Jewish
unity cannot be destroyed because it never existed: such
is the lesson of Jewish history.
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 9th-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
and the
river Sambatyon. The real Jew was the familiar one.
To be accurate, moreover, it is rather 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.
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. . . .
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 America, 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
. . . 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 (like Conservative Jews continuing
to straddle a middle ground); 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. . . .
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.
