Judaism and Assimilation

JUDAISM AND ASSIMILATION

Drift

Like Catholicism, Judaism in America was largely a religion of immigrants. By 1937 nearly 5 million Jews lived in the United States, nearly all of them recent immigrants or children of immigrants, with half of them living in New York City. Like Catholicism, therefore, Judaism in America was tied to the assimilation process. Jews who were determined to maintain a preexistent cultural identity clung to Judaism in its Old World, orthodox form. Many spoke Yiddish, a language unique to east European ghettos, and attempted a degree of isolation from American culture in tightly knit urban neighborhoods. By the 1930s, however, most Jews were drifting away from their faith, especially those determined to assimilate into American society. Many first-generation Jews were repelled by the orthodox religious practices of their parents, burdened as it was with the taint of "foreignness." A 1935 survey in New York City revealed that almost 75 percent of young Jews failed to attend synagogue in the past year. The majority of Jews in the Depression identified themselves more as an ethnic group than a religious faith, and many abandoned any sense of Jewish identity whatsoever. The 1940s were different. Inspired by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and others, by the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel, and by the invigoration of American variants of Judaism, many Jews returned to their faith.

Anti-Semitism

Nothing was more instrumental in sparking a resurgence of Jewish consciousness than the anti-Semitism of the interwar years. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were not alone in scapegoating Jews for the economic dislocations of the era. Anti-Semites in the United States, such as Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Henry Ford, offered elaborate conspiracy theories blaming the Depression and communism on Jews. Although such anti-Semitism was fundamentally rhetorical in the United States, in combination with the oppression of Jews in Europe such pronouncements reunified a Jewish community that had begun to fragment. The Holocaust, of course, advanced this process, unifying the community in collective grief. As important as the Holocaust was in subsequently contributing to a sense of Jewish identity, however, in the 1940s Jews cited the Holocaust more often as a phenomenon unlikely to occur in the United States. The postwar environment, with its suburbs and upward mobility, moreover, tended to mold Judaism into less of a distinctive ethnic philosophy and more into a American faith akin to Catholicism and Protestantism—one with regular family services and social activities. When combined with a common pride many Jews felt about their World War II service, the Holocaust and the suburbs actually served to knit Jewish identity more closely to American nationalism.

Zionism

The establishment of the state of Israel, coming soon after the Holocaust in Europe, also returned many Jews to their religious roots. Zionism, a movement to return the Jews to Palestine, was connected both to the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and to that of American bigots. In the 1930s organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress raised funds to facilitate the creation of Israel in Palestine, arguing that only a Jewish state could protect Jews from anti-Semitism. After World War II, American Jewish groups such as United Jewish Appeal financed the transportation of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe to Palestine. In 1947 United Jewish Appeal raised $117 million for the Zionists. Even American Jews who were not active Zionists sympathized with the Zionist movement; after Israel was established in 1948, it enjoyed widespread Jewish support.

Conservative and Reform Judaism

While anti-Semitism and Zionism were important in aiding the postwar return to Judaism, neither was specifically religious. Conservative and Reform Judaism, however, were sets of religious practices instrumental in returning Jews to their faith. By the 1940s Judaism in America was divided into three fundamental branches: Orthodox Judaism, rooted in Old World ritual, was declining, but slowly; Reform Judaism, incorporating many Protestant concepts and modern scientific ideas, enjoyed steady popularity; and Conservative Judaism, a fusion of Orthodox and Reform practice, was gaining adherents. After World War II both Conservative and Reform Judaism led a renewal in the faith. Reform theologians, such as Leo S. Baeck, rethought the universalism that was a part of the Reform tradition before World War II. He singled out Judaism as a faith of moral dedication, oriented toward reform in this world. In the wake of the war Conservative rabbis, especially at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, rejected many of the more optimistic assessments of human nature present in liberal humanism and embraced the existentialist theologies of thinkers such as Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel. Their work was similar to that of neo-orthodox Protestant theologians in that they renewed Judaism as a serious moral philosophy and appealed to many lapsed congregants. Conservative and Reform Judaism became distinctly modern American versions of the faith, capable of being embraced at the same time that Jews assimilated into American society.

Revival

By the mid 1950s observers were discussing the Jewish "revival," and new Jewish congregations in the suburbs were developing. Five times as many Jews attended Reform synagogues in 1956 as had in 1936, and the growth among Conservative congregations was nearly as great. As Jews moved out of insular urban neighborhoods to affluent and predominantly Protestant suburban neighborhoods, increased Jewish religious practice helped maintain a sense of distinctive culture, and the combination of Reform Judaism's restatement of ideals and Conservative Judaism's moral seriousness fired a new Jewish imagination in America—ironically at the very moment when Jewish assimilation into American society became complete.

Sources:

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972);

Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: A Historical Account of American Religious Life, third edition (New York: Scribners, 1981).