Abstract
Some fifty years ago, three scholars set forth their respective approaches toward explaining the phenomenon of American Conservative Judaism. Each chose a different historical and sociological context that, in their eyes, was the essential fulcrum for understanding why, when, and how a distinctively identified denomination, neither Reform nor Orthodox, became a characteristic part of American Jewish life. This article looks at the models that were proposed by Moshe Davis, Charles (Yeshayahu) Liebman, and Marshall Sklare, respectively, and the differences among them.
Davis, a one-time dean at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary, outlined an ideological trajectory in the late nineteenth century that led modernizing but traditionalist rabbis to turn away from the already-existing Reform option. He linked these American-based developments to the role played by rabbis of the “positive-historical school” in Central Europe.
For his part, Liebman eschewed the idea of an ideological confrontation with Reform and, indeed, gave relatively little credit to rabbis of the “positive-historical school.” Instead, he argued that the Conservative synagogue was a product of non-elite (“folk”) origins and motives. He assigned a key role to the posture of religious laxity that prevailed among the many East European Jewish immigrants who arrived in massive numbers after the turn of the twentieth century.
Sklare, whose argument transferred the movement’s formative period closer to the middle years of the twentieth century, described it as an ethnic phenomenon that took root in the rising middle class neighborhoods of second-generation American Jews. Ideology, as with Liebman’s theory, played a minor role if at all.
One of the things they had in common was that each one of these theorists assigned great significance to the arrival of European Jewish immigrants: Central European rabbis, in Davis’s narrative; East European laypeople, in both Liebman’s and Sklare’s models. The arrival of the immigrants and the ways in which they negotiated their integration into American life proved crucial, whether one looked at the latter nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth. The result was a blend of American denominationalism and religious privatization—co-opted from the prevailing religious environment of that time—infused with the spirit of Jewish tradition. This hybrid religious format, in turn, enabled Jews to appear less different, even as they practiced their own separate customs and traditions.
Looking at these scholars’ approaches today, after the passage of half a century, allows for a critical reassessment of their ideas. Davis’s ideological trailblazers approach was significantly challenged, not only by Liebman and by Sklare, but also by more recent scholarship. Jonathan Sarna posited a process of institutional and denominational separation of the JTS-affiliated rabbis from Orthodoxy during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Michael Cohen, who also looked closely at the early twentieth century, demonstrated the crucial importance of a cadre of younger men, protégés of Solomon Schechter.
Liebman’s “folk religion” theory failed to fully take account of the fact that the version of Judaism that prevailed among the American Jewish congregations of that time was not, in fact, of the same type of popular religion that could be labeled as “native” to the East European immigrants. Rather, some interim, westernizing and modernizing stage or filter, weighted toward a conservative “Lithuanian” (i.e., non-Hasidic) mindset, could be observed among the congregants. This was a religious culture already transformed into something rather less intuitive, something more self-aware, than Liebman’s model of cultural inertia would allow.
Sklare’s notion of a middle-class “ethnic church,” emergent in American Jewish life toward the mid-twentieth century, must be contextualized in order to be fully appreciated. The very close analogy that Sklare drew between a religious middle ground, on the one hand, and a class-based “middle” of the socioeconomic scale, reflected the prevailing trend in liberal philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. That philosophy (itself a by-product of postwar American life) lent vital significance to the convergence of “right” and “left” toward a liberal center, just as it underwrote the idea of a homogenized “middle class” as a liberal, American alternative to binary Marxian models of class struggle.
As suggested, in all these theories, Conservative Judaism served as a bridge to America’s prevailing culture and, hence, as a means to minimize Jewish differences. Some of the more recent transformations in Jewish and American life have continued to underscore the notion of Jewish conformity with western or American norms. Such changes include the internalization of lifestyle and gender egalitarianism and other aspects of the heightened privatization of the religious realm. On the other hand, Jewish differences, despite expectations to the contrary, have also become more visible in recent years, given the political travails in American society.
Eli Lederhendler, PhD is Professor Emeritus and Stephen S. Wise Chair in American Jewish History and Institutions in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.