Cont Jewry (2014) 34:213–216 DOI 10.1007/s12397-014-9125-y

Disloyalty and Dual Loyalty, the Jewish Question Redux: Response to the Sklare lecture Barry A. Kosmin

Received: 26 August 2014 / Accepted: 10 September 2014 / Published online: 7 October 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

It is refreshing to have a Canadian perspective on the social science of the Jews because as Morton Weinfeld epitomizes in his career and so ably demonstrates in his paper, scholars of Canadian Jewry have always been in the forefront of research on that nation’s experiment in multiculturalism and have managed to keep the Jews and the Jewish Question in the mainstream of Canadian academia. The issues of dual loyalty and the strength of local patriotism have been a feature of Canadian as well as Jewish history. Whereas Mort went South for graduate school, I went West on an Ontario Graduate Fellowship to McMaster University, so my first encounter with North American Jewry was in Canada. Under the prime ministership of Pierre Trudeau at the time of the Vietnam War, Canada was focused on asserting its national identity and sovereignty. Although much of Canadian society and its polity was familiar to anyone from Britain, I found Canadian Jewry a somewhat strange religious and communal environment. Whereas Anglophone Canadians had close cultural ties to the United Kingdom and Francophones were increasing their ties to France, at the same time as they were loosening them to Rome and Catholicism, the Jewish community was imitating Canada’s professional sports teams, i.e. increasingly tying themselves to the United States. The most obvious parallel is the National Hockey League, which is binational as is Major League Baseball and the NBA. Unlike most other Commonwealth countries, Canadian Jews have never accepted the authority of Britain’s Chief Rabbi. All of Canada’s synagogue movements—Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform—are part and parcel of the US denominations headquartered in New York. Again, this is a contrast to most other religious traditions in Canada which are locally based, such as the United Church of Canada. Of course, the Catholics look to B. A. Kosmin (&) Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Rome. Only the Jews and Mormons orient their religious loyalties to the United States. The same pattern applies beyond the religious realm. Canada’s Jews—unlike those in Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand—do not have a Board of Deputies as their representative body. In fact the Canadian Jewish Congress withered away and the main fulcrum of Jewish community organization at the local and national level is the Jewish Federation, an American import. Jewish life in Canada is North American. A positive view is that these ties are uncontroversial and nested like Russian dolls. Nevertheless, I would assert that Canadian Jews are also more oriented to the South in career and family ties than other Canadians—more than the British, the French, or recent immigrants. This focus could be an additional underlying factor influencing the results of the ‘‘Tebbit test’’ and the ‘‘dancing at two weddings’’ syndrome Mort’s research has revealed. Let me give one recent and personal example of this dual or continental North American orientation and identity in practice. In October, I was invited to speak about a general topic, secularization of youth at the University of Alberta. When the Edmonton Jewish Federation became aware of the session, I was invited to address a special lunchtime meeting of the community leadership—lay and rabbinical—on the results and implications of the Pew survey. I was happy to give my opinion on the state of American Jewry and to remind them that the survey did not cover Canada, given the local situation and trends might be different. Moreover the local Federation ought to know more about their constituency than an American Jewish Federation because Canada has the benefit of accurate government census data on Jews both by religion and ethnicity—and so the actual numbers of both Jews Not by Religion (JNR) and Jews by Religion (JBR). So to return to Mort’s theme: Why hasn’t the Americanization of Canadian Jewry been a political issue? Why isn’t this US orientation and subordination to New York a cause of embarrassment and ambivalence to its leadership? And on the contrary why is its Zionism and ties to Israel an issue of contention and criticism? Dual loyalties can be acceptable and go unchallenged in quiet and uncontested times helped by the right PR and branding. Queen Elizabeth II is today still head of state and sovereign of 16 countries—where she appears on the coinage and postage stamps. These countries play each other in many sports and have fierce rivalries, but the Queen is not asked to respond to the Tebbit test. In fact, she even transforms her religious loyalty and theology simply by traveling. In England she is Supreme Governor of the Church of England with its bishops, official prayer book, and colorful rituals. Yet once her train crosses the border into Scotland for her summer vacation at Balmoral Castle, she changes from an Anglican to a Presbyterian and attends the Church of Scotland with its Calvinist ecclesiology without bishops and a different worship service. Yet no one person to my knowledge has challenged the Queen on her inconsistent religious behavior. Of course Jews can be inconsistent, hypocritical, or schizophrenic according to your interpretation of their actions. Yet when I was involved with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1970s, I noticed a peculiar phenomenon among some Jewish leaders. They were supporters and donors of the Conservative Party in Britain—and so free market capitalists. But their Israel-based philanthropy was

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oriented to the left—to the Labor Party and socialism. The leaders appeared to believe in both Thatcherism and the kibbutz. Unfortunately, unlike Mort, I was never able to interview them on this peculiarity. To find an answer as to why the Jews, especially when it comes to politics or economics, are placed under the spotlight and subject to special scrutiny, we have to go back in history as Mort did in his paper. He began his account of Judeophobia in Egypt, but I’ll start in Roman Judea. For most of western history the most cited case of Jewish disloyalty occurred around the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. Judas—the eponymous Jew—sold out Jesus and the other 12 attendees at this seder for 30 pieces of silver. In later Christian thinking, the other 12 Jews at the table somehow lost their Jewish identity or at least transitioned honorary gentile status. Jewish untrustworthiness and greed for wealth and power are the linked topoi of Jewish disloyalty and unreliability in the Gospel story. Captain Dreyfus was accused of betraying France as a paid agent of Germany. The core of the accusation by French conservative nationalists and Catholics was not that there was an organized plot by French Jews to enhance the German Reich, but instead that a Jew had no honor and so could never be part of the officer corps or the national elite and should never be placed in a position of trust. Joseph Stalin reached a similar opinion after WWII regarding ‘‘rootless cosmopolitans’’ and purged 63 Jewish generals from the Red Army alone in 1948-53 (Kochan 1970, p. 289). Ironically the Rosenberg trial in the United States in the 1950s led to an almost reciprocal suspicion of American Jews as disloyal Communists and to considerable Jewish communal angst and defensiveness. The accusations then are about the essential disloyalty of Jews rather than dual loyalty per se. Of course this form of prejudice and hostility has its roots too in the situation of Jews in feudal Europe. Medieval Christendom was a hierarchical society bound by solemn oaths and pledges of allegiance by a vassal to one’s liege lord—by serf, knight, baron, duke and so forth up to the king. Jews as non-Christians could not be part of this system; they existed outside the body politic as strangers in a legal limbo. They owed neither service to a lord nor, more importantly, was anyone with power and authority bound by oath or formal obligation to protect them physically or in the courts. Jews were also ‘‘outcastes’’ in the Muslim world—Dar el Islam— for similar religiously based reasons. Following the American and French Revolutions a new era of nation states offering membership opened for the Jews as both individuals and possibly as a collective. Mort is correct that Napoleon’s questions were at the heart of the Jewish question in Europe. But of course there was an ongoing wider political debate over the nature of the nation state. Was it to be a civil nation, a territorial state of all its inhabitants or citizens, or a volkisch state built around or even restricted to one ethnic or language group? Logic suggested that Jews having suffered from religious exclusion would oppose exclusive nationalisms. The Jewish tendency was always to offer political support to the more universal or inclusive political choices in conflict situations—so the Jews and the Habsburgs were most invested in Austria-Hungary, and in the multi-ethnic successor states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Today the Jews favor a united Belgium and United Kingdom, and naturally, Montreal Jews were the strongest opponents of Quebec separatism.

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Similar political questions regarding the nature of the state and who belongs and the boundaries of dissent and loyalty play out today in Israel between those who want a state of its citizens and those favoring Israel as a Jewish state. In some ways the current battle between AIPAC and J Street Jews reflects and incorporates similar divisions. J Streeters claim to be better and more loyal Americans and emphasize their fidelity to the Democratic Party. And inevitably this debate between rival Jewish lobbies incorporates questions of dual loyalty that lie at the core of Zionism and the question not of who is a Jew but what are the Jews? An investigation of dual loyalty inevitably brings us also to the question of the nature of Jewish solidarity and the widespread myth of Jewish unity. Outsiders assume the Jews are clannish and operate a dual ethic, whereby they treat fellow Jews more favorably than gentiles. Yet Jews have always had problems with social boundaries—hence the ‘‘Who is a Jew?’’ question. Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews long viewed each other suspiciously and there was a lack of fellow feeling and commonality in many countries. Hasidim and Mitnagdim denounced each other to the Tsarist police. Even in extremis during the Shoah in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Jews with different ideologies found it difficult to cooperate. In Auschwitz too, Jews of various nationalities clashed because they literally could not understand each other’s language and cultures. History reveals that in many ways the relatively modern concept of Klal Yisrael (invented by Chovevi Zion in 1888) is as aspirational and as mythic as the Muslim Umma. We owe a debt of gratitude to Mort because he has led us back to the heart of the Jewish Question in the contemporary world and to issues much more salient and serious for the Jewish future than internal questions regarding intermarriage or the merits of the recent Pew survey.

Reference Kochan, Lionel. 1970. The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barry A. Kosmin is currently Research Professor in the Public Policy & Law Program and Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut and a senior associate of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew & Jewish Studies, University of Oxford, England. Dr. Kosmin directed the US 1990 National Jewish Population Survey and has been a principal investigator of the American Religious Identification Survey series since its inception in 1990 as well as national social surveys in Europe, Africa, and Asia. His publications on the ARIS include One Nation under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society, 1993 and Religion in a Free Market, 2006.

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