American Judaism: Our Starting Question - What Does It Mean to Be Jewish in America Today?

Jacob Neusner, prolific author and controversial scholar of both rabbinic and contemporary Judaism, compiled an anthology - "American Judaism: Adventure in Modernity" - on "the Judaism of the American middle class"; the beliefs and world view of the many Jews "who may join synagogues but rarely go to them, are 'for Israel' but do not want to live there, like 'Jewish food' but do not keep kosher, and do not believe in God but know for sure that the Jews are God's chosen people."

In his introduction to the volume, Neusner wonders,

What happens to religious traditions in modern times? Historians describe the development of institutions and doctrines, while sociologists uncover their social foundations. Historians of religions, however, tend to concentrate attention on archaic, or pre-modern, religious life, particularly in the Far East, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. They have developed questions about the nature of archaic religions and provided illuminating perspectives. Here we shall ask the questions of historians of religions about people heretofore neglected by them: religious men in modern America. The data differ from all others studied by historians of religions because they derive from a secular, modern, technologically advanced and intellectually sophisticated civilization. And that is why for the study of the history of religions, America, with the contemporary West it represents, is a new and unexplored field of inquiry.

If we were anthropologists studying the religion of a pre-literate tribe, we should ask about the rituals and myths of that tribe, the character of its religious leadership, the social structures that embody its religious traditions, the way in which individual identity is defined. So too of America. We want to know about the religious rituals, beliefs, and stories that shape people’s minds, the religious leaders and their place in those beliefs and stories, the religious institutions, the role of religion in the larger society. But with this difference: America is no tribe, but a complex and heterogeneous society. Americans are not pre-literate, but in their masses highly educated. Religiosity in skeptical, modern America is a different sort of thing from the believing in an archaic society that takes for granted the central propositions of religion, as of the broader culture, and knows nothing of doubt or unbelief.

What does it mean to be religious in America? The question is too abstract, the data insufficiently digested. Here, we focus on a small part of that question, on a group that is both well-documented and intensely self-concerned, the Jews. They form a coherent group in American society. They generally regard their group as religious, though doing so requires the revision of commonplace definitions of religion. And their intellectuals have articulately addressed themselves to what it means to be a Jew in America.

Still more interesting, the Jews came from a society that stood on the threshold of modernity to a country that had long before become its bastion. Central and Eastern European Jewry, which supplied the vast majority of emigrants to America, had experienced no Renaissance to focus attention on man and his achievements; no Reformation to revise the traditional religion and to purify and articulate its doctrines; no Enlightenment to impose on the tradition the astringent criteria of reason and rationality; no Romantic recovery of tradition in a post-Enlightenment reaction; and no Darwinian age of Progress. The five formative centuries of Western civilization passed unnoticed, with little effect, over Central and Eastern European Jews. They came from agricultural villages to the American metropolis, from traditional patterns of human relationships to impersonal ones, from a primitive to a highly developed economic system, from a society where the stranger was an outsider to one in which all were alien to one another, from an intensely religious to a secular world. These changes produced a vast transformation of their religious life, and that is the problem of our study: What has happened to Judaism, and what does it mean to be a Jew today?

The answer to that question does not lie in the study of the history and sociology of American Jewry, or even of American Judaism. We are not going to rehearse the oft-told tales of how in 1654 a few Jewish families came to New Amsterdam, or of the three "waves" of immigration, Spanish, German and Russian, or of the role of the Jews in fighting for America, or of the founding various synagogues and national religious movements. Among the several good introductory studies of American Jews and Judaism, Nathan Glazer’s American Judaism is outstanding. But all that is needed to answer our question lies in the pages of this book, though many works not quoted here deepen and broaden the inquiry. On the whole, such works concentrate on outward things: the place of Jews in American society and culture; the development of their institutions, synagogues, and community organizations; the way in which Jews became Americans. These issues dominated the interest of scholars for whom what it meant for a Jew was generally clear and readily defined. What was problematical was the way in which Jews fit into the larger picture of American life.

Today Jews are sufficiently well integrated into that picture so that one need not wonder whether and how a well-defined foreign body is to be assimilated into a stable and equally well-defined social and cultural structure. After four generations, to be Jewish is a mode of being an American, taken for granted by Jews among other Americans, and no longer problematical. The dominant patterns and institutions of American Jewry have been established for nearly a century. What now remains to be explored is, What do Jews now do because they are Jewish? What do they think, how do they respond, when they do as Jews, to the issues of human existence in America? What has happened to their religious tradition — the whole of it, not merely the theological surface? What of the inner life of people who superficially are the most modern of men?