Religion: Who’s What in Jewry

TO non-Jews, and indeed to many Jews, the ethnic and religious variations among the world’s 14 million Jews are bewildering. Scientifically speaking, there is no Jewish “race.” As Scholar Raphael Patai points out in his book, Tents of Jacob, Jews of one geographical area share physiological traits with their immediate non-Jewish neighbors but much less so with Jews of a distant geographical area. Still, the Jews’ long history of wandering as tightly knit communities has dispersed them into a wide range of distinct ethnic groups.

By far the most numerous today are the ASHKENAZIC Jews, who became an important group in the Rhineland about the 10th century. They take their name from the medieval Hebrew name for Germany, Ashkenaz. The Ashkenazim, who spread across Europe and to North and South America, suffered most of the casualties in the Hitler years, but still account for some 84% of the world’s Jews.

The remaining 16% are divided between the SEPHARDIC and ORIENTAL Jews. The Sephardim developed into a community in medieval Spain, where their achievements in arts, government and letters made them the most influential Jewish community of the Diaspora until their expulsion in 1492. Their language, Ladino, reflects their Spanish roots. The Oriental Jews are scattered from North Africa to Afghanistan, usually speaking Jewish varieties of Arabic or Persian, and in the case of one group, Aramaic.

Beyond these three basic groups there are several smaller Jewish communities with long histories of their own, such as the Jews of the Caucasus, the Cochin Jews of India, the black Falasha Jews of Ethiopia, and an indigenous population in Italy that dates back more than 2,000 years. Though the Italian Jews have often prospered, their numbers are now diminishing through intermarriage with Roman Catholics.

As the Jewish homeland, Israel has Jews of almost every kind, color and Judaic language, although the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew has been made standard for Israel. In the U.S., the oldest Jewish community is that of the Sephardim, who first arrived in 1654. They brought with them an ORTHODOX heritage, but many strayed from it in the New World. The first important wave of Ashkenazic immigration from Germany in the 1840s and ’50s, on the other hand, brought with it the REFORM movement of religious Judaism, an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment. Caught up in the rationalism of the age, Reform set out to modernize liturgy, rejected the binding authority of Jewish law and such key beliefs as a literal Messiah and personal immortality. But it re-emphasized Jewish ethical values.

The Reform approach seemed sterile to some Jews, who in the late 19th century began to turn to a compromise between Reform and Orthodoxy known in the U.S. as CONSERVATIVE Judaism. At the same time, waves of Eastern European Jews, some of whom clung to their Old World Orthodoxy, were emigrating to the U.S. But not until the rise of Nazism in Europe did yet another group of Orthodox Jews arrive in the U.S.—the followers of HASIDISM, a movement of mystical enthusiasm that sprang up in Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Among them were the Satmar Hasidim, named after the Rumanian town of Satmar, and the Lubavitch Hasidim, named after the White Russian town of Lubavitch. The Satmar sect is fiercely loyal to the U.S. but anti-Zionist because only the Messiah can re-establish Israel. They remain small (about 5,000 families), but the Lubavitcher, who accept Israel and are also staunch U.S. patriots, now have perhaps 150,000 members and sympathizers.

At the other end of the spectrum is RECONSTRUCTIONISM, a sort of Jewish equivalent of Unitarianism that grew out of the naturalism and pragmatism of American thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Its adherents number some 2,300 families.

Because the question of religious affiliation has been kept out of recent U.S. censuses, the current Jewish population of the U.S. can only be estimated: about 6,000,000. Roughly half of U.S. Jewish families belong to synagogues, and the three major groups—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox—now probably share that membership in approximately equal thirds. Only a massive Jewish population survey now under way will tell Americans just how Jewish they really are.