Normalization and Its Discontents

This chapter concentrates on the question of normalcy and its relationship to twentieth-century notions of Jewish distinctiveness and purpose. It describes how the idea of a special Jewish mission that initially thrived within the American Reform movement disintegrated as the urge to integrate within American society to gather strength among Jews prominently waned. It talks about Jewish exemplarity that was influentially presented in relation to specifics of the American context through the competing “melting pot” and “orchestra” metaphors of Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen. The chapter illustrates the hope of Jewish normalization that was perceived by sharp observers, such as Karl Kraus, Theodor Lessing and Sigmund Freud in the first half of the twentieth century. It also mentions the horror of the Holocaust that cast a profound chill over the idea of Jewish instrumental purpose, but at the same time brought about a renewal of the idea on the ethical and historical lessons imparted by the Nazi genocide.

So What Are Jews For?

This chapter reviews the question on what Jews are for. It talks about the anxiety over the long-term viability of Judaism that threatened to overwhelm the question across much of the Jewish world in the late twentieth century. It describes the European Jewish life in the aftermath of the Holocaust that was shadowed by a sense of dutiful traditionalism and anxiety over the continued presence of antisemitism. The chapter also analyzes the temptation and increasing ease of assimilation that was perceived as a threat to Jewish continuity in Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere in the New World. It points out how it was clear to some Jewish leaders, while faced with the prospect of a “vanishing diaspora,” that the postwar focus on communal survival lacked the inspirational power to renew Jewish life.

Reason, Toleration, Emancipation

This chapter centers on the eighteenth century as the period in which the primary purpose of Jews was to sharpen the elaboration of key philosophical concepts. It explores the work of Pierre Bayle, whose Historical and Critical Dictionary in the 1700s baffled eighteenth-century readers over its elusive positioning of Judaism as the marker of the limits of rational philosophy. It also reviews the vexed preoccupation of Voltaire with Jews that stemmed from his structurally similar but temperamentally different positioning of them as fundamentally antithetical to enlightenment reason. The chapter also explains the paradigm of exceptionalism that framed the work and reception of Jewish thinkers in the period, including Moses Mendelssohn. It describes the penetrating mind and noble character of Mendelssohn that became the model for the dramatic hero of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's masterpiece Nathan the Wise, in which Jewish purpose was cast as the exemplification of rational universalism.