The major fissure in the Jewish world

By Lloyd Levy

This situation has been so, for thousands of years. Most Jews that had been exiled to Babylon, chose to stay there in the Diaspora, even when some went back to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple in 6th Century BCE.

The modern situation goes back to the French Revolution in Europe 200 years ago. This was 100 years before Jews emigrated in vast numbers from Russia and Eastern Europe to USA. The American community was virtually non existent, but its equivalent western Diaspora Communities were in Germany and France. Until that point in time, the Jews were very much a self contained community, and thought of themselves as a Jewish Nation, not merely as a religion.

After the French Revolution, the Jews in Germany became Germans of Jewish religious belief, or French citizens of Jewish belief etc. In Germany there developed a “Jewish” ideology redefining the notion of the Jews being chosen as a people (because they no longer believed Jews to be a “people”), to the notion that the Jews were chosen to spread a message of toleration and understanding throughout society as a whole. It is this new ideology that led to what became “reform” Judaism in Germany, and which essentially was adopted by the mainstream liberal Jewish community in America.

On the other hand, the Jews of Russia were not accepted as citizens by their Government, and they retained a sense of the Jewish Nation. This concept has to a great extent been carried over into the modern state of Israel, which does stress Jewish Nationalism and the sense that the re-awoken Jewish nation is the future.

Therefore, two forms of Judaism developed, one in Western Europe and then in USA, and another one in Israel. They both see themselves as the future, and this potential conflict of interest, in my opinion, is the main fissure within Judaism, and not the Ashkenazi/Sephardi split.

So where does this relate to President Obama? His Administration contains many Jews, and he seems to court Jewish support, to the extent that he is almost a “Jewish” President in many ways. His worldview reflects the liberal Jewish Establishment mentality. Yet he appears to be unsympathetic to the concept of a Jewish State . This theoretically opens up the fault line as discussed earlier. In UK and France, the Jewish Establishment has invariably been loath under any circumstances, to show any dual loyalty. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the French Jewish leadership did nothing to support Dreyfus, whose plight was taken up by non Jews. In UK, the Jewish establishment was anti-Zionist at the time of the Balfour Declaration, and lobbied against the establishment of a Jewish State. Many would argue that little has changed in the view of the British Jewish Establishment since then !

It will be interesting to see how the American Jewish community reacts to this paradox.  I expect that  the Jewish secular establishment, will increasingly find itself critical of Israel, and shout loudly about its own loyalty to the American Dream. The average Jew, and the more traditionally orthodox, will continue to support Israel through thick and thin.

Whatever the future holds, we need to bear one overwhelming fact in mind-  namely that both Israel and USA each contain approx. 6 million Jews. That number is of course tattooed onto every Jew’s forearm, and neither community must be allowed to fail. 

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Levy divides his time between homes in London and Eilat