The most interesting interchange at the Center for Jewish History event
on Hannah Arendt on May 2 involved Jewish assimilation in western societies.
Arendt was born in Germany in 1906. Jerome Kohn
said that two ideologies she grew up with were assimilationism and Zionism.
The assimilationists were for Jews becoming Germans. The Zionists were against it. They said that
anti-Semitism was the climate of Europe, and that the
answer was a Jewish nation to match the German nation, the French nation, and
so on. Of course, the Zionists were right about
Arendt was not an assimilationist. Though she studied Christian theology, and
was the lover of Heidegger, she never felt herself, panelist Richard Bernstein said, to be part of what she called the German "essence".
Jerome Kohn:
For the assimilationists the Jewish
past [was] the past of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven. This was Jewish history
for the assimilationists⦠[Arendt] says that the problem is that the
assimilationists talked about Jewish history but never talked about …the role of Jews in Jewish history because it
didn’t exist for them. Assimilationism was a story of being part of what they
called bildung [the German ideal of education]…Zionists of course contradicted this impression. For them
Jewish history was a history not of Goethe, Schiller and Beethoven but the
history of anti-Semitism. Again, Jewish history was not the history of Jews; it was
the history of people who hated Jews. Zionists kept pointing out that the
assimilationists were living in an imaginary world of self-deception.
Kohn said that Arendt believed the more "socially-assimilated" Jews became in
Bernstein echoed that point:
One really has to understand⦠what
assimilation meant in a German context. In an American context it means more or
less secular. You don’t have to deny it, you don’t have to pretend that you’re a
Christian, you could be anything⦠It was in Germany, you might say, an aggressive
positive sense in which your identity is primarily German..
I was deeply interested in this conversation because I’m an assimilationist. I’d second Bernstein’s point: the German lesson has little application to
the American experience. Here Jews by assimilating don’t give up political rights or even a sense of Jewish identity. They don’t take on an American Christian "essence." Indeed, privileged Christians might also be said to be "assimilating" into a pluralist American culture that was formed not just by Christians, but by other groups, notably brainy Jews
(Hollywood, the
information industry, the academy). These Christians are also giving up their
religion to do so.
I have several friends who are were raised Episcopalian and
donât believe in the Christian god they were fed as children. They have
abandoned the idea of the divinity of Jesus Christ (though they study Christâs
teachings and the teachings of Buddhists and Hindus too). I join in a spiritual conversation with them
not by maintaining that Jews are a chosen people who received the law on
Steven Smith believe), but by surrendering some of the religious and ethnic paradigms/myths of my childhood. It is interesting to note that someone who would disagree with me, the Straussian Yale scholar Steven Smith, has written that being Jewish means
not accepting the Enlightenment, because Jewishness depends on the belief in
revelation, and specifically the revelation of the law to Moses. "To the
extent that the liberal Enlightenment has urged the abolition of particular
providence, it will always be at odds with Judaism," Smith says.
We assimilationists aren’t keen on that idea of a "particular providence." Here, for
instance, is Ted Koppel on the question: "I try to apply the ethical strictures
of Judaism to my daily life, but many of those have been adopted or adapted by
various branches of Christianity. My
wife is Catholic, my closest colleague, Tom Bettag is Catholic. Our ethical perceptions are largely
interchangeable." Koppel’s paradigm is more American, and useful, than Arendt’s.
