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PDF FormatBut more importantly to my mind, Jewish identity is what it is, and cannot and should not be shaped or reshaped in response to bigots or anyone else. The fact is, Jews are both a nation and a religion. This occurred for historical reasons outlined in Yehoshua’s essay, but whatever the reason, it is a motivating force behind Jewish identity. Whether Yemenite and Polish Jews actually have much in common is less important than the overall sense of what being Jewish means. Jews understand themselves, as Yehoshua notes, as part of a historical and global continuum—a community in the deepest sense of the word. It may make no historical or cultural sense. It may be a fantasy. But I believe it is part of the fundamental nature of being Jewish: to understand oneself as part of a community that seeks to understand the purpose of life and how to live it well, even if that understanding changes over time or place, or varies from Jew to Jew. To deny that sense of indeterminacy or to cut it out of our self-understanding would be to give up being Jewish in order to overcome antisemitism.
Cheryl Greenberg
Trinity College
Hartford, Connecticut
TO THE EDITORS:
A.B. Yehoshua’s thought-provoking essay is an important addition to the voluminous literature on the causes and manifestations of antisemitism. He presents a twofold analysis of the problem: First, the constancy of Jew-hatred throughout the ages; and second, its interaction with the Jews’ awareness of their uniqueness as a people. His interpretation, however, requires some amendment when measured against the history of Jews in the United States.
To be sure, most American Jews, even within the Reform movement, did retain a sense of peoplehood. There were also those who judged antisemitism as part of an ongoing continuum, so that every generation had its own Haman. (As Yehoshua writes, such Jews doubtless drew a measure of comfort from that assumption.) But at the same time, Jews in the United States had to square the notion of eternal Judeophobia with their unshakeable belief in American exceptionalism. The idea of exceptionalism, which became the heart of the promise of America, went back to the founders of the country. It posited that this “new Zion” would be the exemplar of freedom and opportunity for the individual and a haven for the oppressed. Many Jews took this idea one step further: Jewish history, they believed, had turned a corner in the United States. For never before had Jews enjoyed the kind of well-being that America afforded. Indeed, some nineteenth-century Reform Jews even claimed that the future of Judaism lay in America. Breaking with their age-old heritage, they did not share in what Yehoshua calls “the basic Jewish perception” that antisemitism “is a constant motivating factor of human behavior unrelated to the religious, national, social, or economic conditions prevailing in any given period.” Rather, America was different, and the words and deeds of antisemites were but temporary aberrations from the American norm.
Accordingly, Jews who witnessed antisemitism in America before World War I came up with a variety of explanations for it, mostly of a socioeconomic or cultural nature. Exonerating the hate-mongers, many Jewish communal leaders even criticized the behavior of their fellow Jews, lecturing them on proper manners and social deportment. Some Jews added that manifestations of Jew-hatred in the United States were products of European bigotry. Blaming German antisemitism for discrimination in America at the end of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Marcus Jastrow of Philadelphia said: “A drop of poison has been instilled into the blood of Western nations, causing a distemper contagious to its nature, and... the contagion has reached our beloved country.” Whatever the cause, American Jews pinned their hopes for remediation on rational counterarguments, particularly from respected Christian leaders.
Reveling in the blessings of the United States, the overwhelming majority of American Jews never despaired of the diaspora or sought to remove themselves to a Jewish homeland. Nor did they produce a Leo Pinsker of their own. Emma Lazarus, an early proponent of secular Jewish nationalism who was influenced by Pinsker’s Autoemancipation, wrote in her famous Epistle to the Hebrews that American Jews, different from the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, were not obliged to settle in a new country. Even racist antisemitism which underscored the image of the Jew as alien to the United States and Europe, failed to direct Jews to Palestine or, later, the State of Israel. Contemporary American Jews have studied the problems of antisemitism and analyzed their relationship to the Jewish state in an endless stream of surveys, conferences, and youth programs; but as a collective body, they have remained immured within an American cocoon.
Naomi W. Cohen
City University of New York
Jewish Theological Seminary of America
New York, New York
A.B. YEHOSHUA RESPONDS:
The attempt to trace the root of antisemitism in all ages and places is not an assertion that antisemitism necessarily existed everywhere and throughout all of history. In fact, there were periods—and this includes modern times as well—in which antisemitism was less powerful or venomous than it was in others. The root of antisemitism, as I explained in my essay, stems firstly from the state of the antisemite’s identity, not from what the Jew does or does not do. Antisemitism, as the popular saying goes, is a disease of the non-Jew from which the Jew dies. Naomi Cohen is therefore correct in stating that American society has been devoid of intense or dangerous expressions of antisemitism as a result of America’s ingrained pluralism and its adherence to the ideals of freedom and democracy. One must hope that it will remain so forever. True, every now and then bizarre and venomous allegations are thrown around, such as the claim following the September 11 attacks that the Israeli Mossad knew about the attacks ahead of time and warned all the Jewish workers in the World Trade Center not to come to work that day. This absurd type of antisemitism is made possible only by the virtual, imaginary dimension unique to Jewish identity. For if there is antisemitic sentiment in the United States, it is not aimed directly toward American Jews, but focuses instead on Israel (as in the statement “America went to war with Iraq because of Israel”). At the same time, antisemitic sentiment outside of the United States often employs fantasies about American Jews (“Jews control the media, etc.”). It is therefore only natural that the (relatively modest) aliya of American Jews to Israel was not a result of antisemitism, as they viewed themselves as relatively safe in the United States. Rather, this immigration is mainly due to that same drive by whose mere mention I recently caused a minor riot in the American Jewish community: the wish to live a complete and full Jewish life, which can only be had in the land of Israel; conducted in the Hebrew language; and, most importantly, within a binding Jewish reality that deals in a Jewish manner with all aspects of life.
Throughout their 2,500 years of diaspora history, Jews have for the most part managed to cope and learn to live with a certain degree of antisemitism in their countries of residence. It was only when antisemitism became so severe and so grave—namely, from the end of the nineteenth century to the appearance of Nazism—that some Jews began to contemplate a more radical change in their national condition, and hence the door to Zionism was opened. Therefore, even though I accept many of Greenberg’s observations, I find it very difficult to concede her “Jewish” argument that attempts to deal with antisemitism by diminishing the indeterminate component of Jewish identity are akin to a betrayal of this identity and are perhaps even morally flawed, since they appear to be succumbing to the threat of antisemitism. It is on this basis that Greenberg rejects the conclusions of my essay—not as a historian or a person of science, but as a Jew. To this I provide two answers: First, history teaches us that the identity of a nation is not metaphysical, but has the ability to undergo transformations and adaptations with respect to the ever-changing reality around it. (Only three centuries ago, for example, every French citizen was required to be Catholic, or at least Christian. Today, of course, no such requirement exists.) Second, the Israeli Jewish identity—whether secular or religious—which has considerably reduced the degree of Jewish indeterminacy by linking itself with a defined territory, national language, and clear and binding framework that deals with all aspects of life, is by no means “less Jewish” than the virtual, diasporic existence. If anything, it is, in my opinion, more Jewish in its substance and commitments. Not only is it the original Jewish identity as it existed throughout the First and Second Temple periods, but it is also, at least religiously, the aspired-to identity, achieved at last through national redemption. Thus, to argue that “Jewish identity is what it is” is simply irresponsible. An indeterminate identity is only one variation of Jewish existence, and a weak one at that. There are other options, such as the secular one or the solely national one, the latter of which has been gaining momentum in Israel of late. Such variations, which significantly reduce the virtuality of Jewish identity (but do not entirely dismiss it) are, in my opinion, much better able to cope with the projective dimension of antisemitism.
