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II A Part and Apart W OSEPH JONAS, one of the first American Jews to journey Pwest of the Alleghenies, has left us a tale from his travels that precisely captures the several dilemmas with which this study is concerned. One day in 1817, Jonas reports, he encountered an elderly Quaker woman who had never before laid eyes on a Jew, and was rather excited by the prospect. "Art thou a Jew? Thou art one of God's chosen people." She turned him round and round and at last exclaimed, with evident disappointment, "Well, thou art no different to other people."! The Quaker woman was right, of course: Jonas was not appreciably different from other people-far less different, in all likelihood, than the Quakers themselves. Doors to Gentile society long closed to the Jews in Europe had opened early to the Jews of America, and opened widely; Jews like Jonas could and would rush through happily, to a degree of opportunity and participation never before theirs in all the centuries of wandering. "America was different," its Jews would soon proclaim, because, for the first time really, they were not. Yet, if that truly was the case, who were they? A people no longer set apart essentially from its surroundings could not invoke the self-definition of election which had served it for two millennia. It was one thing to call oneself a "chosen people" when religious barriers or ghetto walls reinforced the collective sense of being a "people that must dwell alone." But it was quite another to claim chosenness in the new chosen land of America, where Jews wanted nothing so much as the chance to be a part of the larger society. To describe oneself as "the Lord's special treasure" seemed absurd in such a context, and yet-here is the essential dilemma facing American Jews-what sense could Jewishness make without that inherited selfdefinition ? To abandon the claim to chosenness would be to discard the raison d' etre that had sustained Jewish identity and Jewish faith through the ages, while to make the claim was to question or perhaps even to 3 4 • INTRODUCTION threaten America's precious offer of acceptance. This study is concerned with the ways in which American Jewish thinkers of the past two generations have coped with that dilemma, fashioning a new self-definition for their community through the reinterpretation of the idea of Jewish chosenness. It is this new understanding of self which continues to guide American Jewry in the 1980s. While the history of that reinterpretation has until now not been charted, the dilemma which prompted it has been amply documented. Sociologists of American Jewry have made the Jews' adjustment to America the principal focus of their researches," and more popular works have also treated the problem at some length.' Charles Liebman, in formulations particularly relevant to our own inquiry, has pointed to the conflicting desires of "the ambivalent American Jew" for integration into American society on the one hand and group survival on the other. Refusing to acknowledge that these values are in conflict, "the typical Jew" seeks "an ideological position which denies the existence of any tension," and, to attain it, must "blur reality, obscuring the real referents for those concepts which [jews] find most attractive."! Chosenness, the traditional vehicle for self-definition among Jews, became in America the single concept most often "blurred" and denied "real referents." In reflecting on American Jewish reinterpretation of the doctrine over the past half-century, I will "flesh out," enrich with data, and in some cases call into question, the generalizations advanced by sociologists and other concerning American Jewry's attempt to balance integration and survival. Detailed analysis of the ways in which Jewish thinkers have affirmed, denied, interpreted, and transformed the traditional concept of Israel's chosenness, against the background of identifiable social and intellectual pressures, will teach us a great deal about the character of American Jewish religious thought as a whole. It will also illumine the manner in which the community has been affected by the cluster of forces normally grouped under the umbrella of "secularization ." Chosenness, then, particularly as interpreted by the generation before our own, affords a lens for viewing these wider issues of American Jewish adaptation to a newly chosen land. It was during that "second generation" (ca. 1930-1955) that American Jewry and Judaism as we know them took shape, and a survey of Jewish religious thought in the period reveals chosenness to...

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