Myths are born, they serve a purpose, and they die. When we reside inside them, we swear by them, we invest in them, we think they precede us, and we think they will survive us. They define us, and they alienate us. Myths provide vehicles of meaning, sources of hope, and ways to make sense of the changing world we inhabit. Sometimes we simply discard them because they cease being meaningful; other times, the world makes them impossible.
Below, I briefly address the myth of Jewish peoplehood—an idea that has come to dominate contemporary Jewish discourse in America. I discuss this myth’s origin, its purpose, and why I think it is on the way to obsolescence.
For a long time, the myth of Jewish peoplehood functioned as what Zalman Schachter-Shalomi called a “reality map,” directing us from here to there.
What is so wondrous about maps is that while they can direct us from point A to point B, they also offer a vista of possibilities; there is rarely one way to get to your destination. Maps leave open the input of imagination.
By contrast, a GPS erases those alternatives and offers us the “fastest way” (with maybe one alternative, or at most two). The danger of myths is that they can become a GPS, flattening things to one-directionality. For Jews, this can mean there is only one way to truly identify as a “Jew.” This, I argue, is what is happening with the myth of Jewish peoplehood.
In 1948, Jewish philosopher Simon Rawidowicz published an essay in Hebrew called “Israel, The Ever-Dying People,” which first appeared in English in a collection of his writings in 1986. In this essay, Rawidowicz explored the notion of anxiety and survival, as Jews made their way through a diasporic history in which persecution accompanied periods of tolerance. Throughout this “ever-dying” history, Jews held onto, and also abandoned, many “myths” of collective self-fashioning. Jews survived, always “dying” but never “dead,” in part because of their wily ability to discard myths and invent others, even as each one may have been viewed in some inchoate way as “given at Sinai,” arguably the grand myth of the tradition.
Perhaps the last big myth to fall out of favor in Jewish modernity has been divine election, a biblical idea first openly challenged by the great philosopher Benedict Spinoza in the seventeenth century, on the cusp of modernity, and then more comprehensively negated by the American Jewish theologian Mordecai Kaplan in the early twentieth century. While many American Jews still maintain the doctrine of divine election (whether they believe it or not is another question)—that is, that the Jews were chosen by the God of creation to be God’s cherished people above all others—Kaplan argued that, in our democratic and tolerant society, they do so, if at all, with the awareness of the myth’s complexity and precarity, in ways that our ancestors did not experience. Kaplan famously chose to discard it.
While for Jews in modernity divine election is an important topic of theological reflection, in earlier times it was not such a big deal. In the Middle Ages, one had Judah Ha-Levi’s Sefer Kurzari, and in early modernity the Maharal of Prague wrote Nezah Yisrael (The Eternity of Israel). But mostly it wasn’t a major subject of concern. It is nowhere in Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles of Faith,” for example, nor is it a central theme in most other classical studies in medieval Jewish philosophy, even as it may be taken for granted.
Today, we can’t abandon divine election easily, but we are not quite comfortable with it either. When we express it, we often do so in a whisper, so as to not let others hear that we still believe in an idea that seems odd in a democratic society. It’s not even clear we do believe it; perhaps it’s more that we don’t quite know how to let it go.
What is so wondrous about maps is that while they can direct one from point A to point B, they also offer a vista of possibilities; there is rarely one way to get to your destination. Maps leave open the input of your imagination.
Peoplehood as a term first took form in June 1942, at the Reconstructionist Summer Institute held at Mordecai Kaplan’s synagogue in New York City, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Indeed, calling Jewish peoplehood a myth is somewhat strange in part because, as Noam Pianko has shown us in his book Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation, the term only emerges in early-twentieth-century America, in the works of Kaplan and one of the leading Reform rabbis of that generation, Stephen Wise. It is perhaps the newest Jewish myth—an adaptation of, and alternative to, Jewish nationalism. And yet, as we reach the centenary of its birth, it may have served its purpose.
Part of the move to adopt the term “peoplehood” was an attempt to include all Jews, Zionist and non-Zionist, and also perhaps reflect the changes made in Reform Judaism’s Columbus Platform (1936), which had embraced the Jews as a “nation” (albeit not a nationalist entity) in ways that the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform had not. The Pittsburgh Platform states, “We [Jews] consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community ….”
Pianko demonstrates how Jewish peoplehood is different from other similar terms, such as am Yisrael (the people Israel), showing that “Jewish peoplehood” was used to identify an American Jewish diaspora that was both loyal to its country of residence and faithful to the Jewish national project that brought about the state of Israel. That is, according to Kaplan, peoplehood was an alternative to Jewish nationalism, as Deborah Waxman suggested in her 2015 lecture “Kaplan, Peoplehood, and Reconstructionism.” The term “peoplehood” was a way to renegotiate the status of being a Jew and being Jewish—an identity and a way of being. It was also a way to “overturn the language of nationalism.” A participant in that 1942 institute, Jacob Golub, raised the point that “peoplehood” might in fact challenge political Zionism in its transnational implications, but that challenge did not stop the adaptation of the term. It was used freely by a student of Kaplan, Milton Steinberg, in his book A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (1946), and Kaplan used it in The Future of the American Jew (1948).
Late in life, Kaplan called Judaism an interesting amalgam of “peoplehood” and “nationalism.” The “-hood” remained, but “people” had been replaced with “nation,” suggesting that dual-national affiliation may have become less problematic by this time. The term “nationhood” was not new in this context—it was bandied about in 1942 at the Reconstructionist Summer Institute—but it took more concrete form in the following decades. It is worth noting that peoplehood, for Kaplan, was a term that could not support any sense of chauvinism and, perhaps more important, could not sustain the notion of Jewish chosenness, or “divine election.” The rejection of the myth of divine election was a condition for the new myth of peoplehood.
In an interview with Joshua O. Haberman, the rabbi of Washington Hebrew Congregation, in Washington D.C., in the early 1990s, published in The God I Believe In: Conversations about Judaism, the Israeli scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz was asked about his vision of Israel when deciding to immigrate. He replied: “I had no vision. My dream was the political and national independence of the Jewish people. But the problem today is, what is the contemporary Jewish people? I can’t answer that question.” Haberman replied, “One must answer it on several levels, because there are several kinds of Jewish people.” To which Leibowitz responded, “Which means that there is no Jewish people! The historical Jewish people ceased to exist in the nineteenth century.”
Leibowitz is essentially suggesting, in his acerbic way, that the notion of a coherent Jewish collective ceased to exist in the nineteenth century precisely because what constituted that people, what gave it life—accepting the commandments, or mitzvot—was rejected, not by all, but by enough. When asked whether he still believed in the notion of a chosen people, Leibowitz responded, “We are chosen to be people responsible for mitzvot.” That is, for Leibowitz, no. In 1977, Leibowitz made an even stronger claim. Addressing the prophetic notion that Israel is a “light unto the nations,” Leibowitz wrote, “The idea that the people of Israel has been endowed with a capacity for instructing and guiding all of humanity has no basis in authentic Jewish sources …. The idea was fabricated by the heretics, from the Apostle Paul to Ben Gurion—who meant to cast off the yoke of Torah by substituting it for a faith in an abstract ‘vocation.’” In other words, there is no “peoplehood” only a “people of Torah.” Without Torah, there will be nothing to bind them together.
A coherent Jewish collective ceased to exist in the nineteenth century precisely because what constituted that people, what gave it life—accepting the commandments, or mitzvot—was rejected.
At the same time, emancipation undermined the political foundation of a coherent people, certainly as previously constituted. Once Jews pledged their allegiance to societies outside the Jewish collective body, by accepting citizenship in democratic countries (even as they retained fidelity to their Jewish identity) the notion of a people, as previously conceived, collapsed. Later, Jewish nationalism emerged in its place. And then Jewish peoplehood.
Lest we think Leibowitz’s statement is pure provocation, I offer two examples to support it. When a group of rabbis in France in 1806 were questioned by Stanislas Marie Adélaïde, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a French nobleman and politician, as to whether Jews were a “religion” or a “nation,” they responded that Jews constitute a “religion,” not a “nation,” thus could be, and would be, patriotic French citizens. Example two: In 1885, in America, the Pittsburgh Platform, the first major statement of Reform Judaism in America, stated, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.” (It would be interesting to know how Leibowitz would have responded to the Pittsburgh Platform. On the one hand he would reject such a definition of Judaism, but on the other hand might be sympathetic to the notion of the Jews as solely constituted by traditional religious practice.)
“The problem today is, what is the contemporary Jewish people? I can’t answer that question.”
As Pianko meticulously shows, Jewish nationalism is not Jewish peoplehood. No matter how much Zionism may have co-opted the diasporic term today for its own purposes, Jewish peoplehood was an alternative to Jewish nationalism. Not to Zionism per se, but rather to a Zionism that was an expression of nationalism. Peoplehood, as a reconceptualization of “nation,” emerged as an operative term in the 1920s, almost half a century after the Pittsburgh Platform (1885) stated “Jews are no longer a nation.” Kaplan came up with the term peoplehood to enable Jews to feel both a part of, and distinct from, the increasing popularity of Zionism in America which threatened to evoke the ominous accusation of dual allegiance. That is, as I understand it, peoplehood is a kind of “soft nationalism” that can live comfortably with Americanism. In some way, perhaps, this harkens back to Louis Brandeis’s notion of Jewish “nationality” (as opposed to nationalism) in the 1915 essay “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve it.”
Soon after the political and theological notions of Jewish collective consciousness collapsed in the 1920s—a result of the projects of “Americanization” and secularization—Kaplan and Wise revived it with the invention of a new term, a new myth: Jewish peoplehood. As Pianko shows, the term itself was not used before it was coined by Kaplan.
It quickly became ubiquitous, because it solved a dilemma of the time. The myth of Jewish peoplehood, or the condition of a people, enabled Jews who had largely abandoned religion, and chose not to immigrate to Israel (which would entail changing their primary Jewish identity via nationalism), to make sense of their identity as part of a larger collective, without bumping up against national affiliation or dual allegiance.
The state of Israel is a nation. Jews are not. But Jews, in the wake of Kaplan and Wise’s constructive formulation, are a people. In America, “peoplehood” enabled Jews to identify with a collective (the Jews) outside the realm of the political (the nation, Israel, that they choose not to live in). Perhaps ironically, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, reinforced this notion when he said that “American Jews owe no political affiliation to the state of Israel whatsoever.” In a way, that is a confident Zionism.
Today, the nature of American Jews’ relationship to Jewish nationalism and to American nationalism is more complicated, and the Jewish community is no longer composed solely of Jews. Multiculturalism enabled multi-national identities, even encouraged them, and the early-nineteenth-century French emancipatory promise, “to the Jews everything, to the Jewish people nothing,” no longer applies to any ethnic group.
Today, most American Jewish families are multi-ethnic. Two generations of intermarriage has yielded a more complex notion of Jewishness, not only in terms of religion, but in terms of ethnicity as well. A sizable majority of American Jews have close non-Jewish relatives. Most Jewish communities include non-Jews as members, tacitly or formally. And yet Judaism in America survives and even arguably thrives. The prognostications of the “disappearing American Jew” have been proven false. Yet coherence or “condition” of the “-hood” of peoplehood, which implies ethnic homogeneity, cannot easily bear the weight of American Jewry’s multi-ethnicity.
This may be one reason why peoplehood has been co-opted to tacitly mean Jewish nationalism. It was Zionism in America, in the early decades of the twentieth century, that resisted the “Jews as religion” notion common in earlier decades, and instead pushed the notion of Jews as a “nation,” or even a “race” (at least until the 1930s, when Nazism used race as a weapon for annihilation). One could push this back even further, to the Jim Crow legislation of the 1870s and beyond, when Jews had to confront their “whiteness.” One salient example: in the Jim Crow south, Jews, whether Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, went to white schools, whereas Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) went to black schools. Jews were discriminated against in all kinds of ways—quotas, Sabbath work requirements, etc. But they were discriminated against as white ethnics.
The complexity of viewing Jews primarily as an ethnos and not a religion can be seen in the 1910 debate, between the celebrated Hebrew poet Yosef Hayyim Brenner and the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am, as to whether Jesus should be included in the new canon of Zionist heroes. Brenner was in favor, for an interesting reason that took Zionism to its radical conclusion. If, Brenner surmised, as a radical nationalist Zionist, Zionism has now become the very core of Jewish identity—if ethnos and not religion is what makes a Jew a Jew—then what difference does it make what religion a Jewish nationalist believes in or practices? Ahad Ha-Am resisted. He was not willing to abandon religious identification, even in his nationalist program. (Interestingly, David Ben-Gurion sided with Brenner. When Ben-Gurion’s son Amos, after being wounded in the British army during World War II, married a gentile Welch woman, Ben-Gurion did not care if she converted to Judaism, which she eventually did. He only cared that they both lived in Palestine, which they eventually did.)
I am suggesting that, instead of trying to hold onto the myth of Jewish peoplehood, created almost a century ago to meet specific social and religious needs, we need to re-think the nature of Jewish collectivity in changed circumstances. This is not to deny the viability of Jewish nationalism as one form of identity in America; rather, I wish to challenge the adaptation of “peoplehood” as an alternative to nationalism when, in fact, it has simply become another term for nationalism.
In regards to the new American Jewish constituency—one that includes biological Jews, half-Jews, non-Jews, spousal Jews, Jew-curious non-Jews, etc.—perhaps we need another model of thinking about collective identity. The task is to find a map that might guide us from the old myth of a coherent, cohesive, and well-defined notion of who is and who is not part of the Jewish people (as Leibowitz suggested, through the acceptance of mitzvot), to a new myth that contains the rubrics for more expansive thinking, not bound by nationalist or monoethnic parameters.
Here I want to retrieve a figure from the past, Felix Adler (1851-1933), one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of early-twentieth-century America. Adler was Mordecai Kaplan’s teacher and advisor at Columbia University, and Kaplan was deeply influenced by him, even as he disagreed with Adler on many things.
Adler was slated to follow his father, Samuel, as rabbi of the prestigious Emanu-El synagogue in Manhattan. However, he decided to abandon institutional Judaism, founding the Society for Ethical Culture in 1877. Adler envisioned Ethical Culture as a new kind of spiritual and intellectual community. In lectures he gave in 1923, Adler proffered a new paradigm of community, “group morality.” Each group, he suggested, is constituted by unlike individuals, exercising unlike functions. “The unlikeness of function is the mark that distinguishes a group from a herd.” This was his vision of a new kind of Jewish community, one that included both Jews and gentiles.
I am not suggesting we adopt Adler’s model of Jewish collectivity as a group of unlike individuals, meaning those of many ethnic groups, even though American Jewry today already has a multi-ethnic character. And even for Adler, this was not a call for universal cosmopolitanism. Rather, I am offering a rubric through which we can rethink the notion of “unlikeness,” even ethnic unlikeness, as part of a collective that can have Jewish value, albeit not in an absolute sense. I suggest this not to undermine those who choose to identify through Jewish nationalism, but to open new possibilities of Jewish identification that do not fit under the nationalist rubric now presented under the guise of “peoplehood.”
“The unlikeness of function is the mark that distinguishes a group from a herd.”
Here, American Jewry and Israeli Jewry face different, but not altogether distinct, challenges, the former in relation to a diasporic collectivity, the latter in terms of a multi-ethnic polity (about 23 percent of Israeli citizens are not Jewish, a number that is likely to grow). Some argue that Israel is a Jewish society (and nation-state) that needs to re-think the integration of its non-Jewish citizenry as integral parts of its democratic fabric. It needn’t abandon “Jewishness” to do so, but the “unlikeness” of the Palestinian Israeli or Druze Israeli needs consideration to be fully integrated into its society. Even though it is stated in the Israeli Declaration of Independence that the state “will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex,” it is not provocative to point out that this remains more aspirational than a matter of course, especially after the 2018 Nation State Law that specifically states that Israel is solely “the nation of the Jewish people.”
In America, meanwhile, Jewish communities may need to re-think ethnic identity as a prerequisite to membership, not to simply tolerate the non-Jew but, when applicable, make her an integral part of that community. This may mean the reformulation of rituals, or the creation of rituals that would include the non-Jew in the religious life of the community.
As we move further into this new century, any restructuring of Jewish collective identity in a post-peoplehood phase should thus include two components. First, it should include a positive sense of diasporic existence—one might say positive and even proud integration into a post-ethnic America—founded on the premise of political and cultural protection ensured by the American Constitution. And second, we must make sure that any new vision of Jewish collective identity faces the reality that this category includes non-Jews, not as potential converts, but as functioning members of this new Jewish collective body as non-Jews. They should not just be tolerated but also included, as part of that collective spiritual identity, part of a new Jewish group morality.
One possibility, suggested by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, is to renew the category of the ancient notion of “ger toshav” (a resident alien in a Jewish collective, a category some scholars believe existed in Hellenistic antiquity) in a modern register—to offer inclusion of the non-Jew who is a kind of Jew-affiliate through marriage, interest, or spiritual vocation. Conversion should always remain an option, but in a multicultural society, one’s desire to retain their own familial heritage should also be respected.
Finally, a major problem with “peoplehood” is that it can easily let group identity stand in for religion or religiosity. We must acknowledge, as Leibowitz did, that Jews are custodians of a three-thousand-year-old repository of wisdom which, for millennia, was the core of our identity. This is Judaism—or what Daniel Boyarin calls, in his book Judaism, “Judaité” (or “Jewish doings”). Jewish secularism has cut deeply into this idea, and this too requires consideration, but Jewish secularism, while perhaps dominant, needn’t supplant a core element of Judaism. My claim is that peoplehood, wittingly or not, does just that by enabling us to identify as Jews with little or no content. It may serve as a feeling of identity but it requires nothing more. It too easily amounts to belonging to a club simply because your parents belonged to it. At a minimum, it requires pledging fidelity to a country you choose not to live in.
The coopting of “peoplehood” by Zionists today (I do not say this critically as much as descriptively) essentially offers a soft-touch nationalism under the guise of a broad-based program, which is especially appealing to Jews in modernity who do not have much use for Judaism as a spirituality or set of time-honored practices.
Spinoza believed divine election could not survive the modern liberal republic. Kaplan believed it could not survive American democracy. And Leibowitz believed it could not survive Jews rejecting the yoke of commandments. As the myth of Jewish peoplehood continues to become more history than reality, we should consider the critique of its viability, from Spinoza through Leibowitz, in a new diasporic frame—one that embraces rather than laments the non-Jew in our midst, celebrates rather than resists the opportunities of diasporic existence, and initiates new forms of innovative Jewish expression that embrace the broader scope of human religiosity, as part of a Jewish mission.
Jewish peoplehood may be an exercise in what Svetlana Boym calls, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, “restorative nostalgia.” That is, in our case, constructing a Jewish future by inventing a lost past, at a time when, as Leibowitz noted, previous notions of the Jewish people no longer apply, and when newer forms, such as nationalism, contain hazards in a diasporic context in which other national affiliations exist. This longing for collective cohesion, embracing the secular (Jewish peoplehood is not contingent on religious belief or practice), generates a kind of restorative nostalgia. This is perfectly legitimate if it leaves space for other new myths, or maps, to emerge—that is, if we view Jewishness as a map, not a GPS.
The occupational hazard of nostalgia is that it can fuel a belief that invented myths have always been there, that they were never born, and thus they will never—can never—die. But as the Jewish tradition teaches us, the only thing in this world that lives forever, that never dies because it was never born, is the force that created all of it.