search
Jonathan Jaffe

The Erasure of Jewish Peoplehood

Sign marking the site of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform conference. Photo: Museum of the Jewish People

While Yom Kippur is a time of contrition, I hope you will forgive me, if I come bearing a grudge. I mean to speak critically of an earlier generation and the unfortunate decision made over 200 years ago which continues to affect how the world understands Jews, how we Jews understand ourselves, and how we talk about our relationship with Israel.

The central question I wish to ask is: what does it mean to be Jewish?

Travel back with me in time, to the beginning of the 19th century. Following the enlightenment and western Europe’s emancipation of its Jewish subjects, the very definition of Judaism became a pertinent question. For centuries, Jews had lived as a people apart, practicing their own rituals, holidays, traditions and even legal system. But in the liberated nation state, what would become of the Jew? In 1807, Napoleon convened a group of French Jewish leaders to ascertain if Jews could become loyal citizens. In order to do so, they would first need to relinquish any ethnic identity in exchange for a purely religious one. Offered the opportunity for equal standing, the representatives duly agreed, declaring that Judaism was now a religion and only a religion, and that Jews did not hold any communal identity separate from their French brethren, and that France was their one and only motherland. The Jews of Germany, England and other western European countries quickly followed suit, pouncing on the opportunity to bring an end to two millennia of antisemitism through rapid assimilation. After 3,000 years of peoplehood, we were now to be understood as a religion.

Across the Atlantic, American Jews made the same bargain. The dream of American acceptance was predicted upon mass assimilation and the need to fit Jewish identity into the tidy box of religion. In essence, our great and great-great-grandparents made a pitch for acceptance to their American neighbors, that we Jews are not so different from you. We are Americans, like you. Despite at the time often being called “Orientals”, we are white, like you. We dress like you, go to work like you and even pray in church-like buildings with organs and stained glass windows, like you. Think of us as white anglo saxon protestants, just minus the Jesus.

By the end of the century, this grand bargain had become deeply ingrained in American Jewish life and the idea of Judaism as purely a religion a forgone conclusion. Indeed, when the Reform Movement of Judaism drafted its original platform in 1885, its leaders were outspoken in their denial of Jewish peoplehood, writing:

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.

In saying we are “no longer a nation”, the platform’s author, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, openly acknowledged that this was a departure from the historical understanding of Jewish identity. Kohler argued that Zionism “undermines the very foundation of Reform Judaism…it is un-Jewish.” Our mission ought to be to “transform the national Jew into a religious Jew.” Kohler channeled his own hero, the German pioneer of Reform Judaism Abraham Geiger, who wrote, “The people of Israel no longer lives…it has been transformed into a community of faith.”

Several years later, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism, followed up the 1885 Platform by declaring:

“America is our Zion…The mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political. Its aim is…to spread truths of religion and humanity throughout the world.”

The 1922 Union Prayer Book perhaps went the furthest, daring to offer gratitude for the continued state of Jewish landlessness and powerlessness, reading:

By Thy Grace, O God, it has also been given to us to see in dispersion over the earth…a sign of blessed privilege. Scattered among the nations of the world, Israel is to bear witness to thy power and thy truth.

As we know well, the universalistic hopes of dispersion among the nations went up in the flames of the pogroms and eventually, the Holocaust; exposing the false assumptions upon which they feebly lied. However, the decision to deviate from 3,000 years of Jewish history and reduce Jewish identity to merely a religion continues to affect us deeply today.

Before exploring how, let’s return to our opening question. What does it mean to be Jewish? The problem is, Judaism predates categories such as race, religion, ethnicity or nationality. Once upon a time, ancient peoples such as Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Greeks and even Hawaiians developed their own culture, language, religion, cuisine, music, art and most importantly, connection with their ancestral land. Each of these aspects were fused together as a single identity of “peoplehood”. Over time, each of these peoples either died out or fell victim to colonization. The Hittites, Jebusites and Kenites are no longer around, the Hawaiians are long since Christianized and Egyptians no longer speak in their native tongue about the sun-god, Ra while hanging out on the bank of the Nile River. But we Jews … we stubbornly stuck around. Over time, the world changed around us. Empires rose and fell. Large swaths of the indigenous world were colonized. But despite being conquered and exiled by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and so on, we Jews refused to go away. That made us somewhat annoying to many of our conquerors. Over time, we became the world’s outliers to the point that no one knew what to make of us. They still don’t.

As writer Dara Horn explains, non-Jewish societies have always attempted to place Jews in a box that they could understand, whether it be race or religion or ethnicity or nationality or whatever else. The problem is that we Jews invariably pre-date whatever box is offered. Nevertheless, due to the pressures of assimilation, over time, we American and European Jews embraced this Christian inflected identity, hoping to make ourselves acceptable by identifying ourselves as a religion.

Even today, congregants often speak to me about their Judaism in narrowly religious terms. Well meaning people will say to me that they identify as Jewish but worry about joining a synagogue since they don’t believe in God and really are more interested in “tradition”, which has become our coded language for all aspects of Jewishness aside from prayer. As many of you have likely heard me respond, if we added to our membership application a box to check if you believe in God, and threw away all the unchecked submissions, we would have a much smaller synagogue. Nevertheless, people are often surprised to hear that Judaism is more than a religion and synagogues serve equally as centers of Jewish life and culture.

The Torah clearly understands Jews to be first and foremost a people. When Abraham is first called to travel across the known world and settle the land of Israel for his descendants, the Torah reads:

לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃ וְאֶֽעֶשְׂךָ֙ לְג֣וֹי גָּד֔וֹל

“Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation.”

Not a great religion. Not followers of a particular theology. A nation. Throughout the Torah, this crucial distinction is made again and again. We are called Beit Yisrael, Beit Ya’akov, and Am Segulah – the descendants of Israel and Jacob; a treasured nation. Nowhere does the Torah define Jewishness purely as a religion. When the Moabite Ruth tells her Jewish mother in law Naomi that she wishes to return with her to Israel, she says:

כִּ֠י אֶל־אֲשֶׁ֨ר תֵּלְכִ֜י אֵלֵ֗ךְ / וּבַאֲשֶׁ֤ר תָּלִ֙ינִי֙ אָלִ֔ין / עַמֵּ֣ךְ עַמִּ֔י וֵאלֹהַ֖יִךְ אֱלֹהָֽי׃

For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you stay, I will stay; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

As Ruth articulates, the religious and ethnic identity of the Jewish people are deeply intertwined. But while there exists a covenantal relationship forged at Sinai and confirmed in today’s Torah portion, failure to comply does not erase one’s Jewishness. As Israeli Professor Ze’ev Maghen suggests, I could stop this sermon right now, renounce any belief in God, throw the Torah on the ground, burn it to pieces, dance in the ashes … and I would be a really, really bad Jew, but a Jew nonetheless.

The third century Rabbi Abba bar Zavda taught (Sanhedrin 44a): “Even when the Jewish people have sinned, they are still called Israel.” That is, even if one transgresses all the laws and lacks any sense of belief, he or she is still very much Jewish.

But even though the Reform movement eventually reversed course and endorsed our self-evident identity as a people, Jewishness continues to be discussed by Jews and non-Jews alike as a religion. This needs to stop. Let’s talk about why.

My children’s school system, like most, if not all public schools, have taught about Judaism within the context of religious faith. In comparing religious communities, the curriculum focuses on the three B’s of belief, behavior and belonging. But as I explained to Greeley administrators, this rubric simply does not work when it comes to Jews. What does someone need to believe in order to be Jewish? What behavior do they need to exhibit? I dare say there are many Jews present here today who eat bacon and work on the occasional Saturday. And yet you are all just as Jewish as Moses himself. How do you teach the 3 B’s when two of them do not necessarily apply?

The curriculum featured in the ninth grade comparative religions unit portrays Judaism as a faith based upon creed and commandments. Students learn how the ancient practice of sacrifice gave way to prayer and that Judaism introduced monotheism, later to be built upon by other Abrahamic faiths. In this way, Judaism is portrayed as a precursor to Christianity, even using Christian terms like the Old Testament rather than indigenous ones like Torah or Tanakh. Reading through the curriculum, I sensed a familiar line of reasoning. The answer then appeared: the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, directly quoted in the syllabus. This 145 year old deviation from historical Jewish identity is still paying dividends.

Last year, my daughter and several other students decided to start a Jewish Student Union at her high school. Up to that point, despite the large Jewish population the school had never hosted a specifically Jewish club. The students wrote a description revolving around cultural events, proposed an opening series of programs and submitted their application…which was denied on the grounds that religious groups are not authorized to form clubs. The Jews of 1885 had done it again! The students pointed out that Greeley proudly features Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander and African American clubs. But to the administration, Judaism was of course, a religion and so did not count. Fortunately, after lengthy conversations, the administration was willing to hear the students out and once they understood the civil and cultural underpinnings of Judaism, the club was authorized.

Not all students are so lucky. Following the shocking antisemitic demonstrations in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia formed a coalition of ethnic minority student groups against hate. Guess who was left out? The very Jews who had been targeted. So again, I want to thank our administrators for their responsiveness. But not all are so willing to listen, and the DEI world often suffers from a blind spot for Jews, largely because of the misidentification of Jews as a white-presenting religious denomination rather than an ethnic minority and common target of hatred from both the left and the right.

The notion of peoplehood is especially important when explaining Zionism and articulating our connection with the land of Israel. As Mizrachi writer Hen Mazzig explains, “To be Jewish is to be a part of an ancient agricultural nation connected with a specific land… Jews pray while facing the land of Israel. Our festivals – Sukkot, Passover and Shavuot – commemorate the ancient Israelite pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, and all three have thematic connections to the annual phases of farming the land.” Even the Yom Kippur observance was originally intended as a day of purification to ready oneself for the fall festival of Sukkot. In sum, Judaism is an indigenous practice that we have come to mistaken for a religion. Many of those who engage in anti-Zionism and antisemitism justify their hatred for Jews under the pretext that we are “just a religion”. In so doing, they deny our connection to one another as a people, as well as our connection to the land of our ancestors. But all of this has been enabled by our own historical willingness to deny this obvious fact.

The shortsighted decision to identify Judaism as a religion also complicates our relationship with our Israeli brethren. To fully understand the issue, we need once again to go back in history. Twelve years after the fateful writing of the 1885 Platform, Theodore Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress and published The Jewish State, within which he declared, “We are a people – one people.” But at the very same time, American Jews were essentially saying, “No we are not”. In the ensuing decades, hundreds of thousands of Jews returned to their ancestral homeland of Israel with the hope of rekindling their roots. As Orthodox Jews asserted that only the messiah could return the Jewish people to their homeland, these pioneers were largely secular, eschewing their religious upbringing. And so, beginning in the late 19th century, when Americans and Israelis talked about Judaism, they began to mean entirely different things. American Jews embraced religion and discarded peoplehood. The Israeli pioneers embraced peoplehood and discarded religion. We have been speaking different languages ever since. And as a consequence, when it came time to found the Jewish State, the Reform movement remained stuck in its anti-Zionist stance, for fear of destabilizing the ongoing march towards assimilation. The fact that we non-orthodox Jews abdicated our seat at the table has directly resulted in the Orthodox monopoly of Israeli religious life. We were not there when it most counted, and have been playing catch up ever since.

In the modern era, the definition of Judaism as a religion is used as a cudgel for those seeking to undermine the connection between Jews and our ancestral homeland. As Rabbi David Gedzelman, President & CEO of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life explains, Jewish peoplehood is characterized by a growing number of scholars as a thoroughly modern construct, an invention born of the ideas of modern nationalism, with no real connection to any sense of groupness, national identity in exile, or covenantal connection among the Jews who lived before the modern era. Worse yet, the inclination to want to be connected to those of similar Jewish origin or commitment is condemned by these scholars as being necessarily racist in nature, as in the infamous 1975 UN resolution classifying Zionism as racism, rescinded in 1991. Such critics posit that a group of white people who happen to practice Jewish religion have suddenly conjured an artificial ethnic identity in order to legitimize their colonialist aspirations. It matters little that the majority of Israelis are of middle eastern or north african descent and therefore do not present as white. This is what we get for departing from our historical identity as a people.

Several years ago, my family traveled to Amsterdam. One day, we went to a small town outside of the city to visit a village of picturesque windmills. Our bus full of tourists pulled into town and we headed down the path to see them. Stationed down the road stood a photographer, snapping family photos of the tourist passerbys. As we approached, we heard him calling out to the various tourists to get their attention. “Hello! Konichiwa! Hola! Guttentag!” The guy took one look at my family and in a millisecond called out, “Shalom mishpacha!”. We had been outed by the world’s greatest racial profiler.

But at the same time, when my daughter fills out her college application, she is asked to classify herself as either: American Indian, Alaskan, Asian, African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or … White. How do we exist between the opposing categories offered by the college application and the Dutch photographer?

Throughout the 20th century, various immigrant groups including Jews, Italians, Irish and Greeks received the blessing of whiteness, largely to create a binary separating them from African-American blackness. This transition demonstrates the fluid nature of this categorization, with certain ethnicities deemed to be of color in one era and white in another. In each case, these ethnic groups were deemed to be white when it was beneficial to the ruling majority. Just as calling Jews “white” was helpful in distinguishing against black, today, calling Jews white allows critics to deny our historical and ancestral connection to our indigenous homeland.

In the modern era, Jewish students entering college suddenly find themselves in a world where an academic elite, armed with a critical approach to nationalism, peoplehood and group identity has formulated a new orthodoxy according to which the Jewish people is a modern construct that was invented to further the political aims of Zionism, rather than the other way around. So the argument goes, religions do not lay claim to indigenous lands. Many Mormons may live in Utah, but they cannot declare it their homeland. And if Judaism is merely a religious faith, then neither can it claim indigenous status.

Even worse, a new generation of Jews are embracing the 19th century paradigm, articulating a form of Judaism completely divorced from peoplehood and any connection to our ancestral homeland. Protestors on the quad hold anti-Zionist Passover seders, perhaps unaware that the seder culminates in the aspirational words “Bashana Haba’ah b’Yerushalayim – next year may we be in Jerusalem”. Following the assimilationist model of the 19th century, they present themselves as “good Jews”, untethered from the poisonous anchor of Zionism, deserving approbation for abstaining from this parasite growing on the Jewish soul. These protesters are not offering anything new but rather regurgitating the assimilatory approach of our great great grandparents. Unfortunately, we have seen this story before and know how it ends.

The essential danger is that by dissolving our mooring to the land of Israel, the Jewish people are set adrift to float away, vulnerable to the same assimilatory pressures that erased so many other peoples from the annals of history. As my colleague Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch predicts, “The future of Judaism in the 21st century is Jewish peoplehood, and all those who abandon Jewish peoplehood will be as leaves falling from the tree.”

Rabbi Hirsch continues, the hard left now posits that universal values have not only supplanted national identity but that Jewish national identity itself is morally defective. To them, Jewish peoplehood means whiteness, privilege, injustice, chauvinism, and racism – part of the oppressive power structure that subjugates and exploits racial minorities and indigenous peoples. We are witnessing a moral inversion in which we are denied all that we know about ourselves.

As my colleague Rabbi Diana Fersko explains, we Jews thought that we were indigenous to the state of Israel. Now we are colonizers. We thought of Israel as a modern day miracle, rooted in an ancient yearning for homeland. Now, the greatest sins of our day are attributed to the Jewish state. We once thought that justice was one of our core values. Now, we are told that we don’t know about justice, and we need to attend trainings about other forms of justice instead. We once believed in the power of sacred argument and open discussion. Now, we are socialized towards sameness / hashtags have become valorous, and group think commands us to like re-posted narratives denying Jewish indigeneity to Israel. We thought of ourselves as the consummate outsiders. Now, we are insiders with far too much power.

Through this inversion, we are witnessing the resurrection of supersessionism, in which our critics surmise that we Jews have gone astray and must be replaced by a morally superior entity. Early Christians argued that biblical Jews were praiseworthy but the contemporary ones, the Pharisees, had forfeited their connection to God. Now, it is shtetl Jews, assimilationist Jews, and victims of the holocaust who are presented as noble and pure, while the modern Jew is the imposter and embodiment of all that ails our world. If only these homeland obsessed Jews would go away and be replaced by those good Jews who are so willing to deny their sense of peoplehood. If only we modern day Jews could be more like our 19th century forefathers and play the game in order to fit in.

As Rabbi Hirsch reminds us, at no time in Jewish history was separation from the land of Israel considered to be permanent. Throughout 2,000 years of exile, we never abandoned the dream of return, and despite what earlier Reform prayer books might say, never considered dispersion a blessing. We as a community owe it to ourselves and our future generations to reject the dilution of Judaism to being solely a religion. We need to change the way we talk about ourselves, our institutions and our relationship with Jews around the world. We ought to cease comparing ourselves religiously to Chrisitians and Muslims and instead talk about Jews in comparison to other ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Druze, Armenians and Yazidis. The only difference is that we alone have miraculously realized our greatest aspirations of self-determination and self-defense within our ancient homeland. We ought to look at Jews not as religious colonizers but rather, history’s greatest example of decolonization and restorative justice. We ought to serve as an aspirational example for other peoples who yearn towards freedom within their own lands. The lazy acceptance of an externally formulated definition must end, as we have seen its harmful effects.

As we begin a new year and renew our covenantal relationship to one another, may we proudly demonstrate our uniqueness as a people who defy whatever box we are asked to fit. The fact that we have survived and outlasted so many peoples is not a coincidence. Rather, it is through our common bond to one another that we have endured and in this modern era, thrived. Today, Israel exists as the only country in the world that bears the same name, speaks the same language, practices the same theology and inhabits the same land as it did 3,000 years ago. We are witnesses to a modern day miracle. In response to those who are so willing to define us according to their lackluster understanding and ill-fitting boxes, may we proudly assert our identity as a people and a nation that has risen from the ashes. May we say to them: Am Yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives on.

About the Author
Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe serves as Senior Rabbi for Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester. He also serves as co-chair of the Chappaqua Interfaith Committee and sits on Hebrew Union College’s President’s Rabbinic Council, AIPAC’s National Rabbinic Council and is a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative. He was ordained by Hebrew Union College and received his BA in philosophy and history from Duke University.