David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. His books have won the National Jewish Book Award three times and he has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lady Davis Foundation. Most recently, he won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He is currently the Project Director of an international team writing a History of Hasidism.
This exchange focuses on Professor Biale’s book Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, which was recently released on paperback by Princeton University Press. (Parts one and two can be found here and here.)
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Dear Professor Biale,
For the final question, I'd like to return to a remark you made in round one, about your book presenting “a possible blueprint for a new ideology of Jewish secularism.” In that response you described a growing interest among young American Jews in non-religious readings of traditional Jewish texts and stated that this interest shows the future of Judaism, even in the US, “does not belong only to the Orthodox.”
And yet, one could still ask if bequeathing Judaism to the next generation is a realistic prospect for people whose commitment to the Jewish people is based on secular ideology.
My question:
What kind of future could American Jewish secularists hope to see in two or three generations?
I'd like to thank you once again for your book and for doing this exchange.
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
I want to challenge the assumption behind your question. It is often and widely assumed that only the Orthodox can preserve the Jewish tradition because their form of Judaism is the most “authentic.” This kind of argument gets harnessed to demographic projections that show the Orthodox growing in numbers while the non-Orthodox and the secular are declining due to low fertility and intermarriage. I don’t want to quarrel with the demographers, although I think that they make one-sided assumptions about intermarriage and, conversely, about the ability of the Orthodox to keep their children within their fold.
But the real question is what constitutes authenticity. As I argued in my previous post, both modern Orthodoxy and ultra-Orthodoxy are themselves modern inventions shaped by the world – Jewish and non-Jewish – in which their adherents live. The authenticity of the Jewish secular tradition, as I have defined it, rests not on whether the Bible or the Talmud contain “secular” teachings, but rather on whether secular Jews use the resources of the textual tradition to fashion their own philosophy of Judaism. That philosophy may be a modern invention but it is no more so than what is today called Orthodox.
How does one transmit this philosophy? Here is where the Orthodox certainly are at an advantage because they have built institutions – synagogues, schools, seminaries – that can pass on their particular version of Judaism to the next generation. The weakness of Jewish secularism lies not in its ideas but in its institutions – or lack of them. The so-called movement of secular humanistic Judaism is quite weak and its institutions often look like pale imitations of religious institutions rather than real alternatives. In my last post, I suggested that Jewish Studies programs in secular universities may serve as such alternatives, but, of course, they do so in a very different context. Although a recent study showed that 40% of Jewish students take at least one university-level Jewish Studies course, most take only one and not a comprehensive program. So, I acknowledge that the question of transmission is a real one. And so is the question of institutional frameworks for studying, celebrating and teaching this tradition.
As an historian of Jewish culture, I see my role not as building institutions but as making the sources for secular Judaism available to as wide an audience as possible, Jewish and non-Jewish. I take as my motto the saying of that great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, himself a secular Jew: “Nothing Jewish is alien to me.” One can commit oneself to the Jewish library without committing oneself to obey the commandments. This, in essence, is what secular Judaism is all about. Whether my own modest contribution to this library will be read by future generations or even influence their own identities is a question for prophets, not professors.
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