The Missing Link: The State in Mordecai Kaplan's Vision of Jewish History

On July 4, 1788, in Philadelphia, Americans celebrated the twelfth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. More than five thousand people marched in the parade in honor of the new nation. Church bells pealed, and people sang. The clergy of different Christian denominations participated, as did at least one rabbi. At the end of the parade, Jews joined the celebratory meal without any difficulty, though they sat at a separate table and ate kosher food. "Jews and Christians celebrated together as citizens of the republic and ate separately according to their own rituals and customs."¹ Pluralism being the rule in this "nation of nations," Jews were allowed to be "a nation within the nation"—a status denied them in France. The oneness of that old nation, based on the universalistic pattern of the French Revolution, presumed what Count Clermont-Tonnere announced in a famous speech given at the National Assembly two years later when, for the first time, it was discussed whether Jews could be emancipated as equal citizens: "The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals." The contrast with America is striking.

In France, to become citizens, Jews were asked, like other groups, to abandon any sort of communal bond, any kind of ethnic, cultural, or religious collective identity within the public sphere. How could they eat a kosher meal in the public realm? Amid the turmoil that beset the relations between Church and State, Jews were asked to become secular along with their fellow citizens. The strong French state then emerging aimed to destroy any public expression of pluralism. The state claimed to be Reason in action: one rather than many, a universal excluding all particular associations and allegiances.

One can hardly imagine, therefore, a stronger contrast between the two countries, between the two revolutions, between the two constitutions, between a weak and a strong state, between a democracy and a republic, between a nation of nations and a nation-state. In America we find a hyphenated conception of citizenship, analyzed later by Jewish political theorists such as Horace Kallen or Michael Walzer,² whereas in France we find a more militant sort of citizenship, a citoyenneté oriented toward the state and it alone, hostile to any kind of specific identity. Of course, each system has its own advantages and disadvantages. But it is clear that Mordecai M. Kaplan's interpretation of the comparison is quite bewildering. I will examine it carefully below.

On the one hand, Kaplan puts France and America in the same boat; on the other, he vividly outlines their differences. In Judaism as a Civilization, he divided Jewry into three zones: Palestine; "those countries where they are granted the rights of a culturally autonomous minority people," as proposed by Simon Dubnow; and France and America, "where the only civic status recognized by the state is that of individual citizens and where Judaism can survive only as a subordinate civilization."³ Trying to build a comparative political sociology of modern Jewry, Kaplan lacked an explicit theory of the state. "The modern state is jealous of all other loyalties," he wrote, failing to distinguish between a strong state like the French one, which was and is without doubt hostile to other loyalties, and the American one, which was and is a weak state allowing all kind of loyalties to emerge and be accepted. In fact, no such thing as "the modern state" exists. It is simply not true that all modern states are "jealous." For instance, the state in a consociational democracy such as Switzerland explicitly supports accepted differences organized in cantons and beyond. Oddly enough, Kaplan paid no heed to this contrast, and he put France and America in the same category.

Kaplan also tells his readers why he deeply dislikes the French state and implicitly favors the American model. Judaism as a Civilization reports that Napoleon's Sanhedrin "was terrorized into declaring that the Jews of France were no longer part of a nationality." Thus, "this surrender of Jewish nationhood is a new kind of suicide, suicide on...