The Maccabaean

PARAPHRASING the epigram on politics of Edward A. Freeman, we may say that “history is past sociology and sociology is present history.” Down through the ages, the Jewish people have been subject to a variety of social forces which have not hitherto been analyzed in the light of the social sciences. Until the emancipation of the Jew at the end of the 18th century, the question was viewed as a theological one. The subsequent monumental work of Leopold Zunz on the “Science of Judaism” was not science, as we know it, but rather historical research. It emphasized to us the sense of the continuity of our history, and attempted to create an appreciation of the wide cultural value of its content. The “Wissenschaft des Judenthums” was planned in 1825, and the publication of Zunz’s various work on Judaism antedated Darwin’s epoch-making work in 1859, the “Origin of Species”—the key which unlocked so many of the mysteries of science, biological and social.

> The development of sociology dates back about a generation. It has supplied us with a new point of view in grappling with Jewish problems. It has given us the concept of an abnormal social personality, in the same way as medicine has made us familiar with abnormal functioning in individuals. Prior to the development of modern medicine, illness, physical or mental, was interpreted to be a loss of personality and the possession by spirits which had to be exor- cized.1. Similarly today, despite the full growth of the social sciences, one of the anti-Zionist rabbis, a protagonist of the “Jewish Church” idea, says of Israel, an abnormal social group, “We ceased to be a people and became a unique phenomenon.”

It is easy for us to grasp the concept of the preservation of personality in the cases of illness in individuals because of its brevity, its common occurrence and its compatibility with human standards of thinking in terms of medical science. On the contrary, the concept of an abnormal people, maintaining its personality, was until recently beyond our mental yardstick, by reason of the rarity and the duration of the social phenomenon—a group persisting in dispersion for two thousand years. Only the perspective furnished by sociology enabled us to behold it, as a living though abnormal people.

SOCIAL FORCES IN JEWISH LIFE

The facts in Israel’s struggle for survival fall into a logical scheme. We can discern environmental forces of destruction and of conservation. Out of these Zionism was born. Correspondingly, we are carrying out in our midst the two opposite conscious policies of assimilation and of perpetuation, and to them Zionism has a vital significance.

If the forces of conservation are regarded as permanent measures, does not the question arise, why spend such an enormous amount of energy, not for living fully, but for mere existence, amid conditions

that continually threaten our destruction? If the Goluth is never to end, why not end it at once? If Zionism were to be put permanently beyond realization, every thinking Jew should become an assimilationist. Only the hope of ultimate normal life in Palestine to a portion of the Jewish people can ever furnish a rationale of the Diaspora for the rest.

However, in spite of the several forces of perpetuation, conceived even as temporary props, we are in danger of dissolution. Our life as a group is in unstable equilibrium between two forces,2 on the one hand the greater tendency to be absorbed, and on the other hand the lesser opposing tendency to reassert, temporarily, the will-to-live when assimilation goes too far or too fast. Any future re-alignment, industrial or political, after the war, sectioning civilized life on this planet at new angles will hasten the forces of destruction. What the future holds in store as to the meaning of nationalism, of religious revival, of the relation between labor and capital, and of industrial democracy, no one can tell.. The only safe assumption is that every development will be a departure from tradition, and to that extent subversive of all institutions that will not have the vitality to find a new stable equilibrium in the final readjustment, of the social forces involved. In the post-bellum readjustment, dismembered Jewry faces the severest test in its history. Its very existence is involved.

Our measures can but at best postpone and palliate. It is too much to hope that we can resist universal forces which have destroyed so completely, whole sections of Israel in Italy, France and Germany. The environment we live in, demands for our further existence as a scattered people, a higher education in Jewish history and literature, than did the Ghetto. Can we aspire thereto, with the many competing claims to the time of the child, and the greater freedom of thought of the parents? And if we could, Jewish life would be a matter, not for the masses, as it has been, but for the intellectual minority. We should eventually sublimate into a magnified Menorah Society without the masses, the necessary foundation for every normal social group.

Further, there is a grave defect in the very essence of the partly assimilated condition. There is no logical Stopping point in the process of dejudaization. It is a matter of continual compromise until the end—complete assimilation. In any of the functions of Jewish life, the surrender is unconditional, only the time element grades off the Orthodox, the Reform, and the Ethical Culturist Jew. We have yielded all—so much so that adopting the standards of our neighbors, we have developed a Jewish anti-Semitism, tending to force the newly arrived immigrant into our paths or else to alienate him.’

2 By stable equilibrium we mean, as in physics, the return of the body as a result of displacement of its center of gravity, to the former state. By unstable equilibrium, we mean the loss by a body, upon being displaced, of its center of gravity, and the fall to a continually lower level.

*The phenomenon of social assimilation of a minority finds an interesting analogy in the reaction between two chemicals to form a third, which. continues until the lesser of the two original has disappeared.