Nazism or the Jews’ fate in the war. In contrast, the hundred rabbis and members of the Reform Movement who took part in the gathering avoided any mention of Nazi ideology, the fate of European Jewry, or even antisemitism. Instead, they stressed their profound commitment to all oppressed groups everywhere, especially the millions of exploited persons in Asia and Africa, and their resolve to wage all-out war against all manifestations of injustice to blacks, Indians, Burmese, Koreans, and Filipinos. Observing this universalistic social commitment from a historical perspective, one may certainly wonder how a Jewish conference on racism, held only a few months after the end of the war, refrained from mentioning the speciﬁc manifestation of racism from which the Jews themselves had suﬀered. Assuming that the participants identiﬁed with the suﬀering and humiliation of European Jewry, they certainly elected to express their feelings solely from a universalistic perspective. Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman of St. Louis, who presided over the conference, expressed this clearly. Making no reference to Jewish suﬀering, he stated: Because we believe in one God and in one humanity, we feel a deep sense of kinship with all races. . . . Without hesitancy, we identify ourselves with the oppressed everywhere. Their pain is our agony, their humiliation our hurt, their suﬀering our burden, their injustice our concern.47

46 The “general normalization” view is explained in Gorny, The Quest for Collective Identity, pp. 22–30. 47 Myron Weiss, “For Justice and Peace,” Liberal Judaism, (December 1945), pp. 5–9.

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Although this was an extreme reﬂection of a more diverse and complex Reform trend, one cannot ignore the fact that Reform Judaism, as a movement, hardly paused to express the Jews’ feelings of bereavement and shock in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Reform education system, which gathered a great deal of momentum in the immediate postwar era, is a case in point. The Reform curricula in the second half of the 1940s had a diverse array of courses but omitted all mention, even by allusion, of the annihilation of European Jewry and the questions that might ﬂow from it. A typical curriculum was that of Dr. Philip Jaﬀe, educational advisor to the New York Federation of Reform Synagogues. Jaﬀe sought to create a structure of secondary studies for Jewish youth after bar mitzvah age. His ambitious curriculum, designed to transcend the limits of the minimalistic Sunday School education, included a range of courses on Jewish history and culture, many of them comparing Jews and other Americans. But despite its pretense of tackling major issues that might stand at the forefront of the consciousness of Jewish adolescents, the curriculum did not oﬀer even a single course on the Holocaust or related subjects.48 Even more signiﬁcant was the absence of any reference to the post-Holocaust feelings of bereavement and agony in the Reform religious rite. Prayers, ceremonies, or other religious observances marking the Holocaust were practically nonexistent. There were two exceptions, which did not gain acceptance and remained on paper only. One of them, conceived by Rabbi Ely E. Pilchik back in June 1944, sought to engage all American citizens in “a nation-wide observance of Yom Kippur [of ] . . . universal social justice.” Signiﬁcantly, Pilchik suggested that such an observance would be “our [ Jewish] contribution to the soul of America in this critical hour . . . of aﬄiction.” The second initiative, bruited by Rabbi Polish of Evanston, Illinois, in July 1946, sought to establish a memorial day for “this greatest destruction in our history.” Polish suggested that a fast be observed on the Ninth of Av to commemorate, along with the destruction of the First and Second Temples, “our twentieth century disaster.”49 As

48

Philip Jaﬀe, Liberal Judaism, (November 1945), pp. 80–82. Ely E. Pilchik, “Implementing the Mission” Liberal Judaism, ( June 1944), pp. 16–18; Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 363; Liberal Judaism, ( July 1946), p. 42. 49

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stated, neither of these initiatives was accepted, not even Pilchik’s universalistic, general-American proposal. This disregard of the Holocaust in ceremony and ritual was especially blatant in view of the Reform tendency to re-emphasize the ritual aspect of Judaism. Reporting on this trend, the CCAR Committee on Reform Practice described a lengthy series of “observances” that were celebrated with growing momentum in the second half of the 1940s. These observances, marked in a considerable proportion of Reform congregations (sometimes not on the exact date or only as part of festivities at the synagogue’s school), included some from the Jewish calendar, such as Hanukkah, Jewish Arbor Day (Tu Bi-Shevat), and Purim, and others from the American civil calendar, such as Brotherhood Week, Armistice Day, Thanksgiving, Race Sabbath, Mothers’ Day, and Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. The lengthy series of observances did not include a Holocaust memorial day, even though at least two occasions taken from the American calendar, Armistice Day and Race Sabbath, could have provided an American universalistic framework for it. The Reform Movement also began to introduce new observances into the Jewish calendar, such as Israel Independence Day and memorial days for distinguished Reform leaders. In this category, too, there was no attempt to commemorate the Holocaust.50 What does this suggest about the extent of the Reform eﬀort to confront the challenges to Jewish survival? How, for example, should we interpret the 1957 statement by the American Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer that “the murder of six million Jews by Hitler . . . had remarkably slight eﬀects on the inner life of American Jewry up until the mid-ﬁfties”?51 Should one regard Glazer’s observation as evidence of the shallowness and anemia of American Jewish life at the time, or as evidence of the strength of American Jewry and an indication of its ability, despite the Holocaust, to create positive Jewish identity symbols that might integrate inseparably into their “healthy” and “normal” American identity? On the one hand, there is certainly room to focus on the movement’s inability to express the Jews’ feelings of agony, bereavement,

50

Morton M. Berman, “Whither Trending?” pp. 52–56. Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, Chicago, 1972, pp. 114–115 (ﬁrst edition in 1957). 51

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and helplessness in the aftermath of the Holocaust. On the other hand, one may argue that by not surrendering to the dispiriting reality of the Holocaust, the Reform Movement did engage in a genuine religious confrontation with the existential challenges that were relevant to American Jewry in the 1940s. Perhaps the Reform coping pattern should be viewed as a mirror image of the way the Yishuv in Palestine confronted the Holocaust during those same years. Palestinian Jewry, like American Jewry, contrasted the fate of the Jewish victims in the Holocaust with symbols of heroism and with optimistic faith in the ability to create a “new Jew,” free of the victim mentality and leading a “healthy” and “normal” Jewish life. In the Yishuv, as in America, the aversion to the traditional victim image of the Jew led to a reluctance to “overidentify” with the Jewish fate in the Holocaust. In both cases, the absence of direct reference to the feelings of agony and helplessness in the aftermath of the Holocaust contrasted sharply with optimistic proclamations stressing the splendid future and mission of Judaism. Many Reform leaders stressed the glittering future that awaited a fully integrated American Jewry. They stressed the uniqueness of American society and its immunity to the European strain of antisemitism. At the 1944 CCAR convention, for example, Freehof stated that “racial and religious hatred are not natural in American society” and that “any kind of hate is less poisonous here than in their countries of origin.” Another example was Morgenstern’s assertion – in response to the widespread perception that antisemitism was increasing in the United States – that Nazism and antisemitism “do not voice the spirit of America.” Several years later, the historian Ben Halpern described this inclination as an allinclusive, American-Jewish semi-religious belief that “America is Diﬀerent – because no Hitler calamity is going to happen here.”52 Also in this spirit was the emphasis on American Jewry’s exalted moral (universalistic American) mission as a “response” to the Holocaust. A sermon by the Reform rabbi Richard C. Hertz of California provides a typical example, citing the democratic mission as the Jewish lesson from the Holocaust:

52 Solomon B. Freehof, “President’s Message,” CCARY (1944), pp. 151–173; letter from Julian Morgenstern to Mr. Stephen Klein, AJA, Jan. 3, 1951, MS. Col. 30, 6/13; Ben, Halpern, “America is Diﬀerent,” pp. 23–24.

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The turn of events has made Judaism the living symbol of the democratic way of life. The past twelve years have thrust the Jew in the role of an uncompromising champion of liberty . . . an unconquerable hero of freedom. . . . the Jew is the advanced sentinel guarding freedom.53

Notably, even though the Reform Movement had equated Judaism with the American principles of freedom and democracy since the mid-nineteenth century, Hertz’s remarks reemphasized the point in a way that ﬂowed directly from the Holocaust. “Judaism and Democracy,” a statement of principles adopted in 1945 at the end of HUC’s seventieth-anniversary celebrations, evinced a similar emphasis. According to the statement, American democracy and Reform Judaism are “creating a natural synthesis . . . whose purpose is to . . . bring to all human kind the blessing of equality and justice.” Dr. Jacob R. Marcus, professor of Jewish history at HUC, reaﬃrmed this outlook: It remained for Hitler and the Nazi terrorists to give democracy its current meaning. . . . The ideals of both [Americanism and Judaism] are assimilated to one another. . . . The job of the Jew in this land today is . . . to inﬂuence the larger America to emancipate the “slavish part of mankind” all over the world. . . . The Declaration of Independence and the Ten Commandments are both spiritual documents; the social goals of Americanism and Judaism are the same.54

An additional and even farther-reaching aspect of this trend was the position of leadership and responsibility that Reform Judaism believed it must assume now that the Jewish centers in the Old World had been destroyed. Many Reform leaders contrasted the destruction of the centers of Jewish culture and religion in Europe with their own ﬂourishing institutions so as to demonstrate the vigor and vitality of the universalistic creed. These statements added up to an almost inadvertent declaration of independence by a young Jewish collective that European Jewish leaders had for years regarded as living in a “treife medina” (a profane country) where assimilation would doom all Jews to extinction. Now, Reform leaders believed that the Holocaust had given them solid proof of the correctness of their belief in America. The American values and way of life, they concluded, not

53 Richard C. Hertz, “Judaism During War,” Liberal Judaism, June 1945, pp. 38–41. 54 “Judaism and Democracy,” Liberal Judaism, (November 1945), pp. 58–60; Jacob R. Marcus, “Democracy and Judaism,” Liberal Judaism, (December 1945), pp. 11–19.

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only did not lead to physical or spiritual devastation but were the only guarantees of Jewish continuity and prosperity. Professor Glueck, for example, marked the seventieth anniversary of the founding of HUC by stressing the importance of this institution in view of the destruction of the centers of religious study in Europe. “Who could have foretold then, seventy years ago,” he asked, “that this ﬁrst and still foremost college of its kind in America would be one of the few left in the world to continue . . . the teaching of the great traditions of the Torah?” He also noted that the splendid Jewish theological seminaries that had ﬂourished abroad when HUC was founded were destroyed and that some of their scholars had found shelter at HUC. In the same vein, the journal Liberal Judaism claimed in its lead article that Reform Judaism has a magniﬁcent opportunity in American Jewish life . . . of helping to give the world the moral foundation on which alone it can now stand ﬁrm, and of rebuilding for Israel a new and creative life.55

In both the Yishuv and the American Reform Movement, the confrontation with the Holocaust was shaped by Jewish existential needs that seemed most urgent at the time. In the Yishuv and early Israeli society, this meant national cohesion and a focus on the resurrection of Jewry in its homeland. The universalistic-Jewish ideology faced a diﬀerent challenge: to devise patterns of Jewish identity that could reinforce American Jews’ aspirations as middle-class Americans, without making them choose between the Jewish and the American components of their identity. These patterns found prominent expression in the postwar American Jewish “return to religion.” This was neither a religious-spiritual awakening nor a return to the observance of commandments as Braude had advocated. Instead, it reﬂected the need to create Jewish behavioral patterns that would correspond to the middle-class culture of the suburbs, where the Jewish ethnic culture was considered a foreign implant. The “return to religion” may shed light on the American Jewish existential challenge as it was perceived at the time: how to enable American Jews to express their Jewish identity in ways that conformed to their American middleclass aspirations.56 55 Nelson Glueck, “Adding Link to Link,” p. 10; “Reform Rabbis – A Convention Assembled,” Liberal Judaism, (August 1946), pp. 1–2. 56 Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement, New York, 1985, pp. 129–145.

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Several books by American Jewish authors during those years underscore this challenge of crafting a “healthy” American Jewish identity.57 One of the most salient is Wasteland, by Ruth Seid, who wrote it under the pseudonym Jo Sinclair.58 The book, which won the prestigious Harper Prize for 1946, tells of the psychoanalysis that John Brown, a young American Jew, undergoes in an attempt to ﬁll the “wasteland” inside him. As the psychoanalysis proceeds, John realizes that his inner desolation traces to his attempt to repudiate his Jewish identity. He becomes aware that his attempt at self-repudiation has made him a lonely man, unable to form genuine social relationships either with the Jews around him or with the American environment that he so ardently wants to join. To be liberated from the “spiritual ghetto” in which he has placed himself, he has to learn to see the barriers between Jews and non-Jews as merely one part of a general American struggle. Sinclair chooses to exemplify the “healthy” attitude that John eventually internalizes by comparing it with the outlook of his immigrant parents, who have not internalized the universalistic values of American society. For John’s parents, the reports about the Warsaw ghetto uprising corroborate their sense of a world divided between Jews and non-Jews. In contrast, when John’s psychiatrist summarizes his patient’s successful treatment, he notes that now John “has begun to see the larger ghettos of the world in relation to his own.” Now that he has ﬁnally free himself of his stereotypical view of a dichotomized world, he can re-adopt his Jewish name, Jake Braunowitz, which he had previously concealed. Now his Jewish name and identity do not reﬂect separatism and suspicion vis-à-vis the American surroundings but the opposite: a “healthy” and “normal” relationship between the two spheres of his identity: the American and the Jewish. The quest for a “normal” interrelationship between one’s Jewish and American identities was the focal point of the ﬁrst two editions of the Journal of Social Issues in 1945. Both editions were devoted to

57 Ofer Shiﬀ, “Four Attempts to Mediate between Jewish and American Texts,” Zionism, 21, 1998 (Hebrew), pp. 355–370. 58 Jo Sinclair, Wasteland, New York and London, 1946. Seid adopted her pseudonym to express her identiﬁcation with the famous American author and socialist, Upton Sinclair. The latter Sinclair devoted most of his works to identiﬁcation with the working class and preaching for social justice. By adopting his name, Seid may have wished to identify herself as a “Sinclair of the minorities.” Indeed, her second book, The Changelings, dealt with the black minority

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the theme of “racial and religious prejudice.” They presented typical episodes of American social discrimination against various ethnic groups (American Jews being only one of them), and summoned experts in various ﬁelds (sociologists, psychologists, and clerics) to analyze and explain these episodes.59 The case chosen as representative of discrimination against Jews focused on three teachers, two Christians (Ross and Frank) and a Jew (Daniels), in a small-town school. Ross and Frank, unaware that Daniels is Jewish, made several antisemitic remarks about Jewish immigrants who “ought to know better.” Daniels, severely confused, did not know whether to respond as a “Jew” or as an “American” and quickly walked away. Now his two Gentile acquaintances also felt ill at ease; the next day they avoided Daniels’ company. The two American Jewish “experts” who analyzed the incident, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, criticized Daniels for attempting to conceal his Jewish identity. They argued that if he had accepted his Jewish origins as a legitimate and inseparable part of his American identity, he would have been able to cope with his friends’ antisemitic remarks: If Daniels really accepted being a Jew, he would have known how to speak to Ross without denouncing him. . . . He would have known enough to control himself and to talk in such a way as to get Ross to change his mind, not only about the Jews but about human beings in general. Here was an excellent opportunity to teach the lesson of not generalizing from an individual to a group.

Notwithstanding their critical remarks about Daniels’ behavior, the analysis by Kaplan and Lewin plainly reﬂects their understanding of the universalistic American nature of the “Jewish behavior” that Daniels should exhibit. Although they urge Daniels to take pride in his Jewish identity, they also expect him to respond coolly and objectively, as though the antisemitic incident did not pertain to him personally as a Jew, and to focus solely on the American and universalistic lessons to be learned from the incident. Lewin even argues that having a “balanced personality” may be construed in two diﬀerent ways.

59 “A Symposium on Racial and Religious Prejudice,” Journal of Social Issues, February and May 1945. Interestingly, seven of the thirty-three contributors to the collection belonged to the CCI, which was funded by the American Jewish Congress and chaired by Kurt Lewin.

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While it requires Daniels to take pride in the Jewish components of his identity, one must also remember that Daniels belongs to many groups and that it should be part of his “normal” behavior to consider which aﬃliation is the most relevant and appropriate under given circumstances.60 From a historical perspective, the fact that the Holocaust occurred at the same time as an upturn in American Jews’ expectations of acceptance made the task of achieving a “balanced” American Jewish identity more daunting and complex. From a universalistic Reform standpoint, insistence on both types of aﬃliation, the Jewish and the American, was always considered the desired and courageous coping pattern. Many Reform leaders, whether emphasizing universalistic “American” goals or a more particularistic Jewish viewpoint, stubbornly continued to confront this apparently irresolvable internal contradiction, seeing the confrontation itself as a healthy and positive way of coping with the threats posed by the Holocaust. One salient example is an article by Rabbi Polish about the importance of prayer in the Reform synagogue. Polish focused his discussion on what he considered the shallowness and anemia of religious life in post-Holocaust Reform congregations. The problem, he said, is not the form of the service or the paucity of worshippers but the contents of the prayers, which are “glib and much too smooth . . . [with] too much the ﬂavor of hearty dinner. . . . They do not echo the tormented outcry of mutilated Israel and a bleeding world.” Polish argued, “There is room for protest and hurt in our prayer books. . . . And it is perfectly in order to wonder how God permitted this obscenity of their martyrdom to come to pass.” However, Polish was also aware of the hazards of addressing the agony and protest too directly in the liturgy. Overemphasis of this aspect might cause the worshipper’s personality to collapse and leave it totally misshapen. To overcome this danger, Polish proposed that the liturgy focus on the exemplary military feats of the Maccabees and the Zionists, so as to counterbalance the dispiriting message of the Holocaust. His proposed “antidote” perhaps demonstrates the diﬃculty in articulating in direct religious terms the protest and anguish occasioned by the Holocaust. The intensity of the feelings that Polish wanted to express

60 Ibid., pp. 18–27; Ofer Shiﬀ, “Four Attempts to Mediate between Jewish and American Texts,” pp. 358–360.

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explains why a prayerbook inspired by the agonies of the victims of Bergen-Belsen was not produced.61 Like Polish, Rabbi Morris Eisendrath, director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, inveighed against the sense of false security and well-being that, in his opinion, allowed Reform Jews to disregard the unique Jewish attributes of the Holocaust. Instead of the Jewish-introversion and blind-faith responses, he called for an improvement in Jewish-Christian relations and even construed the unwillingness of some American Jews to participate actively in domestic American social struggles as a manifestation of failure to strive genuinely to face the lessons of the Holocaust.62 A story by Rabbi Joseph R. Narot of Atlantic City, New Jersey, should also be understood from the standpoint of this coping philosophy. Narot told of a ﬁctional American Jewish soldier named Jonathan, who, after visiting a liberated concentration camp, asked a piercing question about the Jewish fate, which seemed to consist wholly of pointless suﬀering. “What is this Jewishness that lies as a curse upon our heads?” Jonathan asks. “Were it not better that it were gone and lost forever?” To answer this question, Narot did not settle for the traditional Jewish coping patterns that were devoid of any universalistic or general American context. Nor did he disregard the particularistic aspects of Jewish fate and survival. Instead, he sought to examine the particularistic meaning of the Jewish Holocaust in a broader universalistic and general American context. Practically speaking, he expressed the Reform Movement’s attempt to avoid estrangement from the bereavement and anguish felt by all American Jews without succumbing to those feelings, which, from the Reform perspective, seemed to threaten the very foundations of the Jewish faith. As a cleric struggling for the tenets of his universalistic Reform faith, he viewed this coping pattern as quite the opposite of an evasion. Instead, it constituted painful recognition of the legitimacy of experiencing disillusionment and anguish as a Jew, coupled with an attempt to interpret these feelings in keeping with the principles of the universalistic American outlook.

61 David Polish, “The Forsaken God,” Liberal Judaism, (November 1946), pp. 10–16. 62 Maurice N. Eisensdrath, “Director’s Comment,” Liberal Judaism, (November 1946), pp. 17–19. For a broader discussion of Eisensdrath’s views, see his book, Can Faith Survive? The Thoughts and Afterthoughts of an American Rabbi, New York, 1964.

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Yes, we have suﬀered long; we suﬀer now. But not for the pretexts that have been mouthed and given credence even by us. This is the essence: they who hate, resent our virtues. They are enraged by the good we have espoused. . . . In every land, in every age, men have suﬀered. . . . If we have suﬀered more . . . If we have been the constant scapegoat, it is because our name and life were early intertwined with man’s eternal hope for growth and betterment. The question then is not alone “to be a Jew or not to be.” . . . The issue rather is “to be men or not to be.” You are needed, Jonathan, needed by the world, your country and your people. . . . You should be casting oﬀ the chains of your own forging: the fear of being diﬀerent in a blessed land where diﬀerence is the essence of the democratic law. . . . Thus shorn of your chains, you too will help create a new, a wondrous era.63

63 Joseph R. Narot, “Titus and the Captive,” Liberal Judaism, ( January 1946), pp. 73–77.

EPILOGUE

THE UNIVERSALISTIC REFORM PATTERN FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE In May 1965, as the academic year drew to a close, Julian Morgenstern, former president of HUC, held a talk with the students of the college.1 The main points of the discussion clearly indicate that Morgenstern’s universalistic Jewish vision had changed substantially in the eighteen years since he had resigned his public functions. Instead of optimistic conﬁdence in the advantages of Jewish integration in America, his remarks reﬂected greater emphasis on the hazards of assimilation that the American spirit of pluralism and ecumenicalism might cause. Back in the 1940s, in a speech given shortly before the United States entered the war, Morgenstern had expressed unbounded conﬁdence in the contribution of social integration to reinforcing the sense of Jewish aﬃliation. He expressed a mixture of contempt and anger toward cultural-pluralism enthusiasts, who, in his opinion, radiated a fear and self-seclusion that sabotaged the welcome process of full cultural integration in America. Even as antisemitism escalated in the United States and in Europe, Morgenstern maintained his optimistic belief and looked forward to the day when the oﬀspring of the American Jews of his era would no longer stand out as a singular ethnic and cultural group. He assured his listeners that when the blessed day arrived and all racial and cultural barriers disappeared, Judaism would not only retain its vitality but would ﬂourish and blossom many times over. He believed that the small amount of assimilation that might occur would cause Judaism only a minimum of harm relative to the beneﬁts to be gained by the masses of converts who would be attracted to the universal content of Judaism.2 By 1965, Morgenstern’s previous optimism had evolved into a much more reserved and cautious approach. Now he admitted that

1 A Talk in HUC by Julian Morgenstern, May 4, 1965, AJA, MS Col. no. 30, 14/2. 2 Julian Morgenstern, “‘Melting Pot’, ‘Cultural Pluralism’, or What?” pp. 333–334.

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assimilation was becoming a real problem for American Jewry. He traced the rising intermarriage rate to the success of the integration process and noted that the spirit of ecumenical tolerance might carry the assimilation and intermarriage trend even further. His outlook on the possibility of in-conversion had also changed. Although he still hoped for an inﬂux of converts, now he described this as a defense mechanism through which Judaism might surmount the risks and adverse eﬀects of acculturation. It was in this context that he called for an active conversion movement to engage in outreach mainly among non-Jewish spouses in intermarriages. He urged Reform rabbis to oﬃciate at the weddings of mixed couples who agreed to consider conversion or, at least, to raise their children as Jews.3 Morgenstern’s changed outlook is reﬂected in an exchange of letters three years later between him and his grandson, the Reform rabbi William A. Greenbaum. Morgenstern, who since his wife’s death had been living with his daughter in a small town in Georgia, considered acting on his own recommendation by oﬃciating at a mixed wedding, which the local Reform rabbi had refused to do. Morgenstern was afraid that refusal to oﬃciate might result in a loss of both spouses to Judaism. Greenbaum, the rabbi of a congregation in Kansas at the time, tried to dissuade his grandfather, claiming that his fear was left over from a time when Reform Jews did not want to be too diﬀerent from the majority. Since then, he maintained, Judaism had regained much of its self-respect: “we can make demands today because we look at our faith completely positively . . . There is no longer the need or the temptation to accede to the majority.” By this point, Greenbaum continued, Reform Judaism regarded any attempt to obscure and relinquish the particularistic Jewish principles as a genuine menace to Jewish continuity.4 There was deﬁnitely something ironic, if not tragic, about the grandson’s evaluation of his grandfather’s generation. In the 1930s and 1940s, Morgenstern and his colleagues had deﬁned their coping patterns as a proud Jewish stance and a courageous attempt to 3 Morgenstern’s criticism of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah was probably related to his outreach advocacy among mixed couples. Although his criticism preceded Nazism and the Holocaust, it became much ﬁercer in the 1930s and 1940s and even served Morgenstern as a basis for his comparison, in 1934 and 1943, of Zionism and Nazism. 4 Letter to Morgenstern from Rabbi William A. Greenbaum II, July 15, 1966, AJA, MS. Col. 30, 13/12.

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invest the integration process with positive Jewish universalistic meaning. Now, Morgenstern’s grandson described the same coping patterns as reﬂections of a lack of self-respect prompted by the wish to curry favor with the majority society. Surprisingly, Morgenstern himself shared some of his grandson’s criticism. For example, when explaining how his views on Zionism had changed, he traced the previous anti-Zionist leanings of the Reform Movement, including his own, to fear that a depiction of all Jews as belonging to a single nationality would clash with their self-image as full-ﬂedged Americans. He noted that the establishment of the State of Israel had completely changed this perception. We realized, with steadily increasing force, that Jews all over the world are brothers, that we have a responsibility for our brethren in all the lands of the world. . . . We have a natural pride in the development of the Jews in Palestine, in the development of the Jewish state. . . . More and more a sense of pride developed, and the sense, the feeling of anti-Zionism grew less and less.5

This emphasis on the awakening of Jewish solidarity and pride among Reform Jews, which Morgenstern credited to the establishment of the State of Israel, was also part of a general American trend toward ethnocentricity in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike their parents, who had invested all their energy in attaining full social acceptance in America, young American Jews had been born into the middle-class suburban culture and, for the most part, took their American aﬃliation for granted. For many of them, the old challenge of attaining acceptance in America was almost irrelevant. Instead, as ethnocentricity became popular in American society, they sought speciﬁcally Jewish emphasis that could distinguish them from other Americans. They were now much less concerned with the few remaining obstacles to their social integration than with enabling the particularistic Jewish identity to survive and thrive in American society. The 1967 SixDay War further sharpened the ethnocentric emphasis on the particularistic Jewish interest. The anxiety that gripped Jews before the war conjured up recollections of the Holocaust era, when the world turned a blind eye to the devastation and suﬀering among the Jews. Thus, the Israeli military victory was considered a belated response to the Jews’ helplessness during the Holocaust. 5

Morgenstern, A Talk in HUC by Julian Morgenstern, p. 2.

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Despite this conspicuous change, the previous universalistic Reform pattern of the 1940s had not lost its relevance or its “positive” signiﬁcance for American Jews. The aspiration to sustain both the general American and the particularistic Jewish points of view was still at the forefront of the American Jewish experience. The previous determination of Reform leaders such as Morgenstern, Freehof, and Polish to avoid “solutions” that might force their congregants to choose between their Jewish and American aﬃliations could still serve as a relevant model of Jewish coping. Moreover, although the universalistic and particularistic components of the American Jewish identity re-equilibrated in the 1960s and 1970s, the contemporary particularistic Jewish emphasis was still anchored in general American and universalistic contexts. This point is demonstrated by a comparison of two possible points of view – of the 1940s and of the 1970s – regarding Arthur Miller’s ﬁrst novel, Focus.6 The hero is a Gentile American named Newman who, at the beginning of the story, is a proclaimed antisemite. When myopia forces him to begin wearing glasses, he “looks Jewish” and becomes himself a victim of antisemitism. He consequently undergoes an inner change that, by the end of the plot, transforms him into a “new man.”7 Shedding his previous antisemitic tendency to rank people by stereotypes having to do with their group aﬃliation, he now starts to relate to them on the basis of their individual traits and behavior. When analyzing the plot in the context of the 1940s, when the book was written, one may ﬁnd in it, as in other books of that time, a reﬂection of the American Jewish tendency to emphasize the universalistic aspects of antisemitism. Miller does this by depicting the particularistic Jewish responses to antisemitism not as reﬂections of an “Old World Jewish mentality” but as universalistic traits that every person, including an antisemite, displays when forced into the social status of “victim.” Focus also expresses the aspiration, already evidenced in the early nineteenth century in Noah’s thinking, to ﬁght antisemitism in a way that reinforces the Jews’ status and self-image

6

Arthur Miller, Focus, 1945. Miller uses a play on words between the name of the hero, Newman, and the concept of “New-Man”. It is of interest to compare the American universalistic signiﬁcance that Miller gave this concept with the particularistic meaning that the concept acquired in contemporary Zionist stories and myths. 7

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as rank-and-ﬁle Americans. In this respect, Miller’s book is no diﬀerent from many other attempts by American Jews at the time to base the Jewish response to antisemitism and the Holocaust almost solely on a general American point of view rather than on their marginal status as “victims.” However, from the American Jewish perspective of the 1960s and 1970s, Focus may be considered a pioneering attempt to stress the image of the Jew as a victim, even turning this image into a paradigm of universal and general American signiﬁcance. The plot gives evidence of this intention at its end, when Newman identiﬁes so strongly with the Jewish victim of an antisemitic incident that he declares himself a Jew. In retrospect Miller himself, in a preface written for a 1985 reprinting, claimed that his purpose in writing the book was to inspire non-Jewish readers “to see anew their own relationships to the Jew” and to identify themselves “with some parts of the Jewish situation.”8 It is not by chance that these two ostensibly clashing trends – that of the 1940s, which tried to obscure the attributes of the Jew as victim, and the later one, which aimed to stress these traits so strongly as to make them into an American symbol – appear together in the same book. This coincidence may reﬂect the underlying dialectical relationship between the universalistic and the particularistic that has always characterized the American Jewish identity. Evidence of this can be found in the diverse interpretations that have been oﬀered since the 1990s for the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the very heart of Washington, D.C. Yosef Gorny, who devotes much of his book Between Auschwitz and Jerusalem to an analysis of these clashing interpretations, explains that the museum represents an attempt to underscore the suﬀering of the Jews so ﬁrmly as to render it into a universal American moral lesson. On the one hand, he observes, this attempt may be considered part of a general American trend that stresses the uniqueness of each group (including the Jews) in the American mosaic. On the other hand,

8 Arthur Miller, introduction to the 1985 paperback edition of his book Focus. A popular although not especially profound expression of this approach may be seen in Laura Z. Hobson’s bestseller Gentleman’s Agreement. This book attained its pinnacle of fame after it was made into a ﬁlm and won the Oscar for 1947. Its main message is that since anyone, even a non-Jewish American, may ﬁnd himself in a Jew’s “shoes,” antisemitism should be treated as something that aﬀects each and every American. For discussion of the ﬁlm, see K. R. M., Short, ed., Feature Films as History, Knoxville, TN, 1980.

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the eﬀort to emphasize the Jews’ unique suﬀering expresses the opposite intention – to make the disaster suﬀered by the Jews part of the general American heritage, a pronounced manifestation of the Jews’ successful Americanization and social integration. Finally, Gorny notes that, paradoxically, this “particularistic” trend may obscure the uniquely Jewish complexion of the Holocaust and may abet greater assimilation.9 The present work deﬁnes this universalistic-particularistic tension as the basic American Jewish pattern of coping with the Holocaust, both while it was occurring and today. In both periods one should take notice of the dialectical attempt to make the particularistic sense of identiﬁcation with the Jewish fate in the Holocaust a major component of the sense of universalistic American aﬃliation. Today, as in the 1930s and the 1940s, the universalistic-particularistic dialectic is manifested most saliently in the Reform Movement. The particularization process that the Reform Movement underwent in the 1960s did not nullify the importance of the universalistic-mission idea. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Reform ideology gave Jewish interests top priority, it described this as a means of promoting the universalistic mission of Judaism. Although the growing importance of Holocaust remembrance as a focal point of Jewish identity emphasized the particularistic lesson of Jewish survival, it was also perceived as evidence of the importance of the Jewish humanistic hope. Similarly, the growing identiﬁcation with the State of Israel accentuated the importance of Jewish solidarity but also oﬀered a model of Jewish unity based on humanistic and universalistic principles.10 The San Francisco Platform, a statement of principles adopted by the Reform Movement in 1976, is a striking example of this constant universalistic-particularistic dialectic. The Reform Movement insisted on not succumbing to the tension between the Jewish and the 9 Gorny, Between Auschwitz and Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, 1999 (Hebrew), pp. 19–21, 220–240. Another notable work in this context is Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. Although his perspective is almost diametrically opposed to Gorny’s, Novick also criticizes the tendency to make the Holocaust a focal point of American Jewish identity. Rather then seeing this trend as dangerously leading to cultural assimilation, Novick regards it as a “negative” form of particularistic identiﬁcation at the expense of a “positive” presentation of the universalistic Jewish heritage, inwardly and outwardly. (Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston and New York, 1999, pp. 6–11.) 10 Allon Gal, The Changing Concept of “Mission” in American Reform Judaism, pp. 23–37.

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American senses of aﬃliation and regarded refusal to relinquish either of them as the main manifestation of the Reform Jewish commitment. Despite the ethnocentricity of the 1960s, the dialectic pattern – represented most conspicuously by the “integrationist school” in the 1930s and 1940s – apparently remains a powerful characteristic of contemporary Reform Jewish identity, as the San Francisco Platform demonstrates: Until the recent past our obligations to the Jewish people and to all humanity seemed congruent. At time now these two imperatives appear to conﬂict. We know of no simple way to resolve such tensions. We must, however, confront them without abandoning either of our commitments. A universal concern for humanity unaccompanied by a devotion to our particular people is self-destructive; a passion for our people without involvement in humankind contradicts what the prophets have meant to us. Judaism calls us simultaneously to universal and particular obligations.11

At the same time, the change in Reform and American Jewish thinking should serve as a warning to anyone who wishes to deﬁne the universalistic Reform ideology in ways that disregard the social and cultural contexts of the times. Morgenstern’s early criticism of the German Reform coping pattern that he believed typiﬁed the nineteenth century is noteworthy in this context. He described this pattern as a manifestation of a negative, assimilationist aspiration and a nearly total dismissal of Jewish distinctiveness.12 The universalistic Reform coping mechanism espoused by Morgenstern and his contemporaries in the 1940s seemed exactly the same to Morgenstern’s grandson, a Reform rabbi in the 1960s and 1970s. The present study attempts to avoid such anachronistic interpretations, and instead to demonstrate a basic, constant characteristic of the Reform Movement.

11 CCARY (1976), pp. 177–178 (Section VI, “Our Obligation: Survival and Service”). A recent example of this approach is a circular from the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL). The circular stresses the Jewish relevance of the values of religious and cultural freedom that American Independence Day expresses. Pursuant to that point, the circular notes, “While there are those in Jewish life who choose to see this freedom and the assimilation it allows as a destructive force, CLAL has championed the idea that when we see the deep connection between our secular choices and our Jewish values, Jewish life thrives.” See “Letter to ‘Friends of CLAL,’ July 4, 2000, signed by Barbara B. Friedman (Chairman), Rabbi Irwin Kula (Persident), and Donna M. Rosenthal (Executive Vice Chairman). 12 Julian Morgenstern, “Were Isaac M. Wise Alive Today,” pp. 31–32; Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism and the Hebrew Union College,” p. 5.

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One may summarize this study by stating that, even though the Reform aspiration to harmonize universalism and particularism took on diﬀerent manifestations at diﬀerent times, all these manifestations are representative of one dialectic eﬀort: to sustain and nurture Jewish identity while investing integration and Americanization with positive Jewish value. The universalistic Reform pattern may also be relevant to contemporary Jewish society in Israel. The growing tendency toward polarization and sectorialism in Israeli Jewish society in recent years may be regarded as a reﬂection of despair and disbelief in the possibility of the coexistence of the universalistic and particularistic components of Jewish identity. Opponents of this trend should posit the heritages of Zionism and the Reform Movement as two models of optimistic Jewish identiﬁcation. On the one hand, it is important to nurture the Zionist utopian heritage of faith in the possibility of creating a sovereign Jewish reality that will lower the internal barriers between two types of belonging, the Jewish-particularistic and the civic-universal. On the other hand, it is important to study the corresponding Sisyphean but uncompromising Reform eﬀort to devise coping patterns that would enable modern Jews to maintain their identities as Jews as well as their general civic aﬃliation. Due to the universalistic-particularistic tension, the Holocaust – so important a factor in shaping the American and Israeli Jewish identities – may also take on a major role in creating a new model of modern-Jewish identiﬁcation. Now that aspects of the Holocaust other than the Jews’ collective helplessness are coming to light, we can observe the uncompromising struggle that two modern Jewish outlooks, Reform and Zionism, waged to prevent the Holocaust from driving a permanent wedge between the Jewish-particularistic and the civic-universal aﬃliations. From a historical perspective, this struggle is one link in the ongoing eﬀort by modern Jewry to perpetuate a Judaism that eschews both assimilation and self-seclusion. Finally, looking at the universalistic coping pattern from a historical perspective, one may claim that Zionism’s success in creating a sovereign Jewish society makes the main contemporary challenge that Reform Judaism tackled from its inception – Jewish continuity in an open, democratic society – a relevant and central issue for Jewish society in Israel and the Diaspora. As centrifugal trends among Jewish communities the world over gather strength, it is worth bearing in mind that the aim of harmonizing the universalistic and the partic-

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ularistic is the crux of the modern Jewish experience both in Israel and in the Diaspora. Willingness to tackle this contradiction should be seen as the crucial common denominator that may knit the riven segments of the Jewish people together. One should therefore regard the universalistic Reform struggle during the Holocaust years as a most relevant model for today’s questions of Jewish identity.

13 For discussion of possible inﬂuences of the American Jewish model on the Israeli-Zionist identity, see Allon Gal, “Israel and American Jewry Relations: The Israeli Perspective,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, Studeis in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel 8 (1998) pp. 12–14 (Hebrew). For discussion of the relevance of the “heritage of Western integrationist Judaism” for Israeli society, see Guy Meron, “The Integrating Jewry: About the Memory and Actuality of Emancipation Jewry and Its Heritage in Our Days,” Gesher, 141 (Summer 2000), pp. 59–67 (Hebrew).

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INDEX OF NAMES AND CONCEPTS Adler Felix 46, 74 Adorno Theodor W. 142 Ahad Ha’am 60, 88, 130 Alliance Israelite Universelle 39 American Council for Judaism 109–113, 116, 119 American Hebrew (newspaper) 17, 56 American Hovevey Zion Society 56 American Israelite (newspaper) 43 American Jewish Committee 48, 63, 104, 141–142, 144–145 American Jewish Conference 115 American Jewish Congress 48, 86, 140–142, 144 AJCongress Administrative Commission on Economic Discrimination 140 American Oriental Society 84 A New Zionism (Kaplan) 133 antisemitism American Jewish pattern of response 11–12, 14, 104–105, 139, 141–147, 150, 153–154, 162–163 and philanthropy 17–18 as a threat to modern Judaism 2–4, 7, 43–45, 53, 55–59, 61, 71 in Germany 1, 44, 63, 71, 101 in the United States 11–12, 17, 43–45, 63, 72, 104, 131, 140–141, 145–146, 159, 162–163 in Eastern Europe 25, 39, 41, 44, 63–64, 89, 129 Quarantine treatment approach 144–145 scientiﬁc research on antisemitism 141–143, 154 traditional view of 21 Ararat ( Jewish colony) 15–16 Autoemancipation (Pinsker) 41 Balfour Declaration 46, 62–63, 86–87 Bellow Saul 143 Bergen-Belsen 156 Berkowitz Henry 86 Berlin Temple 71 Berman Morton M. 137 Bernstein Philip 127 Bettelheim Bruno 141

Beth Israel Congregation (Houston) 114 Between Auschwitz and Jerusalem (Gorny) 163 Binational Jewish-Arab state 95 Biltmore program 112, 115 Blackstone Memorandum 42–43 Bloom Herbert I. 127 Bluestone (Blaustein) Joseph 56–57 B’nai B’rith 26, 39, 115 Brandeis Louis D. 62, 86–87, 89 Braude William G. 125–129, 152 British policy in Palestine 92, 95, 105, 116 Buchenwald (concentration camp) 141 Bureau of War Records 137–138 Busch Isidor 30 Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) American Council for Judaism 113 Antisemitism after W.W.II 140, 146, 150 British policy in Palestine 105 Conversion 111 Economic development of Palestine 87–88 intermarriage 111 Jewish American Synod 47 Jewish Army 109–111 Jewish civil rights 48 Jewish tradition 111, 125–128 Judaism as a religion 48 nazism 144 paciﬁsm 134 race relations 127, 147, 150 reform doctrine after the Holocaust 122–123, 125–129 statement of neutrality (1935) 113 social justice 79, 127 Universalistic Jewish historiography 74–75 Zionism 45, 47, 87–88, 93, 105, 109–111, 113, 116, 122–123, 129 CCAR Commission on Justice and Peace 147 Cohen Joseph X. 140

176

index of names and concepts

Columbus Platform 105 conservative Judaism 60, 80 Cowen Phillip 56 Cresson Warder 27 Cronbach Abraham 134–135 cultural pluralism 60, 80–81, 107, 127, 159

Goldenson Samuel H. 116, 127 Gomez Daniel 23 Goode Alexander 137–138 Gorny Yoshef 6, 132–133, 163–164 Gottheil Gustav 45 Gottheil Richard 45, 54–59 Greenbaum William A. 160–161

Dachau (concentration camp) 141 Damascus blood libel 25 Daniel Deronda (George Eliot) 41 diaspora nationalism 89, 107 Dubnow Simon 60

Hakohen Yechiel 19 Halpern Ben 150 Halukka 17, 19, 26–27, 39 Harby Isaac 12–13, 15 Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) 6 Harrison Benjamin 43 Haskalah 5 Haas Jacob de 56 Hebrew Union College (HUC) 1–2, 46, 60, 64–67, 70, 73–74, 76, 78, 85, 88, 90, 92, 99–100, 106, 112–113, 116, 119–120, 134, 137, 151–152, 159 Heller James 113 Heller Max 83 Heschel Abraham J. 106 Hertz Richard C. 150–151 Herzl Theodore 58, 72 Hevrat Terumat Hakodesh (confraternity) 23 Hirsch Emil G. 35, 43, 68 Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums 67 Hovevey Zion 56, 60

Einhorn David 36–37 Eisendrath Maurice Nathan 116, 156 Emancipation ( Jewish) 5, 13, 21–22, 29, 91 Enelow Hyman 47, 93 Eretz Israel (Palestine) Christian attitude 20, 27–28, 42–43 emigration to 22, 28, 105, 110, 113, 115–116, 119 philanthropy 16–18, 20, 22–24, 26–28, 38–40, 87–89, 105 symbols of modernization and economic development of Palestine 27–29, 39–40, 42–43, 62, 87–89, 130, 132–133 traditional symbols and connection (see also halukka) 14–17, 19–24, 26–27, 38–39, 129 Ezra and Nehemiah’s Reforms 1, 75, 100 Evian Conference 104 Federation of American Zionists (FAZ) 54, 56–57 Felsenthal Bernhard 45 Fineberg Solomon Andhil 104, 144–145 Fleischer Charles 46 Focus (Miller) 162–163 Ford Henry 72 Franklin Leo M. 87 Free Sons of Zion (a Zionist association) 57 Freehof Solomon 128, 140, 150, 162 Friedlander Israel 59–60 Frisch Ephraim 126 Gamoran Emanuel 81–82, 136 Geiger Abraham 68 Glazer Nathan 149 Glueck Nelson 137, 151

Incident Control Study 142–143 Isaacs Samuel Mayer 23 Isserman Ferdinand 147 Jaﬀe Philip 148 Jewish Agency for Palestine 88, 93 Jewish education (see also under Reform Judaism) 30, 69 Jewish Messenger (newspaper) 23, 43 Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS) 59–60 Jewish Welfare Board (see also under Bureau of War Records) 137 Jastrow Morris 86 Journal of Social Issues 153 Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (congregation in Charleston) Kahn Julius 86 Kalischer Zevi Hirsch 29 Kallen Horace M. 60, 81

35

index of names and concepts Kaplan Bernard 86 Kaplan Mordecai 80, 82, 133, 154 Kaufmann Kohler 34, 43, 45–47, 53, 68, 74, 78 Knights of Zion Order (Zionist association) 57, 59 Ku Klux Klan 72 Lazaron Morris S. 113 Lazarus Emma 41–42 Leeser Isaac 20–31, 38–40 Lewin Kurt 142, 154 Levy Hyman 23 Liberal Judaism (newspaper) 134, 137, 152 Lipsky Louis 89 Maccabean (newspaper) 56 Magnes Judah 60–61, 85 Margolis Harry S. 94 Marcus Jacob R. 151 Marshall Louis 61, 63, 93 Menkes J. B. 94 Messianic redemption 20–22, 29–30, 36–37, 39–40 Miller Arthur 133, 162–163 Montefoire Moses 23 Monroe James 12 Monsky Henry 115 Morgenstern Julian 1–4, 64–96, 99–126, 128–130, 135, 137, 150, 159–162, 165 National Advocate (newspaper) 11 Negation-of-the-Diaspora doctrine 60, 91, 102 Narot Joseph R. 156 New Palestine (newspaper) 93 New York Federation of Reform Synagogues 148 New York Federation of Zionists 56 New York Society for Ethical Culture 46, 74 New York Times (newspaper) 63 Noah Mordechai Manuel 11–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 38, 40, 142, 162 Notkin Nathan 26 Occident (newspaper) 20 Ochs Adolph S. 63 Olan Levi A. 126–127 orthodox Judaism (see also under reform doctrine) 20, 25, 29, 56 Overcoming Anti-Semitism (Fineberg) 104

177

Palestine Development League 87–88 Paris Peace Conference (WWI) 63, 86 Philipson David 36, 63, 93 Pilchik Ely E. 148–149 Pittsburgh Platform (1885) 37, 39, 47, 114, 123, 130 Polish David 148, 155, 162 Poznanski Gustav 35 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion 72 reconstructionist movement 80, 133 reform Judaism assimilation 3, 7, 14, 42, 45, 47, 71–72, 74, 80–81, 83, 92, 103, 131, 159–160, 165–166 Biblical criticism 68, 70, 73–75 Christianity/Jewish-Christian Fraternity 41, 45, 47, 71, 73, 78–79, 138, 156, 160 conversion 111, 159–160 Darwinism 68 German reforms 33, 71–72, 78, 85, 91, 165 immigrants’ “un-American” Judaism 43–44, 53, 55–62, 76–77, 82–84, 90, 92, 94–95, 108, 114 intermarriage 111, 160 Jewish civil rights 47 Jewish education 65, 81–82, 92–93, 105, 148 Jewish holidays 34, 36, 45, 47, 65–66, 71, 77, 126, 135–136, 148–149 Jewish nationalism 36–37, 39, 45, 47, 77, 84–85, 87–90, 116, 118, 130–131, 161 Jewish pride and heroism 54–55, 72, 100–101, 133–139, 146–147, 150, 155, 160–161 Jewish rituals, customs 38, 66, 68, 70–71, 75, 78, 80–83, 88, 114, 126, 128, 148–149, 155 militarism/paciﬁsm 109–111, 134–138, 155 mission idea/prophetic outlook 3–4, 35–37, 48, 75–77, 81, 84, 91, 93, 100, 117–118, 122–123, 126, 131, 150–151, 164–165 orthodox Judaism 25, 46, 68–70, 73, 75, 81, 84, 92 prayer books 36–37, 79, 128, 155–156

178

index of names and concepts

relief/rescue attempts (during the Holocaust) 8, 103–106 response to antisemitism (1930s–1940s) 105, 144–147, 150 social justice 48, 68, 78–79, 103, 127, 148, 151, 156 universalistic Jewish historiography 68–69, 74–77, 84–85, 88–89, 91, 94, 100, 102–103, 117–118, 131, 135 reform society of Israelites in Charleston 37 Reichert Victor E. 129–130 Rosenzweig Ephraim M. 127 San-Francisco Platform (1976) 164–165 Sarna Jonathan 15 Schechter Solomon 60 Schiﬀ Jacob 60–61 Schindler Solomon 46 Schoenberger David 146 Scholem Gershom 21 Senior Max 63 Shaarey Teﬁla (congregation in New York) 55 She’erith Israel (congregation in New York) 19 Silver Abba Hillel 61, 69–70, 76–77, 80–83, 116, 122, 130–132 Sinclair Jo (Ruth Seid) 153 Six Day War (1967) 161 Sklare Marshall 132 Sokolow Nahum 1 Studies in Prejudice 142 Synagogue Center Movement 80

Temple Emanuel of New York 60 Temple Tifereth Israel (Cleveland) 81 The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno) 142 The Search for National Identity (Gorny) 133, 163 The Victim (Bellow) 143 Three Pals, Comrades in Life and Death 138 Three Pals in a Foxhole 138 Touro Judah 24 United Jewish Appeal (UJA) 105 Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) 45, 115–116, 156 United States Holocaust Memorial Muesum 163 Warsaw ghetto uprising 133, 146, 153 Wasteland ( Jo Sinclair) 153 Weizmann Chaim 89, 93 Western Zionist Federation 57 White Paper 95, 105 Wise Isaac Mayer 34–42, 78–79, 83–84 Wise Stephen 54, 134 Wolk Samuel J. B. 127 Wolsey Louis 93–94, 108–111, 113 World Zionist Congress 1897 45 1898 54 1933 1 World Zionist Organization (WZO) 1, 47 Zeﬀ Joseph 58 Zionism Zelig Aharon 20

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Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Jewish Cultures of the World)

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