martillo@mit-athena.UUCP (Joaquim Martillo) (07/18/85)
From a recent article by Ruth Wisse: [Irving] Howe identifies Yiddishkeyt with the beginnings of emancipation two hundred years ago. But in fact the Yiddish cultural phenomenon he writes about is barely as old as this century -- and more critically, it never produced a second generation. The most important test of a way of life is its ability to sustain itself; by this standard, Yiddishkeyt failed even where the Jews themselves survived and flourished. It is not simply that the children of the Yiddishists no longer speak to their children in Yiddish. The heirs of Moses Mendelssohn converted to Christianity, yet the Reform movement in Judaism which he inspired is still actively represented in Jewish institutional life today. Yiddishism, which was meant to serve Jewish cohesion, had no such self-regenerating powers, and Yiddishkeyt was but a transitional phase in which a secular generation enjoyed the fruits of a religious civilization. Unquestionably, many of these secular products of religious Jewish homes really did feel themselves imbued with the prophetic tradition, now translated by them into a concern for the poor and the oppressed of all nations. Unquestionably, too, many of them believed that this concern, which they called mentshlekhkeyt but which was really socialism with a Jewish face, was capable of universalizing Jewish teachings and transforming religious ideals into political facts. But the quotient of self-delusion in such thinking was very high. And it also entailed a moral hubris that they proved singularly unwilling to face. The Jewish religious way of life had never claimed innate moral superiority for the Jews, only for the disciplined framework within which they undertook to live. Chosenness meant the voluntary submission of Jews to a body of imperatives that could civilize even the most imperfect of peoples. Anyone who became a Jew and followed the prescribed Jewish way of life would be exalted in the same way. By contrast, Jews who believed in the transforming power of politics, not religion, and who equated Yiddishkeyt with mentshlekhkeyt, were practicing a form of ethnic arrogance that was not only foreign but repugnant to the Jewish tradition they implicitly invoked as its justification.