Appendix D THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF AMERICAN JUDAISM:
A STUDY IN DISINHERITANCE For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins (Rom. 11:25-27).
Jews worry a lot about their corporate future. The continuing recurrence of this fear has been unique to Jews. Members of no other ethnic group have gone into print so often to proclaim the possibility that they might disappear as a separate people.(1) As Otto Scott, of Irish descent, once remarked: "Can you imagine an Irishman worrying in public about this possibility?" Yet, eschatologically speaking, this Jewish fear is legitimate. Paul in Romans 11 teaches that the Jews will eventually disappear as a separate covenantal confessional group and be welcomed into the church.(2) They will, alongside many other ethnic groups, retain their cultural accents and dialects, but the grammar of their confession will be Trinitarian. They will cease to be Jews. Nevertheless, until this happens, Jews will successfully maintain their separate covenantal identity as a people. The question is: Which Jews? The answer is: Jews who both understand and apply the covenantal principle of inheritance and disinheritance.
Judaism, in the sense of adherence to the teachings of the Talmud, is a minority religion even in the State of Israel. A minority religion's greatest threat is not genocide. It is intermarriage. Genocide is not a comparable threat, as the early church learned in the Roman empire. It is never complete because it is always geographically and temporally bounded: this group of adherents in this region persecuted by this State for this period of time. Genocide reinforces the sense of solidarity among the targeted victims, especially first-generation refugees. Genocide creates a reaction: among the victors, who eventually grow weary of the bloodshed and grow embarrassed by the world's reaction; and among the victims, who adopt social strategies of survival. Threats strengthen the will to resist. Seduction weakens it.
The Sociology of Seduction Seduction is the Jews' problem -- seduction in the broadest sense, but also in the narrowest. The seduction that threatens a confessional religion more than any other is marital seduction: the confessionally mixed marriage. God warned Israel about this: "For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods" (Ex. 34:14-16). Note: Moses did not warn the daughters not to marry Canaanite husbands; he warned the men not to marry Canaanite wives. Women were seen as the seducers of covenant religion.
Judaism has always viewed seduction as asymmetrical covenantally: woman have the upper hand in mixed marriages. Judaism has been structured to take advantage of this aspect of the mixed marriage: it defines a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother. The mother's love of her children, which is the most powerful and universal social force there is, is harnessed to the judicial definition of what constitutes a Jew. A Jewish woman may be seduced away from her parents' plans, but she is not automatically disinherited. She is held less responsible than her brothers in this area of life. She does not bear the mark of the Jewish covenant: circumcision. Her flesh does not testify against her marriage vow, as it does with a maritally seduced Jewish male. She surrenders less than he does. Her status as a Jew is transmitted to her children, if they confess the faith. This gives her a great incentive to rear her children as Jews, if possible. Her husband, whose faith was sufficiently weak to enable him to marry someone outside his faith, is not in a strong position to oppose her.
This asymmetric condition is reflected in the statistics of religious training among the children of mixed marriages: Jews with others. In 1971, 86 percent of the children of Jewish mothers and gentile fathers were reared as Jews, while only 17 percent of the children of Jewish fathers and gentile mothers were reared as Jews.(3) In the mutual seduction of a mixed marriage, American Jewish women have retained the upper hand.
This is why the negative sanction of disinheritance of sons has always been crucial for the survival of Judaism. Jewish daughters have seldom inherited, so the threat of disinheritance has not been equally great. The Mosaic law allowed daughters to inherit only when there was no son (Num. 36). So, Judaism's threat of disinheritance has been aimed at keeping sons in line. Jewish daughters have always had less to lose and more to gain than their brothers when entering into mixed marriages. Because Jewish women did not inherit money, and because their children could inherit their mothers' judicial status, the gentiles' seduction of Jewish women has never been the same degree of threat to the survival of Judaism. It is the seduction of sons that has been the primary threat. To defend against this, Judaism imposed harsh sanctions. When it ceased to impose them, it began a march into self-annihilation through seduction.
But who is the chief seducer? Not Christianity or any other confessional supernatural religion. Christianity cannot adopt mixed marriages as tools of evangelism; such marriages are forbidden. They break the covenant, which is necessarily confessional. For the humanist, however, marriage is not seen as a covenant based on a mutual oath before God. It is seen as a cultural institution based on a breakable oath before the State, and the State is seen as religiously neutral. The humanist therefore sees no confessional problem with mixed marriages, for marriage is not a covenant based on a shared confession of faith. He encourages confessionally mixed marriages as a means of undermining the testimony of both partners to their children. This is why humanism is the supreme threat to Judaism -- Judaism's greatest threat in history. Unlike supernatural-confessional religions that are also threatened by seduction and which oppose mixed marriages, humanism proclaims the equality of all supernatural religious confessions -- an equality of cultural irrelevance. Humanism seeks to seduce the sons and daughters of every supernatural religion. Thus, humanism is an equal opportunity seducer: men and women of all faiths are equally its targets.
The ideal of the confessionally mixed marriage has led, step by step, to the ideal of the sexually mixed college dormitory. The humanist believes in the efficacy of seduction. He believes that in the competition between lust and the covenant, lust will win in the 18-24 age population. He believes that the children of Israel, if given the opportunity, will rise up to play.
This is why humanism constitutes the greatest threat to Judaism in its history. A majority religion can survive the assaults of mixed marriage much longer than a minority religion can. There are more candidates for marriage for the members of a majority religion. A minority religion cannot afford the temporary luxury of tolerating mixed marriages. This is especially true of American Jews, who are experiencing birth rates well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. "If Jews, who in most parts of the United States constitute a tiny minority, were to choose their spouses at random, hardly endogamous Jewish couples would be formed at all."(4)
Humanism calls on all partners to choose their marital partners on a confessionally random basis, and to encourage this, humanism has created the most powerful marriage bureau in history: the tax-funded secular university. No group has responded with greater enthusiasm to the siren call of the secular university than the Jews, a topic I shall discuss later in this essay.
The Ghetto and Cultural Identity European Jews prior to the Napoleonic wars (1798-1815) were isolated inside their own autonomous communities: ghettos. Some of these ghettos were urban; others were in small towns. When religious discrimination began to be repealed by law in the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews began to venture out of the ghetto, both intellectually and geographically.(5) The Jewish community's abandonment of traditional Judaism began at that time. A division appeared between reforming Jews and defenders of Talmudic knowledge. Historian Paul Johnson writes: "The pious Jew -- and there could be no other -- did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it."(6) Reform Judaism rejected this outlook; it sought to bring Jews into the world around them. It appeared in the second decade of the nineteenth century.(7) The term "Orthodox Judaism" did not appear until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The term was coined by Reform critics of traditional Judaism.(8)
In Germany, legal discrimination against Jews faded steadily after 1820 and was gone by 1880.(9) Legal equality brought legal integration into the gentile community. Secular law revoked the long-standing special legal situation of Jews, where rabbis and elders possessed the authority to impose civil sanctions on members of the Jewish community. This separate legal status went back to the late Roman Empire. Israel Shahak writes of European Jewry in general: "This was the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the modern state: observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting in the circumstances to a total social break and for that reason very impracticable, except during a religious crisis."(10) Paralleling this change in the Jews' legal status was an increase in animosity against them, although they never constituted more than 1.3 percent of the German population.(11) Social discrimination against Jews in Germany remained common, culminating with the systematic Nazi persecutions, 1933-45.
In contrast, there was almost no social discrimination against Jews in the United States prior to the Civil War (1861-65). Jews had lived in North America as a culturally assimilated people from the mid-seventeenth century. Since the mid-eighteenth century, they had become part of American urban life: in clothing, hair styles, and architecture.(12) In New York, Jews became eligible for citizenship as early as 1715, although this was unique in pre-Revolutionary America.(13) They had never received a separate grant of authority to impose civil sanctions on deviant members of the synagogue. As a result, Jews were far more integrated into American life than their counterparts were in Europe prior to the 1820's. Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazic Jews from Germany and Poland lived together from the beginning in New Amsterdam. This continued when it became New York City in 1664. They worked out an agreement on common worship and rule, 1728-1825; elsewhere in America, separate synagogues were common.(14)
American Jews were a tiny percentage of the population. In 1820, there were about 2,700 Jews in America.(15) The overall American population in 1820 was 9.6 million.(16) Until 1840, there was no ordained, functioning rabbi in the United States, i.e., someone who had graduated from a recognized rabbinical school or who had been certified by a talmudic scholar of distinction who had been licensed.(17) By 1840, the number of Jews in the United States had risen to 6,000. In 1848, there were 50,000.(18) As a means of comparison, consider that in 1840, there were 17 million Americans; in 1850 there were 23 million.(19)
Then, in the 1850's, came the steamship.(20) This changed both the volume and pattern of immigration: from northern Europe to eastern, central, and southern Europe. The great waves of immigration hit America from all over Europe, not just Protestant northern Europe. American demographics changed rapidly. Among the tens of millions of immigrants were millions of Jews. Total immigration of Jews to the United States was no more than 150,000 as of 1880.(21) From 1860 to 1880, more of these came from eastern Europe than from Germany.(22) There were about 240,000 Jews in America in 1880.(23) Of these, 200,000 were from Germany.(24) Over the next 45 years, some 2.5 million Jews arrived, with the vast majority from eastern Europe, especially Russia.(25) From 1880 to 1920, one-third of all the Jews in Eastern Europe emigrated, and over 80 percent of them came to the United States.(26) Diner argues -- implausibly, in my view -- that this new immigration was not fundamentally different from the old: same Judaism, same immigration motivation, i.e., economic opportunity.(27) This is the equivalent of saying that, culturally speaking, New York City's Episcopalians were not fundamentally different from the Baptists of the American frontier. Even this comparison understates the difference: the Episcopalians were separated from the Baptists by the Allegheny mountains; the Sephardic Jews, assimilated into the German-Polish Jewish community from 1841 to 1920,(28) were separated from the Russian Jews by a horse carriage ride and the money to purchase it.(29)
The hostile reactions of the gentile community after 1870 marked a change in its opinion regarding the perceived differences of the new immigration, not merely the latter's increased volume but its social characteristics. In the 1870's, Jews began to be kept out of exclusive resorts and social clubs, and Jewish girls were excluded from certain eastern women's colleges, but this was the extent of the discrimination.(30) (In the 1990's, social club exclusion is all that remains, and just barely.) After 1900, social discrimination against Jews increased.(31) After World War I, it increased dramatically.(32) This exclusion reflected social opinion within the Jewish community. Sorin comments: "The farther west in Europe one's origins, the higher one's status." He calls this "the geographical origins rule."(33)
The great reversal came in 1945 in reaction to the defeat of the Nazis. Anti-Semitism became unfashionable within educated circles, which more and more circles became. It had never been consistent with the religious pluralism of American life, the "live and let live" attitude which has been characteristic of American culture -- an application of nineteenth-century Americans' laissez faire outlook. The Nazi ideology had been defeated on the battlefield, and this reduced the appeal of the old inconsistency. Discrimination was replaced by toleration, and toleration by acceptance, in one generation: 1945 to 1975. But this acceptance has a confessional premise: "My religion is as good as yours, and all religions should be limited to home and congregation." The day that this confession is widely believed by members of a minority religion is the day that it moves toward assimilation. A Baptist can afford to confess this in a Methodist culture, or visa versa, but for a Jew in a humanist culture, such a confession is suicidal. It undermines the traditional answers to the question: "What is a Jew?" A new answer now comes back: "A Unitarian with better business connections."
Jews and the Gods of Modernism Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews actively began to pursue the gods of the gentiles around them: gods of marketplace. They got rich in Germany in that century, moving from poverty in 1820 to middle-class affluence by 1880.(34) The same upward movement of Jews took place in America. There was even less discrimination here. The common goal of Americans was making money. De Tocqueville wrote in 1835, "I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts. . . ."(35) Access to the free market was open to all except slaves in the antebellum South. Jews, who had been small traders in Europe, fit in well. They flourished. Like the members of many other ethnic groups, Jews wrote home to relatives in Europe about America's economic opportunities and the lack of religious discrimination. The waves of immigration grew larger.
In the twentieth century, another group of cosmopolitan gods became a temptation for Jews: gods of the academy. For about 25 years, 1920 to 1945, the prestigious American private colleges, universities, and medical schools placed quotas on the number of Jews. (The University of Chicago was an exception.)(36) Yet even in this case, discrimination was fairly lax. At Columbia University in New York City, the Jewish student population had climbed to 40 percent by 1920.(37) The school's move farther away from the Jewish parts of the city in 1910 failed to reduce the flood of Jewish students when a subway line down the West side was constructed shortly thereafter. Quotas imposed in 1921 reduced this percentage to 22 percent in 1922.(38) Harvard's Jewish population, enhanced by "tram" commuters from Boston, climbed to 20 percent in 1920. The school's president then announced a quota of 10 percent. This decision was formally repealed by a special committee in 1923, but Harvard's new policies of accepting more students from the Midwest pushed Jewish enrolment back to 10 percent by 1930.(39) There were far fewer Jews living in the Midwest.
Jews had long possessed legal access to tax-supported American schools and universities that came into existence after the Civil War. At the City College of New York in 1920, between 80 and 90 percent of the students were Jewish. At the Washington Square campus of the private New York University, the figure was 93 percent.(40) In the 1930's, Jews constituted 3.5 percent of the American population -- the high point -- and 10 percent of its college population. The same drive for education had been present in Europe for a century.(41)
Jews have flourished in this humanistic academic environment. Statistically, the biological heirs of Ashkenazic Jews are the most intelligent ethnic group in the United States.(42) Herrnstein and Murray comment: "A fair estimate seems to be that Jews in America and Britain have an overall IQ mean somewhere between a half and a full standard deviation above the mean, with the source of the difference concentrated in the verbal component. . . . But it is at least worth noting that their mean IQ was .97 standard deviation above the mean of the rest of the population and .84 standard deviation above the mean of whites who identified themselves as Christian."(43) These are statistically significant differences. The result has been the exceptional success of Jews in higher education and in the professions, which are screened by means of academic performance. "My son, the doctor" and "My son, the lawyer" are not just quaint phrases of proud but formally uneducated Jewish mothers in the 1920's through the 1940's. They are representative summaries of the success of Jews in entering the State-licensed professions, an ethnic penetration way out of proportion to their percentage in the overall population.
But there has been a heavy price to pay: initially, the undermining of confessional Judaism; secondarily, the undermining of cultural Judaism. The West's universities have made the same Faustian bargain to all: come to be certified, but give up your claims in the classroom to academically relevant knowledge based on revelation.(44) The Jews, as a minority based on religious confession, and as a minority with a competitive edge based on intelligence, have had the most to gain economically from this bargain, and the most to lose confessionally. For any religious group self-consciously to adopt a dualism that proclaims "two paths of knowledge" is to risk losing its best and brightest to the world of autonomous humanism. The seeming universalism of humanism's ideology offers to its initiates the power and productivity of the division of intellectual labor. To become a participant in this intellectual division of labor, the initiate need only abandon those aspects of his religious worldview that are irreconcilable or not readily shared with the segregating ideals of rival faiths. Jews have responded to this offer with greater enthusiasm and success than any other religious group in the West.(45) Edward Shapiro comments on the effect of secular values on Jewish professors.
Most Jewish professors had only a slight relationship to Jewish culture and Judaism. Data collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1969 revealed that while 32 percent of professors with a Protestant background and 25 percent with a Catholic background were either indifferent or opposed to religion, 67 percent of Jewish professors were indifferent or opposed to religion. And while 16 percent of Protestant professors and 23 percent of Catholic professors considered themselves deeply religious, only 5 percent of Jewish professors defined themselves as such. In comparison to other Jews, Jewish academicians observed fewer Jewish rituals, were more hostile to religion, affiliated with Jewish communal institutions less frequently, and intermarried more often. . . .
Just as its investment in formal education was greater, so American Jewry spent more time, energy, and money than any other American ethnic or religious group in cultivating and analyzing its intellectuals. There must be something seriously wrong with American Jewry, it was argued, if it could not retain the loyalty of its brightest and best-educated members. The alienation of the Jewish intellectual from the American Jewish community occasioned much wringing of hands. There was, however, little that could have been done to bring Jewish intellectuals back to the fold. The sermons of rabbis and the proclamations of Jewish organizations could hardly convince intellectuals and academicians to abandon their secular and universalist outlook.(46)
So, by worshipping in the shrines of secular culture, Jews are disappearing as a separate religious force. They are a political force, but not a religious force. Their separate legal status, which was an aspect of the judicial discrimination against them in Christian civilization, had enabled them to preserve their separate religious status for almost two millennia. With the coming to power of the gods of secular humanism -- politics, money, and education -- Jews left the ghetto and entered the public square to worship with their votes, their taxes, and their children. The public schools have become the established churches of Western civilization. Like the gentiles around them, Jews have tithed their children to the State.
Since at least the 1930's, a majority of American Jews has consistently voted to allow the State to extract an ever-greater percentage of their income.(47) The saying is, "American Jews have the income of Episcopalians and the voting record of Puerto Ricans."(48) As an Orthodox and politically conservative rabbi has put it, "many non-observant Jews desperately pursue liberalism as a way out of their covenant. This is the true purpose of liberalism and Jews are its chief champions because it alone offers an escape from having to accept Jewish law -- the Torah."(49)
One Jewish leader in the American financial community has said of the Jewish New York elite of the 1820-1920 era: "Our Crowd is deader than a doornail. Ninety percent have disappeared and few are Jewish anymore."(50) This problem is not confined to the United States; European Jews are also disappearing through assimilation.(51)
The Disappearance of Non-Observant Jews "In present trends continue," wrote sociologist Ernest van den Haag in 1969, "in the year 2000 there will have never been more handsome, better-endowed synagogues in America, nor so many; nor so few Jews."(52) He argued that the intermarriage problem threatens the survival of American Judaism.(53)
This theme was not even mentioned in sociologist Marshall Sklare's 1957 anthology, The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group. But in April, 1964, Sklare sounded a warning in the Jewish publication, Commentary, in an article titled, "Intermarriage and the Jewish Future." He sounded it even louder in a second Commentary article (March 1970): "Intermarriage and Jewish Survival."(54) A 1971 study showed that the rate of intermarriage was over 30 percent.(55) In 1973, Reform Judaism, the largest and most liberal branch of American Judaism, made its last public pronouncement opposing such intermarriage. It has subsequently accepted the new reality and has tried to deal with it.(56) In these mixed marriages, only 20 percent of the spouses convert to Judaism. Three-quarters of the children in families in which the spouse fails to convert are not reared as Jews. Very few of these children marry Jews.(57) One Jewish historian has called this "the demographic hemorrhaging of American Jewry."(58) The birth rate for Jews is one quarter to one-third less than for gentiles. It is the lowest ethnic birthrate in America.(59) Meanwhile, "Of the major American religious groups, the Jews consistently placed last in surveys of religious attendance and belief."(60) As Van Den Haag predicted, synagogue attendance declined in the 1970's and 1980's. This was especially true in Conservative synagogues, the group positioned between the liberal Reform Jews and the Orthodox Jews.(61) Edward Shapiro ended his book, the fifth in a five-volume history, The Jewish People in America, with this forlorn hope: "Jews have survived one crisis after another, and perhaps they will also survive the freedom and prosperity of America."(62) In 1996, the World Jewish Congress, held in Jerusalem, issued a demographic report, State of World Jewry. It reported that in the United States, over half of all Jews who married in the 1980's married a non-Jewish partner. About one-quarter of the children of such mixed marriages are reared as Jews.(63)
As with all academic matters, this view is controversial and has critics within the Jewish academic community. The demographic data are not sufficiently comprehensive to be sure. But in a carefully reasoned, highly qualified essay, two Jewish scholars conclude that the pessimists have the trends on their side. American Jews are not reproducing at a rate high enough to replace themselves. Whites in general are in the same situation; Jews, however, reproduce at a rate lower than whites in general. They have the lowest rates of reproduction among whites in the United States. The replacement rate is 2.1 children per family. In the mid-1980's, Jews had a rate of under 1.5; whites in general, 1.7.(64)
Mixed marriages by the mid-1980's were in the range of 30 percent. The authors comment that "the inferred U.S. rate of 30 percent for individuals means that 45 percent of all couples with at least one Jewish partner are mixed."(65) Few of the non-Jewish spouses convert to Judaism.(66) This leads to the disinheritance of Judaism. The authors report on a remarkable finding. "A study in Philadelphia covering three generations found that mixed marriages in one generation entailed greater percentages of mixed marriages and increasingly smaller percentages of Jewish children in the following generations. If both parents of the Jewish respondent whose marriage was mixed had been Jews, 37 percent of the grandchildren were Jews; if the grandparents had been a mixed couple, none of the grandchildren were found to be Jewish in this particular study."(67)
By the late 1990's, intermarriage was at the 50% rate. Charles Krauthammer writes that more Jews marry Christians (he means gentiles) than marry Jews: about 52%.(68) With only one in four of the children of these mixed marriages being reared Jewish, the future is grim for the survival of Judaism in America. "A population in which the biological replacement rate is 70 percent and the cultural replacement rate is 70% is headed for extinction. By this calculation, every 100 Jews are raising 56 Jewish children. In just two generations,7 out of 10 Jews will vanish."(69) He concludes that the future of Judaism is dependent on the survival of the state of Israel. The Jews have put most of their eggs -- in both senses -- in one basket.(70) We can begin to understand why Jews prior to the First World War excommunicated adult children who converted to another religion, mainly Christianity. They would hold burial services: symbols of covenantal death. They would cut these defecting children out of their lives. They would not see their grandchildren grow up. They suffered the terrible pain of disinheriting their children, especially their sons, for the sake of the preservation of the religion of Judaism. It was a matter of survival.
Today, the religion of Judaism has been progressively (in both senses) replaced by the culture of Judaism -- a culture without a public confession that invokes a supernatural God. Today, most American Jews do not believe that the God of the Bible brings covenantal sanctions in history for or against Jews on the basis of the community's use of sanctions against covenantal disinheritance. Tolerance has made mixed marriages acceptable. The defecting children are not cut off through the equivalent of excommunication. The grandchildren are not cut off. But the grandchildren are unlikely to bear children who will be reared as Jews. Under the conditions of mixed marriage, the great grandchildren of Jewish couples will not be Jews. Refusing to disinherit children who marry outside the faith, they disinherit Judaism instead. Covenantal tolerance within Jewish families produces heirs with a different confession of faith. This produces extinction of the original confession. Jews are a minority faith. Tolerance within the covenantal bond of marriage leads to absorption. If confession is not seen as more fundamental than sexual attraction, and therefore not a matter of corporate sanctions, the minority faith will disappear. The contest between passion and confession, if left to youth to decide, will lead to the demise of confession. If the surrounding population is larger than those doing the confessing, the aging minority confessors will not be replaced.
The rise of a far more self-conscious Orthodox Judaism, which recruits actively in the secularized Reform Jewish community, has gained considerable publicity. It is not clear yet that this activism has produced any statistically significant change in the religious commitment of most Jews. The high birth rates among Orthodox Jews may in time reverse the larger Jewish community's demographic decline, but in the late twentieth century, American Judaism is slowly disappearing. Jews are a rapidly aging group: the oldest of all American ethnic groups.(71) This demographic fact is masked by the high visibility of Jewish political involvement and influence in national politics. The rise of Jewish national political influence since the end of World War II has paralleled the rise of influence of the farm bloc. The smaller the number of people actually represented by each bloc, the greater its highly concentrated and well-funded political influence. Both are down to about two percent of the population.(72)
Alan Dershowitz refers to an article in the October 1996 issue of Moment magazine. The article reports that, given present birth rates, by the fourth generation, 200 secular Jews will have produced ten great-grandchildren, while the same number of Orthodox Jews will have produced more than 5,000.(73) It is clear what will happen unless covenantal attitudes regarding the future are reversed. Non-observant Jews in the United States will simply disappear.
What we see here is a fulfillment of Moses' warning, three and a half millennia later. "Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth" (Deut. 6:14-15). The eighteenth century saw the construction of modernism's political temple by the Enlightenment, right wing and left wing. The acceptance of the legitimacy of this temple by the churches began the erosion of the ideal of Christendom.(74) The entrance of Jews into this temple in the nineteenth century was the beginning of a great apostasy for Judaism. The leaders of both religions concluded that there could be a reconciliation of confessions through the adoption of a neutral, common-ground confession: humanism. This common confession -- politics, money, and education -- seemed to offer a new era of economic growth, which in fact occurred. But with Western society's unprecedented increase in economic output has come a rise in philosophical despair, war, crime, decadence, family dissolution, and suicide.
Conclusion Jews who live outside of the State of Israel suffer from a major problem: they do not face organized opposition. Dershowitz titles chapter two of The Vanishing American Jew, "Will the End of Anti-Semitism Mean the End of the Jews?" Jews do not face an armed majority that seeks their destruction. In the State of Israel, they do.
Organized opposition has always been major factor in the preservation of the Jews' identity as a separate people. Western society was confessional. Jews did not share this confession. The ghetto was the solution for both sides. (For the anti-Talmudic Karaites, a ghetto within the ghetto was the solution.)(75) With the demise of the ghetto and the rise of Reform Judaism, the old barriers began to disappear. So did the Jews' old opposition to gentile culture. Jews had built effective cultural defenses against the conversion of individual Jews to rival religions, especially Christianity. But few Jews in 1850 perceived that secular humanism is a rival religion; even fewer perceived this in 1950. Christianity and Islam had a place for Jews as Jews, but outside the corridors of power. Humanism has a place for Jews as humanists inside the corridors of power. "Come one, come all," cry the humanists, "but you must leave your revelational civil laws outside the common Temple of Understanding." Jews in unprecedented numbers have succumbed to the siren song of social participation and leadership on these confessional terms.(76)
The cost has been high: escalating absorption. This has always been a threat to Jews. What is unique about humanism's theology of absorption is its theology of a common confession based either on natural law theory or evolutionary political participation. Judaism must now find ways to maintain itself apart from the shawmah Israel. The words of shawmah Israel -- "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD" (Deut. 6:4) -- are still intact, but they have been revised in spirit: "Hear, O Israel, we are not gentiles." But there are two simple, all-too-familiar phrases that have proven incredibly powerful in negating the effects of this revised shawmah Israel. First, "Grandma, I won a scholarship to college." Grandma is dutifully proud. This is followed a few years later by, "Grandma, I'd like you to meet my fiancé." Pride is then accompanied by a sense of loss and a sense of foreboding. Both the sense of loss and the sense of foreboding should have accompanied the first announcement.
Pluralism has a program of assimilation. First, it offers the ballot. Then it offers the full-tuition scholarship. Then it offers the co-ed dorm. Then there is the sound of wedding bells -- if things go well.(77) Then there is the sound of the pitter-patter of little feet. That sound, delightful as it is, has steadily drowned out the sound of the shawmaw Israel.
Then how can the Jews be preserved until the time of the great eschatological conversion? Only by their abandonment of their toleration of mixed marriages and by their abandonment of small families. Jews do not evangelize the general population; hence, there are no workable survival strategies except population growth and the disinheritance of those within the community who abandon the shawmaw Israel. Jews cannot persevere as humanists. The Reform and Conservative Jews will be replaced by the Orthodox. The demographics of Reform and Conservative Judaism will lead to their replacement by the Orthodox. Orthodox Jews rely on confessional prophylaxis, not biological. Liberal religion is having the same effect on American Protestantism's mainline denominations as it had a century ago on Europe's. Why should Reform and Conservative Jews think they are immune?
Footnotes:
1. See, for example, Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
2. "And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?" (Rom. 11:23-24). Cf. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1864] 1950), p. 365; Robert Haldane, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Mad Dill Air Force Base, Florida: MacDonald Pub. Co., [1839] 1958), pp. 632-33; John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), II, pp. 65-103.
3. This was the finding of the National Jewish Population Study of 1970-71, reported by U. O. Schmelz and Sergio Dellapergola, "Basic Trends in American Jewish Demography," in Steven Bayme (ed.), Facing the Future: Essays On Contemporary Jewish Life (n.p.: KTAV Publishing House and American Jewish Committee, 1989), p. 92.
4. Ibid., p. 91.
5. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), Part 5.
6. Ibid., p. 327.
7. Ibid., pp. 332-33.
8. I. Grunfeld, "Samson Raphael Hirsch -- The Man and His Mission," in Judaism Eternal: Selected Essays from the Writings of Samson Raphael Hirsch, 2 vols. (London: Soncino, 1956), I, p. xxiii. Grunfeld says that Hirsch accepted this term of opprobrium and, through his leadership, transformed it into an acceptable self-definition.
9. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880, vol. 3 of The Jewish People in America, 5 vols. (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 17.
10. Israel Shahak, "The Jewish religion and its attitude to non-Jews," Khamsin, VIII (1981), p. 28. See also Diner, Gathering, p. 18.
11. Diner, Gathering, p. 9.
12. Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820, vol. 1 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 4.
13. Ibid., pp. 100-1.
14. Ibid., pp. 60-61, 125.
15. Ibid., p. 107.
16. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), I:8, Series A 1-5.
17. Jacob Rader Marcus, "The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas," Hebrew Union College Annual, XL-XLI (1969-70), p. 411.
18. Diner, Gathering, p. 56.
19. Historical Statistics, loc. cit.
20. Diner, Gathering, p. 43.
21. Ibid., p. 233.
22. Ibid., p. 53.
23. Ibid., p. 56.
24. Gerold Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920, vol. 3 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 2.
25. Dinar, Gathering, p. 233.
26. Sorin, Building, pp. xv, 1.
27. Diner, Gathering, pp. 232-33.
28. Jacob Rader Marcus, "The Periodization of American Jewish History," Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society, XLVII (Sept. 1957-June 1958), p. 129.
29. Stephen Birmingham, "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Birmingham, The Grandees: America's Sephardic Elite (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Birmingham titles Chapter 16, "The Jewish Episcopalians." There has been a reaction to this view among a few Jewish historians. Some of the authors and the general editor of The Jewish People in America (1992), which was funded by the American Jewish Historical Society, reject the familiar periodization of Jewish immigration to America: Sephardic, German-Polish (Ashkenazic), and eastern European. This periodization scheme, familiar to American Jewish historians by 1900, was defended by Marcus, "Periodization of American Jewish History," op. cit., pp. 125-33. With respect to the final wave of immigration, 1880 to 1920, I do not see how its overwhelming eastern European character can be denied. Marcus dates the beginning of the east European Jewish immigration: 1852 (p. 130). This correlates with the advent of the steamship. He dates the triumph of the Russian Jewish tradition: 1920 (p. 130). Simon Kuznets, one of the most respected statisticians in American history and a Nobel Prize winner in economics, remarks that from 1820 to 1870, fewer than 4,000 Jews immigrated from Russia and 4,000 from Poland. From 1881 to 1914, two million Jews immigrated, and over 1.5 million were from Russia: 75 percent. Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure," Perspectives in American History, IX (1975), p. 39. Only 15,000 Jews arrived from Russia in the decade, 1871-80. Ibid., p. 43.
30. John Higham, "Social Discrimination Against Jews in America, 1830-1930," Publication of the Jewish Historical Society, XLVII (1958), p. 13.
31. Ibid., pp. 13-19.
32. Ibid., pp. 19-23.
33. Sorin, Building, p. 2.
34. Diner, Gathering, pp. 12-13.
35. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J. P. Meyer (12th ed.; Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1848] 1969), p. 54.
36. Diner, Gathering, p. 22. This school has been described as a Baptist institution where atheist students study Thomas Aquinas taught by Jewish professors. My assessment is that their Jewish professors are also atheists.
37. Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945, vol. 4 of Jewish People in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 15.
38. Idem.
39. Ibid., p. 18.
40. Ibid., p. 15.
41. Ibid., p. 14.
42. M. D. Storfer, Intelligence and Giftedness: The Contributions of Heredity and Early Environment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), pp. 314-23; cited in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 275.
43. Idem.
44. A good example of an Orthodox Jew who accepted the bargain is a Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, whose study of the effects of secularization reveals the plight of American Jewry: at the present rate of intermarriage, there will be no trace of the Jews in a century. Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
45. See Irving Greenberg, "Jewish Survival and the College Campus," Judaism, XVII (Summer 1968).
46. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II, vol. 5 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 112, 113.
47. Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1968), ch. 12.
48. Cf. Peter Steinfels, "American Jews Stand Firmly to the Left," New York Times (Jan. 8, 1989).
49. Daniel Lapin, "Why Are So Many Jews Liberal?" Crisis: A Journal of Lay Catholic Opinion (April 1993).
50. Alan Greenberg of Bear, Stearns & Co. Cited in Jean Bear, The Self-Chosen: "Our Crowd" is Dead (New York: Arbor House, 1982), p. 23.
51. Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996).
52. Ernest van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique (New York: Dell, [1969] 1971), p. 181.
53. Ibid., ch. 16.
54. Shapiro, Healing, pp. 234-35.
55. Ibid., p. 235.
56. Ibid., pp. 238-39.
57. Ibid., p. 253.
58. Ibid., p. 239.
59. Ibid., p. 243.
60. Ibid., p. 254.
61. Ibid., p. 255.
62. Ibid., p. 257.
63. Religious News Service, reported in Christian News (Feb. 12, 1996), p. 9.
64. Schmelz and Dellapergola, "Basic Trends," Facing the Future, p. 75: Table 1.
65. Ibid., p. 91.
66. Ibid., pp. 91-92.
67. Ibid., p. 93.
68. Charles Krauthammer, "At Last, Zion: Israel and the Fate of the Jews," Weekly Standard (May 11, 1998), p. 24.
69. Ibid., p. 25.
70. Ibid., p. 29.
71. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 95.
72. In 1991, Jews were 2 percent of the population. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), Table 85. In 1993, agriculture employed 2.5 percent of the work force. Ibid., Table 641.
The rise of the gay rights movement after 1970 is an even better example. Homosexuals are a tiny minority -- under one percent of the population -- yet they have enormous political influence in the United States. As AIDS has reduced the number of homosexual men since the early 1980's, their political influence has increased dramatically.
73. Dershowitz, Vanishing American Jew, p. 25.
74. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.
75. This was the case in twelfth-century Constantinople, according to Benjamin of Tudela, whose Book of Travels is a major primary source document of the era. Some 2,500 Jews lived in a fenced-off quarter: 2,000 Talmudists and 500 Karaites. A fence separated the two groups. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 169.
76. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
77. The other possibility is the silent scream of the aborted child.
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