Is Judaism Democratic?

Reflections from Theory and Practice Throughout the Ages

Leonard J. Greenspoon

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781612495545
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

As government by the people, democracy has always had its proponents as well as opponents. What forms of government have Jewish leaders, both with and without actual political power, favored? Not surprisingly, many options have been offered theoretically and in practice. Perhaps more surprisingly, democracy has been at the heart of most systems of governance. Biblical Israel was largely a monarchy, but many writers of the Bible were critical of the excesses that almost always arise when human kings take charge: the general populace loses its freedom. In rabbinic Judaism, the majority ruled, and many principles that support modern democratic institutions have their basis in interpretations offered by the classical rabbis. This is true even though rabbinic Jews did not govern democratically. When Jews did have some degree of self-governance, democratic principles and institutions were often upheld. At the same time, so most communal leaders insisted, God-the ultimate judge-ultimately judges everything and everyone. Modern Israel provides the first instance of an independent Jewish nation since the Hasmonean monarchy of the second and first centuries BCE. On an almost daily basis, common features uniting democracy and Judaism, as well as flash point of controversy, are highlighted there. The fourteen scholars whose work is collected here are mindful of all of these circumstances-and many more. In a style that is accessible, clear, and balanced, they allow readers to assess these issues based on the most current thinking. This volume is required reading for anyone interested in how religion and politics have interacted, and continue to interact, in Judaism and among Jews.

Linking “Egypt with Texas”:
Emma Lazarus’s Jewish Vision
of American Democracy

David J. Peterson and Joan Latchaw

INTRODUCTION

Emma Lazarus was from a mixed Jewish heritage bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. Her mother’s Portuguese Sephardic ancestors (Seixas and Nathan) emigrated to British colonial America before the 1750s, and her father’s Ashkenazic family left Germany for the United States in the 1790s. It was largely the Sephardic ancestry that conferred near blueblood status on Lazarus’s family. Her great-great-uncle Gershom Mendes Seixas, for example, led New York City’s Shearith Israel Synagogue, and her great-great-uncle Moses Mendes Seixas presided over the most fabled of all Jewish American places of worship, Newport’s Yeshuat Israel (later Touro Synagogue).

The correspondence between Moses Seixas and George Washington stands as a beacon to American liberty and civil rights. The newly elected president, along with a delegation that included Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, visited Newport in August 1790. Among the citizens who addressed the president was Seixas, who stated, “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now … behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.”¹ In a letter written soon after the visit, Washington famously assured the Newport Congregation that “‘the children of the Stock of Abraham shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid,’” an image Emma Lazarus would invoke in several of her poems.²

When Emma Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849, her immediate family was prominent in both the Jewish community and, due to her father’s prosperous sugar business, the upper echelons of New York society. Social connections further linked the family to America’s literary elite, enabling an eighteen-year-old Emma to send her first volume of poetry, Poems and Translations (1867), to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He enthusiastically offered to became her literary mentor, and he remained an important advocate of her work.³ With her family’s support (and Emerson’s mentoring), she developed into a prolific writer, publishing six volumes of poetry and translations. In the early 1880s she became, moreover, a social advocate for the Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms. She wrote impassioned defenses of European Jews, along with proto-Zionist essays that appeared in prominent American periodicals such as Century Magazine and American Hebrew. She also volunteered for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and in 1883 organized the short-lived Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews, which promoted the settlement of Palestine.

Eulogizing Lazarus for American Hebrew after her untimely death at thirty-eight in 1887, Rabbi Sabato Morais, Orthodox hazzan [cantor] of Philadelphia’s Mikvah Israel Synagogue, styled her the “poetical Deborah” of the United States, noting she “would have reached a superlative degree as the poetess of the Jews in America” had she lived.⁴ While Morais’s praise for Lazarus asserts an uncomplicated understanding of her Jewish identity, contemporary Lazarus scholars note a sharp contrast between Lazarus’s early poetry—seen as more secular—and the later works that attack European Antisemitism or explore Jewish diasporic experiences, a shift they figure as reflecting an assimilated, secularized American who late in life comes to embrace a Jewish identity.

They further observe that Lazarus shared an uneasy, at times ambivalent, relationship with her Jewish heritage that guided her interest in Jewish philosophers and intellectuals (such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, and Benjamin Disraeli) who experienced similar conflicts between their ethnic and religious heritages and their attraction to a broader, more cosmopolitan world. Esther Schor asserts, for example, that Lazarus shared with Heine a strongly divided sense of self: his between Jewish and German-Romantic identities, and hers between “the double life she was trying to live as an American and a Jew.”⁵ Indeed Lazarus’s own comments on Heine are frequently glossed as summing up her own sense of self: “He was [writes Lazarus] a Jew, with the mind and eyes of a Greek. A beauty-loving, myth-creating pagan soul was imprisoned in a Hebrew frame; or rather, it was twinned … with another equally powerful soul—proud rebellious, oriental in its love of the vague, the mysterious, the grotesque, and tragic with the two-thousand-year-old passion of the Hebrews.”⁶

Though her family was not religious, Lazarus’s Jewish heritage serves as an important touchstone in her writing, drawing on major Jewish figures (mostly Sephardic) from the medieval, Enlightenment, and Romantic periods. She celebrates luminaries such as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi, Spinoza, and Heine for their contributions to both Jewish and European intellectual and artistic culture. Moreover, she herself often made statements that reveal her strong identification with her Jewish heritage even as she explicitly disidentified with the religious aspects of Judaism. Writing to Edmund Stedman, for example, she declares that she is “proud of my blood and heritage, but Hebrew ideals [i.e., religious principles] do not appeal to me.”⁷ Sending Reform Rabbi Gustav Gottheil (Temple Emanu-El, New York City) some requested translations of Gabirol, Judah Ha-Levi, and ibn Ezra, she notes, “I cheerfully offered to help you to the extent of my ability, and was glad to prove to you that my interest and sympathies were loyal to our race, although my religious convictions (if such they can be called) and the circumstances of my life have led me somewhat apart from our people.”⁸

The hypothesis that she struggled with Jewish identity has even been used by some to explain the relative obscurity into which her poetry has fallen. Francine Klagsbrun goes so far as to claim that her writings “[reflect] the discomfort of a woman who was not totally at home in the Christian world she inhabited but had not quite found her footing in the Jewish one either. It has the feel of outsiderness, of a writer who held herself too much apart, too much above the people she sought to defend and counsel. The outsiderness has stood in the way of [her work’s] survival.”⁹ Ranen Omer-Sherman even argues that Lazarus’s Jewish-focused poetry tends to present Jewish faith traditions as parochial, comprising what Lazarus calls “‘the whole rotten machinery of ritualism, feasts and fasts, sacrifices, oblations, and empty prayers.’”¹⁰ Moreover, Omer-Sherman asserts, Lazarus tends to contrast these insular seeming traditions to American democracy’s embrace of the “Enlightenment’s universalizing discourse of rationalism.”¹¹ According to Omer-Sherman, Lazarus’s dedication to such rationalism leads her to “[erase] Jewish difference” in favor of assimilation and to encourage “the consolations of forgetfulness”¹² whereby unenlightened Jews (especially Eastern European Ashkenazim) could move out of their primitive “Oriental” past and into Enlightenment modernity.

Questions about her religious identity, degrees of assimilation, and commitment to Enlightenment universalism obscure, however, her role as both Jewish intellectual and poet of American democracy, roles highlighted in Rabbi Sabato Morais’s eulogy. While Lazarus may have lacked strong religious convictions, she never lost her commitment to the intellectual, spiritual, artistic, and political legacies of her people. Indeed, she belongs in the company of other Jewish-American intellectuals, such as Isaac Leeser, Isaac Mayer Wise, Isaac Harby, and Morais, all advocates for a particularly American-inflected approach to the Jewish Enlightenment, an approach that positions the United States as a new homeland where Jews can enjoy religious, economic, and intellectual liberty.¹³ As Morais argues in his famous 1851 Thanksgiving sermon,

A century has nearly elapsed since the scattered children of Judah here found a home of security and peace; here they have thriven and acquired wealth; no internal adversary has ever molested them, nor has the rod of tyranny from without reached these shores; here they have but to prove themselves worthy, and they will rise as high as any free man can aspire; no disabilities, no legal impediments, militate against them; what a felicity is that of which you are made to partake! dear brethren, the boundless field of knowledge is unclosed to you, you may enter it, and freely gather its delightful fruits; you may give scope to your mental energies, for the advancement of your fellow-citizens and of mankind at large:—Unimpeded in the exercise of your religious duties, in accordance with the Jewish doctrine, you are not merely tolerated, but regarded with respect, for you also form a part of that glorious whole that constitutes the American Republic.¹⁴

Lazarus’s work reflects similar themes. In the subsequent sections of this essay we demonstrate how Lazarus draws on the dominant culture’s tropes of universal rights to freedom, liberty, and opportunity to argue for and promote Jewish belonging. As we show in our discussion of poems such as “In Exile,” she draws on discourses associated with Jeffersonian agrarian democracy to figure America as providing a new promised land for diasporic Jews. Moreover, her model of American democracy does not necessitate assimilation under the aegis of some universalized rationalism that requires Jewish citizens to forget either their ethnic and religious identities or their diasporic experiences. Nor does becoming, in the words of Morais, “a part of the glorious whole that constitutes the American Republic” necessitate the surrendering of differences within the broader Jewish community. Indeed, as our discussion of “By the Waters of Babylon” suggests, Lazarus presents America as the location where all the “outcasts of Judea” (Morais) may gather to reconstitute the “Soul of Israel.” Yet this rebirth cannot fully unfold, Lazarus argues, until the already established Jews of America (the Sephardic Portuguese specifically) are prepared to cast aside their antipathy toward Ashkenazic difference.

“IN EXILE,” RUSSIAN JEWS, AND FRONTIER
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

“In Exile” (Appendix 1) is a five-stanza poem that depicts idyllic, pastoral scenes wherein “soft breezes bow the grass” and Jewish comrades, unused to agrarian life, labor “beneath the shadowing oak tree” after “the Southern day of heavy toil.” The poem opens with an epigraph that situates the poem on the American frontier. In the epigraph, an unidentified Russian correspondent declares that since their arrival in Texas “our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs.” We never learn with any certainty how these Jewish immigrants came to be in Texas. Perhaps they are pogrom refugees fresh off the boat, as it were, who were recruited by organizations such as the Alliance Israelite Universelle/Am Olam and sent West to become farmers. Or perhaps they are Russian exiles who brought with them plans to form agricultural utopian communities in the American West, yearning, as Herscher puts it, to “strike roots in the American soil,” despite having little farming experience. According to Herscher, these Jewish idealists saw America as a democratic utopia, “a great and glorious land of liberty, whose broad and trackless acres offer an asylum and a place for … courageous souls, willing to toil.”¹⁵ Lazarus’s exiles demonstrate similar yearnings. The poem’s images of “brotherly life” and “unbroken paradise,” a phrase repeated in the second stanza, link to a broader discourse about agrarian democracy and the American Frontier’s role in its development, as envisioned by founders such as Thomas Jefferson and extolled by writers and thinkers ranging from Henry David ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Contributors
• Goalkeeping: A Biblical Alternative to Greek Political Philosophy and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
• The “Will of the People” in Antimonarchic Biblical Texts
• The Democratic Principle Underlying Jewish Law: Moving Beyond Whether It Is So to How and Why It Is So
• Mipnei Darkhei Shalom: The Promotion of Harmonious Relationships in the Mishnah’s Social Order
• Theocracy as Monarchy and Anarchy
• Jewish Democracy: From Medieval Community to Modern State
• Linking “Egypt with Texas”: Emma Lazarus’s Jewish Vision of American Democracy
• Judaism and Democracy
• Monarchy and Polity: Systems of Government in Jewish Tradition
• Democracy, Judaism, Israel, Art, and Demagoguery
• Dignity and Democracy: Defending the Principle of the Sanctity of Human Life
• “The Will of the People” or “The Will of the Rabbis”: Democracy and the Rabbis’ Authority
• The Jewish State and the End of Democratic Judaism