A Reconsideration of the Politics of Assimilation

Abstract

In his review article on Jewish assimilation in European society in the nineteenth century, Dr. Michael Marrus discussed two aspects of this historical development: the external pressures of the environment on Jews to acculturate by neglecting their own heritage and the desire of the Jews themselves to barter their identity for civil rights.' Marrus described the negative attitudes that many of the European Jews developed toward Judaism in an attempt to accommodate themselves to the secular modem culture of their host country. In response to Marrus's argument, I would like to emphasize the importance of the first cause in shaping the attitude of Jews toward integration. By comparing the assimilation in eastern and central Europe with that in England and the United States, one can get a wider perspective on the impact of external pressures on the nature of assimilation. Jewish concepts of modernity and acculturation were radical, as they were in Germany, Italy, and France, because of the pressure exerted on Jews to conform to their host societies. But when cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic particularisms were recognized, as in the liberal English and American societies, Jews preferred to retain their Jewish loyalties. This pattern can be seen very clearly in England, where the assimilation of Jews resembled the French and German model prior to the predominance of liberalism (in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), but took a different course during the mid-nineteenth century, the period of emancipation and triumph for English liberalism. During the Georgian period, the upper strata of Anglo-Jewry secularized while losing their Jewish identity. The Jewish gentry was clean shaven, well dressed, English speaking (Yiddish was abandoned), and secular minded. The well-to-do attended the opera and the theatre, gossiped and played cards in coffee houses of the City or took the water at Bath and visited the seashores at Brighton. They spent their leisure time in lavish entertainments and grand dinner parties. Some of them acquired estates in the country and adopted there the habits of the local gentry. Anglo-Jewry in the Georgian period was in a rapid process of secularization at the expense of Jewish loyalties: Jews neglected Sabbath observance, rarely attended synagogues, and were lax in performing religious duties. They lacked traditional education (there was not even a single yeshiva in existence during the eighteenth century), disregarded dietary laws, and rarely appealed to rabbinical author-