Judaism

JUDAISM

JUDAISM. The first Jews in North America arrived from Holland in 1654, their ancestors having been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. The religion of these Sephardic (Spanish) Jews was different from that of the Ashkenazic Jews who arrived in the United States two centuries later from Central and Eastern Europe. Sephardic Jews followed a ritual different from their Ashkenazic counterparts and came from a region where, until the 1490s, they had enjoyed relative peace, security, and wealth under both Muslim and Christian rulers. They were eager to assimilate into American society and did so successfully. During the American Revolution, a Hessian mercenary serving in Newport, Rhode Island, commented that the Jews were "not distinguishable by their beards and attire … while their women wear the same French finery as the other faiths." The arrival of Ashkenazic Jews during the nineteenth century altered the character of Judaism in the United States. Although many gravitated toward the Re-form tradition, the majority remained Orthodox, especially those coming from Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Russia between 1880 and 1924. As a consequence, Orthodox Judaism in the United States became synonymous with Central and Eastern European Jewry.

Orthodox Judaism

By the 1820s three Orthodox Ashkenazic rite synagogues had been established in North America: the first in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1761, followed by Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia in 1802 and, in 1825, by B'nai Jeshurun in New York City. The first Orthodox rabbi, however, did not arrive in the United States until 1840 when Abraham Rice came from Germany to serve the Orthodox congregation in Baltimore.

Orthodox Jews strictly observe the Halachah (Jewish laws). Derived from the Torah, the Mishna (commentaries on the Torah), and the Gemara (commentaries on the commentaries), the laws make up the Talmud, the authoritative text of Judaism. Orthodox Judaism is preeminently a religion of laws and practices that direct and regulate every aspect of life for the faithful. Among Orthodox Jews, however, community is also essential. To worship, Orthodox Jews require only the presence often adult Jewish males, the minyan ; they need no synagogue or rabbi. Such a community could theoretically be small and self-contained, having no formal connection with other Jews; in practice, however, such isolation has proven impossible to sustain. Complex issues involving ritual and law frequently compel adjudication from an outside authority. As a result, questions of, and disputes about, faith, law, and practice have linked one Jewish community to another.

The Retreat from Orthodoxy

The years between 1840 and 1880 were turbulent for the American Jewish community. Jews increasingly rejected the Halachi prescriptions as old-fashioned and inapplicable to their circumstances in the United States. Everywhere Orthodoxy was in retreat.

Reform Jews attempted to accommodate Judaism more completely to the modern world. From the 1840s until the turn of the twentieth century, Reform Judaism was the primary form of Judaism in the United States, losing its dominance to Conservative Judaism only in the 1920s. With roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Reform Judaism emphasized the ethical and moral aspects of religion at the expense of ritual and theology. Only in the United States, however, did Reform Judaism attract substantial numbers of adherents.

The first Reform organization in the United States began among members of the Congregation Beth Elohim of Charleston, South Carolina. They wanted briefer services, greater use of English, and the mixed seating of men and women. (Orthodox Jews separate men and women at

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worship.) When the majority of the congregation refused to yield, the dissidents withdrew and, in 1824, founded the Reformed Society of Israelites.

The principal impetus behind the growth of Reform Judaism in the United States came from German immigrants who created Reform Vereine (Reform Societies) that eventually developed into temples, as they called synagogues. In 1842 Temple Har Siani in Baltimore became the first first Reform temple in the United States, followed in quick succession by Temple Emanu-El in New York City (1845), and later by Sinai in Chicago (1858). During the second half of the nineteenth century, the efforts of Rabbis Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, and Kaufman Kohler gave institutional order and theological substance to Reform Judaism.

Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism radically altered Jewish belief, ritual, practice, and law. Meeting in Philadelphia in 1869, Re-form Jews, guided by the liberal David Einhorn, rabbi at Adath Jeshurun (later Beth-El) in New York City, rejected the hope for a restoration of Israel and a rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Einhorn declared, alternately, that the "messianic aim" of Judaism was a union of all the children of God, not merely the Jews. He also downplayed the customary dietary restrictions and the ritual of male circumcision.

The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, drafted by Kaufman Kohler, rabbi at Temple Beth-El in New York City and Einhorn's son-in-law, superseded the Reform statement of 1869 and repudiated all Jewish laws and practices not in keeping with "the views and habits of modern civilization." In the Pittsburgh Platform, which Isaac Mayer Wise called the "Jewish Declaration of Independence," Kohler asserted that the Jews were not a nation or people in exile, but a religious community. As such, Jews could anticipate "neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state." Kohler and the signatories of the Pittsburgh Platform characterized Judaism as a "progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason."

Controversy and Antagonism

Relations between Reform and Orthodox Judaism could not have been more antagonistic. Reform Jews looked upon the Orthodox as ignorant rabble who had given themselves over entirely to vulgar superstitions. The Orthodox considered Reform Jews heretics and pagans. Yet the majority of the 2.5 million Jewish immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924, or at least their children, gradually abandoned Orthodoxy and embraced Reform Judaism. Although they accepted the tenets of Reform Judaism, Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe were unwilling to renounce their Jewish cultural heritage and ethnic identity. Many were ardent Zionists, and by the 1930s had compelled the Re-form movement to change its position on Zionism. Originally rejecting Zionism, by 1937 the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which Isaac Wise had founded in 1889 as one of the institutional centers of Reform Judaism, adopted a statement of principles that called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Conservative Judaism

The effort to accommodate to American circumstances and concurrently to preserve Jewish tradition led to the emergence of Conservative Judaism. By the end of the twentieth century Conservative Judaism was the largest branch of American Judaism, consisting of 850 congregations that represented 1.5 million members.

Conservative Judaism originated from a breach that developed in the Reform movement. At a banquet held in 1883 to honor the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, the caterer, who was himself Jewish, served shrimp, one of the foods forbidden to Jews who follow kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. Several members of the board of trustees along with a number of rabbis left the banquet in a rage, convinced that they could not make common cause with Reform Jews who apparently sought to ridicule them and to denigrate the customs and precepts they cherished. From this relatively minor incident Conservative Judaism was born.

Although the infamous "trefa (forbidden food) banquet" was the immediate cause of the Jewish division into Reform and Conservative factions, Conservative Judaism had more significant antecedents. Not all Jews in the United States endorsed the radical break with tradition that the reformers espoused in the Pittsburgh Platform. Under the direction of Isaac Lesser, Sabato Morais, Henry Pereira Mendes, Marcus Jastrow, and Benjamin Szold, Conservative Jews sought to perpetuate the Jewish dietary laws, which Isaac Wise had disparaged as "Kitchen Judaism," the identity of Jews as a people in exile, and the unity of American Jews with their brethren scattered throughout the world. The Conservatives did not oppose change—surely God had not sanctioned all elements of the tradition; some were the work of men and thus men could and, when necessary, should alter them.

Conservatives maintained, however, that Reform Jews encouraged purely utilitarian modifications. They opposed the attitude that the law needed to be replaced not because it had been tried and found wanting but because it had been tried and found impractical and difficult. Conservative Jews did not wish to impugn the tradition but to infuse it with new life. Rabbi Alexander Kohut of Ahavath Chesed in New York City expressed the ideals of Conservative Judaism in a sermon delivered in 1885: "I desire a Judaism full of life … a Judaism true to itself and its past, yet receptive of the ideas of the present."

Reconstructionist Judaism

Conservative Jews saw their movement as a compromise between the iconoclasm of Reform Judaism and the rigidity of Orthodox Judaism. They emphasized klal Yisrael (universal Israel), and aspired to unite Jews everywhere into a single community as the chosen people of God. In that larger purpose Conservative Jews failed; their commitment, moreover, alienated liberals, some of whom created a fourth American denomination, Reconstructionist Judaism.

A continuation of the ideas of Mordecai M. Kaplan, who urged American Jews to "reconstruct the Jewish civilization," Reconstructionist Judaism dispensed with belief in the supernatural while retaining some commitment to the Jewish tradition in an effort, as Kaplan wrote, "to maintain the historic continuity of the Jewish people and to express, or symbolize, spiritual values or ideals which can enhance the inner life of Jews." Most Reconstructionist Jews, however, emphatically reject the idea of Jews as the chosen people of God. Although not an independent movement until the 1960s, Reconstructionist Judaism, by the 1990s, boasted a membership of fifty thousand, with sixty congregations and one hundred and fifty rabbis.

American Judaism in the Twenty-First Century: Problems and Prospects

In the two decades between 1945 and 1967 Jews in the United States, though internally divided, enjoyed a peace and security that enabled them to pursue their version of the American dream. That tranquil period ended with the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Although the Israelis prevailed, the threat to the existence of Israel brought Jewish history, including the Holocaust, to the forefront of Jewish concerns. Since the late 1960s, the preservation of Jewish traditions, the maintenance of Jewish identity, and the survival of the Jewish people have come to be of paramount importance to American Jews, including many in the Re-form and Reconstructionist movements.

Common concerns notwithstanding, relations have not been cordial among Jews in the United States. No issue inspired greater conflict than the debate over the role of women. The introduction of integrated seating at worship, a practice that both Reform and some Conservative Jewish congregations adopted, ignited a terrible quarrel. From the Orthodox perspective, though, the worst violation of Jewish tradition and law were changes authorizing greater participation of women in religious services. The first alteration came in 1973, when the law committee of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly issued a takhana (legislative enactment) that permitted women to be counted in the minyan. A ten-year conflict also ensued over whether to admit women to the rabbinate. The dispute ended in 1983 when the faculty of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City voted thirty-four to eight to accept female students. Reform Jews had voted even earlier, in 1972, to ordain women; the Reform decision to consider ordaining homosexuals increased tensions with Orthodox and Conservative Jews.

Predictably, Orthodox Jews have been the most resistant to making concessions. Their defiance strengthened Orthodoxy, which since the 1970s has been the most dynamic and vibrant Jewish denomination. By 2000 the United States had 1,075,000 Orthodox Jews. As young Jews feel increasingly alienated from the secular world and as many seek to rediscover their cultural and religious heritage, Orthodox Judaism has become more attractive. The dramatic and often salutary alternative that Orthodox Judaism presents to those who have grown weary of the degeneracy of modern American society explains, at least in part, its continued appeal. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, Orthodox Jews have had to consider whether, and to what extent, their community can maintain it insularity and protect itself from the contamination of the modern world and how much its survival depends upon adaptation to American life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Moshe. The Emergence of Conservative Judaism: The Historical School in Nineteenth Century America. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963.

Eisen, Arnold. The Chosen People in America: A Study of Jewish Religious Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Glazer, Nathan, ed. American Judaism. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Goldsmith, Emanuel S., Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer, eds. The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. New York: Doubleday, 1955.

Libowitz, Richard. Mordecai M. Kaplan and the Development of Reconstructionism. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1983.

Neusner, Jacob, ed. Sectors of American Judaism: Reform, Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reconstructionism. New York: Katv, 1975.

Olitzky, Kerry M., Lance J. Sussman, and Malcolm A. Stern, eds. Reform Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Plaut, W. Gunther. The Rise of Reform Judaism. 2 vols. New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963–1965.

Rosenblum, Herbert. Conservative Judaism: A Contemporary History. New York: United Synagogue of America, 1983.

Sachar, Howard M. A History of Jews in America. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Mark G. Malvasi

See also Religion and Religious Affiliation ; Religious Thought and Writings .