When Jews Assimilate into the World Around Them

From Hellenistic Judea to American Judaism

We tend to remember Jewish history as a series of encounters between Jews and outsiders: Jews and Greeks, Jews and Romans, Jews and Christians, Jews and the modern nation-states of Europe. But some of the most consequential conflicts in Jewish history were also conflicts among Jews over how Jews should respond to the civilizations around them.

Two medical terms will help us understand this subject, etiology and morphology. Etiology concerns the cause of something: why a particular development occurred. Morphology concerns its form: what that development looks like once it takes shape. Two historical phenomena can have completely different etiologies while sharing a similar morphology.

The Hellenization of Judea and the assimilation of American Jews obviously have radically different etiologies. One occurred in the context of Hellenistic imperialism; the other largely through voluntary integration into a liberal democracy that offered Jews unprecedented security and opportunity. Yet their morphology may contain a recognizable similarity: cultural encounter, selective assimilation, reinterpretation of Jewish identity, competing visions of Jewishness, and eventually intra-Jewish conflict.

The point is not that modern anti-Zionist Jews are simply modern Hellenists. Rather, the Hellenistic crisis provides a historical model for understanding how assimilation can eventually turn a disagreement about how Jews should relate to the surrounding world into a conflict over what Judaism itself means.

The Hanukkah story offers an unusually clear historical example.

Hanukkah Was Not Simply Jews vs. Greeks

The familiar story of Hanukkah is straightforward: Antiochus IV persecuted the Jews, the Maccabees revolted, and the Jews ultimately regained control of Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple.

That story is true, but it can obscure the Jewish conflict that preceded and accompanied the revolt.

The Hellenistic crisis was not simply a matter of Greeks imposing foreign culture on an unwilling Jewish population. Jewish elites themselves participated enthusiastically in Hellenization. Jerusalem acquired Hellenistic institutions. Jewish leaders competed for the high priesthood. Jason and Menelaus represented different versions of a Jewish elite increasingly integrated into the political and cultural world of the Seleucid Empire.

The fundamental question was therefore not merely whether Jews should obey the Greeks. It was something more difficult:

What should Jewish life look like in a Greek world?

For some Jews, Hellenization represented education, political sophistication, economic opportunity, and participation in the wider civilization of the eastern Mediterranean. For others, it represented a threat to the institutions and practices that made Israel distinct.

This is why it is misleading to imagine the Maccabean revolt simply as Jews versus Greeks. There was a Jewish struggle over Hellenization before there was a successful Jewish revolt against Seleucid power.

In that respect, the popular memory of Hanukkah resembles the popular memory of another revolution.

We tend to remember the American Revolution as Americans fighting the British Empire. That is true, but the Revolution was also a civil conflict among Americans themselves. Patriots and Loyalists disagreed over what political community they belonged to and what America ought to become. The external conflict did not eliminate the internal conflict; in many ways, it intensified it.

Something similar happened in Judea. The presence of a powerful foreign empire did not eliminate the question of what kind of Jews the Jews themselves wanted to be.

That question may be more important to the story of Hanukkah than we usually recognize.

Assimilation Without Conquest

The American Jewish experience is obviously not another Hellenistic crisis.

There was no American Antiochus. American Jews were not forced at swordpoint to abandon Judaism. There was no equivalent of the Seleucid decrees against Jewish religious practice.

In fact, the American Jewish experience is remarkable precisely because assimilation happened under conditions of freedom.

American Jews could become Americans without necessarily ceasing to be Jews. They could enter universities, professions, political institutions, and civic life while maintaining synagogues, holidays, religious practices, and communal institutions.

But this creates a different kind of assimilation.

Assimilation does not have to mean abandoning one’s inherited identity. It can mean absorbing the surrounding civilization’s categories so thoroughly that one begins to understand one’s inherited identity through them.

At first, the process can be almost invisible.

I am Jewish, and I am American.

Then:

American democratic values are compatible with Judaism.

Then:

American moral ideals help me understand what Judaism is fundamentally about.

And eventually, in some cases:

When Jewish particularism conflicts with those universal moral ideals, Jewish particularism itself becomes problematic.

This is a different phenomenon from simply abandoning Judaism. The person making this transition may remain intensely Jewish. He may care deeply about Jewish history, invoke Jewish texts, participate in Jewish institutions, and understand his political activism as an expression of Jewish ethics.

The question is therefore not whether he is Jewish.

The more interesting question is what has become authoritative in determining what Judaism means.

From Judaism and America to Judaism Through America

This distinction becomes particularly important when thinking about modern American Jewish ethics.

American Jews did not merely bring Judaism into American society. Over generations, American society also supplied categories through which Jews came to understand Judaism.

American political culture, particularly in its progressive and reformist traditions, has often understood public life as a project of moral improvement. The Social Gospel provided one particularly influential expression of this idea: religious faith should manifest itself through the transformation of society.

American Jews developed their own vocabulary for a similar moral project. Justice, equality, human dignity, social responsibility, and repairing the world became increasingly prominent ways of describing what Jewish ethics meant in public life.

There is nothing inherently un-Jewish about any of these ideas. Jewish tradition contains an extraordinary demand for justice and concern for the vulnerable.

The question is not whether Judaism teaches justice.

It is why Judaism teaches it.

That distinction becomes especially visible in the modern use of tikkun olam.

Tikkun Olam and the Translation of Jewish Ethics

Tikkun olam has a long and complicated Jewish history. Its meanings in rabbinic literature and later Jewish mysticism are not simply interchangeable with the contemporary slogan that Judaism calls us to “repair the world” through social justice.

Yet in contemporary American Jewish discourse, tikkun olam is often used as a broad description of political and social activism: making society more just, protecting marginalized groups, defending democracy, advancing equality, and improving the world.

Again, there is nothing wrong with pursuing those things.

But compare two different ways of understanding the relationship between Judaism and social justice.

In one, the direction of authority runs from covenant to obligation:

We are Israel. We are commanded. Those commandments include obligations toward the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the vulnerable. Therefore Jewish covenantal life has profound social consequences.

In another, the direction can subtly reverse:

Justice is a universal moral imperative. Judaism is a tradition of justice. Therefore Jewish identity calls me to participate in the universal struggle for justice.

The actions produced by these two models may look remarkably similar. But their conceptions of Jewish identity are different.

In the first, Jewish particularity generates universal obligations.

In the second, universal morality becomes the framework through which Jewish tradition is interpreted.

That distinction matters enormously once Jewish particularism itself becomes politically controversial.

Zionism Becomes the Test

This brings us to Zionism.

The fundamental Zionist claim is not that every action of every Israeli government is righteous. It is that Jews constitute a people and therefore have a legitimate claim to collective self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

That claim is deeply particularistic.

And that creates an unavoidable tension with certain forms of modern universalism.

If one’s primary moral framework is suspicious of nationalism, collective identities, borders, ethnic particularity, or asymmetries of political power, then the Jewish state presents a difficult problem. It is not simply another country whose government can be criticized. It embodies a claim about Jewish peoplehood.

This creates an important distinction.

There is a vast difference between saying:

Israel is wrong about X.

and saying:

The political expression of Jewish peoplehood represented by Israel is itself morally illegitimate.

The first is ordinary political criticism.

The second raises a much deeper question about Jewish identity.

And this is where the Hellenistic analogy becomes useful.

The Hellenized Jew faced the question:

What does it mean to be Jewish in a Greek world?

The contemporary American Jewish universalist can face a structurally similar question:

What does it mean to be Jewish in a universalist liberal world?

The answers may conflict.

When Assimilation Becomes Civil Conflict

The most interesting stage of assimilation may therefore not be the moment when a Jew stops practicing Judaism.

It may be the moment when the Jew remains deeply attached to Judaism but begins using the moral categories of the surrounding civilization to determine which aspects of Jewish particularity are legitimate.

At that point, the assimilated Jew does not necessarily abandon Judaism.

He may instead make a competing claim about Judaism.

That is why contemporary Jewish conflicts over Israel can become so emotionally intense. The disagreement is not necessarily experienced as a disagreement over foreign policy.

For one Jew, defending Israel may be an expression of Jewish peoplehood, covenant, historical memory, and the obligation of Jews to protect one another.

For another, opposing Israeli policies—or even opposing Zionism itself—may be experienced as an expression of Jewish ethics, universal human dignity, and Jewish responsibility toward the stranger.

Both may believe they are being faithful to Judaism.

The conflict is therefore not simply:

Jews versus their enemies.

It can become:

Jews versus Jews over what Jewish faithfulness requires.

And that is precisely what makes the Hellenistic analogy worth considering.

The Maccabean revolt was not simply a war between Jews and Greeks. It was also the culmination of a struggle among Jews over what Jewish life should become under the influence of a powerful surrounding civilization.

Modern America is obviously not the Seleucid Empire. American Jews are not Hellenistic Jews. The historical circumstances are fundamentally different.

But the morphology deserves attention.

A Jewish community can become deeply integrated into the civilization around it. Its members can absorb that civilization’s language, institutions, and moral categories. They can then use those categories to reinterpret their Jewish inheritance. And eventually, the most consequential conflicts may no longer be between Jews and outsiders.

They may be conflicts between Jews over which conception of Judaism should prevail.

Hanukkah reminds us that such conflicts are not new.

The enduring Jewish challenge is not simply to choose between particularism and universalism. Judaism demands both: a particular covenantal people with particular obligations, and moral obligations that extend far beyond that people.

The harder question is:

From where does Jewish universalism derive its authority?

If universal concern for humanity grows out of Jewish covenant, mitzvot, and peoplehood, then particularity and universalism need not be enemies.

But if the surrounding civilization becomes the ultimate standard by which Jewish particularity itself is judged, then assimilation has entered a very different stage.

At that point, the question is no longer merely how Jews relate to the world.

It is who gets to tell Jews what Judaism means.