113

THE JEWISH FEMINIST QUESTION

Judith Friedlander

INTRODUCTION

"Shver tsu zayn a Yid, iz shverer tsu zayn a Yidene" [ 1 ] ! So began the impassioned speech by Lilly Scherr at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Pads, November 1978, during the extraordinary Journdes de la culture yiddish held there. Professor of Jewish history and a feminist, Lilly Scherr spoke to the audience at length of the difficulties an unmarried woman had in finding a place among practicing Jews. Her complaints, however, fell on deaf ears. While the Jewish community in France has recently cried out against the rising threat of antiSemitism, few seemed moved by the plight of an intellectual woman who wanted traditional Jews to accept her, even though she refused the role customarily assigned to members of her sex.

Raised in a religious home among Yiddishspeaking immigrants, today, Lilly Scherr frequents the "Yiddishists," talking at public events organized by them. These Yiddishists, however, are anti-religious, the ideological descendants of the Bundists of Eastern Europe who are interested in creating and maintaining a vital secular Jewish culture in the Diaspora. Socialists, they reject traditional Judaism and the class/sex bias they see inscribed in the sacred law. They do not, therefore, even understand why Lilly Scherr cares whether she is Judith Fdedlander is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at the State University of New York at Purchase, N.Y.

welcomed or not by practicing Jews. As for Ashkenazi and Sephardic orthodox groups, be they speakers of Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino or French, they all insist on preserving the Halakhah and are closed, predictably enough, to the concerns of a Lilly Scherr. The orthodox, in fact, have been successfully attracting deserters from the French student left and feminist movements; they have no need to water down Jewish law by incorporating secular ideas about affirmative action in order to draw new members. The potentially receptive group for Jewish cultural feminism is, of course, the Jewish establishment, the so-called Israelites. Assimilated Jews, most of whose families have been living in France for generations, they belong to synagogues recognized by the Consistoire, the rabbinic assembly created by Napoleon to help transform the Jews of the late 18th century into French citizens who happen to attend a Jewish, not Catholic, house of prayer. Like the reform, conservative and reconstructionist Jews in the United States, these French Jews will undoubtedly find ways to reinterpret the Halakhah in order to accomodate contemporary social and political sensibilities. Given the present-day situation in France, however, it is unlikely that somebody coming from Lilly Scherr's background and expressing her ideological views, would choose the establishment for an ally - at least not yet.

114 Lilly Scherr, like many of us, has been caught in an old Jewish dilemma - wanting to assimilate socially, but to stay culturally distinct. I have told her story, because in France the problem is easier to see than it is in the United States. Theirs is a society in which progressive voices have proclaimed for nearly 200 years that the way to build a democracy is to create a nation-state in which everybody shares in the same culture: speaks the same language, reads the same literature, identifies with the same history. The Jews in late 18th century France were considered a "nation within a nation" and were forced to remain separate until after the French Revolution. Then, those gentiles who supported the political and social emancipation of the Jews stipulated that this could only be achieved if the Jews became part of the French nation by adopting French culture. What happened in France soon became the model for the liberation and assimilation of oppressed minorities throughout Europe and then other parts of the world. Ideas about the universal rights of man were intrinsically linked to those about culture and together they became part of the ideological justification for creating nation-states. Over time, these beliefs were uprooted from their historical reference and came to be used by nationalist movements almost everywhere, by those interested in gaining territorial and/or cultural autonomy: the Jews in Eastern Europe, the Irish in Great Britain, the Blacks in America, the Bretons in France and now women in a number of different countries. As one of the many splinter groups of the larger feminist movement, Jewish cultural feminism might best be studied from a wider perspective, so that its specific concerns can be evaluated more completely at a later time. Before reviewing the ways some have sought to improve the role of women in traditional Judaism, I suggest we need to examine the historical bases that led feminists - Jews and gentiles -

together with many other so-called minority peoples, to search for a politically acceptable cultural identity in the first place. In the process, I propose we take some distance from our subject and look at the problem as it has affected a different, but related group. I therefore offer the example of the Jews of Eastern Europe, specifically those interested in developing secular Jewish cultures in the early 20th century. They, like Jewish feminists today, wanted to free themselves from aspects of traditional Judaism for political reasons while they tried to maintain a clearly defined Jewish identity. Their history, I believe, is useful as a comparison, for it unveils a fundamental contradiction: at the same time they claimed to be preserving their inherited cultural differences, these secular Jews transformed the meaning of being a Jew to conform to an ideology that, in the name of equality, called for the elimination of differences. I begin by reviewing briefly the history of nationalism and its relation to the culture question. In particular, I consider the Versailles Treaty and the place it gave to national minorities living in Eastern Europe. The Minorities Treaties, attached to the Versailles Treaty, show clearly that the primary concern of the Paris Peace Conference was to prevent the reconstitution of powerful Central and Eastern European states. To insure this specific political and economic goal, the winning allies encouraged minorities, assimilated to Western ideas about nationalism, to demand their political and cultural autonomy. While supporting cultural diversity in the East, we should not forget that leaders like Wilson promoted the melting pot back home. Next, I turn to look at one of the national minorities identified by the Minorities Treaties, namely the Jews, and analyze the ways their national movements used the cultural values espoused by European nationalism. The rights Lilly Scherr demands for Jewish women are closely tied to these Western ideals of demo-

115 cracy and follow in the tradition of the political and cultural visions of earlier Jewish nationalist movements.

NATIONALISM, NATIONAL MINORITIES AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

While we can trace the idea of the nation back to medieval times [3], we usually date nationalism and the nation-state, in the mode m sense of the term, to the second half of the 18th century. Its first great manifestation, Western historians agree, is the French Revolution [4]. Modern nationalism, then, develops along with the rise of popular sovereignty, with the secularization of society and the spread of industrialization. It depends, what is more, on arousing what Edward Shills has called the "primordial attachments" of a people: the sense of being of the same race, speaking the same language, sharing the same customs and territory [ 5 ]. Nationalism also implies the nation-state and the existence of a nation-state usually strengthens the feeling of nationalism [6]. As we shall see, however, certain Jewish nationalists did not dream of founding a Jewish state, but joined the internationalists in condemning territorial nationalism, while defending their rights to cultural autonomy. The nation-state is a Western European invention. Before the middle of the 19th century, it was not assumed that the two terms went together so simply. Beginning, perhaps, with Rousseau, Western philosophers envisioned a polity to which the masses could identify their cultural and emotional life. Instead of ruling over dominions made up of peoples - nations - who spoke different languages and had separate cultures, the modern state was to be comprised of just one nation. There would be one national culture that everybody could consider his/her own. In Eastern Europe, where the ideas of democracy took longer to evolve, a person's cultural/

ethnic identity remained officially separate from the political unity that governed the area. This distinction between nation and state still persists in a modified form in the Soviet Union. The main point, then, and I repeat, is that Western European nationalism called for the creation not only of a centralized political organization in the form of a state, but for a unified cultural life as well. With few exceptions, by the middle of the 19th century, the ideal had become: one nation within one state. Given the important cultural influence the West has traditionally had on Eastern Europe, it is hardly surprising that by the last quarter of the 19th century, political movements struggling to free their people from the yoke of feudal oppression, sought ideological inspiration from the more enlightened nation-states. Creating a national culture on the Western model was an important act, intimately connected with strategies to gain territorial auton o m y and popular sovereignty. By the end of the first World War, encouraged, of course, by the West, so many nationalities had demanded political and cultural independence that the map of Eastern Europe had to undergo major changes to accommodate them all. Despite the West's interest in supporting as many new nation-states as possible, it became immediately clear that every nationality could not have its own state. A compromise had to be reached and many of the newly formed nation-states rightly concluded that the decisions made in Paris were to their disadvantage, for the Treaty interfered with the development of unified national cultures. With the downfall, first, of the Ottoman Empire, then AustriaHungary and Prussia, fourteen new states emerged, every one firmly committed to protect its national, i.e., cultural, as well as political rights, but each one having to promise as well to respect the cultural rights of the sizable minorities living within its borders, before it would be recognized by the League of Nations. The Minorities Treaties, appended to the Versailles Treaty, determined who should be

116 considered citizens within the new states created after the war and it called on each government to defend the life and liberty of all citizens regardles of their "birth, nationality, language, race or religion" [7]. In other words, while the allies granted the new states sovereignty over their territories, they did not give them exclusive sovereignty: minorities recognized as citizens were to be protected by the League of Nations in ways that comparable minorities were not safeguarded in the West. In Poland, for example, where there were sizeable Ukranian, White Russian and Jewish populations, the Treaty required (Article 9) that the State set up primary schools in the languages of the minority nations in areas where there were high concentrations of non-Polishspeaking peoples. Hospitals and other public facilities had also to be staffed, by law, with people who could communicate in these other tongues. Finally there was a series of special regulations prohibiting Poland from passing legislation that could interfere with the Jewish Sabbath and dietary practices. Elections, for example, could not be held on Saturdays [8]. The important English and American Jewish lobbies at the Paris Peace Conference worked particularly hard to secure personal and religious protection for East European Jews on the Western model. Others, from both the East and West, were more ambitious: they hoped to obtain separate representation for East European Jews at the League of Nations [9]. While they never got their own vote in the international organization, the Eastern Jews did gain the right to preserve their collective national identity, a right they had never been granted in the West. NATIONAL JEWISH CULTURAL MOVEMENTS

I do not mean to imply that Poland or any of the other new states respected the Minorities Treaties for very long, if at all, nor that the Jews waited for recognition by the Pards Peace Conference to begin their own national/secular

cultures. Still, with the token support of the League of Nations behind them, Jewish nationalists, Zionists and Yiddishists alike, those who sought a specifically Jewish homeland and those who joined the internationalist socialist struggle as Jewish-identified revolutionaries, all of them seized the opportunity to build new Jewish cultures. What occurred in the 1920s and 1930s had roots that went back to the 19th century - some might even say to the 18th. But the intensity of activity in the theater, the press, in education and the political arena, was clearly influenced by the victory of nationalistic ideologies after the war. It was almost irrelevant as to whether the political tendencies were to the left or to the right. When it came to national cultures, everybody took the Western European democratic ideal and tried to transform their people's traditions so that they might meet the criteria of an acceptable national culture. The secularization of the Jews and the creation of an identifiable secular Jewish culture began in Western Europe and was consciously an assimilationist movement. In the second half of the 18th century, "enlightened" Jews, like Moses Mendelssohn, the translator of the Hebrew Bible into German, helped prepare the Jewish people for emancipation. They understood that Jews would have to embrace the national cultures of their homelands, for gentile spokesmen for Jewish rights had been explicit about the terms of their support: no longer a nation within a nation, the Jews were to become Germans and Frenchman of the "Mosaic faith." As Clermont-Tonnerre said in 1789 before a French assembly considering the rights of the Jews, "I1 faut tout refuser aux juifs comme nation et tout leur accorder comme individus" [ 10]. In sum, enlightened Jews agreed to compromise, sacrificing cultural autonomy for the whole in order to gain social and political freedom for individuals. The rules were clear enough: democrats insisted that all people be the same before they would legislate that all men were created equal.

117 As the Enlightenment moved east in the early 19th century, it brought with it a similar trend towards assimilation, usually into Russian culture, but sometimes into German and Polish as well. Secular education was favored as Jews prepared for their emancipation. Then, by the mid-1800s, with the dramatic wave of nationalism sweeping across Europe on the one hand and the slight easing of anti-Semitism on the other, the enlightened Jews of the East divided into two major groups: European assimilationists and Hebrew nationalists. The Hebrew nationalists, at this early period, stimulated the development of a modern secular Hebrew literature, posing a very serious threat to the religious Jewish community - both to the Talmudic rationalists (Mithnagdim) of Lithuania and to the mystics (Hasidim) of the south. In czarist Russia, anti-Semitism grew virulent again in the 1870s as a few assimilated Jews began to enter the general economy of the country; even such writers as Dostoyevesky attacked the Jews [ 11 ]. Then in 1881, with the assassination of Alexander II, came the pogroms, economic and residential restrictions and the numerus clausus to keep Jews out of Russian schools. The enlightened Jews generally reacted in three ways. Some, in the older generation, still held on to the belief that progress would win out in the end and that the Jews would be emancipated. Assimilation for them was the only answer. Others, also of the older generation, together with a number of younger intellectuals, particularly from among the wealthier families, transformed Hebrew cultural nationalism into Zionism. Finally, many young Jews joined the Russian revolutionaries and from these politicized youths emerged Yiddishist cultural nationalism. In 1897, in the city of Vilna in Lithuanian Russia, a group of Jewish socialist intellectuals and workers formed the General Jewish Workers' Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Known as the Bund, the party entered the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1898. When

the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split in 1912, the Bundists sided with the latter. While in the early years there were a number of ideological shifts between the European assimilationists and the Jewish cultural nationalists, by 1917 the Bundists were fairly united in their demand for national-cultural autonomy [12]. The platform tried to combine the internationalist socialist vision with cultural specificity. When Poland gained its independence in 1921, Vilna (now spelled Wilno) became a Polish city. By this time, the Bund had developed strong, well-articulated positions against Zionism and religious orthodoxy. Opposing the instruction of Hebrew, the party was more tolerant about observing traditional holidays in non-religious settings and it was in favor of teaching Jewish history. Still, what was most important to the Bundists was the creation of a secular workers' culture, based on the language of the masses, namely Yiddish [13]. Since the Polish government was only expected to provide primary schools in Jewish languages, the Jews took it upon themselves to set up gymnasia, normal schools and university programs, as well as additional primary schools. The Zionists sponsored them in Hebrew and the Bundists in Yiddish. In 1921, the Bund joined the Central Yiddish Schools Organization and in 1925, the intellectuals of the party helped found YIVO, the Institute for Yiddish Studies in Wilno. Until the second World War, when the Institute had to leave Poland and make its New York branch the main center, YIVO played a major role in determining the new Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe. Students there in anthropology and folklore went out into the countryside to study the language and customs of the shtetls, to preserve what was, in fact, fast disappearing [14]. Writers and dramatists, in the name of art and cultural nationalism, wrote on specifically Jewish themes. Ansky's play The Dybbuk is an excellent example of the kind of work appreciated at the time. A folklorist and a

118 socialist, he wrote the play after having led a Jewish ethnographic expedition ( 1911 - 1914) through the villages of Volhynia and Podolia in the Ukraine. First performed in Yiddish in 1920, The Dybbuk is highly critical of bourgeois Jews: A poor yeshiva boy, attracted by Jewish mysticism and the daughter of a rich man, uses the magical powers of the Kabbalah and spirit possession to gain the one he loves. What they refuse him in life for social reasons, he takes through death. The folklore of poor Jews is thus transformed by a poignant socialist message [ 15 ]. Many of the Yiddishist cultural productions provided a nostalgic view of what had virtually disappeared, interpreted by artists who had already assimilated into an entirely different society. Romanticizing the ways of the impoverished shtetl Jews, the Yiddishists also had a political vision: to create a liberated culture which could help free the poor from the oppression they endured both through Jewish and non-Jewish law. Such a dream necessarily required the emancipation of Jews from Judaism and their assimilation into the traditions of Western democratic culture. Within the Yiddish art world, there were writers who were uninterested in using Jewish material in their work, even though they continued to write in the Yiddish language. They joined the European modernists instead, a movement in which other more obviously assimilated Jews, such as Kafka, subsequently gained international recognition. Thus, while they expressed themselves in a Jewish idiom, Yiddish poets, like Glatstein [16], identified with the avant-garde and had even less to do with traditional Judaism than the folklorists did. In sum, even though the Jewish political, intellectual and art worlds between the two wars were divided among several different cultural tendencies, almost all of them helped in their own way to assimilate the Jews. The Zionists, from the socialist Poale Zion, to the right-wing Mizrachi, did the most, ultimately, for making

the Jews like everybody else by seeking to create a Jewish state. But the Bundists too, with their combined nostalgia for the folk and anger at how traditional Judaism discriminated against the poor, together with their vision of a working class culture based on the profane experiences of the Jews, also contributed to the translation of Jewish reality into universal forms. Only the very orthodox [ 17] refused to collaborate with the assimilation process and, as they turned more and more in on themselves, they created an atomsphere that increasingly encouraged the young to leave and look for spiritual fulfillment in a secular world. There were significant thinkers at the time concerned with the impossible conflicts the Jews were living. One, was the historian Simon Dubnow. A socialist, he refused territorial nationalism in Europe or in Palestine and he criticized the rigidity of cultural nationalism expressed by the Zionists and Bundists alike. For Dubnow, there did not have to be just one Jewish language or definition of Jewish culture; there should be many [18]. Another major contributor to the dialogue was Ahad Ha'am. He worded about Jews finding so-called Jewish paths out of Judaism. In spite of their agnosticism, both Dubnow and Ahad Ha'am were unwilling to throw away their Jewish heritage and tradition. For Ahad Ha'am, in contrast to Dubnow, this heritage had to be nurtured by a spiritual center, namely Palestine. Deeply influenced by Ahad Ha'am, the poet Bialik remembers how: Our whole national heritage which outwardly seemed poor and dried up passed from the narrow limits of religion to the broad domain of the nation and thence, in its national guise, to the domain of humanity. Our national riches became human riches. The men of the haskala [the Jewish Enlightenment] regarded our past as a stream of vapors; some of them maintained that Judaism consisted of rubbish heaps scattered in many places and that Maimonides collected them into one large dung hill. It was Ahad Ha'am who made Judaism a foundation stone; who brought us to the realization that those sources which have absorbed the life of all our generations ought to be tapped for revival of Israel [19].

119 Israel, of course, listened very little to Ahad Ha'am and Diaspora Jews did not follow the teachings of Dubnow. The choices made by most Jews were less subtle than those suggested by these two great men, decisions framed in the context of a stultifying orthodoxy on one side and a variety of assimilationist compromises on the other. Reflecting upon the problem, Gershom Scholem remarked a number of years ago: We are paying the price of our slogans. We wanted to change something in the Jewish people and this desire has been a primary factor in our success. But we also wanted something else: to preserve continuity along with the change, continuity that doesn't express itself by changing forms. This we did not achieve. This continuity today expresses itself only in dogmatic conservatism, on the one hand, or indifference to the Jewish cultural heritage on the other [20].

CONCLUSION

Lilly Scherr and other Jewish cultural feminists are attempting to confront the problem identified by Gershom Scholem. But the solutions most available to us still come under the umbrella of assimilationist compromises, not unlike the ones devised by Moses Mendelssohn in his early attempts to make Judaism compatible with Western European cultural values. As we make a plea for the reappraisal of the role of women in Judaism and demand greater equality between the sexes, we are forced to work with the most assimilated branches of the faith, with those who have already sacrificed a good deal of cultural authenticity in order to accommodate bourgeois universalism. Many of us have given up trying to rework the Jewish religion and seek other so-called Jewish paths to a fuller cultural and political life. These secular feminist visions, however, fall into the same traps as those of the Zionists and Bundists, requiring even a more radical break with Jewish traditions, with the ways that make Jews stand culturally apart. The symbolic system of virtually every culture builds upon the biological differences that

exist between the sexes, ages and, where relevant, races. Western democratic traditions, however, claim to minimize them. Expressing an ideological commitment to the equality of all peoples, progressives have proposed only one path to freedom for Jews, women, Blacks and the proletariat: assimilation;or at best, the creation of separate nation-states where people in slightly varied ways can imitate the European ideal of a national culture. There are no simple answers to give and I, like Lilly Scherr, am caught in a web of contradictions. Women within traditional Judaism, as within almost all non-Western cultures, suffer even greater social discrimination, by feminist standards, than they do in Western secular society, a fact that is troubling for those of us who support cultural diversity. I can only think of what Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out over thirty years ago. The Jew, he said, has only one friend: the democrat. The same, we might add, is true for woman, Jewish or gentile. And as a friend, the democrat is a feeble protector. No doubt he proclaims that all men have equal rights; no doubt he has founded the League for the Rights of Man; but his deelarations show the weakness of his position... He recognizes neither Jew nor Arab, nor Negro, nor bourgeois, nor worker, but only man - man always the same in all times and all places [21 ].

A political philosophy that seeks to do away with differences and transforms groups into discrete individuals with the same rights and values, is a poor model for equality of the sexes within Judaism in a non-Jewish world. The best it can do, and has done, I suggest, is to justify the foundation of a separate Jewish nationstate which, in the name of democracy, promotes political and, incidentally, cultural uniformity within its borders. To put the argument another way, we seem to be talking less about feminism in terms that engage Jewish religious beliefs qua religious beliefs than we are about creating a feminism in the Hebrew language, in Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Arabic, the way we might speak about developing similar movements in French, English or Spanish. As it

now stands, Jewish feminism is a nationalist position, be it territorial or simply cultural, and follows in the true democratic tradition o f assimilation. It does little to protect Judaism from cultural homogenization. Judaism builds on maintaining differences, on separating spheres at every level. How can it accommodate the view of equality expressed in democratic theory? There is just one deity, it is true, and God did create "man in his own image, in the image o f God he created him; male and female he created them" [22], but Jewish ritual and scripture reflects complex elaborations o f dualities: heaven/earth; land/ sea; man/woman; Jew/gentile; Kosher/nonKosher; Sabbath/the rest o f the week. The holy and the profane. Even though the deity loves men and women, Jews and gentiles, the very structure o f the religion, as described in biblical texts as well as in the later commentaries, offers a set o f rules based on distinctions, on def'ming and ordering time and space, on determining the roles o f priests and Israelites, free men and slaves, men and women. Is it not inadequate to our task, therefore, to assume that we can merely introduce equal opportunities for women and men into Jewish law and call those changes compatible with the Halakhah? Are there, then, to continue to use Sartre's vocabulary, no "authentic" choices for Jewish women who are feminists to make? Must we stop being Jews in order to enjoy equality? Hopefully not. However, if we are interested in preserving Judaism as well as in changing the position of women within the religion, we must find ways o f freeing the concept o f "difference" from "discrimination." The democrats have not given us this choice. All they offer, is the possibility of being just like everybody else. NOTES i "As difficult as it is to be a Jewish man, it is harder to be a Jewish woman"! 2 Jewish religious law. 3 Arnold Toynbee, The WorldAfter the Peace Conference: Being an Epilogue to the History o f the Peace Conference to Paris and a Prologue to the Survey o f lnternational Af-

DialecticalAnthropology, 8 (1983) 1 1 3 - 1 2 0

fairs, 1920-23 (London: Oxford University Press, issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1926), pp. 4 - 5 . 4 Hans Kohn, The Idea o f Nationalism (New York: MacMiUan Company, 1956), p. 3. 5 Edward Shills, "Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties," British Journal o f Sociology, 8 (1957), pp. 1 3 0 146. 6 Kohn, op. cit., 1956,p. 19. 7 Harold W.V. Temperly, A History o f the Peace Conference o f Paris (London: London Publications under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, Henry Frownde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), Vol. V: Economic Reconstruction and Protection of Minorities, p. 133. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 138. 10 Stanislas Clermont-Tonn6rre (comte), cited in L. Poliakey, Histoire de l'antis~mitisme de Voltaire ~ Wagner (Pads: Calmann-Levy, 1968), Vol. III, p. 234. Translation: "We must refuse the Jews everything as a nation and grant them everything as individuals." 11 While I talk about 19th century Russia and not about thc other Eastern European empires of the period, the history of secularizing Jews living in Austria-Hungary, Prussia or the much reduced Poland that re-emerged for a few years during the 19th century, was often the story of an even more rapid assimilation process than the one witnessed under the Czar. 12 Cecil Roth and G. Wigoder (Editors in Chief), Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: MacMillan Company, 1971), Vol. 4, p. 1502. 13 Joshua Fishman (Editors), Never Say Die/ A Thousand Years o f Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981). See the many articles on the subject of Yiddish letters of the period in this volume. 14 Roth andWigoder, op. cit., 1971. 15 S. Ansky, The Dybbuk, translated from Yiddish by H.G. Alsberg and W. Katzin (New York: Liveright, 1971). See also Lucy S. Dawidowiez (Editor), The Golden Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 6 8 - 6 9 . S. Ansky is a pseudonym for Solomon Rappaport. 16 Jacob Glatstein, perhaps the best known of the Yiddish modernists, founded a group in the United States after the first World War. See Irving Howe, World o f Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich, 1976), pp. 439 ft. 17 By the very orthodox, I mcan those who refused to enter politics, not those who joined together and formed the Agudat Israel and actually won seats in the Polish Sejm. 18 Simon Dubnow (K.S. Pinson, Editor), Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism (New York: Temple Books, Atheneum, 1970). 19 Chalm Bialik, in Dawidowiez, op. cit., 1967, p. 371. 20 Gershom Seholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 41. 21 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, translated by G. Beeker (New York: Sehoeken Books, 1948), p. 55. 22 The Book o f Genesis, Chapter I, Verse 27, King James Version.