The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology

II. “Nation, People, Religion—What Are We?”

][]I "Nation, People, ReligionWhat Are We?" lIN ORDER TO understand the second generation's reinterpretation of election, one first needs to examine the context in which it occurred, and the primary use to which it was put. Over a million Jews had poured into America in the decade before the First World War, following hundreds of thousands who had come just before them. Yet another quarter million would come soon after.' In the late twenties and thirties the children of these immigrants began to work earnestly at the task of being at home in America, and the doctrine of election was enlisted to serve that effort. More than any other idea, chosenness was employed to stipulate a bond between Judaism and democracy, and to define the role of the Jews in America-a chosen people in God's new chosen land. This effort was without precedent in Jewish history for several reasons . First, there were no "ghettoes" in America to wall Jews out. Neither widespread discrimination nor voluntary residential segregation prevented the immigrants and their children from moving quickly out of the initial areas of settlement to new urban districts, and moving up from blue- to white-collar employment. Equally important, there was relatively little halakhic prescription to wall Jews in. The vast majority of the immigrants, and even more of their children, observed few traditional rituals, and absented themselves from the synagogue. The religion which had kept Jews separate for centuries seemed, in the words of one historian, on the way to "rapid dissolution."? Finally, there seemed little cause for separation, for the perceived values of America did not seem substantially different from commitments seen, often vaguely, as "Jewish." Certainly the surrounding American society, unlike those from which the immigrants had come, was not one to which Jews pon2S 26 • THE "SECOND GENERATION" dering their future as a distinct people could feel superior. On the contrary , they wished for nothing so fervently as to join it: to speak its language, adopt its styles, and attain to membership in its growing middle class. This aspiration and opportunity to participate fully in American life only increased the need to explain what essentially separated Jews from other peoples. The more Jews could feel at home in America, the more they needed to be reminded why they should not feel too much at home. America's welcoming environment, then, exacerbated a problem with ample precedent in Jewish history: the conferring of meaning upon Jewish exclusivity. The American rabbis had the difficult task of reconciling two contradictory goals: helping Jews to fit into the surrounding culture and its mores, and seeing to it that, despite America's many comforts, the fit never became entirely snug. "America was different," they agreed, but the Jews' long exile had not ended. There was still a need for separateness; "integration" should not be achieved at the expense of "survival." The notion of chosenness served the rabbis well in balancing these goals. Its rhetoric linked Jews powerfully to America's own self-understanding, even as it proclaimed the message that Jews were by nature "a people dwelling alone"-and had to be so even in America. Americanization and the "Jewish Problem" In considering the rabbis' use of the election tradition, four aspects of the second generation's situation need to be noted: the extraordinary speed of its social mobility, the visions of acculturation which shaped its integration into America, the anti-Semitism to which it was increasingly subject, and the communal institutions which it developed. Between 1920 and 1940, a first generation composed largely of small shopkeepers and manual laborers (many in the needle-trades) gave way to a second generation of businessmen, professionals, and white collar workers. So long as the gates to immigration remained open, new arrivals swelled the ranks of the working class; so long as the Depression gripped America, advancement into the middle class was slow. But already during the twenties Jews were laying the groundwork through intensive education for the rapid economic advance which would soon occur. A survey conducted in San Francisco in the thirties found that, out of every thousand employed Jews, eighteen were lawyers or judges and sixteen were doctors, compared to five in either category in the general population; in Pittsburgh the figures were fourteen and thirteen, compared to four." According to a national estimate made in 1942, thirty-five to forty of each hundred employed Jews were in commercial [3.137.185.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 10...