We deem it opportune to examine this Jewish universalism, which is
played up today against the nationalistic efforts of our people to
re-establish a Homeland in Palestine and to see how far it is sincere
in its motives and compatible with Jewish tradition, and how far it
is intellectual camouflage. We think it rather curious that those
who claim to be Jewish universalists--the radical Reform rabbis and
assimilationists from other camps--always lay stress on American,
German, French or English Judaism, and often speak of the American
Jewish Church or the English Jewish Church, and so forth. It is
also remarkable that these Jewish universalists have always worked
for a "readjustment" of Judaism to local conditions and have tried
to Americanize Judaism in America, to Germanize it in Germany, to
Anglicize it in England, to Magyarize it in Hungary, and so forth.
On the other hand, those who were considered as standing for a petty,
provincial conception of Judaism, the nationalists, have not only
never tried to do anything of the sort but have always defended the
interritoriality and catholicity of Judaism. One never hears a Jewish
nationalist here or abroad speaking of an American Jewish Church or
an English Jewish Church, and so forth. It seems to us that in view
of these facts the sort of universal Judaism as proclaimed by the
assimilationists is of rather doubtful origin and character and that
it is everything but universal, for it is territorial and provincial
to the core. As a matter of fact, Reform Judaism as established
by the Reform rabbis in the middle of the nineteenth century, and
developed by American rabbis at the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth, is the first gigantic attempt to
break the catholicism of Judaism and to territorialize it, that is
to say, to annihilate its organic unity. Reform Judaism is in fact
nothing else but territorialism in religious terms, just as Yiddishism
is a territorialism in linguistic terms. Those who divide Judaism
geographically and claim that each part has little or nothing to do
with the other, and that each part is organically connected only with
its surroundings, that there is such a thing as American Judaism,
English Judaism, German Judaism, French Judaism, and so on, stand for
the same policy as do the Yiddishists, who divide the Jewish people
into ten or fifteen separate groups, claiming that every group is
a unit by itself and has nothing to do with the others. According
to Yiddishists the Ladino-speaking Jew has scarcely anything in
common with the Judeo-German-speaking Jew, just as the Arabic or
Greek-speaking Jews have little or nothing in common with the Ladino
or Yiddish-speaking Jews. Some express their Jewish territorialism and
provincialism in terms of religion, the others in terms of language.
Both are opponents of Jewish unity and Jewish catholicism, both are
opposed to traditional Judaism, both are opposed to Jewish nationalism
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