Alexis Wolfson

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 6, Issue 4 - January 2005

A History of Disagreement: A Brief Review of Early American Conservative Judaism

During the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries American Jews struggled to create a social, political, cultural, and most importantly for this study, a religious identity. By the mid nineteenth-century, American Jewry was influenced by Jewish immigrants who escaped political, economic, and religious strife in Europe. By the turn of the twentieth-century, an increasing number of Jews from eastern Europe immigrated to the United States; they attempted to orient themselves and build a cohesive population rich with the advantages denied them in Europe. American Jewry also grappled with the temptations of assimilation and acculturation into American society, while attempting to fight the old accusation of existing as a “nation within a nation.”¹ This complex phenomenon of the American Jewish search for religious freedom, reorganization, and identity is the primary focus of my research.

The texts referenced in this article provide specific documentation to help answer the following questions: How did American Jewry create its own American Judaism, and, how did the creation of Conservative Judaism in America by the twentieth-century respond to the challenges of assimilation and acculturation in the American Jewish community? The primary sources for the research focused on the development of Conservative Judaism in America, a history of American Jewish immigrants, and definitions of what became different denominations of American Judaism. It should be noted that although I focused my research on Conservative Judaism, other forms of Judaism existed and thrived during the early nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.

American Jewish history can be constructed from a narrative history of disagreement in which Jewish communities throughout the United States responded to the social and economic challenges of reinterpreting European ideals in a new political context. Although the first appearances of a break in traditional or pre-modern Judaism started as early as the Civil War, organized movements in Judaism began to progress during the late nineteenth century as new waves of immigrants arrived. Variety in American Judaism mirrored European experience and attempts to understand how the theological tenets of Judaism could interact with a dynamic, democratic social and political structure.

In the book Sectors of American Judaism, Jacob Neusner presents an analysis of the Jewish religious experience in America. Using a sociological interpretation, he critiques the American religious and Jewish history of data and information. Neusner argues that little detail on “what is religious about the American Jews, what is not merely Jewish, but also Judaic about them, and what is American about what we regard as their religion” has been provided in previous institutional and historical accounts of the development of American denominations of Judaism². He asserts that most research on American Judaism has been presented within the sphere of what he characterizes as “traditionalist” analysis. Neusner characterizes this traditionalism through Jewish religious educational training and a “profound knowledge of the Jewish classical tradition.”³ He recognizes a tension, therefore, between the narrative of American Jewish immigrants and the way in which theologians, historiographers, and sociologists romanticize evidence about how Jews progressed on an intellectual level. Neusner’s arguments are critical to my research as he offers a method for approaching the study of American Judaism from a non-religious perspective.

As part of the discussion of “what makes American Jews Jewish,” as defined by Neusner, one must examine the historical tensions of the different immigrant communities of Sephardic (Jews of Spanish descent), German, and Eastern European Jewry. To certain immigrant groups, the German and Sephardic communities were viewed as elitist citizens who already participated in American democratic and capitalist ideals. These naturalized counterparts accused Eastern European Jewish immigrants of “ghettoizing,” or secluding themselves and Judaism from other groups and religions in America.⁴ For example, one of the points of tension between the established and the immigrant societies was the charge that immigrants isolated their linguistic, cultural, and ethnic patterns within the confines of the small geographical areas in which they settled. In particular, some German Jews in America who integrated into mainstream society sacrificed their German and Jewish identities.

Upon their initial arrival many German Jewish immigrants had little money, but by the late 1880s, several of these Jews had become prominent in business and banking in America. Jews of all backgrounds began to move west and away from the east coast, as their peddling and retail careers prospered. Even though German Jews assimilated into American society and culture, some separated themselves from the Jewish community as their business and cultural adventures flourished in America. As the immigration of Eastern European or Russian Jews increased, German Jews became more critical of and confrontational towards the new immigrants.

As they grappled with these tensions American born Jewish leaders, such as Isaac Leeser and others, used the principle of education to propagate their forms Judaism.⁶ Centered around the European “Positive-Historical School,”⁷ traditionalists such as Sabato Morais, Alexander Szold, and Marcus Jastrow identified with and emphasized tenets of historical Judaism in the creation of a distinct seminary which rejected German liberal Judaism and Eastern European Orthodoxy. According to Moshe Davis, author of The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, “it is true that the spokesman of the other schools also emphasized that their ideas were the true continuation of historical Judaism, but they did not use this term as a description of their purpose as a movement.”⁸ However, like their colleagues in Reform Judaism⁹, adherents of the positive-historical approach sought to reinterpret Judaism in the context of American life, values, and society. In particular, the British Jewish scholar, Solomon Schechter, pioneered the ideology of positive-historical Judaism through his position as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1902 until his death in 1917.

In his book, Conservative Judaism: The New Century, Neil Gillman outlines the founding ideology of Schechter and his followers in reference to Conservative Judaism. As Gillman explains, Schechter expressed that freedoms fundamental to American political, social, cultural, and religious society were absent from the European context. Therefore, Judaism would have room to thrive in conjunction with the non-Jewish community. Second, Gillman argues that for Schechter, Judaism could respond to modernity. Understanding Orthodoxy as a stagnant denomination, which excluded immigrant struggles, Schechter wanted to provide American Jews, native and immigrant, with a sense of Jewish purpose that reacted to contemporary tensions and questioning. Third, Gillman argues that Schechter felt the study of Judaism must incorporate current methods of scholarly research.

Accordingly, Schechter encouraged biblical criticism which critiqued archaic beliefs and practices and used methods employed within the American context. Schechter also felt strongly, as mentioned several times throughout Gillman‘s book, that Judaism has had a history. Schechter focused on a Jewish narrative in its entirety and how that narrative related to present scholarship. Schechter wanted the American Jewish community to take an active role in the development, progression, and change of its form of Judaism. Other concepts Schechter encouraged included the importance of the Hebrew language to the Jewish people, Zionism, and halakhah as the constant authoritative text.¹⁰ Schechter’s ideologies shaped the structure of Conservative Judaism.

Largely due to Schechter, in the twentieth-century Conservative Judaism transformed itself from a struggling religious movement to an ideology that incorporated the multifaceted needs of diverse religious, cultural, and social elements within the Jewish community. As Conservative Jews began to participate in the development of the larger American Jewish community, the theological tenets of the movement became more pronounced and well-defined.

ENDNOTES

“The French National Assembly: Debates on the Eligibility of Jews for Citizenship,” in A Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115.
Jacob Neusner, ed. Sectors of American Judaism,(New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1975), 316. In the same work, Neusner presents two methods by which information on American Judaism is generally presented and supports a third: “First, we have institutional histories and biographies, which tell us pretty much everything that social scientific positivism finds worth reporting. Second, we have established concepts of theologians and ideologues. But the third body of information, the data supplied by creative artists of various kinds, has yet to be introduced into historical discourse” (Pg 318). Neusner’s point on the study of American Judaism seems to be accurate as other researchers fail to present an unbiased and empirical account of the religious traditions in American Judaism.
Sectors of American Judaism, 319.
Kaufman Kohler, “The Concordance of Judaism and Americanism (1911),” in A Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 471.
The American Jewish Experience, 41.
Moshe Davis. The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, (New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963), 35.
“Positive-Historical” Judaism developed through the ideas of the German Jewish scholar and theologian Zacharias Frankel during the mid nineteenth-century. A positive-historical approach to Judaism understands original Jewish texts and customs in a modern context.
The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, 16.
Reform Judaism was a new denomination of American Judaism. The movement’s theological tenets emphasized a cultural restructuring of Judaism, while later Judaisms sought to uphold traditional ideology and authority in primary Jewish sources while providing a modern interpretation of Judaism.
Neil Gillman. Conservative Judaism: The New Century. (New York: Behrman House, INC., 1993), 44-56.

REFERENCES

Bentwich, Norman. Solomon Schechter, A Biography. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948.
Davis, Moshe. The Emergence of Conservative Judaism. New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963.
Gillman, Neil. Conservative Judaism: The New Century. New York: Behrman House, INC., 1993.
Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz Jehuda. The Jew in the Modern World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995
Neusner, Jacob, ed. Sectors of American Judaism. New York: Ktav Publishing House, INC., 1975.
Sarna, Jonathan, ed. The American Jewish Experience, Second Edition. New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishing, 1986.
Waxman, Mordecai, ed. Tradition and Change: The Development of Conservative Judaism. New York: Burning Bush Press, 1958.
Wertheimer, Jack, ed. Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Vol. I & II. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997.

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