Ethos and Identity by Alan Merriam

Author:Alan Merriam [Merriam, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Physical
ISBN: 9781351311182
Google: QpsuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28T03:27:19+00:00

A ‘non-Jewish Jew’?

I have mentioned earlier how among the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants there were many who had already cast off the orthodoxy of the shtetl, and who in America expressed their Jewishness by participating in the Yiddish-speaking labour movement. Paul Jacobs came to socialism by a very different route, just as his home background was also very different. His parents, of middle-class mercantile stock, had come to America from Germany some time before the First World War and, able to rely on already established connections, their transition was accomplished without undue disruption. By the time Paul was born in 1918, his father was running a prosperous import-and-export business, and the family was comfortably settled in an apartment house in the upper-Bronx district of New York.

The Jacobs belonged to a Reform Temple, which gave adequate expression to their rather tepid attachment to Judaism. Indeed, as Paul recalls it, the atmosphere at home was as much German as Jewish; there was no observance of the dietary laws and Christmas was a more important festival than Chanukah. Friday night, the eve of the Sabbath, was marked not by the lighting of candles, but more often was the occasion for a game of bridge with friends. Even so, their Jewish identification remained sufficiently strong for Paul to be sent to Sunday School in order to be prepared for his confirmation. Classes were a bore; by the time he was due to leave Sunday School Paul was already displaying all the familiar signs of adolescent revolt. Assigned as a topic for his graduation address the seventh commandment, he prepared an attack on traditional notions of morality which finished up by suggesting that no Jewish girl should come to the marriage bed a virgin. But whereas the adolescent sons of the Eastern European immigrants might rebel against the ‘meaningless’ demands that orthodoxy made of them, Paul’s early rejection of Judaism had to rest on different grounds. If services at the Temple had to be cancelled during the summer months, it seemed to him that being a Jew was not nearly as important as his parents had said. What repelled him was that the Judaism he was asked to accept was an empty form, lacking in content. Apart from the ‘pallid diet of pap’ that he was fed at the Sunday School, the chief lesson he appeared to learn at home was a set of defensive standards. Proper behaviour was based on the fear of how the Gentile world might react. A Jew did not make ‘trouble’.

Paul appears to have had a close attachment to his mother, whom he describes as gentle. His father, however, was stern and as in later adolescence Paul began to move increasingly in radical circles, their relations became ever more tense and acrimonious. From the parents’ point of view there was deep concern with Paul’s failure to live up to the standards of a ‘good Jewish son’. On Paul’s side there was his contempt for, and impatience with, business and

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