Terrified by centuries of European oppression, Jews entered America and suffocated Judaism’s development. Viewing American culture through the lens of Europe, Jewish immigrants and their descendants failed to comprehend the unique relationship between Judaism and the American Republic. This failure has relegated American Judaism to little more than an homage to its European antecedent, thereby rendering irrelevant the greatest force for the progress of human society. Instead of continuing Judaism’s role in establishing the American civilization, America’s Jews have wasted their resources by transforming Judaism into a mere religion full of self-inspection and myopic isolation.

At the start of the 21st Century, American Jewish groups conducted surveys to determine the Jewish population of the United States. Depending on the survey, there were as many as seven million American Jews or as few as four million. The disparity in estimating the Jewish population is not the product of accounting error or statistical analysis but of each survey’s definition of a Jew. In contrast to their historical antecedents, these surveys were commissioned by Jews, not by gentile oppressors. While critical to survival in Europe, fixing the attributes of Jewish identity has little meaning and even less utility in sustaining Judaism in America. The continued obsession with irrelevant European standards has impeded the progress of American Judaism. The stifling of Judaism in America is the result of a paradigm that evolved from the European experience and that, in turn, has prevented American Jews from breaking free of Europe’s grip on Judaism.

That Judaism survived centuries of European hostility invites categorization as a miracle. While not the only people oppressed by European regimes, Jews were remarkable for their ability to continue their civilization in a hostile, foreign land. Deprived of the opportunity to compete with their neighbors, European Jews adapted their Judaism to the institutional and cultural animus that they could not escape. Recognizing that survival depended on strong group identification, they found ways to celebrate their status and strengthen the importance of belonging to an identifiable group. Binding Jews together were rituals both borrowed from European folk life and traced to scripture. The observance of these rituals signified one’s commitment to Judaism and the simultaneous rejection of the hostile European culture.

European Jews thus arrived from Europe with a Judaism designed for an environment filled with cultural hostility and an occasionally brutal ruling class. While Jews suffered mistreatment in America, the formal apparatus of the United States government did not sanction this abuse. In fact, the American political tradition boasted of the Nation’s guaranteed freedom of conscience. The European paradigm of group identification as a buttress against oppression had lost its urgency. Ritual observance, in America, served only to alienate Jews from a land of promised opportunity. American Jews were free to accept or reject the invitation to assimilate American customs, but, to Jews envisioning only the European past, even benign assimilation could only be interpreted as dishonorable abandonment. To them, the failure to observe ritual signaled the end of Judaism.

The paradigm of conflict provided no mechanism for adapting Judaism for the New World. Those seeking to reform Judaism for a modern America focused on the balance between European tradition and American modernity. The formed the American Reform Movement and established America’s first Jewish seminary in 1875. Viewing the Reform Movement as a bridge leading Jews away from Judaism, devotees of European Judaism founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886. Opposition alone provided no formula for sustaining Judaism in America, and attempts to create a formula led to conflict. Strict adherents to European forms founded the American Orthodox Movement in 1898, and the Jewish Theological Seminary became the intellectual source for the Conservative Movement.

The debate over ritual and assimilation was not an academic exercise. Within a thirty year period spanning the start of the Twentieth Century, more than one million Jews entered the United States from Eastern Europe. Because these Jews could shed their inherited ritualism as other immigrants jettisoned their European customs, Jewish leaders saw full participation in American society as a threat. Like the Orthodox Movement, Reform and Conservative leaders explained Judaism as a counter to the dangers posed by American culture. While these Movements competed against both the rejection of Jewish self-identification and each other, this division was tempered by the existential threat of the Holocaust.

Although the Reform Movement declared America as the safe homeland for Jews, Hitler’s plan to extinguish Judaism forced all American Jews to unify. To save their European brethren, America’s Jews united to establish a Jewish State in the Holy Land of Israel. Images from concentration camps made clear the wisdom of the old paradigm of Jewish separatism as the path to Jewish survival. The distinctiveness of the American Republic was lost amidst the atrocities of Europe, and sustaining Israel all but eliminated the idea of an American Judaism. Germany’s atrocities supported the ahistoric orthodoxy that the Holocaust proved that, even in the United States, Jews were never safe.

No American civics lesson can overcome the primeval fear wrought by watching the inhumanity suffered by fellow Jews. The unique relationship between Judaism and the American Republic no longer seemed relevant, but it is this relationship that is critical to moving humanity beyond its barbarity. In founding a new nation based on principles of justice and self-governance, America’s Revolutionary leaders believed that they were changing the trajectory of human civilization. This belief came from their view that, in breaking free of Europe’s worst traditions, Americans were creating a New World, paralleling the ancient Hebrews’ launch of civilization. Based on divine inspiration, the ancient Hebrews established a society based on moral behavior rather than subjugation. Americans thus declared their independence from England by declaring that their Creator had endowed all citizens with rights that were not subject to the arbitrary decision of a human ruler. Because Americans had developed the appropriate moral sensibilities, they would reignite humanity’s progression, and these sensibilities were the product of their attachment to the ancient Hebrews.

Rather than explore their role in insuring America’s devotion to these values, America’s Jews have relegated Judaism to a religion of ritual and introspection. Where once Judaism’s moral codes had provided the impetus for civilization’s progress, fear of extinction has deprived Judaism of a moment in history when its impact can be most widely felt. That Judaism has failed to flourish in the only host Nation founded on Jewish ideals negates Judaism’s historic role as a revolutionary force. The vacuum created by the abdication of Judaism’s role in the American civilization has been filled by those who, often in Judaism’s name, have staked their claim as the purveyors of moral superiority. To confront these claims and invigorate the Hebrew-American trajectory requires a Judaism firmly entrenched in American culture and ferociously determined to sustain Judaism’s role in the human experience. Only when it has broken free of the European paradigm can Judaism become relevant to American Jews and attain its proper role in the public square of America.

- Matt P. Lavine