DIVERSITY OF COMPOSITION
    Diversity the result of dispersion - The main difference dis-tinguishing the Jews of the East from those of the West - The vigour and complexity of Jewish life in the West - Differences be-tween Eastern and Western Europe - Characteristics of Eastern Europe - Religious tendencies in Western Europe and America - Zionism and other forms of Nationalist aspiration - Forces of dissolution: in economic, political, social, and intellectual life
The great diversity that characterizes modern Jewry is the natural result of its dispersion throughout the globe.  Although united by community of religion and culture, the Jews present notable differences of physical type and intellectual ten-dency. This differentiation is produced by the influence of their several environments, which vary from one another in physical, political, and intellectual conditions, and effect corresponding variations among their Jewish denizens. But the Jews of any particular country, although exposed to the same general influences, are not moulded into a uniform pattern. Having settled in the land at different periods, and having brought from their previous homes different modes of life and different degrees of conservatism, they resist the surrounding influences with unequal will and strength and exhibit varying grades of assimilation to the general population. In each individual country, therefore, there is a series of classes or types of Jews, shaded off from one another, and thus the multiplicity of types in the world forms an almost endless series.

The main difference is that which distinguishes the Jews of. the East from those of the West, though these terms must not be taken in a strictly geographical sense. The Jews of the East are those living in the countries of Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. Settled in lands that have known little or no progress f6r the last two thousand years, cut off from the stimulating forces of modern thought and civilization, they have remained for the most part in the same stage of culture as their remote ancestors. The Jews of Asia Minor, Persia, and Arabia, probably differ in physiognomy only in a faint degree from the contemporaries of Judas Maccabeus, while those settled along the southern shore of the Mediterranean can also have undergone little change owing to their living in compact, congested communities. From the days when the Rabbis of the schools of Babylon mapped out minutely the religious life of the Jew, these Eastern communities have shown unswerving loyalty to Talmudic law and traditional custom. Only once, in the eighth century, did a revolt break out against the Rabbinical code, but the sectarians, who proclaimed their adhesion to the letter of the Scriptures and are known as Karaites, were never numerous. Their numbers are estimated at the present day at 12,000, of whom 10,000 are in Russia. But the bulk of eastern Jewry remained stationary and stagnant, save for its natural increase, until aroused from its long slumber fifty years ago by the educational efforts of the "Alliance Israelite Universelle," supplemented later by the Anglo-Jewish Association and the " Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden."

Quite a different spectacle is presented by the Jews of the West, who have continuously displayed intellectual activity for the last twelve hundred years. Not only have they produced a voluminous literature of theology, poetry, and philosophy, besides works of travel, history, satire, and imagination, but even in the days of political out-lawry they distinguished themselves as devotees of science, particularly in the realm of medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. At the present day, in every country of Western Europe, in America, and in the British possessions, Jews are participating in the general life of their environment, in its social and political affairs, its industrial and commercial activity, and its intellectual aspirations. It is just because their share in the national life of their country, especially where they enjoy complete emancipation, has developed to such a high degree, that a complexity has been wrought in their own life. Moulded by an infinitude of competing influences in their several centres, despite their inherited instincts and ideas, they acquire a varied outlook upon Judaism, develop differences of religious creed and conformity and maintain different views upon their duty towards their race and upon its destiny.
An exhaustive enumeration of all the types and tend-encies among Western Jewry would be impossible in a preliminary survey: the utmost that can be attempted is to trace the main forces making either for the absorption or the preservation of the race. Such a survey is best conducted from east to west, from Eastern Europe, where political bondage has caused the social isolation of Jewry, to Western Europe and other parts of the world where political equality has been followed by a liberal inter-mingling with non-Jews. By Eastern Europe is meant primarily the Russian Empire, in which, with insignificant exceptions, Jews are denied the ordinary rights of citizenship and are confined to the Pale of Settlement. The exclusion of the Jews from political and civic life, on the one hand, and their aggregation in towns in which they form the majority, on the other hand, have had the in-evitable effect of intensifying their communal life and strengthening their solidarity. They have produced a Jewish environment in a non-Jewish land, an environment affording most of the essential conditions for a strict observance of religious rites, for the preservation of ancient traditions, the fostering of a separate culture, and the pursuit of distinctive ideals. They have contributed to the development of a modern Jewish literature, press, and drama, to the maintenance of separate schools and libraries, to the formation of countless societies for intellectual or philanthropic purposes, and even to the creation of specifi-cally Jewish industries. The atmosphere thus created in the Russian Pale is reproduced in the neighbouring territory of Galicia; it prevails likewise in Rumania and Turkey, and it is also found, in greater or less measure, modified by liberal conditions and tinctured by the local spirit, in the great Ghettos that have arisen in Western Europe and Amenca.

This atmosphere is permeated and dominated by the sentiment of religion: it fills a world that revolves about an axis of orthodox faith, whose poles have been fixed by the laws of the Talmud. Not all the inhabitants of this world are attached with equal fervour to the ancient traditions, but all are under the influence of the spirit of Rabbinical Judaism which has held dominion in their midst for more than a thousand years. The most orthodox regulate every day in their lives, from the cradle to the grave, by the minute and comprehensive laws of the medieval codex, the Shulchan Aruck ("Table Prepared"), based and elaborated upon the decisions of the Talmud, which, in turn, are derived from the laws of Moses. Settled though the Jews have been in Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia, for hundreds of years, their minds are still steeped in the lore of their ancestors who lived in Babylon in the early centuries after the destruction of the Temple. To them the traditions handed down by their ancestors are as dear and as divinely inspired as the commandments thundered forth from Sinai. They study them, and all ancient Hebrew literature embodying them, with touching piety; they initiate their children into religious rites from their earliest lisp; and they hold the day imperfect on which they have not uttered a hundred benedictions. Three times a day they turn their faces towards Jerusalem, their prayers re-echoing with the yearning for the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of Zion.

As we travel westward we reach a more temperate zone, which merges in places even into frigidity; but so complex is the diversity of modern Jewry that even in lands that have witnessed the furthest extreme of reform, such as Germany and the United States, there are numerous strongholds of orthodoxy. The general feature that distinguishes Western Jewry is moderation in devotion and in the observance of traditional customs. The pre-valent and growing tendency, due to social and economic forces, is to divorce religious practice from daily life, to exclude the former more and more from the home and to confine it to the synagogue. The synagogues are more imposing and ornate than in the East, but, except for New Year and the Day of Atonement, they mostly present a doleful array of deserted benches. In matters of ritual Western Jewry is divided into Ashkenazim or "German," and Sephardim or "Spaniards," a distinction which dates from medieval times, when Germany and Spain formed the two most important centres of Jewish life and which consists, apart from the question of ritual, in a different pronunciation of Hebrew and different intonation of the prayers. In matters of principle, Western Jewry is divided into two camps - Orthodoxy and Reform - the division being based on a difference of conception of Israel's destiny. The Orthodox regard the dispersion of Jewry as a divine punishment for past transgression, and they believe in the coming of a personal Messiah and in the restoration of Israel to Palestine. The Reformers, on the other hand, regard dispersion as Israel's final lot and as the divinely appointed means for universalizing the teachings of Juda-ism. These differences of principle are reflected in the ritual and other external forms, but neither Orthodoxy nor Reform presents an aspect of complete uniformity. In recent years a new development of the Reform school has arisen under the name of Liberal Judaism, a movement which has made further sacrifices of traditional rites and provides services in the vernacular on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning for those who cannot or will not attend the synagogue on the Sabbath.

The conflict of views upon the destiny of Israel is also reflected in the varying attitude towards the Zionist move-ment, which aims at re-establishing Jewish national life in Palestine. Zionism draws the greatest proportion of its followers from the Orthodox camp, but there are many in it who are opposed to Zionism on the ground that the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land must await the advent of the Messiah; while there are Reformers who, though discarding the belief in a Messiah, look upon the regeneration of Judea as the best means of fulfilling the Jewish mission. In this cross-division we may note that the two principal forces in the conservation of Judaism are the orthodox synagogue and the Zionist movement. The synagogue is a passive force, which is being slowly and subtly undermined by the adverse influences by Western civilization; the Zionist movement is the only active force which is endeavouring to counteract these corroding influences. There are two other forms of nationalist aspiration of a feebler character. The one is the theory propounded by the Russo-Jewish historian, Dubnow, that national Jewish culture and autonomy should be developed in the various lands of dispersion, a theory which fails to take into account the diverse and adverse influences exercised by varied environments, resulting in different types of Judaism. The other tendency is embodied in the aim of the Jewish Territorial Organization to found a home for the Jewish people in any land on the face of the earth. This Organization, created in 1905 by seceders from the Zionist movement, at a time when the world re-echoed with the groans of the victims of Russian pogroms, found much sympathy and support at first; but its quest for a land has so far been fruitless, and its positive activity has been limited to the transplanting of ten thousand Russian emigrants via Galveston to the United States.

Opposed to the agencies consciously striving for the conservation of Jewry are innumerable forces working for its dissolution. In every country in the Western world there is an open advocacy of the doctrine of assimilation, that Jews should regard themselves as distinguished from their fellow-citizens merely in respect of religion, but that otherwise they should merge themselves completely in the general life of the nation in whose midst they dwell. The practice of this doctrine, often preached from radical pulpits, inevitably leads to mixed marriages and apostasy. But the forces of dissolution operate for the most part unconsciously: they arise from the very nature of the environment, which, impregnated with the spirit of science and dominated by industrial competition, is inimical to the cultivation of an Oriental faith. Even the Jews in Eastern Europe are also exposed to corroding influences, for political persecution drives them to seek refuge in baptism or else to remove their homes to a land where man's highest energies are devoted to the amassing of wealth. Thus the soul of Israel among the nations is nowhere immune from iusidious assault. The exigencies of the economic world react upon all strata of Jewry, and cause widespread neglect of the Sabbath. The attractions of the political and the distractions of the social world influence those of comfortable material status, who seek further outlets for their ambition, and in the process they gradually become estranged from the synagogue and sometimes, even in the course of a generation or two, from their faith.

But more subtle and penetrating in its effects than all these forces is the general intellectual atmosphere of the countries of dispersion. Born in the homelands of modern civilization, reared in Western schools and universities, and nurtured upon non-Jewish lore, the Jews tend to become alienated from their own historic culture. Their thoughts and ideas are apt to be inspired and fashioned less by the intellectual traditions of their race than by the intellectual agencies of their native land; and the less of Judaism they have imbibed in their youth the more easily are they moulded into the prevalent national type. This spiritual metamorphosis, aided and impelled by countless unseen forces, precipitates the detachment of Jews from their race and faith and their gradual absorption by the nations. Nor do they remain mere passive creatures of their environment, but actively assist in moulding it anew. In science and art, in literature and politics, in music and the drama, and in various spheres of the academic world, their achievements are remarkable not only in relation to the short time they have engaged in European culture, but in virtue of their own intrinsic worth. They are among the keenest and most trenchant critics of literature, among the most fertile com-posers and brilliant executants of music; among the leading specialists in medical science, and the doughtiest champions of political and ethical movements. And the thoroughness with which they have thrown themselves into the intellectual ferment of modern times is evidenced by the fact that the Jewish origin of many celebrities often passes unnoticed, so utterly denuded is their work of any element reminiscent of their racial descent, religious faith, or historic culture.

Back to table of contents

Back to
Back to Shtetl

© Iosif Vaisman
Feedback, questions: send e-mail to Iosif_Vaisman@unc.edu