Recover the tradition of Jews as bearers of the Enlightenment

Moses Mendelssohn,1729-86) known as the ‘father of the Jewish ‘enlightenment’,  the Haskalah. Followers encouraged the use of Hebrew and European languages in place of Yiddish.

Is the diaspora good for Jews?

In his new book, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews, Alan Wolfe, professor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, asks a controversial and important question: is the Diaspora a blessing in disguise for the Jewish people? For the first time in history, Wolfe argues, Jews can lead successful, meaningful, secure and culturally rich lives in states in which they are a minority. Living outside Israel affords Jews the opportunity to contribute to global diversity, spread pluralism, and deepen Jews’ commitment to fighting prejudice, Wolfe asserts. This book examines those Jews who lead secure and productive lives outside of Israel, which accounts for nearly half of the world’s Jewry.

On November 18, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a discussion addressing this question and other important issues related to the Diaspora. This event was part of the long-running Governing Ideas book series, which is hosted by William A. Galston.

The audio of the whole event can be heard here

The transcript of the whole event can be read here, pdf file.

By Alan Wolfe, Brookings
November 18, 2014

I’m going to begin with a reference to Jacob Meisner who’s written to the effect that in the last 60 or 70 years, the years that have taken place since those two cataclysmic events happened so closely together: The Holocaust in Germany and then the creation of Israel in 1948. He writes that it was inevitable that these two events which shape how post-World War II Jews would think. He insists that in this period, 60 or 70 year period, a period, as it happens, that corresponds almost exactly with my life.

I was born in 1942, six years before Israel, and as the Holocaust was picking up steam the conjunction of these two events really created essentially a new religion for Jews, primarily in the Diaspora, but also to some extent in the holy land. He calls it the Judaism of Holocaust and redemption. He says it’s very, very different from the Judaism of the Torah. In some ways, it resembles Christianity historically more than Judaism because it gives us such a sharp and contrasting contrast between the hell of Hitler and the heaven of Israel. With Hitler the Jews met a form of evil unprecedented in the history of the world; far worse than anything John Milton may have depicted as the Christian hell in Paradise Lost. A living, breathing Satan whose danger that he posed to the Jewish people and to the world was probably unprecedented in human history.

You have this absolute horror of horrors, and then lo and behold, it’s followed shortly thereafter by the prospect of salvation through statehood. That statehood was the heaven for which the Holocaust was the hell. That statehood for the Jewish people assumed an atmosphere of salvation, an atmosphere of redemption. The zionists who created Israel may have been secular, but the meaning of statehood is transformed into religious terms as offering a possible, better ending to a story that had such an awful beginning.

Since these events corresponded so exactly with the years of my own life, I’ve been shaped by them like just about everybody has been. I’m one of those people that absolutely cannot stop reading every book I can find, every movie that I can attend about the Holocaust, obsessed with the Holocaust, and trying to figure out its meaning; writing other books about political evil and subjects like that.

Although Jewish immigration to Palestine began before the holocaust, it wasn’t until after its  foundation as a state  that Israel gained its sacred status as the place for salvation and redemption. The linking of holocaust and Israel is evident in this iconic photo of survivors of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp at Haifa port in 1945. Photograph: Zoltan Kluger/Getty images

But it does occur to me that for all the power of this imagery of destruction and redemption that this religion, the religion of holocaust redemption, unlike most religions is time bound. It’s temporal. It’s not universal. It doesn’t appeal to an endless ending. There is an ending. There will be an ending, and that is when the impact of these two astonishing events begins to lose their grasp on our mental imagination, the linking of the two will have to pass, and something else will have to replace it.

I think that’s essentially what’s happening now, that things like the extensive Pew survey of American Jews shows that among younger Jews consciousness of the Holocaust is diminishing, that the almost sacred attitude towards Israel is also diminishing. I think we’re finding ourselves in a world in which we need a new way of understanding the role that Jews play for themselves and for the rest of the world.

One can lament this, and some writers have. I think primarily of a very, very interesting professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington named Alan Rosenfeld who has written about how the passing of the Holocaust memory would be a tragedy, that the Holocaust was not a generalized lesson of evil; it was a specific horror against the Jews, that it doesn’t correspond to other genocides, and that when we lose that, we lose something precious.

It’s an attitude I can well understand, but it also seems to me to assign to the Jews a perpetual and inevitable victimization, essentially a negative, defensive, protective outlook on the world. I would much rather prefer that the transition from this world in which the Holocaust and the birth of Israel created the beginning and the ending of the story that Jews instead turn back to a tradition that has been part of their history really since Maimonides but was particularly emphasized in 19th century Enlightenment thought in Berlin and then taken to the United States; the tradition of the more universal and universalistic understanding of the Jewish mission.

Bas relief of Maimonides (1135-1204) Jewish philosopher of Cordova, Spain. It is one of 23 marble relief portraits over the gallery doors of the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol which depict historical figures noted for their work in establishing the principles that underlie American law. Maimonides was famed for his exposition of Jewish law as contained in the Pentateuch and in Talmudic literature.

Now, universals and particularism are frequently used as ways of describing contrasting Jewish attitudes towards themselves and toward others. There are numerous scholars who have proven that these terms are hopeless to use, that you can’t really define them, that one blends into the other, and so on. I think all of that is true, and yet I find myself unable to not use them. As I try to understand these things, there really are two basic, different attitudes that have persevered throughout Jewish history since the book of Deuteronomy was written. One sees the dispersal of Jews around the world as a punishment that God has imposed upon their sins. Their sins are primarily forgetting God or ignoring God or putting other gods before Him. Diaspora as punishment. And one Diaspora as dispersion as a positive thing that has happened to the Jews because they relatively enlighten religion associated with Judaism can be spread to the world as a whole and not just confined to the Jewish people.

These have fought back and forth with each other for a very, very long time. It was inevitable that the Holocaust and the creation of Israel would turn the tide in a particularist direction. Hitler himself was particularist. He did choose other peoples than the Jews to massacre and eliminate, but the Jews were in particular his enemy and in particular the people that he singled out.

Israel also singled out Jews: singled out Jews to provide them a home and to provide them a safe place. That conjunction of events, I don’t think there was any choice but for Jews to think more particularistically as long as those events shaped their consciousness.

In a post-Holocaust, post-birth of Israel world however, I think the time is right for a return of the more universalistic traditions within Judaism. The kind that came, for example, from Rabbi David Einhorn. Born in Bavaria, he ultimately understood Judaism as an obligation to spread the seeds of enlightenment around the world. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland, just as the Civil War was breaking out. He had to flee his pulpit in Baltimore because of his antislavery teachings. He had two daughters, both of whom married the number one and number two prominent, reformed Jews in the United States. He spreads this mission of an enlightenment kind of Judaism around the whole country, influencing rabbis from generation to generation. That kind of message is due for a revival.

Alan Wolfe, photo by Lee Pellegrini

The main argument in my book is to look at various developments that are happening in Judaism and in the Jewish community that could return us to this really important, but somewhat under-appreciated tradition over the last 60 or 70 years. In that context, I try to address a number of the things that worry Diaspora Jews like the intermarriage rate, which is indeed very high among Jews, and I try to argue against a doom-and-gloom mentality associated with it. That if Hitler didn’t kill all the Jews, the Christians they marry will. That there’s no fundamental difference between trying to kill Jews and trying to love them. In a sense, they’re both bent on the extermination of Judaism.

 Simon Dubnow, 1860-1941.
Wikipedia: ‘Throughout his active participation in the contemporary social and political life of the Russian Empire, Simon Dubnow, called for modernizing Jewish education, organizing Jewish self-defense against pogroms, and demanding equal rights for Russian Jews, including the right to vote. Living in Vilna, Lithuania, during the early months of 1905 Russian Revolution, he became active in organizing a Jewish political response to opportunities arising from the new civil rights which were being promised. In this effort he worked with a variety of Jewish opinion, e.g., those favoring diaspora autonomy, Zionism, socialism, and assimilation.’

One of the heroes of the book was a man who grew up in Lithuania and died in Waltham, Massachusetts, named Simon Rawidowicz; a man who I think understood so much of the dilemma that Jews face around the world today; who wrote extensively in his time about the problem that Jews who made aliyah to Israel would face with the Arab; who wrote as a, kind of, old-fashioned Jewish prophet and called Jews not just to live, but to live up to an ideal.

I try to bring to life in the book other voices. I particularly focus on a writer like Simon Dubnow (inaudible), a great historian of the Jewish people; after Heinrich Graetz who, again, was born in Europe. He never did come to the United States, but his wife, Sophie, did. She lived until she was 102 years old. She became a very famous Jewish poet in New York. I actually had no idea at the time, but in the 1960s I attended a seminar at Columbia University and one of the members was an economist of the Soviet Union named Alexander Erlich, and he turned out to be Dubnow’s grandson, and I wish I had known at the time when I knew him so well.

This is what the book’s about. It uses a lot of different methods. There’s some counting there. There’s some intellectual history there. There’s a chapter designed to show that was not just one Zionist movement, but there are many kinds of Zionism: Political Zionism, cultural Zionism, and so on.

For me, as a person who is not a professor of Jewish studies, who is not religious in any real sense of the term, a thoroughly secularized, Americanized Jewish boy from Philadelphia, to come to terms relatively late in life with a heritage that I never paid any attention to and to try to make sense of it as best as I could for me and for you, that’s what the book is about. Thank you very much for your attention.

AT HOME IN EXILE
Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews
By Alan Wolfe
272 pages. Beacon Press. $27.95.