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“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans
8:2)
Modern
Judaism – Britannica
Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present)
The new situation
World map showing the estimated percentage of the
population practicing Judaism by country, using shades of purple to indicate
concentration. Israel is highlighted with the darkest color for the highest
percentage, while the United States and Canada also show higher concentrations.
Lighter shades in countries across Europe, South America, Africa, Australia,
and parts of Asia indicate lower percentages, with most regions marked as less
than 0.1 percent. An inset zooms in on Israel and surrounding
World distribution of Judaism
The criteria used to identify dividing points in the
history of the Jews and Judaism are especially notable when it comes to the
start of the modern period. Historians of thought traditionally place this
point in the late 17th century, with the appearance of those who abandoned, in
part or in toto, their inherited Jewish faith but continued to regard
themselves—and to be regarded by others—as Jews. Some Israeli scholars prefer a
date of about 1700, with the first stirrings of the emigration from the
Diaspora to the Holy Land, which culminated in the mid-20th century in the
creation of the State of Israel. Political and social historians put the start
of the modern period in the second half of the 18th century, when the American
and French revolutions eventually resulted in the emancipation of Jews from
discriminatory and segregative laws and customs, their attainment of legal
status as citizens, and the freedom of individual Jews to pursue careers
appropriate to their talents. These varying approaches have one thing in
common: the view that the start of the modern period is marked by the end of
the doctrine of the exile, whereby Jews saw themselves as a people waiting out
centuries of woe in alien lands until the moment of divine redemption. Jewish
modernity for most scholars is characterized by the end of a passive waiting
for the messiah and the beginning of an active pursuit of personal or national
fulfillment on this earth and preferably in one’s own lifetime.
Although the 18th century Haskala (Enlightenment) among the
Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe is often taken as the starting point
of Jewish modernity, the process of Westernization had begun a good deal
earlier among the Sephardim in western Europe and in Italy. The Marranos who
went to the Jewish communities of Amsterdam and Venice in the 17th century to
declare themselves Jews carried with them the Western education that they had
acquired while living as Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the
habits of criticism that had kept them from assimilating into the majority
during their Marrano years. Some, such as Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza
(1632–77), a son of Marranos, applied these skills to all of the biblical
tradition, including especially their own religion. In Italy there was an older
Jewish community that had never been sealed off culturally from the influence
of its environment; some of its figures were influenced by, and participated
in, the main currents of the Renaissance.
Increased contact with Western languages, manners, and
customs came to the Ashkenazim only in the 18th century, when new economic
opportunities created such possibilities. Jewish bankers and brokers in various
German principalities, army provisioners in most European countries,
capitalists who were permitted to live in places such as Berlin because they
opened new factories or were otherwise helpful to the expansion of the
economy—all were in increasing contact with Gentile society, and most of them
began to strive for full acceptance. Around this wealthy element there arose a
number of intellectuals who agitated for the end of ghettoization as a
necessary preamble to the emancipation of the Jews.
The Haskala, or Enlightenment
In central Europe
The most outstanding figure of the 18th-century Jewish
Enlightenment was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a devoted
adherent of traditional Judaism who turned away from the historic Jewish
preoccupation with the Talmud and its literature to the intellectual world of
the European Enlightenment. Mendelssohn did not attempt a philosophical defense
of Judaism until pressed to do so by Christians who questioned how he could
remain faithful to what they saw as an unenlightened religion. In his response,
Jerusalem, published in 1783, Mendelssohn defended the validity of Judaism as
the inherited faith of the Jews by defining it as revealed divine legislation,
and he declared himself at the same time to be a believer in the universal
religion of reason, of which Judaism was but one historical manifestation.
Aware that he was accepted by Gentile society as an “exceptional Jew” who had
embraced Western culture, Mendelssohn’s message to his own community was to
become Westerners, to seek out the culture of the Enlightenment. To that end he
joined with a poet, Naphtali Herz (Hartwig) Wessely (1725–1805), in translating
the Torah into German, combining Hebrew characters with modern German phonetics
in an effort to displace Yiddish, and wrote a modern biblical commentary in
Hebrew, the Beʾur (“Commentary”). Within a generation, Mendelssohn’s Bible
was to be found in almost every literate Jewish home in central Europe, serving
to introduce its readers to German culture. Through his personal example and
his life’s work, Mendelssohn made it possible for his fellow Jews to join the
Western world without sacrificing their Judaism; indeed, he convinced them that
Judaism is compatible with an intellectual commitment to universal reason.
Mendelssohn’s work was carried on by the Berlin Haskala, a
group of Jewish intellectuals who had gathered around Mendelssohn during his
lifetime; the Haskala was most active in the 20 years following his death. In
the pages of their Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Meʾassef (“The
Collector”), they preached the virtues of secular culture and publicized the
need for secular education. In response to the Edict of Toleration promulgated
in 1781 by the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–90), Naphtali Wessely
issued an urgent call for the reform of Jewish education as a prelude to full
emancipation. Secular subjects—mathematics, German, and world history and
literature—were to take precedence over traditional Jewish studies. The study
of the Bible, because it was generally acknowledged to be a fundamental part of
Western culture, was to be emphasized at the expense of the customary focus on
the Talmud. Following this model, modern Jewish schools were established by
Jewish intellectuals and businessmen in several German cities, among them
Frankfurt and Hamburg. As its educational activities began to bear fruit in the
wide dissemination of secular culture, the Berlin Haskala abandoned the use of
Hebrew for German and gradually disintegrated. Unlike Mendelssohn himself, his
immediate intellectual descendants, including his own children, were unable to
strike a balance between Jewish and secular culture; their Western education
undermined their religious faith, and they saw themselves as Europeans rather
than as Jews.
One of Mendelssohn’s disciples, David Friedlaender, offered
to convert to Christianity without accepting Christian dogma or Christian
rites; he felt that both Judaism and Christianity shared the same religious
truth but that there was no relation at all between that truth and Judaism’s
ceremonial law. The offer was refused because Friedlaender would not
acknowledge the superiority of Christianity and make an unconditional
commitment to it. Unlike Friedlaender, many other followers of Mendelssohn
chose to leave the Jewish faith as the only way to win full acceptance in
European society.
In eastern Europe
Thus, the Haskala was quickly played out in central Europe;
as an idea, its further career was to continue in eastern Europe, particularly
in the Russian Empire, where it flourished in the middle third of the 19th
century until, as a result of the pogroms of 1881, Jews lost faith in the
willingness of Russians to accept “enlightened” Jews. It was a tenet of the
Russian Haskala that the tsar was a benevolent leader who would bestow
emancipation upon his Jewish subjects as soon as they proved themselves worthy
of it. A goal of the Russian Haskala, therefore, was for the Jews to transform
themselves into model citizens—enlightened, unsuperstitious, devoted to secular
learning and productive occupations. Following the example of the Berlin
Haskala, a Russian Hebrew-language writer, Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860),
published a pamphlet, Teʿuda be-Yisrael (“Testimony in Israel”), extolling
the benefits of secular education. At the same time, writers such as Joseph
Perl (1774–1839) and Isaac Erter (1792–1851), though traditional Jews
themselves, attacked in virulent satire the superstitious folk customs of the
masses, thereby opening the way to the anticlericalism that became
characteristic of the Russian Haskala.
In the 1840s and ’50s the group’s emphasis shifted from
satirical attacks on the cultural parochialism of the Pale of Settlement (the
regions to which the Jews were restricted) to romanticization of life outside
the Pale, including periods of the Jewish past. Thus, Hebrew poets and
novelists in Russia, such as Micah Judah Lebensohn (1828–52) and Abraham Mapu
(1808–67), contributed to the creation of a modern Hebrew literature. In the
1860s the Russian Haskala, reflecting the larger political climate, entered a
“positivist” phase, calling for practical social and economic reforms.
Hebrew-language journals were established, and the Hebrew essay and didactic
poetry, calling for religious and cultural reforms, came into their own,
particularly in the hands of the poet Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) and the
essayist Moses Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910). Abandoning the original Hebrew and
German orientation of the Russian Haskala, a number of Jewish intellectuals—the
most prominent of whom were Yoachim Tarnopol (1810–1900), Osip Rabinovich
(1817–69), and Lev Levanda (1835–88)—became Russifiers, founding
Russian-language Jewish weeklies devoted to “patriotism, emancipation,
modernism.” Like their contemporary fellow Jews in western Europe, they
declared themselves to be Russians by nationality and Jews by religious belief alone.
In 1863 a group of wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg and Odessa created the
Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia for the purpose
of educating Russian Jewry into “readiness for citizenship.” The goal of all
segments of the Russian Haskala in the 1860s and ’70s was to turn Jews into
good Russians and to make their Jewishness a matter of personal choice. But the
hopes of the Haskala were upset by the reaction of Russians following the
assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Several Jewish communities were
destroyed in pogroms, which often received the tacit approval of the governing
authorities. Jewish economic life was severely curtailed, and quotas for Jewish
students were put in place in secular educational institutions. The bright
optimism of Russian-Jewish intellectuals faded.
Religious reform movements
One element of Westernization that the Haskala championed
was the reform of religion. This movement began in western Europe during the
Napoleonic period (1800–15), when certain aspects of Jewish belief and
observance were seen as incompatible with the new position of the Jew in
Western society. Napoleon convoked a Sanhedrin in 1807 to create a modern
definition of Judaism that renounced Jewish nationhood and national aspirations,
asserted that rabbinic authority was purely spiritual, and recognized the
priority of civil over religious authority even in matters of intermarriage. In
countries other than France, the rationale for reform, at least in its early
years, was more aesthetic than doctrinal. The external aspects of Jewish
worship—i.e., the form of the service—was unacceptable to the newly Westernized
members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in both Germany and the United States, whose
cultural standards had been shaped by the surrounding society and who desired
above all to resemble their Gentile peers. Thus, the short-lived Reform temple
established in Seesen in 1810 by the pioneer German reformer Israel Jacobson
(1768–1828) introduced organ and choir music, allowed men and women to sit
together during worship, delivered the sermon in German instead of Hebrew, and
omitted liturgical references to a personal messiah and the restoration of
Israel. A more radical temple established in Hamburg in 1818 adopted all of
Jacobson’s reforms and published its own much-abridged prayer book, which
deleted almost all references to the long-awaited restoration of Zion.
Reformers in Charleston, South Carolina, introduced similar changes in the
synagogue ritual in 1824. It was apparent to the reformers that in Western
society Judaism would have to divest itself of its alien customs and conform to
the cultural and intellectual standards of the new “age of reason.”
German Reform in the 1840s became institutionalized, a
matter of organized formal belief and practice. At a series of synods held at
Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt (1845), and Breslau (1846), it created the first
theological rationalization for changes introduced to the faith in the previous
generation. Judaism, it was declared, had always been a developmental religion
that conformed to the demands of the times. Moreover, the reformers maintained,
the Jews were no longer a nation and therefore were bound not by their
religious and political code of law but only by the dictates of moral law. Rituals
that impeded full Jewish participation in German social and political life were
no longer considered valid expressions of Jewish religious truth. The use of
Hebrew in religious services was limited; practices such as circumcision and
the dietary laws and all national messianic hopes were questioned in light of
the “spirit of the times.” Messianism in Reform Judaism was transformed into
active concern for social welfare in the present, and the Jewish role in
history became Diaspora-centered; some even thought of it as constituting a
mission to the Gentiles.
Although Reform Judaism was initiated in Europe, its
success was limited there because many central European governments would not
recognize more than one form of Judaism in any one locale. Even in areas where
it had taken root, by the middle of the 19th century, European Reform (now
usually called “Liberal Judaism”) lost much of its early radicalism. Reform was
much more successful in the United States, where it was carried by massive
numbers of German Jewish immigrants in the 1840s and where it coalesced with
existing American reform movements. By 1880 almost all of the 200 synagogues in
the United States (amalgamated in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in
1873) were Reform. In 1885 a conference of Reform rabbis formulated what was
then the most comprehensive statement of Reform philosophy in the so-called
Pittsburgh Platform. This manifesto announced that Judaism was an evolutionary
faith and no longer a national one, and it declared that the Mosaic and
rabbinical laws regulating diet, purity, and dress were “entirely foreign to
our present mental and spiritual state.” While the preservation of historical
identity was considered beneficial, the maintenance of tradition was not; the
Talmud was to be treated merely as religious literature, not as legislation.
The principles of the Pittsburgh Platform remained the official philosophy of
the American Reform movement until 1937, when a later generation, seeking to
meet different emotional and intellectual needs, reintroduced the concept of
Jewish personhood into the Columbus Platform; this document also reemphasized
Hebrew and traditional liturgy and practices. After World War II, Reform in the
United States developed along two tracks. It departed in new ways from
traditional Judaism in ordaining women (1972), allowing patrilineal descent
(1983), and sanctifying same-sex marriage (2000). On the other hand, some
Reform Jews began reintegrating long-discarded rituals into worship services.
This neo-ritualism stimulated greater use of Hebrew in prayer books and a more
dynamic Zionism.
If Reform was a child of Enlightenment rationalism,
Conservative Judaism was a child of historical romanticism. It began in 1845,
when Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) and a group of followers seceded from a second
Reform synod at Frankfurt over the issue of limiting the use of Hebrew to a
small core of prayers. For Frankel, Hebrew represented the spirit of Judaism
and the Jewish people, and Judaism itself was not merely a theology of ethics
but the historical expression of the Jewish experience; this definition he
called “positive-historical Judaism.” Although Conservative Judaism conceived
of Judaism as a developmental religion, it charted its course through close
study of tradition and the will of the people and thus came to largely
traditional conclusions about religious observance.
Orthodox developments
In western and central Europe
Although affected by the efforts at religious reform, the
bulk of the official Jewish establishment in western and central Europe
remained Orthodox (a term first used by Reform leaders to designate their
traditionalist opponents). Under the leadership of Samson Raphael Hirsch
(1808–88) in Frankfurt, a more modern and militant form of Judaism arose. Known
as Neo-Orthodoxy, the new movement asserted its right to break with any Jewish
community that contained Reform elements. The teachings of Neo-Orthodoxy were
profoundly influential, for they indicated the possibility of living a ritually
and religiously full life while being totally integrated into Western society.
This was accomplished by positing a theoretical division between religion and
culture: in religion the Jews were to remain Orthodox (though deferring their
messianic aspirations to the unforeseeable future), while in manners and
culture they were to become Western. This form of Orthodoxy, which became the
intellectual model for Western Orthodoxy, continued into the 21st century in
the United States in a variety of religious and academic institutions (such as
the Yeshiva University in New York City and the bulk of English-speaking
Orthodox synagogues), coexisting in substantial tension with a number of
Orthodox groups, most notably the Lubavitcher and Satmar Hasidim (see Hasidism)
and some Talmudic academies that viewed the Western world as the enemy and
chose to re-create the ghetto.
In eastern Europe
By the mid-18th century, Orthodoxy in eastern Europe,
having been convulsed by frantic messianism and stifled by the sterility of
legalistic scholarship, was ripe for revival. In the mid-17th century the
experience of Shabbetaianism, the first messianic movement to excite virtually
all of world Jewry, had revealed the pervasiveness of Jewish exhaustion with
the Exile and fervent longing for messianic redemption. Later, in the 18th
century, the nihilistic sect of Frankists (the followers of Jacob Frank)
transformed that longing into a this-worldly hysteria. Talmudic piety and
study, sunk in excessive pilpul (acute logical distinctions that often became
mere hairsplitting), was refreshed by the new critical methods of Elijah ben
Solomon (1720–97), the gaon of Vilna. Although essentially a legal rigorist, he
was open to more-scientific methods of textual analysis insofar as they helped
him to elucidate Talmudic texts. Orthodox religious expression also was raised
to a new level with the development of Hasidism (pietism) by Israel Baʿal
Shem Tov (c. 1700–60) in the mid-18th century. Hasidism contained elements of
social protest, being at least in part a movement of the poor against the
wealthy communal leadership and of the unlearned against the learned—though
many of its leaders, among them Rabbi Dov Baer (1710–72), who was the maggid
(“preacher”) of Mezhirich, and Rabbi Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1810), were
well-versed in Talmudic learning. Nevertheless, it was essentially a
non-messianic outcry in the name of piety, emphasizing prayer and personal
religious devotion here and now. The major innovation that Hasidism introduced
into Jewish religious life was the charismatic leader, the rebbe, who served as
teacher, confessor, wonder-worker, God’s vicar on earth, and, occasionally,
atoning sacrifice. The earliest rebbes were democratically chosen, but
spiritual dynasties formed as the position of leadership passed to the
descendants of the first rebbes on the presumption that they had inherited
their fathers’ charisma. Hasidism spread throughout eastern Europe and was most
successful in Poland.
Hasidism made little headway in Lithuania, where the traditional
rabbinic class, under the leadership of Elijah ben Solomon, was able to stave
off its influence by issuing a ban of excommunication (ḥerem, “anathema”)
against the new movement. The tactic, which involved a complete boycott and
cutting off of communication, was widely embraced by non-Hasidic rabbis, who
were given the title of Mitnaggedim (“Opponents”) by the Hasidim. In areas
where the rabbis had lost the respect of the masses, however, the ḥerem
proved largely ineffective, and it called forth a round of
counter-excommunications by the Hasidic rebbes. With the passage of time,
Hasidim and Mitnaggedim abandoned their conflict and came to see each other as
allies against the threat to all Orthodox Jewish religion posed by Haskala and
secularization. The impact of Hasidism on eastern European Jewry cannot be
overemphasized; even in Lithuania, where it did not take firm hold, it
stimulated the growth of a homegrown pietism in the Musar (ethicist) movement
of the mid-19th century, and it renewed the Talmudic energies of its opponents.
Developments in scholarship
As the Jews of central Europe moved into mainstream
society, a group of young Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to Jewish
scholarship of a type far different from traditional Talmudic learning or
medieval philosophy. In 1819 Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Moses Moser
(1796–1838) founded the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning. The original
group quickly dissolved, however, and Zunz became the unofficial leader of a
generation of scholars dedicated to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (“science of
Judaism”).
The Wissenschaft movement sought to prove that the Jewish
past was intellectually respectable and worthy of study, and hence that the
Jews deserved an equal place within European societies. Jewish scholarship was
enlisted as a weapon in the battles for change. Thus, Isaac M. Jost (1793–1860)
wrote a general history of the Jews to promote Reform, Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche
Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (1832; “The Worship Sermons of the
Jews, Historically Developed”) served to legitimize the modern innovation of
the sermon in the vernacular, and Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the outstanding
leader of German Reform in the 1840s and ’50s, interpreted the Pharisees as the
forerunners of the reformers of his own day. In their work, these intellectuals
presented archetypes of what modern Jews should become. To support their claims
of academic respectability, the Wissenschaft figures highlighted those aspects
of the Jewish past that were closely integrated with general fields of study.
In particular, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who owes his fame to towering
achievements in bibliography, was concerned above all with the contribution of
Jews to science, medicine, and mathematics. These scholars set out to praise
Judaism as one of the cofounders of the Western tradition; they argued that,
because the Jews produced great culture whenever they were not excluded from
European society, they would repeat such accomplishments under conditions of social
and political equality.
The Wissenschaft movement stimulated the critical study of
the Jewish past, and great works of synthesis written from a variety of
perspectives began to appear: the multivolume Geschichte der Juden von den
ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76; History of the Jews), written
from a romantic-national point of view by Heinrich Graetz (1817–91); Dorot
ha-rishonim (1897–1932; “The First Generations”), by Isaac Halevy (1847–1914);
Toldot Yisrael (1894; “History of Israel”), written from an orthodox standpoint
by Zeʾev Jawitz; and Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (1925–30;
“The World History of the Jewish People”) by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941),
reflecting his belief in secular, nationalistic communal autonomy. After the
1920s this tradition of great synthesis was carried on in the United States by
Salo W. Baron (1895–1989), who by the early 1980s had produced 18 volumes of
his Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–83), and in Israel by
Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973), whose chief work was Yisrael ba-gola (3rd ed., 5
vol., 1961–66; “Israel in the Exile”). Many other first-rank scholars in
Europe, Israel, and the United States have made notable contributions to the
study of Jewish history, rabbinics, and mysticism.
Jewish-Christian relations
Jewish-Christian relations in the 19th century were
strained at best and often broke down during periods of open conflict. The
established Christian churches, particularly Roman Catholicism, were staunch
upholders of the old order; they identified the Jews as the major beneficiaries
of the French Revolution and as the carriers of liberal, secular, anticlerical,
and often revolutionary doctrines. Clerical antisemitism allied itself with the
antisemitism of the traditional right in France, and both forms contended with
movements that supported the results of the French Revolution in the great
convulsion of the Dreyfus Affair in the last years of the 19th century. In
Russia the conflict between the Jews and the Orthodox Church released the most
open and virulent manifestation of religious antisemitism. In the view of the
church, the Jews were seeking to undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the
very foundations of Russian society. The church and the tsarist authorities
condoned—and even encouraged—violent pogroms against the Jews in 1881–82 and
again in 1905.
Russian Orthodoxy was also active in spreading the blood
libel, a superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder of Christian children
whose blood would be used to make unleavened bread at Passover. The blood libel
first emerged in the 12th century and often led to the persecution of Jews; it
reemerged in Damascus in 1840 (in which instance the French consul in Syria
initiated the accusation) and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882. In both cases,
torture was used to obtain false confessions, though the accused were
ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence of the blood libel in modern
times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish bookkeeper in Odessa who was
accused of ritual murder by the tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more
than two years, he was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury.
From Russian Orthodox circles too arose the Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged
international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social
order through liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements. The
concoction appeared about the turn of the 20th century and was proved to be a
forgery by 1921. Despite this demonstration, the Protocols was widely used in
antisemitic propaganda in Europe, the United States, and the Arab world into
the 21st century.
In the 20th century, Jews and Christians moved toward
mutual understanding. Although many Christians continued to hold irrational and
hostile attitudes toward Jews, some liberal Christian voices were raised
against antisemitism in the early decades of the century. In the United States
the National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1928 in response
to the virulent antisemitism propagated in Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn
Independent. Some Christian leaders spoke out during the 1930s against the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, but the majority of Christian leaders in Europe
remained silent, even during the Holocaust. In 1946, however, the World Council
of Churches denounced antisemitism, and in 1965 the Second Vatican Council of
the Roman Catholic Church adopted the schema on the Jews and other
non-Christian religions, which formally revised the church’s traditional
attitude toward the Jews as the killers of Christ. A growing feeling of
ecumenism was shared between Jews and Christians; indeed, Pope John Paul II
made improved relations between Catholics and Jews a hallmark of his papacy.
Although there remain many difficulties related to the question of the place
that Zionism and the State of Israel hold within Judaism, the older forms of
official church antisemitism have been radically diminished.
Zionism
The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was
Zionism, which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term
for the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the
establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another example of
the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism. In its secular
aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation of the Jews by
transforming them into a nation like all other nations. Although it drew upon
the general currents of 19th-century European nationalism, its major impetus
came from the revival of a virulent form of racist antisemitism in the last
decades of the 19th century, as noted above. Zionism reacted to antisemitic
contentions that the Jews were aliens in European society and could never hope
to be integrated into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge
into a basic premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement.
Zionism has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social
Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new center of Jewish
energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular religion for many
Diaspora Jews.
American Judaism
The history of Judaism in the United States is the story of
several fresh beginnings. In the colonial period the character of the tiny
American Jewish community was shaped by the earliest Sephardic immigrants. The
community was officially Orthodox but, unlike European Jewish communities, was
voluntaristic, and by the early 19th century much of the younger generation had
moved away from the faith. By the mid-19th century a new wave of central
European immigrants revived the declining community and remade it to serve
their own needs. Primarily small shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants
migrated westward, founding new Jewish centers that were almost entirely
controlled by laymen.
Life on the frontier in an open society created a
predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant that the greatest
American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century, Isaac Mayer Wise
(1819–1900), was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wise sought to unite all of
American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions that he founded: the
Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), Hebrew Union College (1875), and
the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical
reforming spirit ultimately drove traditionalist elements into opposition.
The head of the traditionalists was Isaac Leeser (1806–68),
a native of Germany, who had attempted to create an indigenous American
community along the lines of a modernized traditionalism. After his death,
Conservative forces became disorganized, but, in reaction to Reform, they
defined themselves by their attachment to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and
especially to Hebrew as the language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato
Morais (1823–97), a traditional Sephardic Jew of Italian birth, Conservative
circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America.
The eastern European immigrants who moved in large numbers
to American shores from 1881 to 1914 were profoundly different in culture and
manners from the older elements of the American Jewish community, and they and
their descendants have made American Judaism what it is today. The bridge
between the existing Jewish community led by German Jews of Reform persuasion
and the new immigrant masses was the traditionalist element among the older
settlers. A traditionalist, Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), cooperated with the German
Reform circle of Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in reorganizing the Jewish
Theological Seminary (1902) and other institutions for the purpose of Americanizing
the eastern European immigrants. Enough eastern European rabbis and scholars
had immigrated, however, to create their own synagogues, which reproduced the
customs of the Old World. In 1880 almost all of the 200 Jewish congregations in
the United States were Reform, but by 1890 there were 533 synagogues, and most
of the new ones founded by immigrant groups were Orthodox. The Union of
Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements
associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by
Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal.
In 1902 immigrant rabbis also formed their own body, the Union of Orthodox
Rabbis of the United States and Canada (the Agudath ha-Rabbanim), which fostered
the creation of yeshivas (rabbinic academies) of the old type. In 1915 two
small yeshivas, Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, merged
and undertook a program of further growth, adding Yeshiva College of secular
studies in 1928 and becoming Yeshiva University in 1945. The eastern European
Orthodox elements concentrated primarily on Jewish education, and it was they
who introduced the movement for Jewish day schools, analogous to Christian
parochial schools. Gradually, an American version of Orthodoxy developed on the
Neo-Orthodox model of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which combined
institutional separatism with a certain openness to general culture.
The immigrants and their children had three desires: to
advance socially by joining older congregations or forming their own in an
Americanized image, to affirm an unideological commitment to Jewish life, and
to maintain their ties to the overseas Jewish communities of their origin. With
their strong sense of Jewish personhood, they introduced Zionism into American
Jewish life and accepted the basic ideas of the Reconstructionism of Mordecai
Kaplan (1881–1983), which was committed to Zionism. A small group of
anti-Zionists remained a significant force in the 1930s and ’40s, but their central
organization, the American Council for Judaism, represented the descendants of
earlier German Jewish immigrants. The later immigrants took over all the
earlier institutions of the Jewish community and imbued them with their own
spirit.
American Jewish religious life is a continuum, from the
most traditional Orthodoxy to the most radical Reconstructionism. In theory,
all Orthodox groups agree on the revealed nature of all of Jewish law. For
Reform groups, the moral doctrine of Judaism is divine and its ritual law is
man-made; Conservatives see Judaism as the working out in both areas of a
divine revelation that is incarnate in a slowly changing human history; and the
Reconstructionists (who also include some Conservative and Reform Jews) view
Judaism as the evolving civilization created by the Jewish people in the light
of its highest conscience. The role of the rabbi is substantially the same in
all three groups: no longer a Talmudic scholar but a preacher, pastor, and
administrator, a cross between a parish priest and the leader of an ethnic
group. Religious life for the three major Jewish denominations—Orthodox,
Reform, and Conservative—revolves around the individual synagogue and the
denomination to which it belongs. As religious identification has become
increasingly respectable in American life, the Jews have followed the American
norm, affiliating in greater numbers with synagogues, though often for ethnic
or social rather than religious reasons.
Judaism in other lands
Modernity came first to the Jewish people of Europe. It was
therefore within the European context that representatives of important
non-Ashkenazi communities—such as the proto-Zionist Sephardi Judah ben Solomon Ḥai
Alkalai (1798–1878) of Sarajevo and the Luzzatto family and Elijah Benamozegh
(1822–1900) in Italy—participated in variations of Jewish modernity. In England
and France more so than in Germany or Russia, the central focus of Jewish
experience was Wissenschaft des Judentums, with its Enlightenment ideology;
there the “republic of scholarship” became the synagogue of the Jewish
intelligentsia. In neither country did Reform Judaism gain a major foothold,
for the Orthodox establishment liberalized its synagogue practice while
retaining its essentially conservative outlook. In Anglo-Jewish life in the
last decades of the 19th century, the two most pronounced modernist tendencies
were the moderate, romantic traditionalism of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) and
the “renewed Karaism” of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore (1858–1938), whose
version of religious reform was “back to the Bible.”
In South America and Canada, Jewish modernity appeared
late, for European Jewry arrived in those places even later than in the United
States, attaining significant numbers only in the 20th century. These
communities were dependent on immigrant scholars and intellectuals for serious
Jewish thought. Jews in the Arab lands in North Africa and the Middle East,
living in traditional societies, entered modernity even later than those on the
peripheries of Europe. Many of them received their first introduction to the
Western world in schools set up by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (a Jewish
defense organization centered in Paris), which combined Jewish education with
the language and values of French civilization. Yet most of these communities
remained traditionalist almost up to the moment when they were expelled or felt
compelled to relocate, beginning in 1948, when the State of Israel was created.
The ferment of modernity in all its forms is now being felt in their ranks. In
Israel, which has received a large segment of Sephardic Jewry, the attention of
these communities has turned to gaining equality with the more advanced
Ashkenazim rather than to developing forms of modern Jewish thought.
Other groups that may be described as regional or ethnic
include the Bene Israel, descendants of Jewish settlers in the Bombay region
(now Mumbai) of India, whose deviation in some Halakhic matters from the
present Orthodox consensus has raised problems for those among them who have
migrated to Israel; the Falashas of Ethiopia, whose development has been almost
entirely outside the mainstream described in this article; and the Black Jews
of the United States, whose place in and relation to the rest of the community
remains unclear.
Contemporary Judaism
As a result of the Holocaust, Judaism has become a
non-European religion; its three major centers, which together include more
than three-fourths of world Jewry, are Israel, the Slavic region of the former
Soviet Union, and the United States. Although Jews constitute only a small
fraction of the population of the United States, Judaism plays an important
role in American life; with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism it is regarded
as one of the major American faiths. Similarly, in the international realm of
Western religion, Judaism has been welcomed as a partner able to deal with
other major religions as an equal on issues such as antisemitism, human rights,
and world peace.
Within its own community, Jewry is faced with the
increasing secularization of Jewish identity in its three major centers, each
in its own way. In the United States the open society and the “melting pot”
ideologies of past generations have fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish
identity increasingly devoid of concrete religious, national, or historical
content; in the former Soviet Union, government policy from the 1930s had
banned the teaching of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely
discouraged any manifestation of Jewish identity as a sign of the political
disloyalty of “rootless cosmopolitans”; and in Israel a secular nationalism has
taken root, raising questions about the role that Judaism plays in the identity
of the average Israeli.
Nonetheless, underneath the external secularization there
are signs of a deep and persisting religious fervour, in which the sense of
history, community, and personal authenticity figure as the intertwined strands
of Jewish religious life, especially as it has been affected by the State of
Israel. Some of the rituals of the Jewish tradition, especially the rites of
passage at the crucial stages of individual existence, are almost universally
observed; in the United States, for example, more than 80 percent of Jewish
children receive some formal religious training. Among Jewish youth there is,
in some circles, a quest for tradition. In the United States, Jewish communes
have been established that seek new forms of Jewish expression; in Israel,
groups such as Mevaqshe Derekh (“Seekers of the Way”) have tried to bridge
secular Israeli culture and Jewish tradition and to maintain traditional Jewish
ethical standards even in wartime; in Russia, thousands of young people gather
on several occasions of the year to dance and sing and express solidarity in
front of the synagogues in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, signs of major
weaknesses persist. The rate of intermarriage among Jews in the Diaspora has
increased, while regular synagogue attendance, at the very highest 20 percent
in the United States, remains far below church attendance.
Despite their lack of traditional piety, there is a general
sense among Jews that they remain Jews not because of the force of antisemitism
but because of the attractiveness of their tradition and their sense of a
common history and destiny. Although in 1945 the world Jewish community,
decimated and horrified by the Holocaust, felt in danger of disappearing, there
appeared to be no such despair in the last quarter of the century, when there was
an expectation that Jewish communal feeling would remain strong—especially, for
many or most Jews, in light of the existence of the State of Israel. Judaism
enjoyed a heightened dignity in the eyes of the world, not only because of the
creation of the State of Israel but also because of Judaism’s close relations
with other world religions. Although the recurring phenomenon of the alienation
of young Jews from their tradition was troubling, it was no more so than in
recent past generations. Along with other major religions, Judaism’s most
disturbing problem was how to deal with secular ideologies and the growth of
secularism within its own ranks. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, it
appeared that Judaism would have to contend with as many problems as the other
major religions did, but it would face them with no less confidence—and with
more confidence than it had felt at the start of the previous century.
Arthur Hertzberg