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CHAPTER XXI JEWISH COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION The Jewish people to help the Jew attain this-worldly salvation-Modem nationhood to function as a means of this-worldly salvation to the individual-The basic purpose of Jewish communal organization to he the social and economic welfare of its memhers --The congregation no longer to he permitted to obstruct the organization of Jews along communal lines-Needed: a kehillah type of organization-The ultimate evolution of Jewish federations into kehillot. So long as salvation was regarded as attainable only in the world to come, everyone was welcome to it because human imagination pictured that world ample enough to hold all who wanted to get there. But ever since men began to seek salvation in this world, which impresses them as being limited, they are none too anxious to have too many seekers after such salvation. Therefore, if for any reason a group can be shown to be undesirable, the incentive to exclude them from the world's goods, services and opportunities is never lacking, and the arguments with which to do it are always at hand. It is too much to expect people under present conditions to realize that the wells even of this-worldly salvation are inexhaustible, and that there is no reason for preventing any human being from drawing from them. We must resign ourselves to the bitter truth that for many generations to come the nations will continue to be obsessed by the fear of diminishing opportunities and growing populations, and will be dominated by the spirit of intolerance and competition. So long as that condition will obtain, they will begrudge the Jew the full benefit of this-worldly salvation, and will refuse to admit him into their corporate life as an economic and social equal. For them to do otherwise would involve not only a complete break with deeply rooted habits and prejudices, but a complete change of heart and mind. it would involve giving up the christological interpretation of human history according to which the Jew plays the part of antiChrist , or cosmic villain. Furthermore, to admit the Jew on a basis of complete equality, the nations would have to be tolerant of the 280 JEWISH COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION 281 cultural differences among their own groups instead of trying to cast them into a uniform mold. Finally, they would have to be converted to the principle that the common good is best furthered by economic cooperation and justice. So long, therefore, as traditional Christianity, national intolerance and the competitive economic order reign supreme, the nations will refuse to extend to the Jews the right to avail themselves unrestrictedly of the opportunities to achieve this-worldly salvation. To be sure the Jew can always worm his way into Gentile life. He can erase all traces of his ancestry, deny his descent, accept Christianity and perhaps even turn anti-Semite. Such salvation is this-worldly in the most abject and contemptible form. To resort to these tactics is to forfeit that self-respect, freedom and undividedness of personality without which life is not worth saving in any world. This-worldly salvation as the new regulative ideal of human life is not a form of cheap expediency to be secured at the cost of one's soul. It is a high adventure of the spirit from which one with a taint of scheming careerism is precluded. Only in the full light of truth and in complete expression of one's selfhood can one enjoy its bliss. How then can the apostate who for material advantage abjures the history and background that are part of his selfhood and pretends to subscribe to a creed which his reason rejects, be eligible to a spiritual redemption which presupposes complete inner harmony and truth? Of late even the alternative of apostasy is being denied to the Jew so that, all in all, the redemption that the Jew expected from emancipation has turned out to be a mirage. He is therefore compelled to return upon his tracks in the arid wilderness of assimilation, and to march once again in the direction of the only promised land in which he will ultimately be redeemed, the promised land of self-emancipation. Self-emancipation is a term which has by this time become familiar in Jewish life. Leo Pinsker was the one who first coined it in 1886. Although it has gathered about itself a vast body of thought, its far-reaching implications have by no means been exhausted . Interpreted...

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