The fate of American Jews

Abstract

Henry James gave us the phrase with which to worry pleasurably about the "complex fate" of being American. Against the simplifi? cations and dismissals of the rest of the world, we have always known there was more to it than they thought ? although exactly what has remained questionable. Of course analyses of class and conflict in the American experi? ence usefully demystify consensualist and exceptionalist ideologies. Yet America is exceptional as are England, France, Russia and to comprehend how one must attend to indigenous myth-making and culture (lower case "c"). On the conceptual level this is a truism. The problem always is how to negotiate the tricky interplay between, not to say inseparability of, empirical reality and mythic, symbolic, ideological modes of explaining/ mediating our being-in-the-world. This is not the place to review the work of significant students of American culture, although among contemporaries I would invoke the names of Henry Nash Smith and Sacvan Bercovitch as evidence that such stunning achievement is possible. But neither the American west as symbol and myth nor the Puritan origins of the American self exhaust the possibilities. In The American Scene, Henry James wondered if "the great ethnic question" (this phrase is also his) didn't shroud the question of America's ultimate identity in even deeper mystery. At the very least, we can see that a dialectic relationship between "real" (or profane) geography and history and "mythic" (or sacred) space and time defines the axis along which American identity works itself out. A complex and very interesting fate, indeed. As a people, Jews have always performed this negotiation between sacred and profane. The forms and evidence of this have been various: it is in the Sacred Text from the beginning an interpenetration of real and mythic, as Auerbach knew in his discussion of Abraham and Isaac in Mimesis ; in over two thousand years of Exilic prayer that sacralized all Jewish space and time in the act of re? membering an historically fallen but mythical? ly distanced Jerusalem; in the language and observances of eight hundred years of European Jewry ? the people of Peretz, with feet in the mud and their brows touching heaven ? whose everyday Yiddish made way for but was peppered with the language of the holy. Certainly we are in history, like everyone else and really bleed when pricked. Yes, the Jew in the interstices of European feudalism; yes, the Jew (a/ew, sometimes) as middleman, moneylender, accumulator of capital, but to see the survival of the Jews only in those terms is to misread or trivialize history ? Jules Chametzky is Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and Professor of English, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.