THE JEWISH PEOPLE have always
been an aggregate, geographically dispersed
and linguistically and culturally diverse.
Some parts of it are closer to one another
than others; many hold different beliefs,
practice different rituals, and are impelled by
different social and economic interests. Few
are connected to or divided from the rest by
the identical things; most aid one another in
some areas while competing in others and
more or less living and letting live. Since
Jews were everywhere a minority without the
coercive means of government or established
church, it was something they had little
choice about. The very notion of what was or
who was a Jew was never anything but
relative.
So what else, one might ask, is new? The
illusion of Jewish unity, it would seem.
But is it? Jews in the past had this
illusion, too. A Jew in ninth-century Baghdad
or 12th-century Cordoba knew the Judaism of
Baghdad or of Cordoba; if he thought about
Jews elsewhere, he imagined them to be like
himself. The occasional traveler may have
brought tales of distant and exotic Jews
elsewhere, but these were forgotten or
transformed into legend, into lost tribes
beyond the mountains of darkness. The real
Jew was the familiar one.
To be accurate, the sense of Jewish unity
in our own time that has not been entirely an
illusion. Compared with most, perhaps even
all, of the Jewish past, and especially with
the first half of this century, the last 50 years
have witnessed an unusual degree of
solidarity. There has been enough time to get
used to this condition and even to come to
regard it as normal.
ISRAEL AND JEWISH UNITY
Two things have created it: the
Holocaust and the state of Israel. And it is
Israel especially that has been the focal point
of Jewish unity in our time. But it has also
become the foundering point, since while
Jewish communities can live peacefully side
by side with differing standards of
Jewishness, it is impossible to administer a
Jewish state without a single standard, and no
such criterion can be agreed upon. Nor would
it be workable if it could.
Let us suppose for a moment that, by
government decision or (as is more likely)
court order, Reform and Conservative
Judaism were to be fully enfranchised in
Israel tomorrow. Assuming that the
synagogue-state relationship in Israel
remained otherwise unchanged, this would
enable non-Orthodox rabbis to perform
officially recognized conversions, marriages,
and divorces; to serve as chaplains in the
armed forces, hospitals, and prisons; to
receive a share of government funds for
salaries, religious schools, and synagogues;
and to participate in the local religious
councils that are responsible for channeling
and supervising such allocations. Would this
be an equitable or convenient solution for all
Israelis? For all Jews? For all Gentiles
wishing to become Jews?
It would not be. To begin with, the
approximately 1 million Orthodox Jews of
Israel would no longer be able to rely on
official records of Jewishness. They would
have to stop automatically thinking of their
fellow Israelis as fellow Jews, privately
investigate the family trees of prospective
marriage partners, and so forth. The social
walls between them and other Israelis,
already high, would rise higher.
ATHEISTS AND IMMIGRANTS
Of course, this might be considered a fair
price to pay for rectifying a perceived injustice to
non-Orthodox Israeli Jews. But some of these
Jews, in the name of justice, might demand to
have recourse to civil marriage and divorce
as well. The great majority of them, after all,
are not only non-Orthodox but
non-Conservative and non-Reform. Although
some might find a Conservative marriage
ceremony or a Reform divorce proceeding
less alien or onerous than its Orthodox
counterpart, the wholly secular among them
would still be forced to undergo an imposed
religious ritual in order to mark a 
change of
personal status; in essence they would be no
freer of religious coercion than before. And
would not secular Jews in the Diaspora be
justified in complaining, just as Reform and
Conservative Jews do now, that Israel
discriminates against their kind?
And what
about Gentiles in
Israel, such as
the large number
of non-Jewish
immigrants from
the ex-Soviet
Union, or the
even larger
number of
foreign workers
from countries in
Asia, Africa and
Eastern Europe,
many of whom might wish to become Jews
for non-religious reasons - out of an
identification with the Jewish people,
perhaps, or simply because they wish to
acquire Israeli citizenship under the Law of
Return? Are they to be told with a wink that
there are now non-Orthodox rabbis who will
quickly convert them to Judaism if only they
pretend to see the light of Torah? Or will
these rabbis be required to adopt more
stringent standards and turn such applicants
down, as their Orthodox colleagues do?
Consistency would seem to demand that
once Israel makes a start toward religious
evenhandedness, the road be followed to its
ultimate destination in the separation of
church and state, as is the practice in the
United States and other Western
democracies. Let there be religious
marriages, divorces and conversions of all
types and denominations for those who want
them, and civil procedures for those who do
not.
But this too turns out to be a
non-solution, particularly in regard to the
Law of Return, which guarantees citizenship
in Israel to all Jewish applicants. What civil
procedure can there be for declaring a
Gentile a Jew? The most one could imagine
would be some bureaucratic process at the
end of which Jewishness would be acquired
like a fishing license.
Well, then, a logical mind might propose,
why not do away with the Law of Return,
too? Let Israel adopt a policy of origin-blind
immigration like America's, which would
give Jews no special preference. Let the Jew
from New York, the Christian from Ukraine,
and the Buddhist from Thailand compete for
Israeli citizenship on equal terms.
This would indeed be logical. It would
also, so one might think, mean the end of
Israel as a Jewish state.
Or would it? After all, if secular Zionism
sought from the outset to "normalize" the
Jews by remaking them into a people defined
by national territory, language, and culture
like any other, why is the
Tel-Aviv-born-and-raised child of Thai
parents who speaks Hebrew as his native
language and relates to Israeli culture as his
own not a Jew by nationality in the same
sense that he would have been an American
had he grown up in New York? Because he
does not practice Judaism? But neither do
many other Israeli Jews; and besides, to be
an American one does not have to practice
Christianity - or even decorate a Christmas
tree.
Because he is not circumcised? That is
absurd: what "normal" people can be joined
only by having a prepucectomy?
But absurdity is where this whole line of
argument, which started with the seemingly
rational premise of legal equality for
non-Orthodox Judaism in Israel, has
apparently led us, although there has been
nothing illogical about any of the individual
points along the way. Little wonder, then, that
a long succession of Israeli governments, and
not just for reasons of coalition politics, has
struggled mightily against doing the
seemingly rational thing.
FOREIGNERS IN OUR MIDST
Absurd or not, however, the prospect of
hundreds of thousands of native-born,
non-Arab, Hebrew-speaking Israelis who are
not Jews by halakhic standards is not merely
a possibility; it is a near certainty. When it
comes to the foreign workers in its midst
today, indeed, Israel is currently in the same
stage of denial as was Germany about its
Gastarbeiter, or France about immigrant
labor from Algeria, in the 1960s.
Too struck by the novelty of cheap
servants from abroad to grasp the fact of their
permanence in the household, most Israelis
still believe that when all the dishes are
washed, the scaffolds dismantled, and the
oranges picked, the last Ghanaian, Romanian
and Thai will board an airplane and head
home. But all the dishes are never washed,
and the Ghanaian or Thai child born this year
in Tel Aviv already may be at home. Either
he will become relegated there to perpetual
second-class status; or Israel really will
cease to be a Jewish state; or he will become
a Jew - if not by formally converting, then
by acculturating like immigrants everywhere
and forcing Israeli notions of Jewishness to
include him, just as the Algerian has been
reshaping the notion of francité and the Turk
or the Kurd of Deutschtum.
This will not happen more easily in
Israel than in France or Germany. It will be a
long and wrenching process. But happen it
may. And if it does, it will be in a very real
sense the logical culmination of secular
Zionism - a culmination toward which a
large portion of Israeli reality has been
moving for close to a century as the
specifically religious element of Jewish
identity has become progressively attenuated
in it.
Indeed, secular Zionism, which set out to
create a Jewish national culture independent
of religion, and Reform Judaism, which set
out to free Judaism of all ethno-cultural
specificity, have curiously converged on this
point: for each has theoretically, and in no
small measure practically, eliminated not one
strand but two from the traditional four of
Jewish identity-the second being the
biological tie of endogamy. And each is now
faced with a massive increment of non-Jews
such as the Jewish people has probably not
known since its rapid spread around the
Mediterranean in the early days of the Roman
empire. But the result of this convergence,
involving transformations and cultural and
intellectual adventures that can only be
guessed at, will also be a divergence, since
the coefficient of Jewish identity between,
say, the child of a Jewish-Protestant
intermarriage raised in a Reform home in
California and feeling little or no ethnic
connectedness to other Jews, and the child of
an Israeli-Thai intermarriage raised in a
secular home in Tel Aviv and feeling little or
no religious connectedness to other Jews,
will be low.
THREE PEOPLES
The Jews, it might thus seem, are on their
way to becoming three peoples. One will be
traditionally Orthodox and spread all over
the world, with its principal concentrations in
Israel and the United States. One will be a
new Jewish-Gentile hybrid, situated largely
in the United States, in which will flourish,
besides more conventional forms of
non-Orthodox Judaism, a partly serious and
partly zany array of New Age communities,
groups, and cults-communal Jews, Buddhist
Jews, eco-Jews, femo-Jews, gay Jews, Jesus
Jews, neo-hasidic Jews, neo-kabbalistic
Jews, pneumatic Jews of all kinds and
shapes. And one will consist of secular
Israeli Jews, whose already eclectic make-up
will absorb the genomes and cultures of
Slavs, Thais, Ethiopian Jews, Filipinos,
Nigerians, Columbians, Ghanaians and
various self-invented or ostensibly lost -
and - found Jewish tribes from remoter
parts of the world.
The first of these peoples will live in
physical proximity to the other two but will
not intermarry or interact Jewishly with
either. The second and third will be miscible
in principle but will rarely come into contact.
Without bans or schisms - Jews, we have
said, do not go in for them - all three will
slowly drift apart like the tectonic plates of
continents.
An accurate forecast? Probably not. It
again ignores the multivalence of things.
There are always enough subtrends (for
example, secular Israelis seeking to explore
their religious roots); subgroups); and crosscurrents (such as
Orthodox Jews, the great commuters of the
Jewish world), to gum up the works. The
more chaotic the Jewish future becomes -
and it is likely to be chaotic in the extreme -
the more, so chaos theory tells us, small
developments will lead to large surprises.
On the face of it, in any case, as
ethno-cultural and religious ties among large
sectors of the Jewish world decline, and
endogamy ceases to be a defining Jewish
characteristic, the slack will have to be taken
up by politics. Already in our times politics
alone has mobilized the solidarity that exists,
bringing together disparate groups of Jews
with no common cultural or religious agenda.
POLITICS OF DIVISIVENESS
But Jewish politics need not only be
unifying. It can just as easily be divisive, as
was the case up to and even for a short while
after World War II, when in Europe and
Palestine, and to a lesser extent in the United
States, right-wing Zionists, left-wing
Zionists, anti-Zionists, Hebraists,
Yiddishists, Jewish socialists, Jewish
Communists, Jewish liberals, Orthodox Jews,
ultra-Orthodox Jews and anti-Orthodox Jews
were continually at one another's throats. It is
hard for Jews today, brought up in a very
different atmosphere, to conceive of the
passionate hatreds of those years, although
thinking about Israel in the period right
before and after the Rabin assassination is a
help.
The particular intensity of such
arguments stemmed from their being en
famille - sometimes quite literally, since it
was not unusual to find Jewish families in the
Poland or Germany of the 1920s or '30s in
which every brother and sister argued the
case for a different political party or
position. And even when the family table was
a metaphorical one, it was no less real: the
ties of Yiddishkeit binding a Warsaw
Communist to a New York Zionist in those
years were in most cases strong enough to
feel like - ultimately to be - blood ties.
A secular Zionist myself, I plead guilty
to the charge of being one such Jew: I
honestly look forward to all that added DNA.
But there will be a thinning-out. It was
Robert Frost, I believe, who wrote that
family is what has to take you in when you
have nowhere else to go. It is also that to
which you never have to explain yourself.
Many Jews in the world today - Orthodox,
non-Orthodox, and even sometimes,
mysteriously enough, converts - still know
what this means in terms of their Jewish
identity. They know that although it is
irrational for a great religion or culture to be
also a caste or a tribe, precisely such
foolishness - as hilarious or repugnant as
this may seem to others to whom Jewish fate
seems far from enviable - is what makes
them feel like aristocrats among the nations.
In the future, I would guess, Jews will
have a great deal of explaining to do to one
another. There will be many different kinds
of them out there, all peddling their own
version of Jewishness, and the family table
will be gone. Meeting in distant places, Jews
will not ask each other vus makht a Yid, the
old Yiddish greeting that means "What is a
Jew up to?" and that implies unmistakably
that the answer, whatever it is, will be
understood. They will ask, "Who are you?"
and the answer, "A Jew," will tell them little
or nothing at all.
