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Jewish Identity in America, Part One
| Article
# : |
14607 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
4,041 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
Over two hundred years ago, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, the French observer of American mores, asked the most famous and important question in American history: "What then is the American, this new man?" His answer stressed both the biological and intellectual uniqueness of the transplanted European. The American was an amalgamation of the ethnic strains of Europe, or at least of western Europe. "I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations." The true American had also discarded European modes of thought. "He is an American, who, leaving behind him all the ancient prejudices and manners, acts upon new principles, entertains new ideas, and forms new opinions."
Crevecoeur waxed poetic as he contemplated the future of this American "new man" and his land. "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." American writers of the nineteenth century followed Crevecoeur's cue and stressed the theme of the newness of America and the American. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous 1837 "American Scholar" address delivered before Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society, declared that American dependence on the learning of other lands had ended. "The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves." He concluded with perhaps the most famous sentences in American literature. "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.... What is the remedy? ... We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."
It is no coincidence that America's Jews, perhaps more than any other group, have followed the advice of Crevecoeur and Emerson to leave behind the prejudices and manners of Europe and to sing of American events. This has been true not only in defining American nationality, but also in defining American Jewish identity.
Crevecoeur's "new mode of life" was especially new for the Jew. The definitions of Jewish identity developed elsewhere were hardly relevant for America. In Europe, Africa, and Asia, status and citizenship were based on religion. Anti-Semitism was pervasive, and Jews were denied citizenship until the nineteenth century. The kehillah, the self-contained Jewish community, played a vital role and had an official, or at least semi-official,
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