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Sacred, Patriotic, Public The Zionism of Abba Hillel Silver
By Samuel B. Hainbach
Senior Honors Thesis In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors Department of Religious Studies Brown University
13 April 2018
Advisor, First Reader: Professor Paul Nahme
Second Reader: Professor Daniel Vaca
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents 2 Acknowledgments 3 Introduction 4 Origins of the Project 6 Project Overview 8 A Note on Genealogy as an Aspiration 10 Definitions: The “Americanization of Zionism” and “Americanist Zionism” 12 Chapter One: A Problematic Politics – Zionism’s Early Struggles in the United States 16 A First Problem: Dual Belonging 17 A Second Problem: Negation of American Judaism 23 Nevertheless, American Zionism 26 Chapter Two: Theories of Public Religion and Civil Religion as Guideposts 46 Public Religion as a Critique of Privatization 46 Types of Public Religion 51 American Civil Religion 52 Civil Religion as a Type of Public Religion 59 Chapter Three: Emil Hirsch’s Model of Judaism as a Denomination of American Civil Religion 65 A Shared Mission Among Israel, Old and New 68 What do We Want? The Messianic Era! Where do We Want It? Here! 71 An American Civil Judaism 74 Chapter Four: The Zionism of Abba Hillel Silver 78 An Introduction to Silver’s Zionism 82 Zionism as Judaism’s Universal Mission – Its Importance Qualified and Sharpened by the Religious Imperative 83 How Zionism-as-Mission Counters the Negation of American Judaism 87 Zionism, Demanded by the American Civil Religion 90 Zionism at the Intersection of Americanism and Judaism 92 Americanist Zionism – Sacred, Patriotic, Public 96 Conclusion 101 Works Cited 103
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Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to complete this project without the support of many people. I want to extend my thanks first of all to Professor Paul Nahme for taking me on as an advisee. Throughout the past six months he has consistently pushed my engagement with the material to deeper and deeper levels, pointed me in new directions to explore, and helped me to tighten my thinking around this subject. Without such encouragement, this project might have never gotten off the ground. I would also like to think Professor Daniel Vaca for joining this project as my second reader, and especially for his help as I thought through the connections between theories of civil religion and of religion in the public sphere.
I would also like to thank the rest of the Religious Studies Department, as well as the Brown faculty in general. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have studied religion with so many amazing professors over the past four years. I am also fortunate to have been able to approach my study of religion from an interdisciplinary lens – I count my experiences in courses both inside and outside of the Religious Studies Department as among the most influential that I have had at Brown.
I am also grateful to have experienced an incredible semester of learning abroad at Trinity College Dublin’s Irish School of Ecumenics. It was Professor Carlo Aldrovandi’s class on religion and international relations that introduced me to post-secularism and that challenged me to look more closely at the intersections of religion and politics, and it was Professor Aldrovandi who first encouraged me to write on this topic.
Of course, I am beyond grateful for the support of family and friends throughout this process. Thank you especially to my parents, sister, and grandparents who have always encouraged and supported me. Thank you to the wonderful Sarah Joffe for constant support. Thank you also to Rachel Leiken and Hannah Liu, for encouraging me to study in the Religious Studies Department and to write this thesis, and for always answering all of my frantic calls and texts with the best advice that I could ask for.
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Introduction
Did Abba Hillel Silver ever pound his fist angrily on Harry Truman’s Oval Office desk, demanding of the President of the United States that their country support – without reservation
– the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine? Increased immigration, on humanitarian grounds, without independence, would not suffice, not for the rabbi from Cleveland. The anecdote is likely false.1 But its spirit is true, at least. Silver was not afraid to make demands of his government, and he did not care who he antagonized in the process. Furthermore, in making these demands, Silver felt that he was modeling a successful Jewish presence in the American public sphere.
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver was a remarkable figure in the annals of American Jewish history. He was a true pulpit rabbi, dedicated to Congregation Tifereth Israel (affectionately referred to as The Temple or, while he led the congregation, Silver’s Temple), near Cleveland, where he officiated for forty-six years. But in his spare time Silver was a national leader among
American Jewry and an international leader among Am Yisrael (the Jewish people), working from 1942 to 1948 as the de facto head of the American Zionist movement. He was a unique leader in the annals of the American Zionist movement. Whereas Louis Brandeis focused on organizing American Jewish nickels, dimes, and dollars, with an eye toward financially supporting the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv), Silver explicitly called for a Jewish state. And whereas Stephen Wise largely preferred behind the scenes efforts to lobby the United
States government, Silver called upon American Jews to loudly employ their status as American citizens to follow him in advocating for an American foreign policy in favor of Zionist goals.
1 Rafael Medoff. “A Slander Against a Zionist Leader That Just Won’t Go Away,” The Jewish Press, August 2, 2017, http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/front-page/a-slander-against-a-zionist-leader-that-just-wont-go- away/2017/08/02/.
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Finally, whereas Zionism was often defined in terms of Jewish survival, whether physical or spiritual, Silver additionally defined Zionism as a means toward realizing a universalist Jewish mission.
The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that Abba Silver’s ideology and tactics represent the cultivation of an originally Americanist Zionism. This Zionism is “Americanist” not simply because it located in the United States, but in that it is fully embedded in the country’s very self-image. I propose that Silver carries out his vision by locating his Zionism firmly within a “public Judaism” of American civil society – specifically, within an admixture of
American civil religion and American Reform Judaism. To be more specific, Silver locates
Zionist ideologies and goals at the intersection of American Reform Judaism’s tenets of global mission and epochal messianism with the American civil religion’s tenets of American chosenness and mission as the New Israel. In other words, I aim to demonstrate how Silver’s
Zionism represents a synthesis of normative political Zionist goals with both American civil religion and Reform Judaism. I hope to convey that the cultivation of this ideological synthesis, this Americanist Zionism, was of value for Silver’s advocacy because it had the effect of addressing two existential questions facing Zionism, especially political Zionism, in the United
States. These are the questions of whether Zionist ideologies (generally speaking) are compatible with American patriotism, and thus if they have a place within American public discourse, and whether or not they inherently negate the purpose and potential of American Jewry, as a corollary of the importance that they place on Palestinian, and then Israeli, Jewry.
Eventually, the reader of this thesis will come to understand Silver’s impact much as I have – as the capstone of the historical process that Naomi Cohen and others refer to as the
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“Americanization of Zionism.”2 But one could come to that conclusion without reading this thesis. Ofer Shiff, for example, has written a wonderful political biography of Rabbi Silver, and
Silver garners ample coverage in the historical works on American Zionism of Cohen and
Melvin Urofsky.3 Jonathan Sarna and others have even put together a collection of essays on
Silver’s life and work into a single volume.4 Rather, the original contribution of my thesis, I hope, is in the teasing out of the different threads of Silver’s Zionism and the examination of each as models of religion’s presence in the American public sphere.5
Origins of the Project
This thesis was not my initial proposal. Originally, I intended to conduct a study of the ways in which Judaism manifested itself in ostensibly secular American pro-Israel lobbying groups, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and J Street. I was inspired to pursue this goal after a semester abroad in Dublin, Ireland. At Trinity College’s Irish
School of Ecumenics, I took a module, taught by Dr. Carlo Aldrovandi, on religion and international relations. As a part of the module I studied in depth for the first time secularization thesis and post-secularism. After a semester of studying the various ways in which the western academic world has, since the 1980s, been coming to grips with the idea of religion as
2 Naomi W. Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 1897-1948 (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003) Brandeis Institutional Repository. 3 Ofer Shiff, “Abba Hillel Silver and David Ben-Gurion: A Diaspora Leader Challenges the Revered Status of the ‘Founding Father,’” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10, no. 3 (2010): 391-412, Wiley Online Library; Ofer Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014); Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) EBSCOhost. 4 Mark A. Raider, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Ronald W. Zweig, editors, Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism (New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997). 5 In this thesis, I am referring to the differentiation between “public” and “private” in the Habermasian sense, as seen in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991).
7 inextricable from of history, I decided I would apply the sociological framework of post- secularist critiques of secularization theory to one of the corners of the world that I knew best, namely, contemporary Jewish-American pro-Israel activism. I began from a presumption that much of American Zionism, as embodied by AIPAC and J Street alike, predominantly represent a secular Zionism in the tradition of Theodore Herzl and the founders of the state of Israel. This liberal Zionism, in a simplified form, calls for the international re-enfranchisement of the Jewish people, a homeland for the Jews under the nation-state model by which all other nations are supposedly constituted, and a safe haven from political persecution abroad.
Informed by my semester at Trinity, I aimed to investigate the ways in which ostensibly secular liberal Zionism might not be as irreligious as I had initially presumed. I signed up for myriads of email lists from AIPAC and J Street, pored over their websites, and read their literature. I also began to read up on the history of Zionism in the United States. Amid my historical research, I came upon the works and writings of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, a leader of
American Zionism and Reform Judaism, and Israeli historian Ofer Shiff’s political biography of him.6 I also gained a much greater appreciation of the extent to which Zionism, a European import to the United States, was considered anathema by large portions of liberal American
Jewry well into the twentieth century and the history of how the ideology eventually did come to be embraced by that community. I learned so much, in fact, that my focus changed.
Rather than look for challenges to and critiques of secularization thesis within contemporary
Zionist political activism in the United States, I began to look for similar challenges and critiques within early American Zionism, especially within the “Americanization of Zionism,” as Naomi
Cohen, an influential scholar of American Jewish history, named the complex and multifaceted
6 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver.
8 historical process by which Zionism gained traction in the United States.7 I began to ask myself the following questions: To what extent and in what ways was the Americanization of Zionism a religious process? What does the answer, and indeed, the question itself, tell us about religion in the United States? What does it tell us about the relationship of said religion to society in the
United States? And what about within the Jewish-American context, specifically? These questions are broad, to put things mildly. Over the course of this thesis, in addition to making a first attempt at answering them, I hope to also provide further definition, delineation, and contextualization on the subjects of religion, religion in American, and on each of these as they relate to Jewish America, in order that my discussion of them will have practical value within the fields of religious studies, sociology of religion, history, and Jewish studies (or within the
American subsets of these fields, to more precisely circumscribe the scope of my investigation).
Project Overview
In order to paint the fullest picture that I am able of the importance of Abba Hillel
Silver’s Zionism, this thesis is divided into four chapters, each with its own theme and approach.
Chapter One has the purpose of setting the scene. In it I will tell the story of American Zionism up until and including Silver’s early career. This includes articulating the importance of two potentially existential concerns facing Zionism in the United States – that of whether Zionism negates American Jewry and that of whether Zionism, in that it represents a political, public
Jewish identity, is compatible with American patriotism. I will then sample from several individual American Zionist leaders and historical factors. Although not a complete historical summary, this context will serve a few purposes. First, it will ground Silver’s work into a
7 Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism.
9 decades-old tradition of American Zionist activism and discourse. Thus, upon later examination of Silver himself, we will be better equipped to understand the significance of his work. Where does he build upon his predecessors? Where does he refute them? What about his Zionism is unique? And ultimately, why do I call his Zionism Americanist, but not (for the most part) theirs?
Chapter Two has the primary purpose of setting the theoretical framework for my later exegesis of Silver’s work. As I perceive much of the significance of Silver’s Zionism as lying in his location of Zionism within a public Jewish identity of American society, which in turn lies at the intersection of American Reform Judaism8 and American civil religion, I will begin the chapter by laying the analytical groundwork necessary to demonstrate this phenomenon in a meaningful way. Accordingly, I aim to outline the theory in which I will be embedding my later historical and exegetical analysis, as well as to define several key terms and explain the relationships between them. I will first discuss José Casanova’s notion of public religions and his grounding of the concept in a body of critique of secularization thesis. I will next delve into scholarship on the American civil religion, in order to define the concept for practical use. I will then highlight the intersection between the categories of civil religion and public religion, and note how Casanova’s perception of this intersection provides one paradigm for how American
Reform Judaism can have a presence in the American public sphere.
In Chapter Three I will provide a case study of a “public Judaism of American civil society.” I will do this through an exegesis of Rabbi Emil Hirsch’s speech, “The Concordance of
Americanism and Judaism,” given in 1906. I will demonstrate the ways in which Hirsch’s address represents one formulation of a public Judaism at the level of American civil society,
8 Silver’s denomination of Judaism. As such, the Judaism which I will paying the most attention to in this thesis.
10 specifically the cultivation of public Judaism as a Jewish denomination of American civil religion. Although Hirsch himself was an anti-Zionist, “Concordance” is important for my project because Silver’s Zionism is located within such a Jewish denomination of American civil religion, very much not unlike that of Hirsch. Thus, this chapter will serve to familiarize the reader with the nuances of the phenomenon such a public Judaism in the United States, before adding the Zionist program into the picture.
It is only with this groundwork accomplished that I will, in Chapter Four, shift my focus to the myriad writings and speeches of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the foremost American Zionist leader of 1942-1948. I hope to put on display Silver’s perception of and appeals to a thorough convergence of American Reform Jewish theology, American civil religion and the goals and purposes of political Zionism. After providing some biographical notes on Silver’s career, in order to contextualize the importance of his Zionism, I will discuss his location of Zionist goals and ideologies to within both American Reform Judaism and American civil religion, and the respective significance thereof. Next I will discuss how Silver locates his Zionism at the intersection of those two traditions, within what could be called a Jewish denomination of
American civil religion. Finally, I will remind the reader of what all this accomplishes for Silver, and the significance of his work.
A Note on Genealogy as an Aspiration
This thesis is in part meant to contribute to the genealogy of American Zionist history, but certainly not to act as a history in and of itself. My inspiration for thinking of the project in this way came from a recent first reading of Cornel West’s “Race and Modernity.” West refers to the aesthetic elements of white supremacy, i.e., the valuing of white European standards of beauty over black ones, whether it be in hair or facial structure. He presents evidence of
11 racialized beauty standards throughout the foundations of modernity, particularly in classical and neo-classical discourses. Positioning his essay as a genealogical complement to existing histories of the origins of racism in the new economies of Europe’s American and Caribbean colonies,
West emphasizes that it:
“does not purport to be an explanation of the rise of modern racism, but rather a theoretical inquiry into a particular neglected variable, i.e., the discursive factor, within a larger explanatory model. This variable is significant because it not only precludes reductionist treatments of modem racism; it also highlights the cultural and aesthetic impact of the idea of white supremacy on black people. This inquiry accents the fact that the everyday life of black people is shaped not simply by the exploitative (oligopolistic) capitalist system of production, but also by cultural attitudes and sensibilities, including alienating ideals of beauty.”9
It is a similar approach that I wish to emphasize by associating my study of American Zionism with the genealogical approach. I aim to cast a spotlight upon elements of the religious in history that a historian might not see a need to emphasize. I might even at times point out instances in which I think inserting a consideration of religion could strengthen a historical narrative. Yet, in synthesizing the history of Zionism in the United States with a religious studies approach, I do not mean to eliminate, marginalize, or to any substantial degree challenge the historical work of figures like Naomi Cohen and Jonathan Sarna, without whom I would not be able to begin my own work. The processes that each describe are in no way invalidated or diminished by my work. Similarly, while I draw upon history and historical frameworks, and attempt to account for historical shifts within my topic, this project is certainly not in and of itself a comprehensive historical account.
Rather, I aim to promote, borrowing some words from West, “a particular neglected variable… within a larger explanatory model.” I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Silver
9 Cornel West, “Race and Modernity,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Civitas Books, 1999), 85-86.
12 brought Reform theologies, American civil religion and systems of self-conception into a mutual interplay with contemporaneous Zionist politics and ideology, in the process creating a uniquely
Americanist Zionism as well as a public American Judaism. While I certainly am not the first to discuss this interplay – for example Jonathan Sarna describes it as a “synthesis”10 – I am aiming to provide a more comprehensive analysis than I believe is often done.
Definitions: The “Americanization of Zionism” and “Americanist Zionism”
Before beginning this project in earnest, it is important to note that I will be using the term “Americanization of Zionism” in a very specific manner. When I refer to the
“Americanization of Zionism,” I am referring to the processes and methods by which Silver and others affirmed the consistency of Zionist aims, broadly speaking, with Jewish-American identity. To put matters another way, my Americanization of Zionism is not the process by which Zionism is adapted to America, it is rather the process by which Zionism is located within the American ethos. Thus, I consider the Americanization of Zionism to consist of rhetorical and political action that affirms a permanent and all-inclusive American rational for Zionism.
What I am not referring to is the work writ large of American Zionists to bring individual non-Zionist American Jews as well as the American Jewish community as a unit into their political camp; nor am I necessarily referring to all of American Zionists’ strategies to adapt an originally European political platform for success in the United States, a setting in which it was met with a decent amount of hostility early on. Thus, I distinguish between the propagation of
Zionism in America and the Americanization of Zionism. This clarification is important because each use of “Americanization of Zionism” (as I mean it and in reference to the propagation of
10 Jonathan Sarna, “Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 196.
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Zionism) is equally as valid as the other. As such I can have no expectations that my reader automatically pivots to the lens through which I am viewing the term for the purposes of this thesis.
A prominent example of the use of the term in reference the overall historical and political process of pursuing Zionist aims within the United States is provided by historian
Naomi W. Cohen’s 2003 book, appropriately titled The Americanization of Zionism.11 There are certain situations for which Cohen uses “Americanization of Zionism” as an apt descriptor of what is happening, but with regards to which I would steer clear of employing the phrase. By pointing to a couple of these situations I wish to highlight the difference between these two uses of the phrase. First, Cohen applies the label of “Americanization of Zionism” to what she presents as political concessions on behalf of the Zionists toward American sensibilities, such as not advocating for an independent state but instead working toward building a Jewish presence in
Palestine.12 I provisionally disagree with this use of the term because in qualifying Zionism for purposes of its integration into the United States, one is necessarily admitting that there is something about it which does not accord with that setting. This does not represent
Americanization (again, for my immediate purposes), because it indexes not an all-inclusive affirmation of the Americanness of Zionism, but rather a relatively conditional approval of only the supposedly less-offensive elements of a broader platform. Similarly, Cohen also presents as
“Americanization” advocacy for Zionism not based on universal values or even on the
11 Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism. For a similarly eponymous work see Ben Halpern, “The Americanization of Zionism, 1880-1930,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York: New York University Press, 1996). Halpern poses what could be an interesting challenge to my thesis. While he agrees with me that there is a distinctly American brand of Zionism that could be called “Romantic” or “Messianic,” he holds that this Zionism, at least before 1930, was not widely held by American Zionists. 12 Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 7-10.
14 ideology’s benefits for world Jewry, but rather in terms of the United States’ wartime aims during World War II.13 This is an example, however, of an impermanent affirmation of
Zionism’s place in the United States, that places the country’s consideration of Zionism at the whims of its foreign policy of the moment, rather than aligned with its basic values. My distinction between Cohen’s use of the term and my own is of further importance because there are significant overlaps between the two uses. For example, Cohen also frames the locating of
Zionism within America’s divine mission as the Americanization of Zionism, much as I will.
While the wide scope of Cohen’s use of the eponymous term is not inherently problematic, it encompasses far too much for my own use, hence the importance of distinguishing between her wider usage and my own.
Thus, in this thesis the Americanization of Zionism will refer to the process by which
Zionism is located within the American ethos. Similarly, my own clunky neologism of
“Americanist Zionism” will refer to Zionisms that are constructed to affirm the consistency of political Zionist goals and ideologies with this ethos. Meanwhile, I choose to define “American
Zionism” more normatively, as the Zionist movement and organizations physically located in the
United States. Likewise, an “American Zionist” will be a Zionist actor of American nationality or extended residence without regard to the specifics of their ideology.
It would also be remiss if I did not acknowledge the potential width of the term
“Zionism” itself. Acknowledging that my own definition has shortcomings, for the purposes of this thesis, Zionism can be broadly taken as the idea that world Jewry would significantly benefit from a concentration of settlement in the biblical land of Israel and to corresponding action to
13 Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 166.
15 actualize this idea. Although this definition includes cultural and political Zionism alike,14 when
I refer to Zionism without a preceding adjective, it should be assumed by the reader that I am referring to a political Zionism of some sort, whether that Zionism calls for a sovereign state or for an autonomous entity, but not to the exclusion of cultural Zionist ideas. Further delineation of political Zionism, for example into revisionism, binationalism, etc., is not of immediate importance for this project.
14 Generally speaking, political Zionism refers to Zionism that advocates for a political entity whereas cultural Zionism advocates for a Jewish religious or spiritual center. The ideas should not be taken as mutually exclusive.
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Chapter One: A Problematic Politics – Zionism’s Early Struggles in the United States
That many American Jews did not immediately take to Zionism is no secret. Both in terms of intellectualism and activism, the movement was born in Eastern and Central Europe.
American Jewish leadership, especially the leadership of what became known as Classical
Reform Judaism, was not just non-Zionist, but ardently anti-Zionist through the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Thus, in this first chapter I intend to articulate and explore two significant and at times existential concerns facing American Zionist leaders and that needed to be addressed both to propagate and to Americanize Zionism. In the second half of the chapter, I will discuss the ways in in which these Zionist leaders, up to and including Abba
Hillel Silver, propagated and at times Americanized Zionism despite these problems.
The first of these two concerns was that Zionist political advocacy, i.e. political advocacy on behalf of a Jewish collective, or even non-Zionist Jewish political activity in the public sphere, is to at least some degree mutually exclusive with American political involvement, belonging, and loyalty, i.e., American patriotism. I will refer to this throughout my thesis as the dual belonging problem. The second concern was that political and other forms of Zionism, in portraying Jewish physical, political, and/or spiritual well-being as dependent upon the condition of some sort of Jewish presence in Palestine, presume that American Jewish well-being and content are implicitly and axiomatically deficient. I will refer to this throughout my thesis as the negation of American Judaism. In hopes of better framing these two issues, I will undertake below to further draw out the debates surrounding them.
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A First Problem: Dual Belonging
The problem of dual belonging can be defined as a perceived tension between civic identity as a citizen of the modern liberal state and some sort of Jewish political (i.e. public) identity. This tension can be projected upon Jews by non-Jewish citizens, held internally by
Jewish citizens themselves, or both. It is exceedingly present in the story of Zionism, especially political Zionism, in the United States. In fact, it can be seen in American Reform Judaism well before Theodore Herzl published The Jews’ State (1896) or convened the Basel Conference
(1897). The leaders of the American Reform Movement, in the era of its existence known now as
“Classical”,15 had convened in 1885 and published the Pittsburgh Platform.16 The document had eight short articles, each of which presented a key tenet of the movement. Article number five was the one that opposed Zionism. It read, in part:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”17
The Pittsburgh Platform thus stands as an example of one major stumbling block impeding the embrace of Zionism by American Jews, namely, the self-perception by many American Jews of themselves as a “religious community,” rather than as a nation. Historians agree that a main reason for Reform’s aversion to Zionism and its assertion of Jewish nationhood was that it exposed the American Jewish community to accusations of dual loyalty.18 By advocating for the
15 Classical Reform communities still exist across the United States. I refer here to Classical Reform as an “era” due to the fact that what is now a specific, relatively small denomination was at one point mainly synonymous with the Reform movement at large. 16 “Declaration of Principles: The Pittsburgh Platform,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, accessed April 9, 2018, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-declaration-principles/. 17 Central Conference of American Rabbis, “The Pittsburgh Platform.” 18 Jonathan Sarna, “Louis D. Brandeis: Zionist Leader,” Brandeis Review 11, no. 3 (Winter 1992): 25, https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/americanjewishcultureandscholarship/Archive4/LouisD.BrandeisZionistL eader.pdf; Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 5.
18 establishment of a Jewish political entity, whether autonomous or sovereign, American Jews might appear to staking a claim with a political belonging somewhere other than with the United
States. Additionally, by organizing politically as Jews, American Zionists could, so their opponents alleged, be inserting a barrier between the ideal interlocutor-less relationship between the liberal state and the individual citizen. Stephen Wise, a key leader in the American Zionist movement between the 1920s and 1940s, and a Reform rabbi, made clear his rejection of the idea of a “so-called ‘Jewish vote,’” the existence of which, perhaps in addition to implying a conflict of loyalties, would imply that the United States dealt with Jews as a bloc rather than as individuals. “Americans,” Wise pronounced, should “vote as Americans, and not as Jews and
Catholics and Protestants…”19
The presence of this tension between political identification as Jews and as Americans is grounded in the history of the western, modern, liberal state. In century or so leading up to the arrival of Zionism in the United States, Jews in Western Europe and the United States enjoyed more freedoms than they ever had benefited from in early modern Europe. In France, the
Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was quickly followed by laws enumerating first the partial and then the total political emancipation of France’s Jews. Half a century later, in 1871, the legal emancipation of the Jews was institutionalized throughout the newly formed German Empire. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, George Washington’s “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport” famously declared that “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship”20 at the very beginnings of the new North American
19 Stephen S. Wise, letter to Henry I. Moskowitz, October 19, 1928, in Stephen S. Wise: Servant of the People, ed. Carl Hermann Voss (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 160. 20 George Washington, “George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport,” accessed April 13, 2016, via The Touro Synagogue, http://www.tourosynagogue.org/history-learning/tsf-intro-menu/slom- scholarship/86-washington-letter.
19 republic. In both France and Germany, however, while Jews were offered civil and religious freedom on the individual level, they were explicitly encouraged to disavow any outward differentiation between themselves and the rest of those respective countries, including and especially any national component of their Jewish identity. In the United States such pressure was not as explicit, perhaps because, unlike in the former two cases, there was never any actual process of emancipation in the United States, as the country had had a certain extent of religious freedom and for the most part had tolerated its Jewish citizens from its very inception.21
The concern of dual belonging is seen most clearly, perhaps, in the aftermath of French
Revolution. While the focus of this thesis is the story of American Zionism, the case study of the early French nation state provides tools for this project that are useful and relatively easily accessible, due to the fact the tensions between civic identity and Jewish national identity were very explicitly debated in that setting, especially in comparison to the United States’ lack of any formal emancipatory process. Within the setting of the French Revolution itself, the example par excellence of the dual belonging problem is perhaps presented by Count Stanislas-Marie-
Adélaide de Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1789. The count famously declared that the French National
Assembly:
“must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so- called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the
21 As Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson note, from its very beginning, liberalism in the United States was “so entrenched that no formal emancipation was necessary for its Jews.” Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, “Emancipation and the Liberal Offer,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 25.
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state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually…It is repugnant to have in the state…a nation within the nation.”22
In fact, the count said, having “a nation within the nation” was so repugnant that, if the Jews dithered at prospective individual emancipation in favor of any non-French national status, they should be banished from France. The count’s statement, read in conjunction with the fifth plank of the Pittsburg Platform and the worries of Rabbi Wise about establishing the existence of a
Jewish vote, establishes the complexity of the question of dual belonging.
The count’s aversion to having “a nation within the nation,” first indicates concern surrounding dual belonging specifically in regard to the possibility of conflicting loyalties to mutually exclusive national affiliations. As often understood, nationalism rests on the fundamental idea that the body politic of the state ought to be tied to a single national group. As
Ernest Gellner defines the term: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.”23 Or as Eric Hobsbawm says, the primary historical meaning of nation is “political” in that “it [equates] ‘the people’ and the state.”24 That in the case of the United States “the people” do not hail from a single ethnic group does not mean that “the people” does not exist. Indeed, nationalism frequently manifests itself as a part of American identity; an “American people” of multiple ethnic backgrounds is still very much considered an authentic national unit. As William Herberg puts it, for the American
22 Stanislas–Marie–Adélaide De Clermont–Tonnerre, “Clermont–Tonnerre, ‘Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions’ (23 December 1789),” accessed February 11, 2018, via Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/284/. 23 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 24 E.J. Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18.
21 immigrant and his descendent old nationality and ethnic affiliations are “expected to change…as he becomes American.”25
Since loyalty to the state is often perceived to be indexed by one’s identification with the corresponding national affiliation of that state, Zionism’s implicit identification of American
Jews with a non-American national group, even in addition to their identification with the
American national group, is problematic for the ideology’s success among an American audience. Just as the count considers “a nation within the nation” to be “repugnant” in part because it could index loyalty to a non-French nationality, the Pittsburg Platform’s rejection of
Jewish national identity likewise implies a rejection of any assertion that American Jews are loyal to some Jewish national unit rather than the United States. In a world increasingly full of states built on a theory of nationalism of some form or another, an Americanist Zionism seems oxymoronic.
But the concern of dual belonging cannot be wholly reduced to a concern of having multiple national identities. While crucial in and of itself, this concern was interwoven with the centralization of the modern state and its consolidation of its power of the public sphere;26 and especially with a corresponding removal of religious authority and public manifestations of religious identity from the public sphere.27 As Karl Marx put it, the centralization of the modern
25 Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Second Edition (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 23. See pp. 6-31 for a broader look at Herberg’s discussions of the role of ethnic and national identity in United States. 26 For a more detailed explanation of how civic identity is related to the consolidation of state power, see William Rogers Brubaker, “The French Revolution and the Invention of Citizenship,” French Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 30-49, JSTOR, especially pp. 45-47. 27 For various stances on how the rise of the modern state was correlated with the privatization of religion and/or a decline in religious political authority see José Casanova, “Secularization, Enlightenment, and Modern Religion,” in Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11-39; William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995), 397-420, ISSN 0266-7177; Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), EBSCOhost.
22 state remained incomplete so long as “medieval rubbish” remained as alternatives to state authority. He speaks of the French Revolution as a “gigantic broom” that cleared away “the last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice.”28 This “rubbish” that Marx speaks of is explained by historian Gary Kates:
“Old Regime society was corporate and particularistic. The law recognized individuals only insofar as they held membership in a legal group. A tailor needed the protection of his guild, a priest his religious order, a merchant his town corporation, and so on. In this respect, Jews were considered legitimate subjects of the king if they were attached to a legally recognized Jewish community.”29
This stands in direct contrast to post-revolutionary France in which, theoretically, one was either a citizen (whether active or passive) or not, and in which neither guild nor estate nor religion had any direct bearing on one’s political status. Thus, the count’s quote is also representative of the process of state centralization and de-corporatization that France underwent as part of the revolution; a public identity other than that of “citizen” is seen as backwards. In Wise’s rejection of voting along religious lines, there are distinct echoes of the same desire for the state to deal directly with the individual. And while the count’s emphasis on the emancipation of Jews as individuals rather than the emancipation of Jews as a collective body30 and corresponding disgust with the prospect of a “nation within a nation” demonstrate a desire to remove corporate interlocutors between the state and the individual in general, it is worth noting again that such a political reorganization is deeply intertwined with perceptions of the proper relationship between
28 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Civil War in France,” in Selected Works in One Volume, (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 289, quoted in Brubaker, “The French Revolution,” 45-46. cite Marx in Brubaker 29 Gary Kates, “Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality and Representation in Revolutionary France,” Social Research 56, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 223-224, JSTOR. 30 Or bodies. Jews in revolutionary France were overwhelmingly located in three locations, each with a distinct history, as well as with semi-independent (and even competing) processes of emancipation. See I. H. Hersch, “The French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Jews,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 19, no. 3 (April 1907), JSTOR.
23 religion and the public sphere. For this political reorganization and de-corporatization demands that religion, or at least minority religion, become an identity of the private sphere only.
Consequently, as Zionism in America requires the political organization of American Jewry as such in the United States’ public sphere the movement is almost inherently problematic.
Thus, the question of dual belonging in its American manifestation was the first significant contributing factor to Zionism’s initially chilly reception among American Jews. It is the question of whether or not in advocating on behalf of a Jewish body politic, one was necessarily excluding themself from proper belonging to the American body politic. It is the question of whether or not one can be both a Zionist and an American patriot. Deeply rooted in the tradition of the western, liberal state as it was, this question would not be easy for American
Zionists to overcome.
A Second Problem: Negation of American Judaism
The second contributing factor to American Jews’ initial reticence concerning Zionist ideas was a fear of endorsing an ideology that implies that American Jewish culture and life is inherently less than, or even dependent on, Jewish life and culture in Palestine. This concept is known as the negation of the Diaspora, but can be referred to as the negation of American
Judaism in the specific context with which we are dealing. As Eliezer Schweid, an Israeli philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, writes in an essay in defense of the concept, the negation of the Diaspora “is a common assumption of all Zionist trends that the
Jews as a people have no future in the Diaspora without [at least] an independent ‘spiritual center’ in the Land of Israel.”31 In the terms of cultural Zionism, negation of the Diaspora argues
31 Eliezer Schweid, “The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 133.
24 that Diaspora communities will be spiritually and culturally constrained without feeding off of a
Jewish energy, so to speak, provided by the spiritual center. In the terms of political Zionism, the principle claims that Diaspora communities are doomed to extinction without the existence of a politically autonomous or sovereign homeland, either for most Jews to ‘return’ to or in order to
‘normalize’ their international status.
Jewish-American aversion to the negation of their own community was so critical to
Zionism’s traction in the United States that a 1950 “entente” between David Ben Gurion (then prime minister of Israel) and Jacob Blaustein (unofficially representing American Jews in his capacity as president of the American Jewish Committee) included the affirmation “that Israel fully accepts the fact that the Jews in the United States do not live ‘in exile,’ and that America is home for them.”32 Of course, this compromise does not rule out Zionism’s negation of the
Diaspora more broadly (to do so might make Zionism itself absurd) but certainly creates an exception for the American case. And as with the problem of dual belonging, the foundational tensions surrounding the interplay of Zionism and the negation of the Diaspora have been present from the earliest days of Zionism in the United States.
The relationship between Zionism and negation of the Diaspora is seen in some of the foundational proto-Zionist33 writings, including Leon Pinsker’s foundational Auto-
Emancipation.34 Pinsker (1821-1891), a Russian-born Jew, originally held that the solution to antisemitism was for Jews to assimilate into the countries of their residence.35 After visiting
32 Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 334-35. 33 I use “proto-Zionist” to refer to Zionist-like concepts in place before the popularization of the term through the work of Theodore Herzl in the late 1890s. I will most frequently use it in reference to the work of Emma Lazarus. 34 Leon Pinsker “Auto-Emancipation,” accessed November 5, 2017, via Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-auto-emancipation-quot-leon-pinsker. 35 Biographical information from Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Leo Pinsker,” accessed April 12, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Pinsker.
25
Western Europe, and after the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s, he became convinced that rather than assimilation, or perhaps in addition to assimilation, the answer to antisemitism was the foundation of a Jewish state.36 He took action upon these beliefs, becoming a key founder of the Chovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement that encouraged Jewish migration to Ottoman
Palestine. And while Herzl’s The Jews’ State is considered by many to be the first important articulation of political Zionism, Ahad Ha’am, Pinsker’s contemporary and as a founding figure of cultural Zionism, a bit of an ideological rival, claims otherwise. In a commentary of Auto-
Emancipation, honoring the author on the 10th anniversary of his death, Ha’am writes that
Pinsker was “the man, who, fifteen years before Herzl, worked out the whole theory of political
Zionism from beginning to end, with a logical thoroughness and an elevation of style unequalled by any subsequent work.”37
Auto-Emancipation’s articulation of political Zionism makes abundantly clear that the very existence of the Jewish nation is inseparable from its political existence in Palestine.
Pinsker compares the Jewish nation to the “ghostlike apparition of a living corpse, of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive, and yet walking among the living.”38 In a less poetic section of his pamphlet, Pinsker describes the
Jewish “corpse” as follows:
“It lacks most of the essential attributes by which a nation is recognized. It lacks that autochthonous life which is inconceivable without a common language and customs and without cohesion in space. The Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands; no center of focus or gravity, no government of its own, no official representation. They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home.
36 Dimitry Shumsky posits, counter to many narratives, that Pinsker never stopped being assimilationist. Rather, Shumsky argues that Pinsker saw a Jewish political entity in Palestine as the normalizing factor that would enable Jewish assimilation in other countries. Dimitry Shumsky, “Leon Pinsker and ‘Autoemancipation!’: A Reevaluation,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 1 (Fall 2011), Project MUSE. 37 Ahad Ha’am, “Pinsker and Political Zionism,” in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. Hans Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), 92. 38 “Auto-Emancipation,” Jewish Virtual Library.
26
The nations have never to deal with a Jewish nation but always with mere Jews. The Jews are not a nation because they lack a certain distinctive national character, inherent in all other nations, which is formed by common residence in a single state. It was clearly impossible for this national character to be developed in the Diaspora; the Jews seem rather to have lost all remembrance of their former home.”39
That Pinsker’s Zionism negates the Diaspora could not be made clearer. Subsequently, it could not be made clearer that normative Zionism contains a negation of the Diaspora as well, given
Pinsker’s foundational role in the Zionist movement and ideology. Indeed, negation of the
Diaspora is enmeshed throughout early political Zionism. In The Jews’ State (1896), Theodore
Herzl frames the goal of a state as an answer to contemporary European antisemitism, which he repeatedly equates with the “plight of the Jews,”40 or some similar phrase. Zionism is presented as the solution to the problem, and the problem is one that is inherently present in the Diasporic state of being, with no exceptions made, at least not at first, for the United States of America.
Nevertheless, American Zionism
Obviously, neither fears of dual belonging nor a hinted negation of American Jewry were ultimately fatal for the success of Zionism in the United States. Over the course of the late- nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, larger and larger proportions of American Jewry adopted a Zionism of some sort. Even before the horrors of the Holocaust radically rearranged the conversation, American Zionists had made significant headway in their proselytization efforts.41 What follows is a selective look at several ways in which American Zionist individuals and groups promoted their ideology in the face of concerns regarding Zionism’s implications of public-sphere Jewish identity and the negation of American Jewry. By presenting those of his
39 Ibid. 40 Theodor Herzl, The Jews’ State, trans. Henk Overberg, (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1997), p. 125. 41 For examples of how the Holocaust changed the conversation on Zionist efforts among American Jews, see Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 12, 93.
27 predecessors and peers, I aim to contextualize Silver’s ideology and actions with regard to these challenges. I will especially aim to highlight where we can see examples of Zionism being clearly aligned with specifically American or Jewish-American creeds, as well as to differentiate between instances of adapting or not adapting Zionism itself in response to the concerns of negation or dual belonging. I will note that this is not, however, an attempt at a complete historical summary of Zionism in the United States.
For a first example, one aspect of Zionism’s struggle to avoid negating American
Judaism came through the branding of Zionism as a largely humanitarian effort. Emma Lazarus, a Jewish-American poet and proto-Zionist advocate, of Statue of Liberty fame,42 was one leader who framed Zionism in this manner, as she does in two letters of An Epistle to the Hebrews, a series of fifteen essays originally published in The American Hebrew from late 1882 through early 1883. In the first essay (the twelfth of fifteen) Lazarus emphasizes that work to create a
Jewish homeland is an act of charity from the vantage points of American Jews on behalf of those less fortunate. She writes that American Jews are lucky to have found themselves somewhere:
“which by friendly chance has proved a kind and hospitable refuge. Should we repudiate and withhold our hand from those have found a less happy termination to our common misfortune? …It will be a lasting blot upon American Judaism – nay, upon prosperous Judaism of whatever nationality – if we do not come forward now with encouragement for the disheartened and help for the helpless” (emphasis Lazarus’s).43
Here, we see Lazarus exhorting American Jews to support the Jewish colonization of Palestine despite her claim that this effort will have no bearing on their own immediate communities. In
42 Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” which graces the base of the Statue of Liberty. 43 “Emma Lazarus, “XII” in An Epistle to the Hebrews: Centennial Edition, edited by Morris U. Schappes (New York: The Jewish Historical Society of New York, 1987), 66.
28 partially shifting the focus of Zionism from political ideology to humanitarianism, she creates room for American Jews to take part in proto-Zionism without feeling that they are making a statement of inadequacy about their Judaism or on the cultural or spiritual effect thereupon of the movement for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. In the next essay, she makes this affirmation of
American Jewry explicit, while also denying that even more overtly political, state-building activity indexes any sort of dual belonging. She writes:
“Today, wherever we are free, we are at home… We are ready and glad to pay the full price demanded equally of Spaniard and Englishman, of Teuton and Celt, of Jew and Christian, for the privileges of American citizenship, viz: the forfeiture of all claim to an alien nationality… My plea for the establishment of a free Jewish State therefore has not the remotest bearing upon the position of American Jews” (emphasis added).44
We can see here how the problem of negation is tied to that of dual belonging, as in this excerpt
Lazarus’s denial of the latter charge is tied to that of the former. For if one’s Americanness inhibits one’s Jewishness, how can one fully identify as both?
The humanitarian framing practiced by Lazarus is quite similar in effect to what Naomi
Cohen refers to as “Palestinianism” – which is not to be confused with Edward Said’s name for intersectional Palestinian Arab popular resistance.45 In Palestinianism and Lazarus’s humanitarian proto-Zionism alike, the primary beneficiaries of the movement are posited to be those Jews in Palestine and the old countries of Eastern Europe, thus lowering the political stakes for the Jewish population of the United States. Under Palestinianism specifically, American
Zionist activism put an emphasis on philanthropy as opposed to nationalist ideology, with a healthy dose of American economic and social progressivism. The target of this philanthropic
44 “XIV” in Lazarus, Epistle to the Hebrews, 73. 45 Said’s Palestinianism is “a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestine’s multiracial and multireligious history.” Edward Said, “The Palestinian Experience,” in The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 16.
29 giving and fundraising was supporting the Yishuv, Jewish settlements in Palestine, and the practical and financial needs of the colonization project, especially the construction of a labor- oriented agriculturalist Jewish society. This stands in contrast to the European, mainstream focus on an autonomous or sovereign Jewish state. With the motto of “Men! Money! Discipline!” a well-organized Palestinianism became the signature of Louis Brandeis’s tenure as the primary leader of American Zionism. In large part by deemphasizing the potentiality of political statehood, Palestinianism was seen as much more acceptable to the Reform leadership and
American Jewish elite, including much of the American Jewish Committee, especially after
Britain’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration indexed a new type of legitimacy to Jewish settlement in Palestine. American Jews who would never identify as Zionist were eager to join forces financially with Brandeis and his allies in raising money toward the settlement of Jewish refugees from the first World War in Palestine and the building of institutions such as the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the kibbutzim (agricultural collective). Despite that he was not the first to advocate a philanthropic version of Zionism, it was nevertheless with Brandeis’s work that these efforts truly came to define the movement in the United States.46
Of course, the shift in focus from Herzlian ideology, which was still the basis of
European Zionism, to Palestinianism was not without detractors. It was part of why Brandeis lost a vote of confidence and resigned from the leadership of the Zionist Organization of America
(ZOA) in 1922.47 But the setback for Palestinianism proved both shallow and temporary. In the years of Brandeis’s absence his opponents adopted many of his policies and the Brandeis camp was eventually invited back to leadership, in large part because the organization found itself in
46 Cohen 7-10 47 “Chapter Seven ‘Schism!,’” in Urofsky, American Zionism, 247-298.
30 steep decline under his successor, Louis Lipsky.48 By the end of 1920s Palestinianism was back in place as the dominant medium of American Zionist activities.49
Besides the emphasis on humanitarianism Lazarus avoids negating American Judaism in other ways as well. First, she calls for the revitalization – in the United States – of Jewish physicality. Her affirmation of American Judaism via her praise for the opportunities that
America holds for revitalizing Jewish physicality appears prominently in the third and fourth letters of An Epistle to the Hebrews, in which she calls for a broad industrialization and physicalizing of American Jewish education:
“Now that all trades and industries are open to us, let us take advantage of our liberty by fostering and developing to the highest perfection every useful branch of industrial life”50
“Let us live, let us develop to their highest possible limit the physical and productive capacities of our people.”51
Lazarus’s affirmation of American Jewry is also implied by her location of this call for physical revitalization, relative to her mention of movement to colonize Palestine. In An Epistle to the
Hebrews the topic of Jewish settlement in Palestine makes no appearance until the sixth essay of fifteen, and does not even dominate the series beyond that point. Much of the first five letters, such as the ones in which the above excerpts are from, are focused, instead, on the prospect of improving Jewish standing in the United States as a wholly domestic matter.
This is not to say that all American Zionists worked to depoliticize Zionism by placing its success an arm’s length away from American Jewry. Lazarus’s juxtaposition of a humanitarian
48 While Urofsky assigns much of the blame for American Zionism’s decline to Lipsky and his camp (American Zionsim, 305-07), Halpern (“The Americanization of Zionism,” 326-27)) believes the post Brandeis decline was merely a natural regression from heightened interest in Zionist activity due the emergency of World War I, with its large numbers of Jewish refugees. 49 Urofsky, “The Americanization of Zionism,” 297. 50 “III” in Lazarus, Epistle to the Hebrews, 20. 51 “IV” in Lazarus, Epistle to the Hebrews, 25.
31
Zionism that will have no effect on the well-being of the American Jew with her calls for
American Jewish physical revitalization that will happen independently of goings-on in Palestine stands in relief against American Zionisms that seem to accept to a significantly greater degree the negation of American Judaism. Such examples are provided by Henrietta Szold, founder of
Hadassah, the Zionist women’s public health organization, and Solomon Schechter,
Conservative rabbi and the first president of the United Synagogue of America (now the United
Synagogue of Conservative Judaism). In 1909 Szold, during her first visit to Palestine, recounted that it was “smelling the very soil and… rubbing shoulders with the people” that made her “more convinced than ever that if not Zionism, then nothing – then extinction for the Jew” (emphasis added).52 By association, she implicitly ties the well-being of American Jewry to the success of
Zionist agricultural endeavors in Palestine. Schechter too ties American Jewish vibrancy to
Zionist success, perhaps most famously when he referred to the movement as “the great bulwark against assimilation.”53 In the same statement, Schechter makes abundantly clear that he views the galut (Diaspora/exile) as a “tragedy,” and that without a religious center in Palestine “the effects [on Judaism] are bound to be fatal,” thus driving home that fears of negation are in fact a driving force behind his Zionism.
Additionally, Szold and Schechter each saw Zionist activism in and of itself as beneficial for American Jewry. As Szold put in a 1913 letter to Alice Seligsberg, another American Zionist leader, “We [American Jews] need Zionism as much as those Jews do who need a physical home.”54 In an unrelated letter five years later, during a visit to Texas, Szold expounded:
52 Henrietta Szold, letter to Elvira N. Solis, December 12, 1909, in Life and Letters, ed. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: The Viking Press, 1942), 67. 53 Solomon Schechter, “Zionism: A Statement,” accessed April 12, 2018, via The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/zionismstatement00sche/zionismstatement00sche_djvu.txt. 54 Szold, letter to Alice Seligsberg, October 10, 1913, in Life and Letters, 82.
32
“We in New York haven’t a conception of Jewish laxity [elsewhere in the United States] – the distance between the Jew and Judaism. It is not a question of reform and orthodoxy – it is Judaism and non-Judaism. Zionism is the only anchor in sight. Here is the problem in its nakedness. How is it to be solved? I say through Zionism. What other solution is offered?”55
Thus, in addition to her claim that the existence of Palestinian homeland is the sole guarantor of
Jewish survival, Szold advocates for Zionism on the basis that activism on behalf of a Jewish cause in and of itself would help keep American Jews engaged with their Judaism and with their
Jewish communities. Schechter again parallels Szold in that he also saw Zionism as a way to connect American Jews to Judaism.56 He and other religious leaders, including some second- generation American Reform leaders, additionally saw the movement as a way to combat
Classical Reform Judaism’s anti-nationalist interpretation of Jewish identity.57 In this, we see that the contention over Zionism was to an extent an extension of inter and even intra- denominational tensions within American Judaism, as still relatively young movements grappled with each other to maximize their theological and political appeals to various populations.
Again in contrast with Szold’s and Schechter’s views on the American Judaism,
Lazarus’s poetry also affirms the Jewish presence in the United States, at times in the strongest of terms. She takes the opportunity to extol America as place of vibrant Jewish life, or at the very least, as a place where a Jewish renaissance can take place independently of events in Palestine.
Ranen Omer-Sherman, who as someone who has published detailed essays on Lazarus in his book Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature58 as well as in an essay in Legacy: A
55 Szold, letter to Elvira N. Solis, January 18, 1918, in Life and Letters, 102. 56 Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 50-59 57 Ibid. 58 Ranen Omer-Sherman, “‘Thy People Are My People’: Emma Lazarus, Zion, and Jewish Modernity in the 1880s,” in Diaspora Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth, (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002).
33
Journal of American Women Writers, is somewhat of an authority on her work, writes that the poet views America and Palestine as “two complementary, not competing, Zions.”59 As Lazarus herself writes in her poem, “The New Year:”
“In two divided streams the exiles part. One rushing homeward to its ancient source, One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart. By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled, Each separate soul contains the nation's force. And both embrace the world.”60
Lazarus sets her magnification of the United States’ promise for the Jews side by side with her affinity for Jewish physicality. Her tributes to the opportunities for success afforded to the
Jewish immigrant-refugee to the United State are often pastoral in tone. For example, in her poem “In Exile” she combines the themes of physicality and America as Zion by referring to the new immigrant-refugees as “unused tillers of the soil,” who find in Texas the:
“Freedom to love the law that Moses brought. To sing the songs of David, and to think The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught, Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink The universal air — for this they sought Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain.”61
The synthesis continues in “Currents,” where she writes how, “The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem's royal shepherd renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.”62
59 Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of Modernity,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 19, no. 2 (2002): 187, JSTOR. 60 “The New Year,” in Emma Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889) (Alexandria, Virginia: Chadwyck- Healey Inc., 1996), 2:2, ProQuest Literature Online. 61 “In Exile,” in Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889), 2:6. 62 “Currents,” in Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889), 2:64
34
A further key figure in the propagation of Zionism in America, perhaps the most key figure, was Louis Brandeis, a notable figure in many regards. He was the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court of the United States and before that an effective progressive activist and lawyer. And, in an impressive turn-about for someone who did not frequently move in Jewish circles until his fifties, a critical figure in the Americanization of Zionism. In fact, historians, from Jonathan Sarna to Naomi Cohen to Melvin Urofsky, commonly credit Brandeis with being the primary individual behind the Americanization of Zionism. Sarna cites a “veteran Zionist leader” saying that “thanks to Brandeis, ‘Zionism became ‘fashionable’ almost overnight.”63
Sarna notes that a large part of this was due to the force of personality that Brandeis brought to the movement as a progressive and Jewish hero. While Brandeis simply as a figure of pride for
American Jewry was indeed a critical part of Zionism’s eventual success, his organizing and speaking skills also had a distinct role to play, as did his ability to cast Zionism as a completely legitimate American movement, one that in no way indexed disqualifying conflicting loyalties or a public religious interruption of the state’s relationship with its citizens. As Cohen writes,
Brandeis “welded American Progressive ideals to those of Zionism” in the “Brandeisian synthesis,” a turn of phrase for which she credits Urofsky.64 The Brandeisian synthesis will be the topic of the immediately following pages.
In a famous 1915 speech to a gathering of Reform rabbis, Brandeis illustrates three aspects of this synthesis and his corresponding refutation of the charge of dual belonging. First, he distinguishes between nation and nationality. What is often referred to as a nation, he said, should more properly be referred to as a nationality; the former is often composed of by a
63 Sarna, “Louis D. Brandeis,” 25. 64 Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 61. She is citing Urofsky, American Zionism, 164.
35 collection of the latter. As examples, he proposed the “British nation,” with its English, Scottish,
Welsh, and Irish nationalities and, in a statement that reveals his efforts to categorize Jews as white, the “American nation which comprises nearly all the white nationalities.”65 He continues to say that “the unity of a nationality is a fact of nature; the unification into a nation is largely the work of man” before attributing to a conflation of the two the outbreak of World War I, which embroiled Europe at the time of his speech.66 This separation of nation into nationality has two effects. First, it refutes a paradigm in which one can politically identify either as Jewish or as
American, but not as both. By splitting political identification into two components, nation and nationality, he creates room for the American Zionist to own both American and Jewish political identities, neither at the exclusion of the other. To be clear, anti-Zionist leaders could and often did share a similar conception of dual national identity with Brandeis, specifically Rabbis
Kauffman Kohler and Emil Hirsch.67 Nevertheless, it is important to identify Brandeis’s legitimation of dual national belonging in that it is one example of a specific philosophical approach by which American Zionists argued in favor of their project, particularly of its consonance with their American political identities.
The second way in which Brandeis addressed the charge of dual loyalty was by framing
Zionism as a movement of universal, rather than particular, ideals, of which Zionism was merely a one manifestation of a worldwide aim. To do so he frames Zionism as an effort to lift Jews up to a status equal to the rightful status of every nation. He defines the movement as aiming “to enable the same right now exercised by practically every other people [i.e. nationality] in the
65 Louis D. Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It” (speech, St. Louis, April 25, 1915), Louis D. Brandeis School of Law Library, University of Louisville, accessed April 12, 2018, https://louisville.edu/law/library/special- collections/the-louis-d.-brandeis-collection/the-jewish-problem-how-to-solve-it-by-louis-d.-brandeis 66 Ibid. 67 Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 51
36 world: to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or some other country.”68 By juxtaposing political Zionism’s aims with what he claims is the global norm for an ethno-cultural collective, Brandeis implies that Zionism should not be taken solely as a Jewish cause, rather it should be taken as the Jewish manifestation as a universal cause and therefore an American cause. “Full equality of opportunity,” he later reiterates, “cannot be obtained by Jews until we, like members of other nationalities, shall have the option of living elsewhere or of returning to land of our forefathers” (emphasis added).69 Brandeis bolsters his argument by appealing to the precedent that was contemporaneously being set by the Irish struggle for independence from the
British Empire and Irish-American support thereof. His reference to Zionist efforts as hopefully culminating in “home rule”70 can be taken as an allusion to the Irish struggle, given both the historical context and the fact that he elsewhere mentions Irish-American support for Irish nationalism as a precedent for Jewish-American support for Zionism.71 In [find de Haas book and cite], Brandeis says, “When we consider how large and generous has been the contribution of the Irish of America for the cause of home rule, the present demand upon the Jews for Zionist purposes seems small indeed.”72 In other words, if American citizens of Irish descent act on this universal ideal, why not the Jews?
The third way in which Brandeis addresses the question of dual loyalty is via a claim that
Zionism is a fundamental way for Jews in America to display their American patriotism. This
68 Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem.” 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 The reference was timely. 1915, the year of Brandeis’ speech, was toward the beginning of the Irish Revolutionary Period. In 1916 the famous Easter Rising would occur, in 1919 the Irish War of Independence/Civil War would begin, and in 1921 Ireland would be partitioned and the island, excluding the Northeast, would be reconstituted as a British Dominion, the Irish Free State. 72 Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem.”
37 refutation of dual belonging is the most explicit in Brandeis’s speech; it also incorporates his first two refutations:
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with Patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. A man is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city; for being loyal to his family, and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or his lodge. Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”73
In claiming that “multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent,” Brandeis employs his differentiation between types of political allegiances to explicitly state that one can identify – politically! – simultaneously as an American and as a Jew. He both dismisses the idea that dual belonging is equivalent to conflicting loyalty and argues for the legitimacy of an individual holding public identities other than as the citizen of a state. And in again appealing to the precedent of Irish-American solidarity with Ireland’s struggle against the crown, he again reminds his audience of rabbis that he perceives Zionism as merely the Jewish manifestation of a universal right. But how does Zionist activity make one “a better American,” as Brandeis insists it does? Brandeis does in fact provide an answer:
“Indeed, loyalty to America demands rather that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance. The Jewish spirit, so long preserved, the character developed by so many centuries of sacrifice, should be preserved and developed further, so that in America as elsewhere the sons of the race may in future live lives and do deeds worthy of their ancestors.”74
73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.
38
Or, as he more succinctly puts it elsewhere, “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”75 Again, this identification of the harmony between
American and Jewish identity is not Brandeis’s own invention. Indeed, we will see it in the most definitely not Zionist ideology of Rabbi Emil Hirsch, just as we will see it in a privileged position within the Americanist Zionism of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.
Of course, the propagation of American Zionism did not simply occur via a debate held inside an ivory tower somewhere, whether within the walls of the rabbinical schools at the
Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College (HUC) and the Conservative Movement’s Jewish
Theological Seminary (JTS), or the conference rooms of the American Jewish Committee. It was a multifaceted historical and political process, which included changing demographics of
American Jewry, changes in American Jewish politics, the organizing work of American
Zionists, and more. While the theoretical and rhetorical contributions of leaders like Lazarus,
Szold, Brandeis, and even Silver played critical roles, they cannot on their own account for the sea change that took place between the end of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries.
One contributing factor was the arrival of Eastern European immigrants to the United
States. In 1880, American Jewry was predominantly German or otherwise of Central European extract, and numbered roughly a quarter of a million.76 It was this Jewish population and its establishment, especially its various immigrant rabbis of the early American Classical Reform movement, such as Isaac Mayer Wise, Kauffman Kohler, and Emil Hirsch, that would be tepid at
75 Louis D. Brandeis, “The Rebirth of the Jewish Nation” (1915), in Louis D. Brandeis: A Biographical Sketch, ed. Jacob de Haas (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1929), 163. 76 Population estimate from “Appendix: American Jewish Population Estimates, 1660-2000” in Sarna, American Judaism. Demographics estimate from Sarna, American Judaism, 63-64.
39 best about Zionism upon the movement’s arrival in the United States. In 1881, however, massive
Jewish immigration to the United States from Eastern Europe began, especially from the Russian
Empire. Between 1881 and 1914 around two million Eastern European Jews arrived in the
United States.77
Melvin Urofsky cautions against crediting these new arrivals with the salvation of
Zionism in America. At first, the most common ideology among them was an anti-Zionist, anti- nationalist socialism. And in 1914, less than 20,000 American Jews held membership in a
Zionist organization. Nevertheless, he does acknowledge that that the majority of American
Zionists around the turn of the century were of Eastern European descent. Outside of a few
American Reform rabbis of Central European descent – notably Richard Gottheil and Stephen
Wise – who were disciples of Herzl, the majority of early American Zionist organizing lay in the same communities that generated the first European movements to Palestine, especially in the form of organizations such as Leon Pinsker’s Chovevei Zion, which originated in Eastern Europe but quickly followed Eastern European Jews to New York.78
Naomi Cohen treats the matter with a similar nuance as does Urofsky. Like Urofsky, she notes that Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States were not destined to be
Zionists. After all, they had all just arrived in the United States as their land of refuge, not
Palestine.79
But throughout The Americanization of Zionism, however, Cohen reminds her reader that
American Jews of Eastern European descent and origins had different influences on their conceptions of Jewish identity relative to American Jews of Central European descent and
77 Sarna, American Judaism, 151. 78 Urofksy, “Zionism comes to America” in American Zionism. 79 Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 4.
40 origins, as well as American Jews who had been in the United States for many generations, such as the Sephardic (of Spanish descent) minority, which was the first Jewish ethnic group in the
Americas. The key difference of the moment is between Eastern European and Central/Western
European and American views on the relationship between nationality and Jewish identity. The
Jewish experience in Germany, France, and the United States included a process or state of emancipation in which Jewish identity was encouraged to fit a mold of a religious identity that precluded national identification. Such an experience was not shared by Jews from places such as the Russian Empire, who instead experienced what Cohen terms a “nationalist enlightenment” and effectively remained a national minority of a relatively illiberal state.80 The comparative lack of separation between conceptions of nationality and religion, Cohen argues, encouraged a relatively positive predisposition toward Zionism on the part of American Jews of Eastern
European descent. Thus, arguments that American Jews could legitimately claim both American and Jewish national belonging, such as the one from Louis Brandeis, were often more likely to be well received by Eastern European immigrants, the arrival of whom to the United States was fundamentally shifting the demographics of American Judaism.
Another major factor in the popularization of Zionism among American Jews was an intentional effort by American Zionists and others to democratize the American Jewish community. As Naomi Cohen tells the story, through the lens of her research on a Federation of
American Zionists (FAZ – the predecessor to today’s Zionist Organization of America, or ZOA) publication, The Maccabaean, two motivations stood behind the strategy. First, a democratically organized American Jewish community was a political necessity. In the years immediately preceding World War I, the dominant voice broadcasted by the American Jewish community into
80 Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 27.
41 the country at large was provided by the American Jewish Committee (founded in 1906), whose agenda was determined by the wealthiest American Jews. Cohen describes the Committee’s leadership as self-appointed stewards of American Jewry following in the footsteps of the shtadlanim (court Jews) of Europe’s old regime who had interceded with kings and other nobility on behalf of the Jewish communities there. These leaders were almost entirely anti-Zionist or non-Zionist and opposed to any Jewish organizing that might encourage perceptions of Jews as a nation within a nation, and perhaps pave the way for rampant antisemitism in the United States.
For the most part, the Committee opposed the scattered successes of the early American Zionists, and the Zionists resented that a few anti-Zionists represented a community that was not nearly so united in its opposition to Zionism as the Committee made it out to be. The Committee was not representative in other ways, as well. It was dominated by entrenched, elite, acculturated Jews of
German heritage, the so-called “uptown Yahudim,” whereas the Zionists were predominantly more recently arrived, less-affluent, Russian immigrants and their descendants, the “downtown
Yids.” Of course, by the early twentieth century the latter demographic vastly outnumbered the former, and although nowhere near all of them were Zionists, the movement’s leadership had confidence that a democratically structured Jewish community would serve its cause well.81
Second, a democratically organized American Jewish community enabled Zionists to present their platform as quintessentially American. As we have already seen, a subtext of
Zionism’s presumed incompatibility with Americanism is implicit within the twin concerns of dual belonging and the negation of American Judaism. By framing their argument for leadership of the community as a question of democracy versus oligarchy, the Zionist camp was able to flip
81 Cohen, “Forging an American Zionism: The Maccabaean” in Americanization of Zionism.
42 the accusation of Zionism as anti-American.82 In the same fashion as Louis Brandeis, who declared that “to be good Americans… we must become Zionists,”83 democratic methods enabled the American Zionists at large to pronounce that they were not American patriots in spite of their Zionism, but that rather they were patriots because of their Zionism.
Key events in the democratization of American Judaism happened around each of the two world wars. Even in the early stages of World War I, a desire to ensure that Jewish interests would be accounted for in a future peace conference drove American Zionists to begin drumming up support for a national Jewish congress. (It can be assumed that the American
Zionists had the expectation that such a congress would establish Jewish interests as synonymous with Zionist interests, or at least as much closer than previously perceived.) Debate within
American Jewry over whether or not hold such a congress, and if so, what it would look like, begat an arduous process. Melvin Urofsky describes the interests of the various stakeholders as follows:
“Zionism clouded the issue, but the fight over the congress was not a fight for or against Zionism. Rather, it marked the coming to maturity of the Russian immigrants, and their desire to have a major say in the American Jewish community. It also denoted the efforts of the Zionists to become a leading force among American Jews. Intertwined in the struggle were the fears of Reform Jews that Zionism would stigmatize them as a separate nation, and their dislike for any public airing of Jewish disputes. The fight’s leitmotiv proved to be democracy, and the effort to dominate Jewish affairs quickly became a battle between democracy and aristocracy.”84
At first the debate was held mainly between Brandeis and the leaders of the American Jewish
Committee, but Urofsky notes that the eventual extent to which the congress would be democratic was established when Eastern European organizations – that were Jewish but not
82 Ibid, 23-27. 83 Brandeis, “Rebirth of the Jewish Nation,” 163. 84 Urofsky, American Zionism, 173.
43 necessarily Zionist – took matters into their own hands in late 1915, laying down demands of both the Zionist leadership and the American Jewish Committee.85 Thus, the democratization of the American Jewish community, in addition to being a boon for the Zionists and a powerful argument for the Americanness of the movement, was inextricable from the changing demographics of American Jewry.
Democratization was also a key element of American Zionist progress during World War
II, as seen in the pro-Zionist resolutions of a new organization, the American Jewish Conference.
In similar circumstances to those surrounding the congress fight of over a quarter-century earlier, the Conference was convened by Zionists in order to create a body with the authority to ratify a pro-Zionist stance as being the official politics of American Jewry, and Zionist organizations worked accordingly to establish their delegates as a majority. At its first meeting, in 1943, Rabbi
Abba Hillel Silver rallied the delegates to vote not only for Zionism in general, but for a Zionism explicitly in favor of Jewish statehood. While the American Jewish Committee quickly quit the
Conference’s ranks upon the vote and the Conference’s ability to enforce its decisions upon its remaining member organizations remained in doubt until through its disbandment in 1949, its meeting in 1943 stands as yet another example of how Zionist democratization of the American
Jewish community was a critical part of aligning that community with Zionism.86
Silver’s successful push for the American Jewish Conference to endorse Jewish statehood in Palestine was a coup de maître. Indeed, it had only been the preceding year that American
85 Urofsky, “The Congress Fight” in American Zionism. 86 Cohen, “The American Jewish Conference: A Zionist Experiment at Unity and Leadership” in Americanization of Zionism.
44
Zionist groups had come to this same consensus,87 following twenty years of a less politically charged Palestinianism.
In many ways, Silver’s Zionism built on that of his predecessors. As we just saw, Silver was central in the World War II-era usage of democratization as an intra-communal tactic, and we will soon see the ways in which his Zionism also relies upon democratization in its capacity as indicator of the movement’s Americanism. And if Brandeis first created the synthesis of
Zionism with Americanism, Silver perfected it, by clearly locating his Zionism within American civil religion writ large as well as at the intersection of that tradition with the traditions of
American Reform Judaism. As we will see, a central tenet of American civil religion is the conception of America as the New Israel, and thus even Lazarus’s affirmation of America as
Zion serves to foreshadow Silver’s later appeals to that tradition. Furthermore, just as Lazarus denied negations of American Jewry through petitions to revitalize the physicality of American
Jews, independently of goings-on in Palestine, Silver similarly denied negations of American
Jewry through appeals to revitalize Jewish-American spirituality, again independently of goings- on in Palestine and then Israel.
But even as Silver built upon his predecessors’ work in his efforts to propagate Zionism, we will see how he differed with them on some very crucial points. To reintroduce my own neologism, it is in these differences where his Zionism truly becomes an “Americanist Zionism.”
We will see how Silver fiercely opposed support of Jewish settlement in Palestine on solely humanitarian grounds. Of course, garnering support for Zionism by way of framing the movement in humanitarian and philanthropic terms was important to the work of Lazarus, and especially to Brandeis. But while the writings and speeches, respectively, of these two imply a
87 At the Biltmore Conference.
45 desire to depoliticize Zionism, Silver demanded that Zionism be as politically significant as possible. For Silver, what happened in Palestine was not only an end unto itself. Zionism had much significance for American Jewry beyond the fight to create the state of Israel, including as a means by which American Judaism could enter the realm of civil discourse of the American public sphere. The flipside of Silver’s condemnation of apolitical humanitarianism was his firm attachment to the goal of a Jewish state. Silver even went so far as to tie the well-being of
American Judaism to the existence of such a state, thus flirting with a negation of American
Jewry that many prior American Zionists, albeit with notable counter-examples such as Szold and Schechter, had worked so hard to avoid. But in the same breath, he would affirm that the purpose and mission of American Judaism, if somewhat dependent on Zionism and the state of
Israel, extended far beyond these things.
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Chapter Two: Theories of Public Religion and Civil Religion as Guideposts
The overarching goal of this thesis is to convey how Silver cultivated an Americanist
Zionism by locating his Zionism within American Reform Judaism, American civil religion, and at the intersection thereof. I furthermore believe that as part and parcel of this cultivation, Silver works to remodel American Judaism as a public Judaism under a paradigm presented by sociologist of religion José Casanova.88 But the legitimation of a public American Judaism is no small goal in and of itself. With the prominent exception of hegemonic mainstream
Protestantism, bringing one’s religious identity into the public sphere had largely been taboo in the United States. One should worship as they wish in the home and in the church, but only in the home and in the church. But what is a public religion, anyway? The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with Casanova’s work on the concept, as well as with civil religion, and then to propose a model for how I can use these bodies of theory in my analysis of Silver’s
Americanist Zionism.
Public Religion as a Critique of Privatization
My understanding and usage of the term “public religion” derive predominantly from the work of sociologist of religion José Casanova, particularly his 1994 book Public Religions in the
Modern World and his 2003 essay, “What is a Public Religion?”89 In short, Casanova identifies public religion, in its very existence, as a challenge to a common assumption that religion has no role outside of the church and the home.90 In his words, public religion plays the role of a
88 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World. 89 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World; José Casanova, “What is a Public Religion?” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003). 90 I.e., that religion has no role in the public sphere, and should be kept in the private sphere. In this thesis, I am referring to the differentiation between “public” and “private” in the Habermasian sense, as seen in Jürgen
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“counterfactual normative critique of dominant historical trends,” particularly the trend of allocating to religion only a private role.91 Thus, a public religion’s importance partially lies in that it is the visible phenomenon that indexes the occurrence of a contemporary process of the
“deprivatization” of religion.92
The idea of public religion as a “counterfactual normative critique of dominant historical trends” is rooted in the theoretical framework of secularization thesis and contemporary critiques thereof. Secularization thesis, generally speaking, stands for the idea that religion writ large, over the past centuries, has slowly and surely marched toward marginalization from the public sphere, and will continue to do so. Casanova posits that the theory of secularization (this second term may be used more or less interchangeably with secularization thesis) is more useful when divided into three component parts.93 The first part is the differentiation of the religious from the secular. More specifically, differentiation refers to the processes by which things religious were, in a change foundational to the creation of modern Europe, structurally separated from public affairs of the state. In other words, differentiation refers to the very creation of religion as a self- contained ontological category separate from the secular realm.94 Thus, understanding differentiation means to understand the particularity of religion’s existence as an ontological category. Religion should be thought of as a phenomenon whose existence is localized both temporally and spatially. The idea that an individual’s or group’s metaphysical beliefs and/or ritual practices have universally been isolated into a single ontological category, referred to as
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991). 91 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 43. 92 Ibid, 6. 93 Ibid, 19-20. 94 Ibid, 20-25.
48 religion in some language or other, is simply false.95 These components are not, everywhere and everywhen, treated as a standalone concept. This is not to say that what is now often referred to as “religion” – interlinked systems of belief and practice – do not exist everywhere, nor is it to entirely deny some measure of usefulness of projecting the term “religion” onto these situations for ease of analysis, if done with proper prudence and awareness.96
The second component of Casanova’s tripartite conception of secularization thesis is a faith in an inevitable decline and total or near total disappearance of religion. This confidence in religious decline posits that religious beliefs and practices, while serving some sort of mystic, psychological, or social purpose in generations past, have no efficacious use in the age of science and reason. The decline of religion sub-thesis is therefore anchored in enlightenment critiques of religion, which in turn can be divided into critiques based on rationalist opposition to supernaturalism, political opposition to church power, and moral opposition to the very concept of God. It is important to note, as Casanova does, that this second sub-thesis has never been especially true in the United States, dating back to Alexander de Tocqueville’s observations on
American religious vitality.97
The third sub-thesis that Casanova identifies is that of the privatization of religion. It is this sub-thesis in which he will locate his discussions of public religion. The idea behind privatization is that religion must be removed from the public sphere, for the mutual good of each realm. Religion has a place in the home and in the church, but not in the marketplace or
95 For more on religion as a temporally and spatially particular concept see: Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 96 Religion does not have to be a universal concept in order to still a useful academic tool, as is made clear in certain critiques of Nongbri’s book. For example, see: David T.M. Frankfurter, review of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, by Brent Nongbri, Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, no. 4 (Winter 2015), Project MUSE. In my case, although many forms of Judaism might not perfectly fit a Protestant-influenced paradigm of religion, “religious studies” nevertheless provides a necessary framework with which to study Judaism. 97 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 25-35.
49 town hall and religious institutions are depoliticized and discouraged from taking any role in the public sphere. “The modern quest for salvation and personal meaning had withdrawn to the private sphere of the self” and non-religious public institutions are “no longer… interested in maintaining a sacred cosmos or public religious worldview.”98 Casanova cautions that differentiation and privatization should not be confused with one another, although each may appear similar to the other at first glance. He stresses that, “Unlike secular differentiation, which remains a structural trend that serves to define the very structure of modernity, the privatization of religion is a historical option, a ‘preferred option’ to be sure, but an option nonetheless.”99
Whereas differentiation refers to the very creation of religion as an independent ontological category, privatization refers to the removal and distancing of that category from the separate category of the public sphere or saeculum (in its Latin articulation).100
Part of the importance of dividing secularization theory into three sub-theses is that each sub-thesis is correct to different extents. Casanova maintains that the first component, differentiation, remains the “defensible core” of theories of secularization.101 The second component, religious decline, however, seems only to be empirically supported in particular situations, such as in Western Europe and with regard to indigenous religions. In other parts of the world, especially the United States, religion seems to be growing or at least at a sustainable equilibrium.102 Meanwhile, Casanova stresses that privatization is a “preferred historical option”
98 Ibid, 36-37. For this part of his description of privatization Casanova cites Thomas Luckmann, Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 99 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 39. 100 Ibid, 35-39. 101 Ibid, 7. 102 Ibid, 26-27.
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– the third sub-thesis is supported in that it has often happened, but invalid as a normative prescription:103 As he writes:
“The theory and the thesis of privatization become problematic, however, when they are applied in such a way that the thesis of privatization, from being a testable and falsifiable empirical theory of dominant historical trends, is turned into a prescriptive normative theory of how religious institutions ought to behave in the modern world.”104
Thus when Casanova challenges the privatization sub-thesis, he is not questioning that privatization happened, had effects, and could happen in the future, rather, he is contesting claims of its predetermination and totality. In other words, it is important to differentiate between privatization as a historical process, which it frequently is, and as a telos, which it is not.
Casanova says that in both embracing and opposing secularization thesis, academia has a poor track record of telling an accurate and precise story of religion in the public sphere. As
Casanova points out, his book is well-timed for the purpose of problematizing a false binary of possible reactions to secularization theory. Published in 1994, it takes place shortly after events such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the political (re)emergence of rightwing evangelical
Protestants in the United States, and the spread of liberation theologies worldwide, each of which he counts as a significant demonstration that religion is undergoing a “deprivatization.” These re- emergences of public religion were taken as a cue by many, Casanova alleges, to completely disregard secularization thesis. He says that “the majority of the sociologists of religion… have abandoned [secularization thesis writ large] with the same uncritical haste with which they previously embraced it.”105 In first unquestioningly affirming and then unforgivingly denying the validity of a secularization thesis that is, without further elaboration, too lacking in precision to
103 Ibid, 39. 104 Ibid, 38. 105 Ibid, 11.
51 be of much analytical use in any case, many scholars have failed to account for myriad nuances and complications.
Types of Public Religion
Now that we have located the concept of public religion within Casanova’s critique of secularization thesis, and even more specifically, within his critique of the privatization sub- thesis, it is appropriate to discuss the content, form, and purpose of public religion. Casanova proposes that we think of public religion as having the potential to operate on three levels: that of the state, the political society, and the civil society. As examples of public religion on a state level, he gives the examples of theocracy and caesaropapism. As examples of public religion on the level of political society, he cites single issue mobilization of a religious group, formal lobbying efforts, or mobilization of a single religious group as a particular party or for a particular party (as in a two-party system). Finally, there are public religions of civil society.
These are public religions in the sense that they take part in open discussions about public affairs and the common good. Whereas public religions at the level of political society mobilize as interest groups, public religions at the level of civil society operate in the service of the society as a whole.106 As an example of public religion of civil society, Casanova cites the American
Catholic involvement in questions of war and peace, economic justice, and more in the 1970s and 1980s.107 This last type of public religion is the one of most interest to Casanova; at the end of Chapter Two of Public Religions in the Modern World he clarifies that the focus of his work on deprivatization is “the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private
106 Ibid, 61-63; as well as Casanova, “What is a Public Religion?” 111-112. 107 Casanova, “Catholicism in the United States: From Private to Public Denomination” in Public Religions in the Modern World; Casanova, “What is a Public Religion?” 118-123.
52 sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing of the boundaries.”108 In other words, public religions of civil society.
In the case of this thesis, we have already seen that American Zionist leaders were wary of an activism that portrayed American Judaism a public religion at the level of political society.
And even though Silver was eager for American Jews to pursue Zionism within America political society via lobbying efforts and electoral politics, he never thought of it as work on behalf of an interest group. Rather, he thought of American Zionism – as a particular version of public Judaism – as operating at the level of civil society, in that he always justified his efforts to pursue Zionist goals within the United States as being in the common interest of the United
States’ very essence of being. While the lines between the two types of public religion can be admittedly blurred at times, I will be focusing mainly on Judaism and Zionism ‘going public’ at the level of civil society. I, like Casanova, am interested in “the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing of the boundaries.”
American Civil Religion
Another key aspect of this thesis is my claim that Abba Hillel Silver’s efforts to locate
Zionism within a public American Judaism, or even as form of public American Judaism, at the level of civil society rests upon his appeals to American civil religion. But what is civil religion, and why is it useful for Silver? The term is usually cited as first appearing in the end of Jean
108 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 65-66.
53
Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762). Rousseau proposes that a sovereign state can best encourage patriotism and civic valor through the adoption of several dogmas, which he says will serve the role of “social sentiments.” These dogmas consist of belief in a single deity, the existence of heaven and hell, rejection of “intolerance,” and “the sanctity of the social contract and the laws.”109 While the specifics of Rousseau’s definition may not have been followed over the generations, the idea that a relatively atheological,110 yet pervasive and profound, religious identification with the state remained of utmost importance.
Most notably, the concept of civil religion gained traction with sociologist Robert
Bellah’s essay, “Civil Religion in America,” published in 1967. Bellah follows in Rousseau’s footsteps by articulating a vision of a civil religion that exists for the purpose of identifying the liberal state with a deep religious feeling. Bellah demonstrates American civil religion by citing the United States’ founding documents, fathers, and several presidents, highlighting their mentions of God in relationship to the country. These include references and allusions to the interrelated ideas of America as a chosen nation or the New Israel, America’s obligation to carry out God’s will, and that divine grace lies behind American political legitimacy.111 Unlike
Rousseau, however, Bellah stresses that American civil religion is in fact dogmatic. For Bellah,
American civil religion is not “simply ‘religion in general’… the civil religion was specific enough when it came to America.”112
109 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Civic Religion” in The Social Contract, accessed April 12, 2018, via www.earlymoderntexts.com, 72-73. 110 But nevertheless definitely still Christian. 111 Robert Bellah “Civil Religion in America” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post- Traditional World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 112 Ibid, 176. While the civil religion be might undogmatic in its “unitarian” lack of any direct mention of Christ, Bellah attributes this to the deism shared by many of the founding fathers rather than any explicit effort to make the civil religion accessible to non-Christian religious minorities (175-176).
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Yet, while Bellah’s work piqued interest in the concept of civil religion, it did not circumscribe it; there is no agreed upon definition as to what exactly civil religion is either in general or in its American incarnations. In fact, in his afterword to The Broken Covenant:
American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial Bellah notes that the academic debate over American civil religion in the first quarter of a century after his article launched the topic to prominence was so disorganized and far flung that the term lost a certain amount of precision in definition.113
It would be impossible for me to provide the reader with an exhaustive accounting of the field of discussion around American civil religion in the space that I have here. Nevertheless, given that I wish to argue that American civil religion plays a central role in the interrelated processes of
Americanizing Zionism and creating a public American Judaism, it behooves me to define
American civil religion in the plural, vis a vi presenting three prominent understandings of the term so that my reader can recognize with me where it, or something close to it, appears.
Therefore, in addition to Robert Bellah’s conception of American civil religion, I will introduce the work of sociologists Will Herberg and Philip Gorski.
While Bellah’s model made American civil religion famous, Bellah himself was not the first to mention it. In 1955, Will Herberg published Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in
American Religious Sociology. In it, he describes the “American Way of Life” or “Americanism” as the “operative faith” and “civic religion” of the American people.114 And while Herberg does not use the exact term that Bellah would go on to popularize, historian of religion Ronit Y. Stahl confirms that his book should stand as an important part of the genealogy of the discourse.115
113 Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 164-65. 114 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 75, 263. 115 Ronit Y. Stahl, “A Jewish America and a Protestant Civil Religion: Will Herberg, Robert Bellah, and Mid- Twentieth Century American Religion,” Religions 6, no. 2 (2015): 435-36. MPDI.
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Like Bellah, Herberg denies that the American Way of Life is a simple common denominator between religious traditions. It is instead an independent and organic structure.116 And just as
Bellah’s civil religion consists of “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and ritual with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity,”117 Herberg’s American Way of Life is:
“a spiritual structure, a structure of ideas and ideals, of aspirations and values, of beliefs and standards; it synthesizes all that commends itself to the American as the right, the good, and the true in actual life… [it] is the symbol by which Americans define themselves and establish their unity.”118
The similarity of Herberg’s and Bellah’s definitions of American civil religion establish that the phenomenon fits quite well within Clifford Geertz’s influential description of religion as a cultural system.119 This was quite possibly the intent of each of the two scholars, as locating civil religion under Geertz’s paradigm serves to legitimate their claims that civil religion is in fact a religion.
Meanwhile, Philip Gorski, in American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the
Puritans to the Present (2017), does not proffer an independent definition for the phenomenon, preferring instead to adopt Bellah’s as a solid starting point.120 But he does contribute three important items to the conversation. First, he provides the most cogent articulation that I have yet to find on the importance of understanding civil religion. Namely, this is that civil religion is important because it explains that, even in a state that respects a separation of church and state to
116 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 77. 117 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” 175. 118 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 75. 119 Geertz’s famous definition: “A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." As seen in Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Lambek (Malden, Massachusets: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 59. 120 Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 14.
56 perfect satisfaction, political issues can have a religious imperative attached to them.121 Second, he unpacks in a little more detail the specific genealogy of American civil religion than do Bellah and Herberg. He says that American civil religion can best be described as a synthesis between aspects of western secular philosophy and Jewish and Christian sacred scripture – namely, the enlightenment tradition of civic republicanism and the biblical tradition of prophetic religion, the combination of which he christens “prophetic republicanism.”122 Thirdly, Gorski describes his scholarly method for analyzing civil religion as a “poor man’s hermeneutics that… tries to put texts into contexts – biographical, historical, and social” (as opposed to a hermeneutics grounded in literary theory).123 In my last two chapters I try to stick to the Gorskian method for textual analysis – both with regard to his practical hermeneutical approach as well as with regard to his genealogical approach to understanding civil religions, which I will apply more broadly to religion, and Zionism, in the American public sphere.
One place where the sharper distinctions can be drawn between Bellah, Herberg, and
Gorski is in their respective attitudes toward the role of civil religion in American society.124
First of all, Bellah and Herberg differ quite strongly in their attitudes toward the effects of civil religion on society. Herberg views American civil religion as a vain conceit that constantly justifies its own misuse. He criticizes the phenomenon as “idolatrous” in that it inherently represents a society’s self-worship.125 It:
121 Gorski, American Covenant, 15. 122 Gorski, American Covenant, 16-19. 123 Gorski, American Covenant, 7. 124 For a much more thorough outline of these differences than I give below, see Stahl, “A Jewish America and a Protestant Civil Religion.” 125 This association of civil religion with societal self-worship perhaps implies a particularly cynical reading of Emile Durkheim’s work on totemism throughout The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. [Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).] For another take on Durkheim’s influence on Herbeg, see Stahl, “A Jewish America and a Protestant Civil Religion,” 438.
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“validates culture and society, without in any sense bringing them under judgment. It lends an ultimate sanction to culture and society by assuring them that they constitute an unequivocal expression of ‘spiritual ideals’ and ‘religious values.’ Religion becomes, in effect, the cult of culture and society… In a more directly political sense, this religiosity very easily comes to serve as a spiritual reinforcement of national self-will… The temptation is therefore particularly strong to identify the American cause with the cause of God… In its crudest form, this identification of religion with national purpose generates a kind of national messianism.”126
Bellah meanwhile, perceives within American civil religion an ideal of striving toward God. He affirms that, “the civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the
American people.”127 While he allows throughout his career that American civil religion can be used to justify vanity and atrocity, he considers this to be civil religion at its worst rather than an inherent quality of the phenomenon. Indeed, he openly admits that “Without an awareness that our nation stands under higher judgment, the tradition of civil religion would be dangerous indeed.”128 And twenty-five years later, Bellah bristles at critiques of his work that fail to take into account his consistent emphasis of “divine judgement over the nation” and that instead choose to broadly brushstroke his conception of civil religion as idolatrous,129 as Herberg might have done. In “American Civil Religion” Bellah posits that this awareness of divine judgement and corresponding strivings toward God’s will has served the United States well through two
“times of trial” – seeking independence and abolishing slavery. He expresses his hopes that it will do the same in a third time of trial, as the United States navigates being a global superpower.130 Overall, the difference between Bellah’s and Herberg’s attitudes toward
126 Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew, 263-264. 127 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 179. 128 Ibid, 185. 129 Bellah, Broken Covenant, ix. 130 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 180.
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American civil religion can be summed up in the following manner: what Bellah interprets as civil religion at its worst, Herberg interprets to be civil religion’s very essence.
Gorski zeroes in on this point of tension between Bellah and Herberg, perhaps with the benefit of nearly fifty years of hindsight on the former’s work and sixty on the latter’s. What
Bellah refers to as failed civil religion, and what Herberg thinks of as an inherent component of civil religion, Gorski isolates as another phenomenon altogether: religious nationalism. He stresses that religious nationalism is not merely civil religion gone bad. Rather, it represents a fundamentally different philosophical approach to the relationship between the res publica and religion. Whereas the religious nationalist seeks conquest on God’s behalf, the “civil religionist” wishes for the nation to more seek righteousness via a utilization of its citizens’ understanding of the prophetic tradition.131 This delineation justifies the raison d’etre of Gorski’s book, which, itself in keeping with the prophetic tradition, calls for an American return to civil religion, as opposed to the temptation of religious nationalism on one side and radical secularism on the other.
By lining up side by side the three theorist’s understandings of American civil religion we can see that prominent understandings thereof are similar enough to one another that these theorists can engage in a productive dialogue with one another. Thus, we can be confident that the term, despite its relatively disorganized discursive history, is nonetheless sharply defined enough for use in religious studies discourse in general.
131 Gorski, American Covenant, 16-23.
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Civil Religion as a Type of Public Religion
I intend to argue that appeals to American civil religion were an integral part of the cultivation of a public Judaism and, not coincidentally, Silver’s Americanization of Zionism; I will argue that it was only by appealing to notions of America’s relationship with the divine that
Abba Hillel Silver and others were able to deprivatize Judaism in a way that they could expect would be accepted by their contemporaries. This argument presumes that there is something about American civil religion that enables it to be used in such a way. Thus, I will dedicate the next section of this introduction to examining different conceptions of the relationship between
American civil religion and American religions such as Christianity and Judaism.
One possible conception, perhaps the original conception, of the relationship between civil religion and other religions is of the latter threatening the former. Rousseau, the founder of civil religious theory, originally conceives of the concept as a guard against shortcomings that he perceived in a Christianity dedicated solely to its soteriological motif. He worries that a truly
Christian individual will be “occupied solely with heavenly things” and consequently unanimated by any plight of the state.132 Thus his proposal of the implementation of the civil religion is largely order to generate feelings of loyalty toward the state, which can be turned into action in times of war or other trials. In other words, civil religion is a way of bolstering the state
– i.e. of taking positive action within the public sphere – of which privatized religion is ill equipped to partake. Two centuries later, Casanova extrapolates from Rousseau’s assertion that
“entirely spiritual” religion will harm the state a claim that wholly privatized religion must necessarily harm public civil religion as well, inasmuch as civil religion is conceptually tied to the state: “Most corrosive of republican civil religions are those soteriological religious tenets
132 Rousseau, “Civic Religion,” 71.
60 which liberate the individual from absolute allegiance to the political community.”133 Whereas
Rousseau only went so far as to explicitly claim that soteriological religious tenets are not satisfactory for the defense of the state, Casanova’s formulation implies that under Rousseau’s conception of civil religion all soteriological religions have the inherent potential to threaten the state, an understanding which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. Different aspects of
Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam have all at some point or another been deemed inconsistent with the values and wellbeing of the United States, resulting in uniquely American versions of anti-
Catholicism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. For example, Catholic-American deference to
Rome’s spiritual values has often been interpreted by suspicious Protestant-Americans of indexing disloyalty to Washington’s political values.134 And while mainstream Protestant soteriology is rarely seen as “corrosive” of American civil religion, the dominant American denomination does not find itself immune from charges of damaging the American civil religion, as evidenced by Gorski’s fervent desire to protect his conception of civil religion from the taint of a Protestant-inflected “religious nationalism.”135
A second possible conception of the relationship between the two types of is the converse of the above. Namely, that civil religion is a threat to its non-civil cousins. This view point is provided by Herberg. We already saw how he thinks of the “American Way of Life” as societal self-worship. Unsurprisingly, this misplaced worship correlates with a decline in worship where it really matters. Herberg says that while the civil religion pays homage to Judaism and
Christianity upon which it draws from, it nevertheless replaces these traditions in the hearts and
133 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 59. 134 Ibid, 167-68. 135 Gorski, American Covenant, 16-19.
61 minds of the American citizen.136 And even while it encourages religious identification and affiliation, religious faith is less important, replaced by a “religiousness without religion.”137 In addition to societal self-worship and worship of the republic, worship of faith, of religion, and of worship itself replaces the worship of God.
A third conception of this relationship is provided by Bellah, who perceives civil religion to be in a commensal relationship with its non-civil component traditions, i.e., that the former draws from the latter without harming them. He details the relationship as follows:
“The American civil religion was never anti-clerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. In this way, the civil religion was able to build up without any bitter struggle with the church powerful symbols of national solidarity and to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals.”138
Herberg, of course, might respond to this defense of the civil religion by saying that American civil religion need not be “anti-clerical or militantly secular” in order to do damage Judaism or
Christianity, but that it could do damage to those traditions in much more subversive ways.
Casanova provides a fourth conception for the relationship between civil religion and the
United States’ other religious traditions. In an intriguing reframing, Casanova incorporates civil religion into his work on public religion. Recall that Casanova’s paradigm for public religion consists of three levels: the level of the state, of political society, and of civil society. For
Casanova, there are “two different models of civil public religion, ‘civil religion’ proper and what I have termed public religions of civil society.”139 Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “one may distinguish between hegemonic civil religions…and the public intervention of religious groups…
136 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 87-89. 137 Ibid, 260. 138 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 180-181. 139 Casanova “What is a Public Religion?” 124.
62 in the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society.”140 Note where Casanova locates the key differences between these two models. Public religion writ large is defined by what it does – intervene in the public sphere of civil society. Civil religion, meanwhile, is hegemonic – it does not need to perceptibly act in order to have power, as a non-hegemonic public religion does.
Thus, civil religion is a particular, but powerful, version of public religion of civil society. For example, Casanova reconceptualizes nineteenth century American civil religion as a
“hegemonic form of public religion [Protestantism] in civil society.”141 Similarly, citing Herberg and Bellah’s relatively less-denominational conceptions of American civil religion, he notes that
“the model of a ‘Christian’ nation was expanded into that of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ one with the successful incorporation of the Catholic and Jewish minorities into the national covenant”
(emphasis added).142 In other words, the status of Catholics and Jews in the United States can partially be measured by the extent to which their religious traditions are associated with the country’s civil religion, and thus have ascended to the level of the hegemonic.
Indeed, Casanova notes that at certain points, segments of American Catholic leadership have motioned toward a Catholic denomination of the American civil religion. Although these were efforts were initially condemned by the Vatican as the “Americanist” heresy around the turn of the twentieth century, by the middle of that century, “Catholicism and American patriotism had become undistinguishably fused in the American civil religion” for leaders such as Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York.143 But whereas Casanova presents this fusion as
140 Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World, 219. 141 Casanova, “What is a Public Religion?” 124. 142 Ibid. 143 Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World, 182-183.
63 predominantly leading to American Catholic support of extant United States policy,144 we will see that Abba Hillel Silver uses a similar fusion as a base from which to launch his critiques of two presidential administrations’ reticence to embrace Zionist aims.
Thus, in a way, my thesis sits as an observer of the Jewish ascent of the American pantheon, and the possibilities unlocked for American Zionism by that ascent. I will not be analyzing public Judaism in the sense of an “intervention” in American civil society. Rather, I will be analyzing Silver’s attempts to create a public Judaism on the merits of his appeals to
Judaism’s belonging within American civil religion, or even to locate Judaism as a denomination of the American civil religion, which could perhaps be called an American civil Judaism.145 I will argue that Abba Hillel Silver’s speeches and sermons represent an effort to validate Zionism in turn as a part of this public Judaism of American civil society also via appeals to American civil religion, or even an effort to present Zionism as a naturally occurring offshoot of that
American civil religion. But what is this ethos, this American rational, that Zionism needs to be located within in order to be Americanized? Simply put, it is that Zionism, in addition to
Judaism, must be at the very least consistent with, and ideally mandated by, the American civil religion, which, the reader might recall, is described at one point by Herberg as “Americanism.”
Zionism-within-Americanism should fit Bellah’s prototype, by appealing both to America’s
“almost chosen” status and the looming threat of divine judgment. And as Gorski notes, it must hold the middle ground between religious nationalism and radical secularism – upholding liberal
144 Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World, 189. Casanova considers the America Catholic right to have regarded themselves as “inquisitorial guardians of Americanism” with regard to World War II and the anti- Communism of the early Cold War. 145 Jonathan Woocher explicitly (if hesitantly) analogizes “civil Judaism” to American civil religion. But whereas he uses the term in reference to intra-Jewish affairs, I will be using similar language to describe a particular manifestation of Jewish presence within the American public sphere at large [Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)].
64 and democratic values such as the separation of church and state while affirming a religous imperative behind its mission.
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Chapter Three: Emil Hirsch’s Model of Judaism as a Denomination of American Civil Religion
An address of Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch (1851/2 – 1923) titled “The Concordance of Judaism and Americanism,”146 given in 1906 to celebrate 250 years of Jewish presence in the Western
Hemisphere, provides a case study of an attempt to validate a public Judaism through an association with the hegemonic civil religion. Hirsch argues that Judaism has a role in the
American public sphere in large part by arguing that Judaism converges with and underpins
“Americanism.” This in turn he does by locating American Judaism in immediate proximity to
American civil religion, especially including the latter’s prominent Protestant components. He suggests that the commonalities between the two traditions are found in their shared chosenness, shared mission, and shared messianic goal. In the context of my project at large, this case study serves as a preliminary example of public American Judaism. The encounter with Hirsch will hopefully help to prepare the reader for the later encounter with Silver, in that each rabbi’s cultivation of a public Judaism depends on similar associations of Reform Judaism with
American civil religion. One could even posit that Silver’s civil American Judaism is therefore part of a much larger Reform Jewish tradition, dating back to Hirsch and before.147
Additionally, while Hirsch’s argument refers briefly to his anti-Zionism, I will argue that with some relatively acute changes, the very themes that he emphasizes can and are used by
Silver in his efforts to bring American Zionism into the American public sphere. This section is also beneficial in that it underscores that public or civil Judaism does not guarantee the existence of Zionism, as Hirsch’s public Judaism is avowedly not a Zionist endeavor. Because of Silver’s
146 E.G. Hirsch, “The Concordance of Judaism and Americanism,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 14 (1906): 148-163, JSTOR. 147 For a discussion of the importance of evaluating a particular of manifestation civil religion in the context of the traditions in which it is located, see Gorski, American Covenant, 4-7.
66 tendency to alternately consider the one as a means for the other, this distinction is especially important.
As Hirsch was a leader in the American Reform Movement, his ideas are not of interest simply because they represent interesting and powerful theology. One need look no further than his relations by marriage to see just how centered he was in the Reform elite. He was the son-in- law148 of the famous and controversial Rabbi David Einhorn149 and brother-in-law (through another of Einhorn’s daughters) to the similarly impressive Rabbi Kauffman Kohler.150 His privileged position by marriage transferred to politics. Jonathan Sarna describes him as one of the Reform movement’s “leading thinkers and preachers”151 and some of the social justice- linked, epochal messianism found in “Concordance” remain central to Reform theology through
Abba Hillel Silver’s day, and even through today. For example, in addition to “Concordance,” the importance of social justice to Reform Judaism is highlighted in the American Reform
Movement’s first singular statement of purpose, the Pittsburg Platform, which describes the
Jewish people’s “duty” as solving “on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society,” in its eighth and final point, which was advocated for by Hirsch himself.152 As Sarna expounds, the “social justice motif – the Jewish equivalent of the Protestant Social Gospel – became… ever more influential
148 Sarna, American Judaism, 194. 149 Einhorn’s inspirational career is worth a note. German-born, his first American congregation was in Baltimore, from which he was driven out by a mob in return for his anti-slavery rhetoric. His revolutionary goals for Reform Judaism represented “the most radical position on the American Jewish religious spectrum.” Both of Einhorn’s sons- in-law, however, were leaders of the mainstream Classical Reform, as opposed to Einhorn’s own self-proclaimed “Radical Reform” (Sarna, American Judaism, 98-99). 150 Kohler was the rabbi largely responsible for convening the gathering at which the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 was drafted (Sarna, American Judaism, 148). 151 Sarna, American Judaism, 194. 152 Central Conference of American Rabbis, “The Pittsburgh Platform;” Sarna, American Judaism, 150.
67 within Reform circles over the ensuing decades.”153 In 1955, Jude Teller wrote in the Jewish-
American magazine Commentary that social reform, along with Zionism, forms the “bricks and mortar of American Jewish community cohesion.”154 And in contemporary times, we can find the social justice motif in the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis’s
(CCAR) 1999 statement of principles which maintains that, “we reaffirm social action and social justice as a central prophetic focus of traditional Reform Jewish belief and practice.”155 Clearly, some of Hirsch’s vision for Reform Judaism has long outlasted him.
But what exactly is this “concordance of Judaism and Americanism”? Where can it be seen? And what is the purpose of it? One answer to the first question is that the concordance of
Judaism and Americanism can be read as Hirsch’s way of articulating that American Jews hold a stake in the American civil religious tradition. It is the close relationship between Judaism and
“America’s political creed,” the latter of which he perceives the former to underwrite. Hirsch asks:
“Is not America's political creed the practical execution and activization of… fundamental conceptions of Judaism? Judaism's philosophy spreads the basis whereon rests the political practice of America. No other justification is there for the assumption that men are born free and equal than the conception of man as the incarnation of the divine, his personality constituting his unpurchasable worth and being the exponent of the One in whose image all alike are created.”156
Hirsch shortly thereafter continues his association of Judaism with the United States, claiming that, “The implications of the belief in the One God are basic to our democracy.”157 These excerpts are instantly recognizable as Bellah-like formulations of the American civil religion.
153 Sarna, American Judaism, 151. 154 Judd Teller, “America’s Two Zionist Traditions: Brandeis and Weizmann,” Commentary, October 1, 1955. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/americas-two-zionist-traditionsbrandeis-and-weizmann/. 155 Central Conference of American Rabbis, “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” accessed April 12, 2018, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-statement-principles-reform-judaism/. 156 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 155. 157 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 157.
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Just as in Bellah’s conception of American civil religion, in “Concordance” the United States’ political structure is justified via an appeal to the divine, which in turn indexes the civil religion’s dogma regarding the divine’s relationship with the nation.
A Shared Mission Among Israel, Old and New
So the concordance of Judaism and Americanism represents an American Jewish claim to belong under the umbrella of American civil religion. But where is this seen? In other words, how exactly does Hirsch attempt to demonstrate this overlap between the two traditions? Hirsch first locates the connection between Judaism and Americanism in the idea that each tradition carries within it a similar mandate to carry out a similar mission. As we saw, Bellah, Herberg, and Gorski each identify some sort of motif of chosenness and surety of mission as key tenets of
American civil religion, for better or for worse. Hirsch first describes this specific concordance of chosenness and mission by way of an extensive metaphor that describes Judaism and
Americanism – the latter at times indistinguishable from liberal American Protestantism – as sharing a divinely ordained purpose of bringing life-bearing water to the United States.158 In dramatic and beautiful language, he describes two North American raindrops as “twin children of the clouds, cradled in one nursery.”159 Sadly, the twins are separated by the continental divide.
Each flows to an opposite ocean, one to the Atlantic, the other to the Pacific. However:
“Closer attention to the intention which underlies Nature's dividing decree soon will reveal that underneath the superficial divergence is operative concordance of duty. Both waterdrops that at the line must part from each other, are commissioned to one and the same task. It is theirs to coax forth flowers, to fertilize field and forest. Both are messengers and ministers of life. And again when they shall have reached their respective goals, be it the sea which laps the Eastern shores or that which sings the lullaby to the Western States, the miracle of the resurrection which awaits them will wing both alike to new upward flight and on the heights their
158 Concordance 148-51 159 Ibid, 148.
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divided destinies will finally converge. Seemingly doomed to eternal separation, snowflakes and dewdrops that part company at the divide are foreordained to identity of obligation.”160
The droplets, the reader is quickly encouraged to realize, are different religions. Most probably, one is American Reform Judaism, the other liberal American Protestantism, the rootstock of
American civil religion.161 The language of the entire metaphor is theologically supercharged.
The droplets-cum-traditions are “commissioned” as “messengers and ministers of life.” It is some supreme being that carries out the commissioning, just as it is “Nature” that issues the
“dividing decree.” It does not take much of a leap to assign that omnipotent role to Hirsch’s imagination of a Judeo-Christian god. But despite this “dividing decree” the droplets’ “divided destinies will finally converge… [they] are foreordained to identity of obligation.” In other words, the religions each start from the same heavenly place, are separated, however in their separation are assigned the same task or mission, and, in the end, each religious tradition culminates in the same heavenly place.
Hirsch’s description of the droplets’ journeys also evokes the concept of the United
States’ supposed manifest destiny – which of course is but one embodiment of the overall motif of chosenness, although perhaps in the sense that Herberg, Bellah, and Gorski all fear. In speaking of the “menace of the roaring canyons over which bridge and span are thrown in proud unconcern,”162 Hirsch makes clear his appreciation for the physical act of settlement and engineering across the continent. He also frames the mission of each droplet as taking place between two oceans. And whether that water drop rushes toward the sea “which laps the Eastern
160 Ibid, 149. 161 As a reminder, in Chapter Two we saw how American civil religion in its earlier forms could be seen as a hegemonic public Protestantism in American civil society. Or, see Casanova, “What is a Public Religion,” 124. 162 Concordance 148
70 shores or that which sings the lullaby to the Western States,” both have accomplished the same divine mission and eagerly face the same divine salvation. Indeed, Hirsch’s imagery evokes John
Gast’s famous painting, American Progress (1872).163 Just as Hirsch does, Gast frames
America’s mission as continent wide, from sea-to-shining-sea. And while the framing of
America between two oceans sets the stage for the idea of American chosenness, both Gast and
Hirsch have further points to make on that front, points which claim divine favor upon America’s role in the world. In Gast’s work an angelic figure appears overhead. Telegraph line in hand, she not only guides but actively partakes in American westward expansion. God’s favor upon
American enterprises could not be illustrated more clearly. Meanwhile, Hirsch’s exuberant description indexes a similar imagination of God’s involvement with America. The droplet-cum- traditions are “commissioned” as “messengers and ministers of life,” to be resurrected once their purpose is met. Crucially, a main difference between Hirsch’s and Gast’s conceptions of the
United States’ continental role is that the former inserts American Reform Judaism into the narrative, thus affirming his religious community’s stake in the American project, and vice- versa, the importance of the American project for his religious community, via the proximity between the Reform tradition and the American civil religion.
As a further part of his appeal to the American civil religion’s dogma of American chosenness, Hirsch lays a Jewish claim to the American Puritan dogma of the New Israel. As he says:
“In the Mayflower, our Bible crossed the Atlantic. At Plymouth Rock in sober reality the Pentateuch was recognized as one of the inspirations of the young
163 Wikimedia Commons contributors, "File:American Progress (1872) by John Gast.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:American_Progress_(1872)_by_John_Gast.jpg&oldid=2382 42308 (accessed April 13, 2018).
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commonwealth… Serious [the Pilgrims] were, but their seriousness dowered them with the fortitude without which none may hope to yoke untamed nature to his purposes. Puritan Hebrewism alone enabled the Pilgrims to exercise dominion over the wilds of their new home. This Puritan spirit was nursed at the breast of Jewish literature. It was the gift laid by old Judaism into the cradle of this new civilization. It had share in preparing the advent of the era of independence, as in the thinking of the men that later phrased our political documents undoubtedly Old Testament principles had had determinating influence.”164
Puritan theologies of the United States’ chosenness as the New Israel are central to ideas of
American civil religion. A classic early example is provided by a famous quote of John
Winthrop, written in 1630 en route to taking up a post as an early governor of Great Britain’s
Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop alludes to Matthew 5:14 and the city of Jerusalem in preaching that the colonists would “be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are among us.”165 Hirsch, by associating Judaism with Puritanism, is staking a claim to the very foundations of American chosenness. The concordance between Americanism and Judaism of which he speaks is inherent, not coincidental. Therefore, this association of the Hebrew Old Israel with the
American New Israel is important in that it underscores the deepness of the concordance that
Hirsch is building and promoting.
What do We Want? The Messianic Era! Where do We Want It? Here!
Just as Hirsch identifies a concordance between Jewish and Protestant-inflected
American ideas of mission, he similarly identifies a concordance between the anticipated return upon successful completion of those missions. In both the public American Judaism that he is trying to cultivate and in the liberal American Protestantism of civil society – whose borders
164 Hirsch, “Concordance” 153-154. 165 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” Accessed April 12, 2018, via The Winthrop Society, https://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php; Matthew 5:14 reads “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid” (NRSV).
72 with the American civil religion proper of the time are quite blurred, as we have seen – there is a strong motif of “epochal messianism,” the coming of which is dependent upon a state of justice in worldly society. This concept of messianism as something that can be brought about via the striving of communities toward social justice is a very strong theme of Hirsch’s address. As he describes the coming messianic age,
“But this kingdom, this Olam ha-ba [“The World to Come”] was not beyond the cloud. Its portals were not those of the grave. That world to be, which is the vision of Israel's hope and faith, is this world of ours reconstituted under the sanctifying, reforming sway of justice, righteousness, and love. With justice triumphant, righteousness socialized, Judaism hails the advent of the Messianic age when conditions on earth will be such that no man is denied opportunity to realize his own divinity.”166
I will draw the reader’s attention to Hirsch’s characterization of the messianic world as “this world of ours reconstituted under the sanctifying, reforming sway of justice, righteousness, and love… when conditions on earth will be such that no man is denied opportunity to realize his own divinity.” This excerpt makes two powerful claims about the nature of the messianic world.
First, it claims that it is one that is temporally rather than geospatially removed from the current world. The realm of God is not at the peak of Olympus, “beyond the cloud,” as Hirsch puts it.
Rather, the realm of God is on this earth, but in the future. Second, it claims that the messianic world – or age – is inextricably linked with ideas of justice, righteous, and realization of individual divinity. In other words, Hirsch’s Jewish messianism is synonymous with a more socially just United States of America. As Gorski might put it, public affairs have taken on the nature of a religious imperative.
Darren Kleinberg, a rabbi and holder of a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Arizona State
University, probes further into the ideas of the “social justice motif” and “epochal messianism”
166 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 158.
73 in his essay, “Reform Judaism and the Jewish ‘Social Gospel,’” published in CCAR Journal: The
Reform Jewish Quarterly. In the essay, Kleinberg contextualizes the social justice motif of
Classical Reform by analyzing it in juxtaposition with the American Protestant Social Gospel, a progressive and pro-justice theology, and application thereof to social action. His main thesis is that, contrary to what he presents as the normative picture of liberal American Judaism playing catch-up to liberal American Protestantism in terms of developing a theology of social justice,
“the American Reform Movement was the first denomination in American religious life to develop a ‘social gospel,’ as it were.”167
Kleinberg highlights that the Pittsburgh Platform describes “Israel’s great messianic hope” as “the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men.”168
Kleinberg refers to this messianic hope, and particularly that it refers to an age that can be brought about by humanity, as “epochal messianism,” which he describes as follows:
“Instead of a personal messiah that will come at any time, i.e., according to God’s will and not as a result of people’s actions, the Pittsburgh Platform took the radical position that messianism refers not to the coming of a particular person but, rather, to the beginning of an era. Unlike Maimonides, the framers of the Pittsburgh Platform claimed, in essence, that it is for people to make the messianic era a reality…Only by acknowledging that humanity is ultimately responsible for fixing the world was the Reform Movement able to jettison the traditional notion of divine redemption at the hands of a personal messiah and introduce a social justice plank into its core beliefs. Just as the Social Gospel Movement based itself on the theological conception of social salvation, the Reform Movement had at its foundation a theological conception of epochal messianism.”169
Kleinberg’s analysis of Classical Reform messianism fits like a glove the language that we saw used by Hirsch in “Concordance.” As I will remind the reader, Hirsch describes “that world to
167 Darren Kleinberg, “Reform Judaism and the Jewish ‘Social Gospel,’” CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly (Fall 2009): 151, accessed April 12, 2018, https://www.valleybeitmidrash.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/06/CCAR-Final-Edit.pdf. 168 Ibid, 160-61. 169 Ibid, 162.
74 be” as nothing more than “this world of ours reconstituted under the sanctifying, reforming sway of justice, righteousness, and love.”170
In the course of arguing American Reform Judaism’s case and defending its historical and theological accomplishments, Kleinberg repeatedly notes that a shared commitment to social justice brought liberal Protestants and Reform Jews together in a common mission.171 Given the proximity between American civil religion and mainline American Protestantism in American civil society that we have established, this association of Judaism with Protestantism enables
Hirsch to in turn justify a public Judaism based on its Americanism. Regardless of whether
Reform Judaism or liberal Protestantism was first in the development of a Social Gospel, Jewish leaders such as Hirsch can point to the common value as evidence of American Jews’ equal share, with the Protestant mainstream, in the project of creating a more perfect United States.
Furthermore, Kleinberg explicitly connects the social justice motif to its theological underpinnings in Classical Reform Judaism. This involves the articulation of the social justice motif as an explicitly Jewish type of mission and as an equally explicitly Jewish type of messianism.172 This will be helpful going forward, as we explore the ways in which Silver incorporates this motif into both his Zionism and his conceptions of public Judaism, while similarly appealing to the motif as wholly Jewish and wholly American.
An American Civil Judaism
The entirety of Hirsch’s characterization of Judaism as in concordance with Americanism
– from a shared epochal messianism to a shared sense of chosenness – is an implicit affirmation
170 Hirch, “Concordance,” 158. 171 Kleinberg, “The Jewish ‘Social Gospel,’” 156-157. 172 Ibid, 159-162.
75 of a religious, Jewish, role in the public sphere. It is good to note, however, that Hirsch explicitly affirms Judaism’s role in the public sphere. Although he does not put it in so many words, Hirsch argues firmly against what Casanova dubbed the “preferred historical option” of privatization:
“There is no divide at which the secular parts company from the sacred. Religion must be in all things, or it is in nothing. That misinterpreted phrase ‘My Kingdom is not of this world,’ as understood by Catholic Christianity and Calvinistic theology, has no place in the dictionary of Judaism.”173
Indeed, Hirsch’s emphasis on the social justice motif serves as a neat historical example of
Casanova’s conception of “the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing of the boundaries.”174
Even though for Casanova the Social Gospel movement (the Protestant cousin of Classical
Reform’s social justice motif) was ultimately a failed attempt at deprivatization, as it directly preceded the peak of the American secularization process,175 there is no denying that the synthesis of theology with social and civil life is representative of this “redrawing of the boundaries” between the differentiated spheres of the religious and the secular. Hirsch declares,
“Judaism is for this world!”176 He does not accept a paradigm in which religion has no place in the public sphere.
To conclude this section, I will present an excerpt from “Concordance” in which Hirsch ties together the themes of social justice, chosenness, and the non-privatization of religion. In
173 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 158 - This might, at first glance, seem to be an argument against not only privatization but also differentiation sub-thesis. But despite the strength of Hirsch’s claim that religion “must be in all things” it is important to remember the distinction that Casanova makes between structural differentiation and the “historically preferred option” of privatization (Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 39). Even if, as in Hirsch’s ideal society, religion is omnipresent, he is not challenging the idea of religion as a differentiated category. 174 Casanova Public Religions in the Modern World, 65-66. 175 Ibid, 136-138 – Casanova associates the Social Gospel movement with the “second disestablishment” of religion from the United States. 176 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 160.
76 this selection, Hirsch also ties these three themes to his anti-Zionism, his only mention of the movement in the entire address:
“We [Reform Jews] feel that if anywhere on God's footstool our Messianic vision will be made real, it is in this land where a new humanity seems destined to arise. Not to Jerusalem are our eyes turned, but to God! We cannot honestly declare that we are here in exile. We cannot honestly petition that we be led back to Palestine as our country. We have a country which is ours by the right of our being identified with its destinies, our being devoted to its welfare, our sharing its trials, our rejoicing in its triumphs. Two hundred and fifty years has the Jew sojourned in this country. He is not an alien here. His views of liberty and law, of man's inalienable rights and duties hallowed by the sublimities of his religion, are in creative concordance with the distinctive principles pillaring American civilization.”177
Here, Hirsch reiterates that his and Reform Judaism’s messianic vision, that of social justice, is destined by God to be an American project. Thus a public American Judaism, which perhaps takes the form of a Jewish denomination of a heretofore solely Protestant-adjacent American civil religion in an increasingly religiously diverse United States, is justified. But although he presents this concordance of Americanism and Judaism as logically and naturally anti-Zionist, he is also setting up Silver’s later argument for the concordance of both American civil religion and
Judaism with Zionism. What is to happen, we might ask, when notions of national self- determination and a Wilsonian world order are consolidated into a conception of social justice on the international scale, if justice includes the idea that world Jewry should have an autonomous, or even sovereign, national home? What is to happen when ideas of American chosenness with regards to fulfilling the mission of social justice is also expanded beyond the domestic front, to the mission of spreading democracy and American ideals throughout the rest of the world? In my analysis of Silver’s work, I will present my answer to this question. I will argue that when understandings of national self-determination as global justice, conceptions of American
177 Ibid, 160-61.
77 chosenness and destiny, and of Reform mission, all dovetail with one another, Zionism becomes not only tolerable to, but part of, a public Judaism in the form of a denomination of the American civil religion. Hirsch says that “by rejoicing as Jews we are accentuating our Americanism.”178 It will not take long for “Zionists” to be substituted for “Jews” in that sentence, as we saw that
Brandeis indeed does, and therefore that Hirsch’s public Judaism is a foundational prelude to
Silver’s Americanization of Zionism.
178 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 153
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Chapter Four: The Zionism of Abba Hillel Silver
So far in this project, we have discussed the history of Zionism in America, Casanova’s theorizing on the public religion in civil society, and a case study of a public Judaism cultivated via an appeal to American civil religion. It is time now to employ all three of these approaches in an exploration of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver’s (1893-1963) Americanist Zionism, which Silver locates within American Reform Judaism, American civil religion, and at the intersection of the two.
Indeed, Silver is a unique figure in the annals of American Zionism, both in the role he played and in the ideology he held. In the early 1940s, upon the death of Louis Brandeis, he leapfrogged to the head of the American Zionist movement alongside the elder statesman Rabbi
Stephen Wise. Throughout the rest of the war and the establishment of the state of Israel, Silver remained perhaps the single most important American Zionist leader. By 1950, however, he had been largely marginalized in Zionist politics, and while he would regain some stature in Zionist and pro-Israel circles before his death in 1963, his later role was dwarfed by the power he had wielded in that fateful decade of the 1940s.
Silver was raised in a Zionist home in New York City, after immigrating with his family from Lithuania as a child. Although his father and grandfather were Orthodox rabbis, Silver chose to study at and receive ordination from the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College.
And although Silver was raised as a Zionist in the Herzlian, political model, having established with two friends a “Dr. Herzl Zion Club” as a boy in New York, for the first part of his rabbinate, he kept to the cultural Zionist model of Ahad Ha’am.179 In a letter to the anti-Zionist
179 For these and further biographic details of Silver’s early life, the reader can turn to John B. Judis, “Abba Hillel Silver and the Zionist Lobby” in Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 164-70; and Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 57-63.
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Rabbi Moses Griers of Temple Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, who was considering the young rabbi as his successor, Silver affirmed that:
“a spiritual and cultural center in Palestine cannot but meet with my sympathy and approval. Not that I see in the establishment of such a center the solution of all Jewish problems the world over, but that such a center may be contributory towards a galvanization of Jewish life the world over… For me the political phase of Zionism has at all times been secondary and incidental…”180
His cultural Zionism in fact drew a sharp rebuke from Stephen Wise. Upon hearing that Silver had “passed muster” with Griers, Wise wrote to his junior colleague in the rabbinate ostensibly congratulating him on his new post, and roundly criticizing him for presenting a Zionism “so qualified as to be altogether unobjectionable,” while encouraging him to quickly “correct this impression” and salvage his “self-respect.”181 Silver wrote back, defending both himself from the accusation of self-abasement in pursuit of a professional post and the merits of his cultural
Zionism from the biases of Wise.182
By the mid 1930s Silver’s attitude toward political Zionism had drastically shifted.
Although he had been involved in official American Zionist activities since the early 1920s
(while never relinquishing his commitment to a concordant cultural Zionism), it was only with the rise of the Nazi threat and a 1933 visit to Hitler’s Germany that Silver joined the ranks
American Zionist leadership.183 A decade later, in the midst of World War II, a Zionist conference at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel included two crucial, interrelated happenings.
The first was the publishing of the Biltmore Program, a statement of American Zionist principles
180 Abba Hillel Silver, letter to Moses Griers, 1916, quoted in Judis, “Abba Hillel Silver,” 168-69. 181 Stephen S. Wise, letter to Abba Hille Silver, May 7, 1917, in Stephen S. Wise: Servant of the People, ed. Voss, 79-80. 182 Editorial note in Stephen S. Wise: Servant of the People, ed. Voss, 80. 183 Judis, “Abba Hillel Silver,” 170-72; Additionally, 1920, just three years after the tense exchange between Silver and Stephen Wise, the latter described the former as “a most ardent Zionist [who] gives of his time and his strength to the cause” (Wise, letter to Nathan Straus, April 22, 1920, in Stephen S. Wise: Servant of the People, ed. Voss, 99).
80 that included a pointed call for the “fulfillment of the Balfour declaration and the Mandate” through the establishment of Palestine “as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.”184 Per Naomi Cohen, the resolution put an exclamation point on a year-old trend in American Zionist circles of speaking of a commonwealth rather than a home.185
This was a significant change from what Cohen terms the “comfortable Zionism” of the interwar years, which had represented a version of Palestinianism, the financial supporting of the up- building of Jewish settlements in Palestine which Cohen distinguishes from a true commitment to Herzlian Zionism.186 A second, but related, key event at the Biltmore was the transfer of power from the Zionist old guard of Chaim Weizmann and the recently deceased Brandeis, to
David Ben Gurion of the Yishuv and Silver.187
In a reversal of the situation of two decades earlier, Silver chastened established Zionist leaders such as Stephen Wise if and when he found their Zionism to be lacking.188 Silver also thought that the American Zionist leadership was far too partisan. Although not a conservative
(indeed he had a long career in progressive-affiliated causes such as labor organizing189), Silver’s eagerness to lobby the Republican party and candidates, especially when he deemed the Zionism of their Democratic opponents insufficient, became a hallmark of his.190 This was especially remarkable in a Democratic dominated movement in which, for example, Stephen Wise maintained a close relationship with President Roosevelt. Thus, it was in an apparent rebuttal of
Wise’s leadership that Silver made his campaign slogan for intra-Zionist affairs “trust not in
184 “The Biltmore Program,” accessed April 12, 2018, via Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-biltmore-conference-1942. 185 Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 60. 186 Ibid, 92. 187 Urofsky, American Zionism, 425. 188 Judis, “Abba Hillel Silver,” 175. 189 Shiff The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 43-44. 190 Ibid, 87-89.
81 princes.”191 Silver also became infamous within Zionist leadership for his disregard for the collective decisions of that leadership with regards to strategy, particularly concerning the United
States government. At one point, after failing through Congress a joint resolution in favor of
Zionist goals against the wishes of the Roosevelt administration, Silver was temporarily forced to resign his position in the American Zionist Emergency Council, a war-era Zionist lobbying group.192 Nevertheless, over the six years between the publishing of the Biltmore Program and the foundation of Israel, Silver largely consolidated his power, perhaps becoming the singularly most important American Zionist advocate.193
Silver’s loss of power was as meteoric as was his rise. In early 1949 Silver resigned all of his positions in Zionist organizations and turned his full attention to his congregation in
Cleveland.194 And although his commitment to his pastoral role was unquestionable, Silver was no Cincinnatus, to give up his hard-earned power and influence completely voluntarily. Part of what happened was that Silver had been so successful that his role was no longer necessary.
When Zionism was a merely a political movement, it had been accepted that American Zionists were often the ones who would negotiate with the American government. But now the Zionist movement had its own state, complete with citizens and ambassadors.195 The second, related part was that Silver had deep disagreements with Ben Gurion over the role, and indeed, very purpose of, American Zionism. These disagreements had existed before the founding of Israel, but they became nearly irreconcilable afterwards.196 For Silver was not merely a political activist,
191 Ibid, 84. 192 Judis, “Abba Hillel Silver,” 179-183. 193 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 8-11. 194 Ibid, 1. 195 Shiff, “Abba Hillel Silver and David Ben-Gurion,” 396-97. 196 Ibid, 391-412.
82 working toward the goal of the state without further thought to the purpose of Zionism. He was rather a committed ideologue, committed to what I call his “Americanist” Zionism.
An Introduction to Silver’s Zionism
Silver’s Zionism has four components that I find critical for the purposes of examining his Americanization of the ideology. The first is Silver’s commitment to an Israeli state as a means of fulfilling Reform Judaism’s universal mission rather than as a nationalist end in and of itself.197 He saw the establishment of the state as merely the first step in a process that included both the re-spiritualization of world Jewry and also the creation of a better world writ large.
Second is Silver’s association of Zionism with tenets of American civil religion. This vision too, highlighted the creation of the Jewish state as part of a longer and larger process of creating a better world order, while that the United States and the Jewish state would share a role as champions of democracy and liberalism. Whereas the first two components of his Zionism are its location within Reform Judaism and American civil religion, respectively, the third component is his location of Zionism at the intersection of those two traditions. The fourth and final component is Silver’s commitment to the entrance of the American Jewish community within
American political and civil discourse on behalf of the world Zionist movement. This breaking of what had heretofore been taboo in American Zionism is evidenced in Silver’s efforts (with mixed results) to play the major parties off of one another in efforts to obtain pro-Zionist, and then pro-Israel, United States foreign policy.198
197 Whether that nationalist end be manifested in cultural, Zionism, political Zionism or, as the case with Silver, a combination of the two. 198 For Silver’s relatively successful politicking in the 1940s, see “The 1940s: The Holocaust as Political Leverage,” in Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 80-105. For his relatively unsuccessful efforts to do the same in the 1950s, see “The Attempt to Regain Status in the Wake of Eisenhower’s Election,” also in Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 167-194.
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Thus, Silver’s Zionism represents the projection of ideas about theology and religion very similar to those seen in the anti-Zionist rabbi Emil Hirsch’s “Concordance of Judaism and
Americanism,” as well as in early American Reform Judaism more generally, onto the American
Zionist project. Indeed, the reader may have noticed that my three spotlighted components of
Silver’s American Zionism map quite neatly onto claims made by Hirsch in his address. When
Silver presents Zionism as the means toward the end of re-spiritualization of world Jewry and the creation of a better world, he does so while employing a liberal epochal messianism dependent upon Judaism’s and humanity’s bringing about the proper social conditions, on a global scale.
When Silver presents the United States as a champion of world democracy and liberalism, he subscribes to and promotes a deeply rooted conception of America’s chosenness intertwined with
Judaism’s chosenness. And when he advocates for an unabashed Zionist presence in American politics and civil discourse, he is challenging the heart of a construction of public and private spheres that systematically discourage the consideration of religious identity in matters of the public sphere.
Zionism as Judaism’s Universal Mission – Its Importance Qualified and Sharpened by the Religious Imperative
The first element of Silver’s Zionism that makes it uniquely Americanist is his location of it within the tenets of American Reform Judaism’s tradition of mission. Especially from the later
1920s onwards, Silver’s Zionism was one that incorporated and even privileged political
Zionism, but nevertheless saw the goal of a Jewish state as merely the beginning of a much longer process. Unlike Herzlian Zionism, which sees the solving of the Jewish Question as an end in and of itself, Silver views it as also a prerequisite for the Jewish mission. Jewish nationalists, Silver maintains in his 1928 book, The Democratic Impulse in Jewish History, must
84 not try to be “like all the other peoples” but should rather “ascribe to Israel [a] unique ethico- religious mission which call[s] for a universal apostleship.”199 That Zionist aims of statehood or settlement in Palestine, including both political Zionist aims and the aims of the Ha’amian cultural Zionism that so influenced his thought, served as but a precondition of Judaism’s ability to fulfill its universal mission is made clear in a 1926 sermon:
“To the Jew a nation must vindicate its existence through some social, creative purpose… a nation does not justify its existence merely by surviving… I would not wish my people to become another statelet, another little Montenegro somewhere, merely for the sake of existing as a separate entity there. I wish my people to continue its historic mission as a light-bringer unto mankind.”200
Beyond ragging on the Balkan states, this excerpt serves to locate the prospect of a Jewish state as but one segment, albeit a central one, of a larger, more multifaceted Zionist ideology. As Ofer
Shiff puts it, Silver localizes the prospect of a Jewish state in a particular spot “within
[Judaism’s] universalistic mission”201 – rather than as a replacement for or culmination of that mission. Once the state of Israel was established and Jewish survival guaranteed, Silver hoped that world Jewry would turn their focus to their universal mission, including world peace.202
Associating the pursuit of statehood with mission does two things for Silver. First, it places political Zionism not only in dialogue with Reform Judaism, but within that movement’s very framework. To be precise, this integration both qualifies and sharpens the importance of the pursuit of statehood. Secondly, it addresses concerns of the negation of American Judaism.
199 Abba Hillel Silver, The Democratic Impulse in Jewish History (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1928), 28. 200 Abba Hillel Silver, “Nationalism – The Struggle for Survival,” in Therefore Choose Life, Vol. 1 of Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Writings of Abba Hillel Silver, ed. Herbert Weiner (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1967), 215-16. 201 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 261. 202 Ibid, 26, 196.
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The positioning qualifies the importance of statehood by shifting Zionist emphasis on it from representing the end-all-be-all of Jewish existence to serving as but one of several critical means for the Jewish mission. This theme is present throughout Silver’s career. In The
Democratic Impulse in Jewish History, Silver avers that, “The establishment of a strong Jewish
Commonwealth in Palestine will not accomplish the miracle of preservation for the American
Jew.”203 While this is in part a Ha’am-like cultural Zionist critique of political Zionism, it is also more than that; Silver further avers that, “Only the religious Jew [regardless of where] who will continue steadfast in his faith will conserve and carry on the culture and the traditions of
Israel.”204 In effect, this statement decentralizes, to a limited extent, the position of Palestine itself in Silver’s ideology. For Silver, Jewish settlement in Palestine is not only a means as much as it is an end, it is also but one single, albeit critical, means among multiple, including the
Diaspora Jew’s own religiosity and thus does not deny the simultaneous existence of other critical needs for Jewish survival and success. On a similar note, Silver affirms, nearly two decades later, that “Liberal Judaism has a mission to perform in Jewish life whether a Jewish state exists or not.”205
This weighing of state building as a part of the Jewish mission alongside that mission’s other elements had very real effects on Silver’s politics, as was made manifest in the very beginning of Silver’s rise to national prominence. After his fateful visit in 1933 to early Nazi
Germany, Silver, up until at least 1938, paired his bourgeoning Zionist leadership with a call for
German Jews to stay in the land of their birth. As Shiff describes, this call was predicated on a
203 Silver, Democratic Impulse, 40. 204 Ibid. 205 Abba Hillel Silver, “Liberal Judaism and Israel,” in Vision and Victory: A Collection of Addresses by Dr. Abba Hillel Silver 1942-1948, ed. Harold P. Manson (New York: Ampco Printing Company, 1949), 227.
86 fear that “their immigration be perceived as abandoning the principled liberal struggle for democracy.”206 While other Zionist leaders would focus all of their efforts at that moment on facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, Silver was not willing to pursue mainstream Zionist goals at the expense of other priorities. As we will see more and more, for Silver Zionism was part of a movement for total Jewish liberation in the name of a movement towards global peace and justice.
Simultaneously, however, Silver’s positioning of the pursuit of statehood within Reform
Judaism’s doctrine of mission sharpens the importance of state-building within his Zionism, by providing for it a religious imperative. Although statehood is not the ultimate end, it is still an incredibly critical means to the religiously significant mission. While Shiff notes that Silver in his early career was somewhat skeptical of Reform’s conception of the universal mission, thinking it naïve,207 the rabbi does lay out in his The Democratic Impulse in Jewish History, in
1928, a vision of social justice as mission quite similar to that described in Hirsch’s “The
Concordance of Judaism and Americanism.” In the 1928 treatise, Silver describes the “great social message of Israel” as “its heroic code of justice,” which, he says:
“is incomprehensible without an understanding of the pervading democratic spirit of the race. Every individual life was conceived to be inviolable, a reflex of divinity and an end in the cosmic scheme. Every act of wrong and injustice which mars the life of a man, defaces also the image of God. Oppression and exploitation are therefore more than violations of the laws of society. They are sacrilege and blasphemy.”208
Besides the affiliation of Judaism with the American progressivism-aligned themes of democracy and social justice, what we have here is an example of Silver positioning these
206 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 69-70. 207 Ibid, 41. 208 Silver, The Democratic Impulse, 8-9.
87 themes of social and economic justice, along with respect for individual rights, as religious imperatives. Pursue justice, or place yourself in opposition to God. Or, as we saw Hirsch say,
“The implications of the belief in the One God are basic to our democracy.”209 In both cases the stakes of the social justice motif could not be higher. It is the same high stakes that Silver attaches to Zionism. As Shiff says, “for Silver, pledging unconditional loyalty to the Jewish state
[was] the basis for a commitment to [Judaism’s] universalistic mission.”210 Shiff furthermore provides the apt comparison of Silver’s view of the Jewish state to how one might think of oxygen, “when absent it becomes the sole object of interest, but when available, critical though it may be, it is still just a means not an end in itself.”211 While the state is but one means to the end
(the mission), and would not by itself fulfill the mission, it is the most critical means to that end, without which the mission, and thus American Jewry’s religious duty, could perhaps never be fully realized. Silver is therefore not advocating for a Jewish state despite his Reform Judaism, he is advocating for it because of his Reform Judaism.
How Zionism-as-Mission Counters the Negation of American Judaism
Silver’s harmonizing of Zionism with Reform conceptions of universal mission also has the effect of addressing the question of the negation of American Judaism, which we saw posed such a threat to the acceptance of Zionism by many American Jews. While Silver’s conception of a Jewish state as a sort of oxygen supply for world Jewry obviously contains within it the negation of the Diaspora, in that it argues that a non-Diasporic existence is necessary for world
Judaism to achieve its full potential, it does not subsequently deny that American Judaism has a
209 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 157. 210 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 25. 211 Ibid, 12-13.
88 purpose in and of itself, nor does it necessarily position American Judaism as inferior to
Palestinian or Israeli Judaism. Silver saw the struggle for survival as an all-consuming objective of world Jewry, and no less so for Jews living in the safe haven of the United States. But once the Jewish state would be or was established, world Jewry, and especially American Jewry, could turn its attention to other goals, such as its universal mission. Under this paradigm of the relationship between Diaspora Jews and Jewish state, it is not only where Jews live, nor necessarily even the existence of a spiritual center, that most affects the quality of their Jewish lives, but also what they can or cannot accomplish as determined by how much attention the practical concern of the survival of their co-religionists warrants at the moment.
Again, all this is certainly not to say that Silver completely or even mostly rebuts normative conceptions of the negation of the Diaspora. In the 1926 sermon cited above, Silver repeats Ha’am’s cultural Zionist negations of the Diaspora. In the Diaspora, “the Jew has lacked that complete freedom, that spaciousness, that stability, that sense of belonging which enables a people to create for it grand and lasting things.”212 He makes no exception for American Jews.
Later in his career, Silver also conceives of the Diaspora and the negation thereof in ways that make him seem a direct disciple of Pinsker. In a speech given at the Reform Movement’s biennial assembly just months after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, he proposes that the recent constitution of a Jewish state spells the very end of the Diaspora, in that:
“When people can of their own free will return to their ancestral home, they are not in exile. Only compulsorily banishment spells exile. All nations send forth immigrants to all parts of the world. People are continually moving from one country to another, and change their citizenship, but they are not regarded as exiles… This fact alone – the end of national exile for the Jewish people, as such – is destined to affect favorably the psyche of the Jew throughout the world. It will
212 Silver, “The Struggle for Survival,” in Therefore Choose Life, 216.
89
endow the Jew, wherever he lives, with a self-respect and sense of security, a normal tone, long wanting in Jewish experience.”213
Just as Pinsker or Herzl would, Silver at this point in his career sees the establishment of Israel as internationally normalizing the status of the Jewish people, and the existence of the Israeli populace is implicitly saving the international Jewish community. A negation of American
Judaism as it contemporarily stands, in that it is to a large degree dependent on the success of the
Zionist enterprise, is therefore clearly present in both the cultural and political strands of Silver’s
Zionism.
But despite the prominence of a negation of the Diaspora that positions American Jewry as to some degree dependent upon a Palestinian/Israeli Jewish community – and it is prominent –
Silver’s incorporation of Reform ideals of universal mission into his Zionism is a discourse- shaking addition. To see this incorporation of universal mission in Silver’s Zionism we again turn to the same 1926 sermon as cited above. Following his Ha’amian critique of the potential for extra-Palestinian Jewish spirituality, Silver states that the Diaspora Jew should nevertheless focus upon three things. First and second, they should “remain loyal to their faith” and “preserve their racial and historical identity.” These first two items can each be characterized as preservative, in that they are things that Diaspora Jews can do to keep from assimilating. But third, Silver says:
“the Jew in the Diaspora, here [in the United States] and elsewhere, may continue as a contributing force to civilization by living up to the ideals of his race, the moral teaching, the mission of his people; then he is, in a good sense, a missionary to mankind, an apostle of truth, a messenger of good tidings, a champion of justice and truth.”214
213 Silver, “Liberal Judaism and Israel,” in Vision and Victory, 221-222. 214 Silver, “The Struggle for Survival,” in Therefore Choose Life, 217.
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Whereas the first two items were preservative, this third item can be characterized as constructive. Diaspora Jews can do much more than just minimize spiritual and ethno-cultural degeneration and decay. Rather, Silver says that they can contribute to humanity, regardless of the situation in Palestine. And not merely contribute a bare minimum. The language he uses is dramatic, prophetic, and poignant; Silver affirms that Diaspora Jews have not just any role, but a critical role to play in global affairs and civilization.
Silver’s inclusion of Reform’s vision of American Jewry’s universal mission within the same ideological framework in which he includes a negation of the Diaspora, including
American Jewry, is certainly not without tension. That there is tension, however, does not reduce the importance of the fusion. For in spotlighting the constructive potential of Diaspora Jews, rather than simply the preservative potential, Silver lays the groundwork for conceptions of a
Jewish state as a means toward Judaism’s universal mission, in addition to serving as an end in and of itself. In fact, Silver’s conception of the impact of a Palestinian state or center on
Diaspora Jewry mildly subverts normative conceptions of that relationship, as presented by
Zionists of all stripes, from Pinsker to Ha’am and back to Herzl. The characterization of such a state’s existence as a constructive means, via the synthesis of Zionism and core tenets of liberal
American Judaism, is a large part of what makes Silver’s Zionism a distinctly Americanist
Zionism.
Zionism, Demanded by the American Civil Religion
The second element of Silver’s Zionism that makes it uniquely Americanist is his location of it within American civil religion, specifically, that tradition’s imagination of the
United States’ role on the world stage. In the process of critiquing American intractability before a Cold War meeting between President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev, he
91 explicitly names “to advance the cause of peace and freedom in the world” as “the larger mission of our national destiny… We ought to recapture the vision which was ours, which made America the glorious hope of mankind.”215 In language that could have been quoted verbatim by Bellah with regards to the “third time of trial,”216 Silver positions the United States’ mission and destiny, glorious though they may be, as things that need to be worked for and sought after in order to be accomplished.
Silver brings the same civil religious authority to bear on his pleas for the United States to support Zionist endeavors. He argues that the United States itself should pursue Zionism in order to truly realize its own mission and destiny, maintaining that the United States could only claim righteousness in its fight against Germany if its conduct toward the Jewish people reflected its democratic mission.217 In a 1943 speech before the National Conference for Palestine, Silver censures the United States military apparatus in command of what shortly before had been Vichy and Nazi controlled Algeria, for keeping in place the antisemitic policies of its predecessors. As long as that remains the case, he warns, “then our armies can no longer be regarded as armies of human liberation, and the war is in danger of becoming just another war between rival combinations of powers fighting for supremacy.”218 With this dire warning in the minds of his audience, Silver abruptly shifts gears from the status of Jews in liberated territories to the progress which Zionism is and is not making with the British and American governments. By association, the gravitas of his earlier prophetic judgement remains.
215 Abba Hillel Silver, “Shadows over the Summit,” May 15, 1960, AHSP IV 1037, in Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 251. 216 The “third time of trial” refers to the question of American leadership in a post-World War II world, see Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” 183-86. 217 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 81. 218 Silver, “The Conspiracy of Silence,” in Vision and Victory, 4.
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Silver even remained critical of American policy when President Truman supported
Zionist aims of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine post-war. This was because Truman was supporting this immigration for humanitarian rather than ideological reasons. In line with
Wilsonian conceptions of a universal right to national self-determination, Silver would only be satisfied with Truman’s support for Zionist aims in the framework of Jewish national enfranchisement.219 If Truman and the United States did not support the establishment of a
Jewish commonwealth, to Silver, then the United States was failing in its mission, and he was not afraid to say so.220 Thus, upon the United States’ vote in favor of the partition of Palestine, and thus in favor of the creation of an independent Jewish state, Silver praises the United States for living up to his standards for it, declaring that the United States “rose to the challenge of the hour and the mandates of its destiny.”221
Zionism at the Intersection of Americanism and Judaism
Finally, Silver embeds his Zionism at the intersection of American Reform Judaism and
American civil religion. Silver’s ability to do so relies upon his articulation of a Jewish denomination of the American civil religion, that is much like the one Hirsch articulates in “The
Concordance of Judaism and Americanism.”
Indeed, Silver proposes as the bedrock of this fusion an argument that Hirsch himself would have agreed with, namely that the United States writ large and its Jewish population share a mission. Just as Hirsch does, Silver does this in part by laying a Jewish claim to the United
219 In reverent eulogy for Wilson, early in his career, Silver regarded the “prince of peace” almost as a failed messiah for his ideals of spreading democracy and self-determination throughout the world. See Abba Hillel Silver, “Woodrow Wilson,” in A Word in its Season, Vol. 2 of Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Writings of Abba Hillel Silver, ed. by Herbert Weiner (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1972), 351-58. 220 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 92-93. 221 Silver, “The Month of Exaltation,” in Vision and Victory, 156.
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States’ Puritan heritage. In a sermon delivered less than two weeks before his passing, in late
1963, he describes the Pilgrims as bringing with them to North America a “Hebraic love of righteousness earnestness, and sanctity. They built their New World commonwealth on the model of the Old Testament.”222 This claim that Judaism underwrites America’s past is in turn made for the purpose of claiming a shared future. As Shiff notes, Silver, in an earlier speech given on the 300th anniversary of the Jewish presence in the Americas, “linked a fervent belief in the greatness of American democracy with expectations of a glorious future for American
Jewry… continuing an established American discourse that dated back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”223 In other words, Silver, fifty years after Hirsch delivered “Concordance” to celebrate the 250th anniversary of that selfsame occasion, delivered a speech with a near identical purpose. Because of the concordance of Judaism and Americanism, Silver perceived the
Jewish mission of social justice to be also the American mission.224 Similarly, Silver posits that
Judaism “offers mankind a gospel of social progress and its summons men to social action, to the building of the good society” and that “these are original ideas of Judaism.”225 Here again, we have Silver staking a Jewish claim to the central values of liberal (and Protestant-influenced)
Americanism.
Unlike Hirsch in “Concordance,” however, Silver takes pains to establish that this shared social justice motif extends beyond the borders of the United States. In a 1949 sermon, Silver assigns credit to Judaism for the “ideal of the one world… that the whole of humanity is one.”226
222 Silver, “The Jewish Impact on Civilization: Part II,” in A Word in its Season, 331. 223 Shiff The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 18. 224 Ibid, 42. 225 Abba Hillel Silver, “With Our Eyes toward the Future,” May 1, 1957, AHSP V 945, in Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 43. 226 Silver, “The Vision of the One World,” in Therefore Choose Life, 91.
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He asserts that, just as it has always mandated individual rights and social and economic justice,
Judaism mandates, “that all nations harmonize their interests and live in peace, cooperate internationally for the common good so that all might become one society, ‘to do Thy will with a whole heart.’”227 Here, again, political action is imbued with a religious imperative, this time on the international scale. And lest the listener think that Silver is speaking in abstract platitudes about an underdeveloped wish for world peace, Silver makes clear that he is talking specifically about American and Soviet Cold War policies, and providing a religiously-informed critique thereof. “Judaism,” he continues, “rejected that conception of iron curtains between peoples and nations. God was God of all mankind.”228 The sanctification of social justice is of course not
Silver’s innovation; the phenomenon is deeply rooted in his Reform tradition. Neither, perhaps, is Silver’s projection of this motif into international politics. Yet, his particular projection of the social justice motif into the global realm plays a critical role in his efforts to Americanize
Zionism, and ultimately in the product of the process, his own Zionism.
Where Silver radically differs from Hirsch is in his argument that there is not only a concordance of Judaism and Americanism, but that there is also a concordance of Zionism including the state of Israel, and Americanism. Just as he and Hirsch locate the concordance of
Judaism and Americanism within the story of the pilgrims, Silver identifies the root of shared
Zionist and Americanist missions by comparing the Jewish movement to the early Puritan settlers of North America. Silver, in a speech celebrating the one-month anniversary of the
United Nations General Assembly’s late 1947 vote in favor of partitioning the mandate into separate Jewish and Arab states, declares that the early British colonists of North America and
227 Ibid, 93. 228 Ibid.
95 the Jewish settlers of Palestine have in common commitments to the Burkean ideals of resistance, dissent, and liberty.229 He concludes with a rousing call that the State of Israel, “this new, free, and democratic country… will embody those same great Biblical ideals of justice, brotherhood and peace which inspired the founding fathers of this Republic.”230 Silver also proposes, in his speech to the Reform Movement shortly after the establishment of the state, that:
“just as [the United States] became a melting-pot of peoples, so Israel is destined to become a melting-pot of world Jewry… American life richly profited from the manifold gifts and talents which many peoples brought to it; so Israel is likewise destined to profit from the skills, cultures and enthusiasms which Jews all over the world will bring to it… Life in Israel will be characterized… by that same energy, initiative, and inventiveness which have characterized American life.”231
In addition to claiming shared foundational ideals between Zionism and Americanism, we see here that Silver conceives of the two ideologies as convergent in terms of what they will result in, namely, a very special, diverse, and energetic national society, predisposed to great success.
So too do the missions of the two national ideologies, Americanism and Zionism, converge. In an understanding of the global mission of the state of Israel that might as well be found in
Gorski’s description of the “prophetic republicanism” of the Americana civil religion, Silver affirms that:
“[Statehood] is not the substance of our own ancestral tradition, whose motif is not nationalism but prophetism … After its national life is secured, Israel must push on to the frontiers of the new world – the world of internationalism, of economic freedom, of brotherhood and of peace.”232
As a part of this location of Zionism at the intersection of Judaism and Americanism,
Silver incorporates Zionism into a Hirschian conception of epochal messianism; in other words,
229 Silver, “Exaltation,” in Vision and Victory, 154. 230 Ibid, 159. 231 Silver, “Liberal Judaism and Israel,” in Vision and Victory, 22. 232 Abba Hillel Silver, “Beyond the Jewish State,” 1940, AHSP 180, in Silver, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 13.
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Silver positions the pursuit of Zionism as part and parcel of efforts to usher in the messianic age.
In 1943 Silver gave a speech before the National Conference for Palestine, a gathering convoked by the United Palestine Appeal (now the United Israel Appeal). In the speech, he proposes that how the world treats the Jewish people after the war will index the overall ability and willingness of the world to rebuild itself in a just manner. He paints this relationship with soteriological terminology, saying that if, after the war, the allied powers “will act in a spirit of justice, vision and true statesmanship [with regards to Zionism], then there is hope that, by the same spirit, the entire world will be healed and saved.”233 This location of Zionism within epochal, human- driven messianism is of course part of Silver’s perception of the state of Israel as a means as well an end. According to Shiff, Silver thought that “the role of the Zionist leader in the post- statehood period was to educate his people about Zionism’s revolutionary character by serving as a prophet of universal progressivism striving to eradicate injustice, oppression, and war.”234
Americanist Zionism – Sacred, Patriotic, Public
That Silver attempts to hold the United States accountable to Zionist aims is somewhat of a remarkable feat, considering the long history of worry concerning the threat of dual belonging or loyalty within the liberal American Jewish establishment. We saw earlier that this worry was one of the major impediments standing in the way of the Americanization of Zionism. But Silver rejects of a model of citizenship and public participation that denies that Judaism can be anything more than private faith and ritual practice and simultaneously be compatible with an American national and civic identity. Silver sees the denial that Jewish identity could play a legitimate role
233 Silver, “The Conspiracy of Silence,” in Vision and Victory, 9. 234 Shiff, The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 247.
97 in American politics as evidence of intolerance and Jewish marginality in American society.235
He saw political activism that proudly incorporated American Jewish particularity within it to represent true American patriotism.236
Silver’s confidence in the necessity for Jewish collective identification within American politics was a point of departure for him with fellow Reform and Zionist leader, Rabbi Stephen
Wise, as I mentioned in my biographical section on Silver. As Shiff writes:
“Silver’s main allegation against Wise was that, by failing to challenge the [Roosevelt] administration [on its lack of action on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust], he had unwittingly promoted an approach that distinguished between so-called narrow Jewish interests and legitimate American interests.”237
To Silver American Jewish interests were American interests, full stop, and thus Wise’s hesitancy to demand that President Roosevelt act on behalf of European Jewry cultivated a marginal status for Jews in American politics, which for Silver was inexcusable. Only by making political demands as Jews could American Jewry fully integrate itself within American political society. Silver’s commitment to Jewish involvement in American politics as Jews was manifested in his politicization of Zionism. He was averse to promoting Zionism on the grounds of humanitarian aid, preferring instead that it be promoted as a way for the American Jew to immerse themself in American society.238 This is not to say that Silver thought that American
Jews should always vote for the more Zionist-friendly party of the moment. At the 1944 ZOA convention Silver affirmed that:
“American Zionists, in the exercise of their privileges as American citizens, will vote for one party or another, for one candidate or another. American Zionists are to be found in the ranks of both the Democratic and Republican as well as other
235 Ibid, 84-87. 236 Ibid, 58. 237 Ibid, 80. 238 Ibid, 74.
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parties, and when they speak in endorsement of one party or another, they do so not as Zionist spokesmen, but as American citizens.”239
Rather, he is merely affirming that Zionism is one among many legitimate interests of American
Jewish voters. Silver also affirms the propriety of American Jews acting as a collective political body, if not voting as such. While acknowledging that, “It is folly to expect universal agreement among five million Jews of America,” at the 1943 American Jewish Conference, Silver declares that the “overwhelming majority of American Jews” is well within its rights to express its view in favor of a Jewish state on behalf of American Jewry240 – a reminder of the power of the ethos of democratization in the propagation of Zionism in the United States.
By hearkening back to Casanova’s definitions of public religions of civil society, it becomes apparent how Silver’s efforts to locate his Zionism at the nexus of American civil religion and American Reform Judaism fit the mold. Recall Casanova’s definition of deprivatization as “the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing of the boundaries.” Recall now the differences between Silver’s Zionism and earlier American Zionisms. Recall that as Brandeis does, Silver locates his Zionism under the rubric of Americanism, but whereas Brandeis’ conception of Americanism does not explicitly acknowledge religiosity, Silver’s thrives on such a recognition. Likewise, recall that where whereas Lazarus pairs her Zionism with a need for
American Jewish physical revitalization, Silver pairs his with a call for religious revitalization.
Think of how much Silver’s Zionism has in common with Hirsch’s anti-Zionism, in that each enthusiastically affirms that religion has an important role to play in the public sphere. Quoting
239 Abba Hillel Silver, “A Year’s Advance,” in Vision and Victory, 58-59. 240 Abba Hillel Silver, “On American Jewish Unity,” in Vision and Victory, 74.
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Rabbi David Einhorn, his father in-law, Hirsch says, “by all means religion in politics.”241 Silver would agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, but incorporates his Zionism into Hirsch’s civil
American Judaism.
The themes of mission and messianism, of American chosenness and of the role of
Jewish identity in the public sphere, in addition to intertwining with and affecting Silver’s
Zionism, ultimately resulting in a particularly Americanist Zionism, show that Silver was able to locate Zionism as a key tenet of a public Judaism, and perhaps even as the key tenet of a Jewish denomination of the American civil religion. This Jewish branch of the American civil religion affirmed that Judaism belonged in the American public sphere. As Shiff points out, Silver based his Zionist activism “on an idealized hyphenated American-Jewish identity” that “affirmed the reciprocal relationship between Jewish solidarity and American patriotism.”242 It was only by locating his Zionism within American civil religious tradition, in other words, at the top of the
American pantheon, that Silver was able to appeal to the latter in his demands for the former. It was this location that enabled Silver to demand that the United States support Zionism on ideological grounds, rather than humanitarian ones. Thus, Silver’s Zionism is a true example of religion abandoning its “assigned place in the private sphere” and entering the “undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing of the boundaries.” And this is all in addition to that Silver defended
Zionism among his Jewish audience as part and parcel of American Reform Judaism, its traditional foe in the United States.
241 Hirsch, “Concordance,” 159. 242 Shiff The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver, 80.
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Silver himself alludes to this significance in a speech given a month after the United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine’s plan to partition the mandate into separate Jewish and
Arab states was approved by the UN General Assembly in late 1947. “We are of course secularists in that we oppose a theocratic state,” Silver says, while simultaneously affirming that
Zionism, “was… inspired by the same prophetic idealism which twice beckoned our ancestors from exile to national restoration in Palestine.”243 While Silver attributes this “prophetic idealism,” to the ancient Israelites emerging from Persia, it is the same prophetic idealism that is at the core of Bellah’s and Gorski’s conceptions of American civil religion, and it is this same prophetic idealism that drives the social justice motif of Reform Judaism. Indeed, it is not nationalism, not humanitarianism, but prophetism, located within Judaism, Americanism, and at the intersection of the two, upon which Silver relies to bring his Zionism into the American public sphere.
243 Silver, “Exaltation,” in Vision and Victory, 152-53.
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Conclusion
In 1955, Judd Teller wrote an article in the Jewish-American Commentary Magazine reflecting on an apparent disconnect between Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and American
Zionists. In the lead up to the World Zionist Congress, the Americans were wary of disappointing Ben Gurion with a low number of young Jews who would make aliyah (immigrate to Israel), and not for the first time. Teller imagines Ben Gurion asking the flustered Americans,
“how does Zionism differ from non-Zionism if you do not come and settle with us?” He maintains that the origins of this disconnect are in in the differences between two strands of
Zionism – a dominant Eastern European/Palestinian/Israeli strand on one hand, and an American strand on the other. Whereas the former strand is characterized by its nationalism, the latter is characterized by its “messianic pragmatism,” or at least it was in its early days. Thus, what the
American Zionists require, the Israelis do not give them, and will not until they “recapture the wholeness of [Zionist] ideology,” including “the messianism of the American Zionist tradition.”244
With some changes in names and dates, Teller’s article could be written today. Zionist organizations consistently worry about their and Israel’s ability to connect to young American
Jews.245 While this thesis has not been about young people in particular, nor about contemporary events, I believe that the question is nevertheless a fitting place to conclude. I identified Abba
Hillel Silver’s Zionism as “Americanist” because of his ability to locate it within Reform
Judaism, within an American civil religious tradition, and at the intersection of the two. Are
244 Teller, “America’s Two Zionist Traditions.” 245 For one example, see Judy Maltz, “Young American Jews Increasingly Turning Away from Israel, Jewish Agency Leader Warns,” Haaretz, January 22, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-jewish-agency- chief-warns-young-u-s-jews-more-turned-off-to-israel-1.5751616.
102 contemporary Zionist and pro-Israel organizations able to do something similar? Given the growing entrenchment of Israel’s occupation and the corresponding violence against
Palestinians, the answer is a far cry from an automatic yes. Or are Israel and the Zionist center of gravity now too far removed from Jewish ideals of mission and American civil religious ideals of prophetic republicanism for such a synthesis as Silver pursued?
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