Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.1996.0049

1086-3141

Edward S. Shapiro,

Race, History, and American Society

Introduction Edward S. Shapiro, Guest Editor (bio) The motto on the Great Seal of the United States is “novus ordo seclorum”—a new order of the ages. The revolutionary nature of America was particularly true for Jews. For thousands of years they had lived in states in Europe and the Arab countries in which anti-Semitism was actively promoted or tacitly encouraged by the political authorities. Life in America, by contrast, was remarkable for the relative absence of official anti-Semitism. Here there were neither powerful anti-Semitic political parties or officially sanctioned barriers to the social and economic advancement of Jews, and the local and national governments protected the property and lives of Jews. As Washington noted in his famous letter of 1790 to the Newport, Rhode Island, synagogue, the policy of the United States was neither to sanction bigotry or to assist persecution. “The children of the stock of Abraham” and Christians will “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities and citizenship.” While America was not the Promised Land, to Jews it was the land of promise, and for every Jew who settled in Palestine between 1880–1920, at least forty immigrated to the United States. Not surprisingly, it was a Jew (Irving Berlin) who composed “God Bless America” and another Jew (Emma Lazarus) who wrote “The New Colossus,” the sonnet placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty which proclaimed America to be a refuge for the “huddled masses yearning to be free.” Nor was it unexpected that a Jewish immigrant would title her autobiography The Promised Land, as Mary Antin did in 1911. In this “goldenah medinah” the great theme of Jewish history was not confronting anti-Semitism but defining Jewish identity. In the United States the government did not concern itself with the Jews, and there was no official rabbinate with the power to define Jewish identity or to determine the financial, religious, and social obligations of Jews. Nor was there a Jewish communal structure with the power to tax and discipline recalcitrant members. In America a Jew could be any kind of Jew he or she wanted, or even cease being a Jew at all. It certainly is not coincidental that the two major terms used to describe the nature of American nationality were coined by Jews struggling over the nature of Jewish identity in this new land—Israel Zangwill’s “the melting pot” and Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism.” This unprecedented freedom to be different, not only from Gentiles [End Page 285] but also from other Jews, resulted in the appearance of a plethora of new expressions of Jewish identity, and this has continued to the present day. No version of Jewish identity has lacked for advocates in America. If American Jews, by and large, no longer see themselves as a Chosen People and bless God for having given the Torah to them, and only to them, they certainly have been a choosing people when it comes to Jewish identity, and this has been true for a century and a half. Isaac Mayer Wise, the most important American Jewish figure of the nineteenth century, talked about the need for a “minhag America” and the necessity of Jews adapting their religious and ethnic identity to the realities of this new land. The decision a century later by the official bodies of Reform Judaism to recognize patrilineal descent as a basis of Jewish identity is simply the latest chapter in the history of defining what it means to be a Jew in America. The question of identity has been more problematic for Jews than for any other American subgroup. This is largely due to the perplexing nature of what it means to be Jewish. Is Jewishness a matter of religion, ethnicity, history, or culture? 1 And if it is all of these, what is its dominant element? The identity of other groups is not so muddled. There is no confusion over the fact that Irish-Catholics are Irish by ethnicity and Catholic by religion. An Irishman who becomes an atheist remains Irish although he is no longer a Catholic. But this is not true for Jews. A Jewish atheist or agnostic, such as an...