The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science

Amos Morris-Reich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135900915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

The transformation of the human sciences into the social sciences in the third part of the 19th century was closely related to attempts to develop and implement methods for dealing with social tensions and the rationalization of society. This book studies the connections between academic disciplines and notions of Jewish assimilation and integration and demonstrates that the quest for Jewish assimilation is linked to and built into the conceptual foundations of modern social science disciplines.

Focusing on two influential "assimilated" Jewish authors—anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel—this study shows that epistemological considerations underlie the authors' respective evaluations of the Jews' assimilation in German and American societies as a form of "group extinction" or as a form of "social identity." This conceptual model gives a new "key" to understanding pivotal issues in recent Jewish history and in the history of the social sciences.

1
Language, Culture, and the Representation of the Jews

Throughout his numerous writings in the sphere of culture, in marked contradiction to his works in the sphere of physical anthropology, Boas never mentions the Jews. This discrepancy raises a number of questions. How is this connected to his aims in the spheres of cultural and physical anthropology? And how is this connected to his support of Jewish assimilation? The social sciences of the latter part of the nineteenth century attempted to define the relations between cultures and peoples. Throughout his career, Franz Boas developed three independent but interconnected variables for the study of distinct anthropological groups: geography, race, and culture.¹

In this chapter, I reconstruct key aspects of Boas’s linguistic paradigm, which constituted the core of his concept of culture.² I shall claim that these aspects are incapable of representing the complex Jewish linguistic situation. Leonard Glick argued that Boas’s revocation of Jewish group existence is the outcome of his biographical background. I shall claim that a reflection on Jewish assimilation from the viewpoint of the paradigm of the research involved will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. I will show that Boas’s cultural paradigm constitutes group differences according to certain constants that, based on their real and imagined characteristics, cannot apply in the Jewish case. Hence, I argue that his allusions to Jews or abstention thereof become clear when one recognizes his differing anthropological aims, and I show that as a result of these theoretical considerations, the Jews were tossed into “anthropological limbo.” Jewish cultural existence, as represented by Boas’s anthropological coordinates, contradicts some of the most elementary and cardinal principles of his paradigm.

LANGUAGE

In his pioneering treatment of languages devoid of a writing system (designated by Boas as “primitive”), Boas subverted the nineteenth-century concept of language and initiated a long-standing working paradigm further developed by Sapir, Whorf, and others. I first deal with Boas’s confrontation with the Western Eurocentric, evolutionary study of primitive languages among the native Indians of America prevalent upon his arrival in the United States. Then I shall evaluate the difficulty his linguistic paradigm encounters with the Jews’ complex linguistic situation.

Counter-Eurocentric Evolutionism

The central paradigm of nineteenth-century linguistics, as asserted by Dell Hymes, “records it as the triumph of historical work, especially of comparative Indo-European” languages.³ Nineteenth-century linguists and anthropologists linked language and race, paying special attention to the texts and manuscripts of written language. This attention was inherently based on a limited, ethnocentric perspective on language, since it was restricted to those cultures and languages with a long written tradition, which were largely their own Western ones. Historical philologists restricted themselves mainly to the diachronic study of language. Upon his arrival in the United States in 1887, Boas challenged linguistic work done on the Native Americans on at least three points, which vitally changed research on the language of peoples without writing systems and helped transpose linguistics. First, Boas challenged the empirical value of the research done in his time, and this was central in turning the study of language among the Native Americans into a professional academic area. Second, in contrast to the comparisons between American languages and Indo-European ones, which were based solely on the model of the Indo-European languages, Boas introduced what he called analytical terms of description. Third, Boas strongly undermined the regnant evolutionary presumptions in the study of primitive language.

The study of North American Indian languages was, at that time, performed mainly by missionaries eager to convert Indians to Christianity. This work was largely carried out by untrained amateurs and was not subject to academic scrutiny. Boas requested that a student of a tribe, a group, or a language know the language he is studying and have a basic education in the area of linguistics. This constituted a demand for a comprehensive modification of the standards of study of Indian languages.⁴ Boas’s influence not only set new standards for the field of ethnology but also institutionalized those standards throughout the work of generations of his students.

Boas’s program for a “descriptive analytical” treatment of languages was in fact a demand for an inherently counterevolutionary paradigm in the study of what were perceived as primitive languages. The majority of linguistic studies of Native American languages in Boas’s day were comparisons of compounded lists of words with the vocabulary of Indo-European languages and the comparison of native grammatical structures with those of Indo-European languages. Scholars such as Brinton and Powell assumed that all Native American languages shared similar grammatical features, as well as the same evolutionary stages of development. The then-current work on the subject constantly pointed to the inferiority of these languages (smaller vocabulary, simpler syntax, lack of abstract notions found in European languages).⁵ Boas’s program aimed at revealing the false premises and erroneous procedures of such research. The comparisons of his contemporaries, Boas maintained, were grounded in a specific notion of language, itself borrowed from European conceptions of Indo-European languages and thus the compared languages could only be found to be inferior in form to the European ones. These results, in turn, reaffirmed the supremacy of European languages (and races).

Any language can basically serve as an arbitrary reference point for the analysis of the grammatical forms of another language. Indo-European languages could equally be analyzed according to grammatical forms found in Indian languages. Boas demanded a purely “analytical” study of language, by which he meant “to keep out the point of view of the Indo-European languages as thoroughly as possible.”⁶ Indo-European languages would no longer serve as a privileged point of reference for the study of other languages.

Studying groups that lacked any system of writing and therefore had no corpus of written texts rendered the European-philological method of studying the evolution of language, by a detailed philological and etymological analysis of written texts, inapplicable.⁷ Boas’s program for a purely descriptive analytical analysis of language was based from its very onset on the spoken language. Language was studied in terms of practically learned, physically produced sounds. As the product of nineteenth-century historicism, Boas maintained that each language evolved historically. However, he moved towards structuralism, an approach that defines the status of elements explicitly and consistently in terms of internal relations.

The fact that Boas and his students were establishing a paradigm for the linguistic study of groups with no writing system and no corpus of written texts is of utmost significance to our context. Boas’s paradigm came to identify the existence of the language with the people who spoke it. Boas states that “to the linguist … language is the individuality of a people, and therefore a classification of languages must present itself to him as a classification of peoples.”⁸ But when a language has no written record, its existence corresponds to the lifespan of those who speak it. A language “lives” as long as it is spoken. Implicitly, linguistic assimilation of the group’s members leads to the disappearance of the group.⁹

Boas’s synchronic paradigm subverted the evolutionary premises of anthropological study of primitive language. Couched in methodological considerations, as early as 1888, Boas, in his article “On Alternating Sounds,” argued against the prevalent evolutionary paradigm of Brinton and other linguists of primitive languages concerning the problem known as “alternating sounds.” Brinton and others, as Stocking writes, “were still interpreting them as traces of the ‘vague,’ ‘fluctuating,’ and still tentative language of Paleolithic man, as evidence of the evolutionary ‘primitiveness of Indian tongues.’ ”¹⁰ That is, “alternating sounds” recorded in the languages of primitive peoples testified to the primitiveness of the language as well as the people who speak it.

In his field research, Boas came to notice that on different occasions he spelled the same words differently. For instance, the Tsimshian word for “fear,” once as päc and once as bas. Drawing on his own experience, he reached the thesis of “sound-blindness,” suggested by a student of G. Stanley Hall.¹¹ “Sound fluctuation” had more to do with the anthropologist who is attempting to record a fully unfamiliar language than the language he was investigating. A closer investigation of his own misspellings suggested to him that each of the misspelled component sounds was located somewhere between two sounds to which his ear was accustomed. Dustin M. Wax points to the fact that Boas was extending the same methodology of his earlier work on the color of water, which also reflected a learned pattern of perception native to culture.¹² That is, Boas related the fluctuation of sound to perception, and to his own practices as an anthropologist, rather than to the language he was trying to record. Stocking stresses the significance of this article for the history of anthropological thought. Boas characteristically grounded his critique in considerations of methodology. But, according to Stocking, “On Alternating Sounds” is much more than a critical or methodological exercise. It in fact foreshadows much of Boas’s later criticism of racial thought and physical anthropology.¹³ Considering Boas’s treatment of language in a broader context, Stocking concludes that Boas was “beginning to develop, the broader problem … of [asking] were savages to be treated as imperfect approximations of those of European civilization, or rather, as quite differently constituted cultural categorizations.”¹⁴

The Linguistic Paradigm of Boas

The linguistic paradigm initiated by Boas was to become one of the most influential paradigms in American linguistics, which lasted well into the 1950s, when Noam Chomsky’s linguistics succeeded it. Two branches can be considered as originating from Boas’s linguistic work. The first includes works such as those of Alfred Louis Kroeber’s, for whom language was a tool in ethnological study. Edward Sapir and Lee Whorf, on the other hand, increasingly turned language into their center of research per se. Boas introduced important issues into American anthropology and linguistics, which divided later paradigms of linguistics and anthropology. Chomsky’s starting point, for instance, may well be seen as a reaction to Boas’s and his students’ relativism (to which, it seems plausible, Boas might not have objected). Boas, as we will see, focused on performance, which is by necessity historically determined. Operating on the same differentiation between universal faculties and historically determined performance, Bloomsfield moved towards the search for universal linguistic categories. This progression was further developed by Zelig Harris and completed by Chomsky. Chomsky shifted his argument from performance to potency, which his paradigm represents as universal. Clifford Geertz made an analogous move in relation to the notion of culture, showing that cultures are not sui generis but implicit in human nature.¹⁵ I shall now attempt to demonstrate that what Boas saw as a strictly empirical and analytical study of language introduced in fact important supraempirical axioms concerning the nature of language and its relation to the life of its speech community.

Boas sides with the empiricist conception of language rather than the rationalist one. Boas was not seeking the abstract, universal logic or grammar of all languages but rather the empirical characteristics of different historical languages. I focus on Boas’s development of German Romantic notions of intuiting the “genius” of a culture’s distinctive configuration through careful study of its language.¹⁶ My aim is to show that this conception encounters serious difficulties with the linguistic situation of the Jews.

Boas continues Herder’s line of thought, according to which human nature is anthropologically diversified. For Boas, human nature was not a datum but a problem, something variable, whose special characteristics called for separate investigation in special cases. In this respect, language occupied a privileged status; following Theodor Waitz’s Anthropologie und Naturvölker, Boas viewed the characteristics of language as being more stable than racial or ethnoracial qualities. Language was increasingly conceived as more permanent, more durable than religion or race.¹⁷

In holding this view, Boas was importing German thought to the United States. Fichte expresses a similar understanding concerning the interdependence between language and group identity. In his Addresses to the German Nation, Fichte states that language “is the most important criterion by which a nation is recognized to exist, and to have the right to form a state of its own.” Very much in line with Boas’s treatment of the linguistic aspect of anthropological being, Fichte concluded that “we give the name of people to men whose organs of speech are influenced by the same external conditions, who live together, and who develop their language in continuous communication with each other.” Furthermore, Fichte adds: “so one can say, on the other hand that, where a people has ceased to govern itself, it is equally bound to give up its language and to coalesce with its conquerors.”¹⁸ Consequently, it is possible to conclude from these statements that there is an affinity between the idea of a language with that of its origin.¹⁹ In this framework, wishing to affirm the assimilability of the Jews, Boas must find a way to deny that the Jews have their origin in themselves.

Language, according to Herder, “can only be learnt in a community. It is synonymous with thought … every language is different from every other.”²⁰ Each language expresses the collective experience of the group.²¹ However, with the creation of racial categories in the nineteenth century, all of humanity’s attributes, including language, were seen as reflective of biology.²² The unique achievement of Boasian anthropology is the development of Herder’s thoughts on language while separating them from the biological domain. In fact, Boas ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Language, Culture, and the Representation of the Jews
• 2 Assimilation as Extinction
• 3 From Assimilation to Difference
• 4 Objects, Definitions, and Assimilation
• 5 The Aesthetics of Jewish Assimilation
• 6 The “Jew”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index