The Questioning Jew and the Jewish Question

Abstract

The Questioning Jew and the Jewish Question James A. Diamond The recent Pew Research Center's independent comprehensive study of American Jewry is a shocking wake‐up call. It has stimulated much needed debate and breast beating within the Jewish community in response to the bleak portrait its findings paint for the future survival of Jews and Judaism. Here I will single out only one statistic that is characteristic of the study as a whole which speaks for itself in regards to the pessimistic demographic prospects it indicates—the rate of intermarriage among American Jews is 58 percent, with the percentage escalating to an astounding 71 percent among non‐Orthodox Jews. I am not a social scientist nor a demographer but a scholar of Jewish thought and history. It is out of that expertise, as well as a lifelong existential commitment to Judaism that I offer here a philosophically optimistic response to the study by identifying something elusive about Jews that polls, surveys, and sociological studies can never hope to reveal. What does it mean to be Jewish and what is it that sustains my Jewishness and my deeply rooted loyalty to, and membership in, the Jewish community? These appear to be curious questions to those outside the community who may easily identify themselves ethnically, nationally, culturally, or even religiously, most often with definitive results. However, the questions of what constitutes identity in the case of Jews and what amounts to Jewishness are acutely perplexing. The “Brother Daniel” case, adjudicated in the earlier years of the nascent State of Israel, highlights this perplexity. It involved the question of whether the right granted every Jew to claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return extends to a “naturally born” Jew who converted to Christianity. A strict application of orthodox religious law would have substantiated the convert's Jewishness, since it posits the rule once a Jew always a Jew. However, the application of secular modern conceptions of nationality and peoplehood by the Supreme Court of Israel found conversion a betrayal of cultural and national heritage and therefore a categorical denial of Jewishness. In other words, Israeli civil law conflicts with Jewish law on the fundamental issue of Jewish identity. Attempts at reducing Jewishness to a single marker, or cluster of characteristics that all, or even most, Jews would acknowledge sharing and that would provide the critical ingredients for constructing an organic cohesive community of any kind, all break down at some point. When the protagonist in a James Salter novel finds himself among a group of Jews, he reflects on what particularly accounts for membership in this group—“they were a people, they somehow recognized and understood each other, even as strangers. They carried it in their blood, a thing you could not know.” Can we at least approximate this “thing” which cannot be known? In an age when the vast majority of those considering themselves Jewish do not subscribe to the tenets, rituals, or laws of Judaism, religion alone fails to account for the confident and deeply felt assertion, “I am Jewish”, that cuts across the variegated spectrum of those claiming membership in this group. Indeed, Martin Buber, one of the most eminent of modern Jewish philosophers, considered religious commandments and ritual inimical to any authentic relationship with the divine. Whether adjudged as a remnant fossil by the likes of historians such as Arnold Toynbee, or claimed to be superseded by Christian theologians, or philosophically relegated to a curious anachronism by no less a thinker than Hegel (Immanuel Kant another great eighteenth century philosopher called for Judaism's euthanization), or nearly physically annihilated by racial anti‐semitism in the twentieth century, something inherent in Jews and Judaism continues to defy the “logic” of history, philosophy, genetics, and theology in its resolute perpetuation and endurance. Even some vaguely held theological abstraction that reduces Judaism to monotheism does not suffice when both Christianity and Islam are themselves popularly acknowledged as monotheistic religions. Furthermore, many of the most outspoken contemporary atheists are, and would consider themselves, Jewish. The late Christopher Hitchens, one of the most articulate voices for a principled godlessness, suggested, somewhat facetiously yet bearing a certain truth, that Jews are genetically...