Emancipation and “Religion Only”

Kaplan's concerns about Americanization and the erosion of Jewish otherness were decisively informed by his particular way of seeing the history of Jewish life in Europe. In looking back at Europe for the purpose of charting a course for the American Jewish future, one thing seems to have stood out to Kaplan above almost everything else—the issue of Jewish emancipation—that is, the (sometimes temporary) extension of civic equality to the formerly disenfranchised Jews of France and Germany.Footnote ¹³ In Civilization, Kaplan caustically terms emancipation as “one of the grievous mistakes in Jewish history.”Footnote ¹⁴ The mistake, he argues, is that emancipation caused Jews to adopt “the fictitious assumption that Judaism was a religion only.”Footnote ¹⁵

From the outset, it should be said that this is a somewhat odd verdict for Kaplan to render on the issue of emancipation. Kaplan is not lamenting that emancipation led to a specific change in Jewish religious attitudes. Nor is he saying that further proximity to other European peoples and cultures was harmful in and of itself. In other words, Kaplan is neither promoting insularity nor xenophobia. Rather, his critique of emancipation is based on a more fundamental worry about changes taking place in modern Jewish self-understanding.

Specifically, Kaplan's worry is about the power dynamic underwriting these changes. Kaplan views Judaism's transformation into a “religion only” as coming at the behest of a dominant state and a hegemonic culture. He is not contesting that Judaism is in part a religion, but that it has been reduced from the outside into a religion only. Irrespective of the historical veracity of Kaplan's account of Jewish history, his introduction of this perspective on the category of religion, especially as it relates to the future of American Judaism, is nonetheless noteworthy. According to Kaplan, Judaism became a religion only in recent times under specific conditions—coercive conditions that led Jews to confuse emancipation (i.e., liberal freedom) and submission.

This discussion of emancipation is an important prelude to Civilization's analysis of the place of, and possibilities for, minority collectives in the modern liberal state. According to Kaplan, the emancipation of European Jewry was conditioned on the unqualified acceptance of the state as the sole public authority to which they owed loyalty.Footnote ¹⁶ Emancipated Jews thus were forced to forfeit an officially recognized, albeit stateless, Jewish community in exchange for citizenship. Kaplan characterizes Jewish collectivity prior to emancipation as possessed of a “common life and singleness of purpose.” He even goes so far as to favorably compare the corporate structure of preemancipation Jewish life with those “peoples living in their own lands and under their own governments.”Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, Jewish political life outside the state was preferable even to having a territory and sovereignty of one's own. For Kaplan, the Jewish national spirit was healthy and intact even and especially without the benefits of citizenship in the modern state.

In the coerced exchange of emancipation, Kaplan notes a degradation of the meaning of Judaism in the life of the Jew. As a consequence of divesting the Jewish community of all authority, involvement in Jewish life was transformed into the more or less free choice of the individual. As individuals, Jews could come and go as they pleased, participating as much or as little in Jewish life as they desired. Religion was no longer the domain of communal striving and growth. As a “religion only,” Judaism was reduced to a voluntary and largely confessional association of Jewish individuals.

Of course, Kaplan was a leader and thinker in the context of American—not European—Jewry. Nevertheless, in addressing himself to the condition and future of American Judaism, Kaplan framed America as liable to exacerbate the already fearsome problems evident in European emancipation.Footnote ¹⁸ In particular, Kaplan's pessimistic forecast for the future of American Judaism was motivated in part by the appearance of American hospitality. American Jews, notably the millions of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, were able to receive the benefits of American citizenship without having to protect themselves from state-backed pogroms or wage a fight for emancipation. In other words, to the recently arrived European Jewish immigrants, America appeared largely more welcoming than Europe had ever been. It thus stood to reason that America was also more deserving of individual Jews’ identification with the state.

Kaplan's American project was thus predicated on something of a longing backward glance at preemancipation Jewish life. Kaplan's situating of his anxieties about the American Jewish future in the context of the European past opens an important question. That is, what have been, and continue to be, the conditions and costs of liberal American hospitality? This question is an important frame for Kaplan's constructive project—under the heading of “civilization”—which was intended to stave off what he foresaw as the assimilative consequences of America's update to European emancipation.

In Judaism as a Civilization, Kaplan's analysis of the threat that America posed to Judaism goes well beyond a time-stamped account of an immigrant's cautious appreciation of his new home. On the contrary, Kaplan offers resources for a critique of the hegemonic terms of American life and identity. As Noam Pianko has argued, Kaplan's antihegemonic posture is core to his appropriation of the language of “civilization.” Pianko likens Kaplan to such “thinkers and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells” who, in the language of Gail Bederman, “invert[ed] the discourse” of the otherwise imperialist and colonialist meaning of civilization.Footnote ¹⁹ Kaplan's distinctive use of “civilization” thus runs counter to the homogenizing imperative at the core of the liberal state. For Kaplan, “civilization” denotes a kind of minority identity where “[one's] entire being becomes a nerve that reaches out to the life of [one's] people.”Footnote ²⁰ In this engagement with Kaplan, however, I am setting the term “civilization” to the side in order to focus on his analysis of religion and race.Footnote ²¹ This focus, I believe, has even more potential than analysis of the term “civilization” to serve as a resource for engaging with contemporary questions of racism, antisemitism, and whiteness in American Jewish life.Footnote ²²

The Invisibility of American Protestant Dominance

In his search for a term to nurture rather than restrict the full breadth and dynamism of modern Jewish life, Kaplan identifies the category of “religion” as a kind of poisoned bait that has been largely swallowed by modern Judaism. Judaism as a “religion only,” according to Kaplan, catalyzes an ever-deeper ingratiation into and acceptance of the costs of liberal hospitality and political equality. But what exactly makes the modern category of religion so potent and pernicious in this respect? In most respects, Kaplan's answer to this question is: Christianity.

As an immigrant from Eastern Europe, Kaplan looked back at a context for Jewish life where political Christianity was ubiquitous. Nearly twenty years before Civilization, Kaplan had appraised this situation critically and linked the universalistic outlook of Christian theology to Christendom's imperial ambitions.Footnote ²³ The Church could not conceive of any individual outside the boundaries of its saving power and, therefore, could not concede that anyone should remain beyond the reach of its political power. This, according to Kaplan, led the Church to lay claim to the Jewish soul and try to lay waste to the Jewish body.Footnote ²⁴ Kaplan contrasted the violent hostility of Catholic Christendom to the Reformation and its Protestant outgrowths. Writing two decades before Civilization, Kaplan identified in Protestantism a type of religion that would encourage the “spiritual potentialities of nations,” and thus the flourishing of Judaism.Footnote ²⁵

Two decades later, however, Kaplan's assessment of Protestantism could not be more at odds with these earlier comments.Footnote ²⁶ Kaplan now saw American Protestantism as the undisputed heir to political Christendom in Europe. Despite America's pretensions to separation of church and state, Kaplan regarded the state's appearance of confessional neutrality mostly as an illusion. The modern state's claim to the individual betrayed the spirit of political Christendom's imperial ambitions. Kaplan glosses the American ideal of the melting pot as an updated rendition of Christendom's imperial ambitions.Footnote ²⁷ Pianko has aptly termed this Kaplan's “Christian model of American national culture.”Footnote ²⁸

It was widely evident in Kaplan's time that America's religious preference—even if disestablished—was Protestantism. Indeed, in the regular goings on of American life during the period in which he wrote Civilization, Kaplan lived with the concrete effects of Protestant hegemony.Footnote ²⁹ It is crucial to note that, for Kaplan, the victims of Protestant hegemony were not limited to Jews.Footnote ³⁰ His analysis extended to any group (particularly and ironically Catholics)Footnote ³¹ whose religious life was impinged upon by the unholy alliance of Protestantism and the modern American state. Nevertheless, Kaplan was understandably sensitive to the antisemitism of his environment.

During and after the waves of immigration, nativist sentiment and antiimmigrant backlash amplified the intensity and acceptability of antisemitism.Footnote ³² In 1921, to great fanfare, Henry Ford published the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Dearborn Independent, then among the most widely circulated newspapers in the country. In addition to widespread white Protestant nativism, the elite bastions of Protestant America were particularly intent to ward off Jewish intrusion.Footnote ³³ Their fear manifested in admissions quotas at top universities, blanket bans on Jewish admission to social clubs, and grotesquely advertised housing discrimination.Footnote ³⁴ Kaplan could see for himself the brittleness of America's commitment to equality and the de facto power to discriminate held by the majority. Hospitality came with manifold strings attached. Not all strings, however, were as obvious as racist signs taped to apartment building doors.

Seemingly at odds with this picture of Protestant power was the fact that, for Kaplan, American Protestantism also epitomized the feebleness of modern religion. It was fully denationalized. Like postemancipation Judaism, Kaplan saw Protestant religion as a voluntary association of individuals. However, the real poverty of its definition of religion was evident in its self-understanding as “purely spiritual.”Footnote ³⁵ Protestantism laid claim only to the individual and, even then, only to her metaphysical well-being. By definition, this left out communal life as well as the community's material interactions with its environment (i.e., culture).Footnote ³⁶ Kaplan saw around him no visibly Protestant forms of language, dance, or music. Protestants could share worship practices in common and little else without defaulting on religious expectations. Kaplan finds evidence for this in the fact that religious schools “have been found unworkable in the Protestant system.”Footnote ³⁷ Such schools, founded on an understanding of religion without a connection to “manifold culture,” lacked any direction for the “socialization” of their pupils.

What Kaplan here outlines is a dynamic where the emptying out of the modern meaning of religion actually works to reinforce the majoritarian power of Christianity. That is, for Kaplan, American Protestantism's tacit control over national life depended on the feebleness of the modern category of religion. The modern relation of religion and state emptied religion of life-sustaining value for everyone. However, once the state thus limited religion, only those “in the majority . . . require[d] no justification” to pursue their development as a collective.Footnote ³⁸ Despite the state's pretensions to confessional neutrality, this collective development was pursued essentially as a state-backed venture. On Kaplan's view, the weakening of religion in modernity wound up eliding the distinction between national culture and the culture of the religious majority. Though Christianity was formally divorced from the state, it nonetheless constituted the shadow architecture of the state. In this context, Kaplan worried that Jews could only choose between capitulation—and the embrace of modernity's weak notion of “religion only”—or resistance and self-marginalization. All things being equal, as Kaplan saw, preferring the former was the logical choice.

For Kaplan, this choice was not merely theoretical but had already been made by Reform Judaism. Reform, according to Kaplan, was anxious “to [bring] the Jews into whole-hearted cooperation with the national democratic state of which they are citizens” and thus insisted on the “abrogation of Jewish nationhood.”Footnote ³⁹ This abrogation required the foreswearing of all collective activities, present and future, predicated on anything beyond a confessional purpose for Judaism. Reform, according to Kaplan, had totally reimagined Judaism to accord with the individualism of emancipation. For him, this reimagining was more like Judaism with Stockholm syndrome. “The experiment has been undertaken by Reformism,” Kaplan declares incredulously, “to have the Jewish religion without the living entity to which that religion belongs—without a living, functioning Jewish people.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In this sacrifice of nationhood, Kaplan could see nothing other than Judaism's abject capitulation to modern religion and the domination of American Protestantism.

In Civilization's analysis of Reform, Kaplan takes himself to have witnessed the Protestantization of American Jewish life. On his account, Jewish Americanization not only took advantage of the hospitality shown particularly to European immigrants, but made recourse to a modern definition of religion that wound up reinscribing Protestant hegemony while leaving American Jews increasingly isolated from one another. This hegemony, of course, was not only theoretical but also practical. Indeed, on the heels of a seemingly Pollyannaish welcome, American Jews encountered rising nativism and antisemitism both in America and around the world. The surge in hostility not only undercut the experience of hospitality, but also revealed the invisible architectonics of American Protestant domination at work in the liberal ideal to which certain streams of Judaism had attempted to conform themselves. Protestant elites forcibly reasserted certain treasured privileges, while at the same time promulgating an enervating vision, for anyone but the dominant majority, of collective life.

Kaplan thus helps us frame the redaction of Judaism into a modern religion—rendering it compatible with the individualism of the liberal state—as always already a concession to American Protestant hegemony. As we will see, the contemporary salience of this story is the fact that the trends that culminated in the inclusion of Jewishness within the privileged pantheon of American whiteness were really catalyzed by this subtle (as compared with Catholic Christendom) but no less pernicious kind of Christian domination. Kaplan helps us unmask the continued role for this sort of domination in contemporary antisemitism. Specifically, modern American liberalism has offered Americanization (i.e., whiteness) as a salve for Jewish physical insecurity, while at the same time exacerbating a situation that is hostile to the flourishing of Jewish collective life in fundamental ways. This, I argue, aids our understanding of the deep confusion that comes to the surface around contemporary invocations of antisemitism. Most basically, it reveals why the relationship of antisemitism and Jewish whiteness is so vexed. Among other contexts, this issue is especially evident in the often-flustered attempts to speak in the same breath about Blacks and Jews and their no less vexed history of allyship and conflict.Footnote ⁴¹

To that end, I turn now, all too briefly, to a fragment from James Baldwin's 1969 essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic because They're Anti-White.” This fragment is far from representative of the full breadth of Baldwin's reflection on religion and race. Nevertheless, when read together with Kaplan, Baldwin—who is writing at markedly different moment in the American Jewish march toward whiteness—brings out the extraordinarily complicated and important issue of how and whether to analogize Black and Jewish experiences of America. In returning to Kaplan after Baldwin's deft handling of this issue, we will be better able to crystallize what Kaplan can offer us for thinking through the contemporary questions of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism.

James Baldwin and the Possibilities for Speaking of Blacks and Jews

Writing some thirty-five years after the publication of Judaism as Civilization—as well as in the immediate aftermath of the souring of the Black-Jewish civil rights coalition,Footnote ⁴² James Baldwin directly took on the possibility of analogizing the experiences of Blacks and Jews in America. Any possibility of such an analogy, Baldwin cautions, is imperiled by the complicated issue of America's display of selective hospitality.

Here, the “Jewish travail” to which Baldwin is referring is the Holocaust—not yet a part of Kaplan's context when he wrote Civilization. Nevertheless, Baldwin's point holds for Kaplan's time, too. The more than two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants that came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth were not fleeing extermination camps, but they were fleeing a “house of bondage,” nonetheless. For them, America was a chosen destination and a land of opportunity. America, Baldwin reminds us, is the Biblical Egypt for some. But it is clearly not so for America's Jews.

Particularly in the first decades following the Holocaust, Kaplan's comparison of Jewish emancipation in Europe and Jewish citizenship in America would have appeared as especially far-fetched. The former concluded, catastrophically, in genocide. America, meanwhile, has visited no such plague on its Jews. As Baldwin points out, the experience of American hospitality cannot but be understood as salvific for so many European Jewish immigrants and their descendants. Baldwin directly contrasts this experience of salvation with America as “the house of bondage for the Negro.” Crucially, Baldwin characterizes this not as incidental to the Black experience of America, but as coterminous with the fullness of that experience. “The Negro” is in bondage “because he is an American.” Baldwin thus identifies not only two divergent experiences of America, but also two divergent and seemingly irreconcilable meanings of “American.”

However, Baldwin does not reject the idea that there is some asymmetrical analogy that can be drawn between Black and Jewish experience of America. Baldwin is writing after the accomplished fact of Jewish Americanization and whiteness. He realizes, however, that Jews became white through a process—the very process that Kaplan attempted to preempt a few decades earlier. Baldwin, of course, notes that Jews such as Kaplan were eligible for this process, while he was not. His observations about this fact are striking: “If one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Here, Baldwin sympathizes with the Black person who resents Jews for receiving a privilege to which he is denied. Baldwin stipulates, however, that the flavor of this resentment is not moral condemnation; it is “nothing more than envy.” Both Blacks and Jews might reasonably covet acceptance into whiteness. Yet the resilience of the color line renders Jewish whiteness possible, whereas “Black whiteness” is a contradiction in terms.

In a manner that draws out the fullest possibilities for Kaplan's analysis, Baldwin notes that Jewish whiteness is laced with something rotten. This rottenness is not Jewish complicity in America racism, though he explores this, too. Rather, it is germane to the meaning and putrefaction of Jewish identity in America under conditions of Protestant hegemony: “In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The link that Baldwin sketches between Blacks and Jews is not only one of resentment and condescension, of racial privilege and its conspicuous absence. It is a link premised, in part, by the observation that American Jews are no longer Jews at all, but have really become Christians. Baldwin regards this development not as an exercise of privilege, but—like Kaplan—as a function of Christian violence by which Jews and Blacks have each been victimized: “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, Baldwin grants the lexical priorityFootnote ⁴⁷ of religion to race. Millennia of Christianity's imperial lust lie just beneath the surface of present-day white supremacy—including in its effects on American Jews.

For Baldwin, the problematics of Christianity obviously do not obviate the reality of the color line. But the color line operates according to an age-old religious logic that has not infrequently been wielded as the cudgel against Jewish and Black men alike. The “old, rugged Roman cross” has been schlepped across oceans and deserts to announce Christendom's irresistibility. And it has brought death to would-be resisters. Thus, for both Kaplan and Baldwin, the enemy is Christendom. Baldwin notes that Jews share this enemy as well. As I will show, Kaplan offers something in the way of reciprocity in his own, albeit private, understanding of Black religion and Christianity.

For now, we can see that any possibility of speaking together of Blacks and American Jews must be tethered to the question of how Christianity has menaced both groups. This, of course, is a starting point and not a destination. Nevertheless, like Kaplan's interrogation of American hospitality, Baldwin's analysis surfaces the often covered-over role of Christianity in thinking about the development of American Judaism. In this vein, it is important to emphasize that what Baldwin helps us see is Kaplan's emphasis on the modern problem of religion in Civilization's account of race.

Baldwin makes it explicit that imperial Christianity is an antecedent to whiteness. He furthermore clarifies that Jewish whiteness comes at the expense of Judaism in making Christians out of Jews. In Kaplan's own searching and sometimes mistaken exploration of the relationship of Jewishness and race, we can see—with Baldwin's help—an inchoate understanding of whiteness in Kaplan's writings about the perils of Americanization. Of course, Kaplan does not get us all the way to a full-fledged account of the relation of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism. Nevertheless, he offers a vital occasion for reflecting on American Judaism's persistently ambiguous attempt to predicate its own distinctiveness, even and especially after the fact of Jewish whiteness.

“Jewish Racialism” from within Early Jewish Whiteness

In The Price of Whiteness, Eric Goldstein traces the bumpy road that American Judaism traveled toward inclusion in the pantheon of whiteness. While the consummation of this journey would be deferred until after World War II,Footnote ⁴⁸ Goldstein notes earlier trend lines in this direction, particularly among Reform Jews of Western and Central European extraction in the 1920s and 1930s. This community had much deeper roots in the United States, going back even before the American Revolution, and was anxious to preserve its privileged status in American society. The primary guarantee for such status was, of course, to be regarded as white.

Goldstein argues that the American Jewish attempt to “conform to the prevailing racial paradigm and identify . . . as unambiguously white” was tempered by the commitment to maintain a “distinctive identity.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He emphasizes Reform's embrace of religion as the basis of Jewish identity, “religion only” in Kaplan's language, as calibrated to make this cocktail of acceptance and distinctiveness possible.Footnote ⁵⁰ Reform, argues Goldstein, “went to ridiculous lengths . . . to ingratiate themselves with the non-Jewish public.”Footnote ⁵¹ Specifically, “[b]y trying to change the conversation . . . to religion, they aimed to protect their status as white Americans” without directly denying Jewish difference.Footnote ⁵² The language of religion secured confessional distinctiveness for Judaism, while still promoting public racial acculturation (i.e., whiteness). Goldstein underscores the operations of white supremacy in the ability for an American minority group such as Jews to claim religious rather than racial difference. Laying claim to religious difference is a form of racial privilege because no such credible claim is available to Black Americans. Thus, to the extent that Jews shied away from claiming racial difference, or punted on the race question altogether, they were making overtures toward whiteness.

In Civilization, Kaplan demonstrates little awareness of the relative race privilege of American Jewry, including that of the recently arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe. This unnamed racial privilege is, however, directly connected to Kaplan's diagnosis of Judaism's degeneration under the conditions of the modern relationship of religion and state. What Kaplan, ventriloquizing Reform, expresses as “cooperation with the national democratic state” is largely coextensive with Goldstein's conception of whiteness. The appeal of whiteness is nothing other than the “national democratic” identity that demands “cooperation” (i.e., submission). In Reform's lust for acceptance, Kaplan does not explicitly note the privilege of the very possibility of this acceptance. But he does game out the ramifications of whiteness on those, like the descendants of most of his American Jewish contemporaries, who will ultimately become white. Whiteness, as Baldwin also notes across his oeuvre, exacts a cost on those who are on their way to becoming white.Footnote ⁵³ The cost, according to Kaplan's critique of Reform, is the self-negation, really the self-evacuation, of the meaningful collectivity of those minority groups on their way to whiteness.

Despite his ignorance of Judaism's early twentieth-century positionality regarding whiteness, Kaplan does engage at some length with the question of race in Civilization. Writing in 1934, Kaplan had witnessed a decisive turn to a more race-based view of Jewish identity and difference. Goldstein links the move toward race to the rise in American antisemitism between the world wars.Footnote ⁵⁴ American Jews, immigrants and native born alike, could not escape the ubiquity of race talk, racial science, and racial supremacy during this period. A surge in racial animus, including antisemitism, during the 1920s focused on the racial alterity of Eastern European Jews and other immigrants.Footnote ⁵⁵ Native-born white Americans classified these immigrants according to a racial taxonomy, situating them in relation to the Black-white dichotomy as an “antidote” to their fears about the newcomers.Footnote ⁵⁶ Jews were classified sometimes closer to white and sometimes closer to Black, and sometimes somewhere in between—all in an effort to domesticate the unknown.

As targets of this racist surge, Jews—for a time—were less sanguine about appearing as a fraternal annex to the white Protestant majority and instead became comfortable asserting a more categorical, and thus racial, kind of distinctiveness. The scale of the change in attitude toward a Jewish racial identity was most in evidence among Reform Jewish elites who had only recently abjured racial language and coveted the security of whiteness.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to Goldstein, the time between the World Wars was a distinctive period when Jewish optimism about whiteness was on the ebb.Footnote ⁵⁸ The response by many was to embrace and appropriate the racialization they had first encountered in the hostility and anxiety of white nativism. As with his analysis of Reform and religion, Goldstein explains this new stage of development in American Jewish identity in terms of the fluctuating availability of whiteness to American Jews. He concedes that American Jews of the time had a determinate interest in maintaining their distinctiveness, but their strategies for doing so could not—or at least did not—operate independently of white supremacy.

Somewhat contrastingly, Kaplan's analysis of Reform's move toward race accords more to agency and seemingly less to whiteness: “The Reformists have to some extent apprehended the danger of basing the unity and continuity of Jewish collective life upon religion solely, and have therefore sought to bolster up that unity by means of the theory of Jewish racialism.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Kaplan's account of the turn to race does not mention surging antisemitism, though his account is no doubt impacted by it. Rather, it notes Reform's welcome, albeit belated, apprehension of the dangers posed to American Jewish life by the modern definition of religion. “Jewish racialism” was thus proposed as a hoped-for salve for the ailments of American Jewry. It was supposed to shore up Jewish “unity and continuity” by marking Jews as inherently, that is, biologically, different. Reform of that time, and Kaplan, too, operated on the basis of a fully realist account of race—that is, race as a matter of biological reality. Thus, “the main practical corollary to which [Jewishness as racial identity] gives rise is the deprecation of intermarriage.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Despite comprehending the reasons for the shift, Kaplan criticizes Reform's embrace of racial identity as ultimately incoherent and inadequate. Regarding the former, Kaplan finds the move to be at loggerheads with the transformative steps already taken by Reform to reduce Judaism to a “religion only.” “The raciality of the Jew,” he writes, “is awkwardly and irrationally forced into the conception of a religion that is meant to be universal.”Footnote ⁶¹ Kaplan is perplexed that Reform, which had already sacrificed Jewish nationhood on the altar of Jewish membership in the human race writ large, would double back and proclaim “the raciality of the Jew,” which might preempt—or at least strain—this membership. A Jewish identity predicated on race would necessarily undermine the compatibility of Judaism and liberal universalism that “religion only” had been intended to secure.

Here, Kaplan's critique of the incoherence of Reform's move to race deepens his overall analysis of the modern relationship of religion and race. He figures Reform's appeal to race as meant to cure the ailments of Judaism as “religion only.” For Kaplan, as we have seen, “whole-hearted cooperation” with the modern state privatizes Jewish difference, alienates Jews from their community, and causes Judaism to atrophy. Race then appears as a strategy to salvage the “unity and continuity” of Jewish life. This strategy, no doubt, derived in large part from the prejudicial system of racial classification that greeted Jewish and other immigrants upon their arrival in America.Footnote ⁶² Yet, for Kaplan, the problem with race is not that it is exogenous to Judaism, but that it is no less narrow a basis of collective differentiation than “religion only.” Thus, what at first glance appeared to be a free choice undertaken by Reform to reconceptualize the meaning of Jewish identity turns out to have been something more like a hopeless attempt to salvage Jewish “unity and continuity” within the suffocating structures of whiteness.

Contemporary Echoes of “Jewish Racialism”

In Civilization, Kaplan makes a fairly outdated argument with respect to the meaning of race. Race, he argues, sets a human group apart with respect to something amoral and inert. It conflates biology and ontology. Race thus “carries with it all of the dangerous implications of nationalism and none of its redeeming traits.”Footnote ⁶³ It sets a collectivity apart, but offers no resources for its cultural development and progress. Race's denotation of sheer hereditary difference supplies little in the way of useful cultural or historical resources to revive group identity and communal life.

Here, Kaplan argues that race is a detemporalized form of identity, lacking the necessary spirit to impel collective life toward a creative future. He characterizes racial difference as inherent. As such, there is nothing self-conscious about the meaning of this sort of difference. It is difference for its own sake. It is not difference born of, or put to use for, creative purposes.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Kaplan, race does not suggest evolution out of the past, but invokes an idealized past as proof of essential difference.

In contemplating the future of American Judaism, Kaplan finds this idea of race to be an altogether inadequate basis for a Jewish future of vital and enduring difference. On his account, the common racial past simply was, but offers no guarantee that anyone should “want to retain” what was. Its production of difference only preempts exogamy and the apparent betrayal of collective ties.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, for Kaplan, race cannot reanimate the spirit of preemancipation Jewish life that he hoped to restore. And appeals to “Jewish racialism” cannot fix the problems of Jewish life in modernity.

In the midst of this argument rejecting “Jewish racialism,” Kaplan makes a crucial and troubling reference to racism and Black Americans. While critiquing Reform's appeal to race, Kaplan searches about to confirm the error of this strategy. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, he invokes Black people as those whose difference is paradigmatically defined by race: “The colored people constitute a race in a far truer and deeper sense than the Jews, yet some of its members would give half their lives to be absorbed by the whites.”Footnote ⁶⁷

With this crude example, Kaplan takes himself to be illustrating the essential inadequacy of race to predicate a form of difference that the group so differentiated will desire to sustain. Because Blackness is a racial form of difference—and race is essentially presentist and uncreative—Black people have no compelling reason to want to remain Black. This argument betrays Kaplan's ignorance and even a racist dismissiveness of the richness of Black life. Moreover, his contention that Black people form a racial group in a “truer and deeper sense” makes clear his erroneous view of race's ultimate reality.

Reading this passage, Goldstein argues, “Kaplan makes an important link between Jewish culture and whiteness.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Goldstein believes that Kaplan is trying to make Jewishness more obviously compatible with whiteness by situating Blackness as the persistent sign of racialized, unassimilable otherness. Jews, then, are necessarily positioned as more proximate to whiteness. To the extent that Kaplan's statement reinforces the notion that Blackness is singularly and absolutely other, then his words are indeed just another harbinger of the future of Jewish whiteness. On this reading, race and Blackness only matter to Kaplan as useful foils—points of contrast against which he can situate Judaism's more palatable (i.e., ultimately nonracial) kind of difference, leaving its eligibility for whiteness intact. Goldstein, I think, illuminates the thorny dynamics of whiteness confronted and negotiated by immigrant Jews like Kaplan. At the same time, however, Kaplan's comment also suggests an important avenue whereby American Jews may be able to subject significant aspects of whiteness to critique.

Most basically, Kaplan notes the looming specter of absorption into whiteness. As we have seen, Kaplan's critique of Protestant hegemony focused on the constriction of the possible kinds of permitted difference under liberalism. In this, Kaplan gets at whiteness from one side—that is, from the side of the imperial impulse of its Christian heritage. In diagnosing the limits on difference, Kaplan is able to show—in his discussion of Reform—how the gravitational pull of the American Protestant majority locked minority groups in its orbit. In his time, Kaplan saw the roots of what would be accomplished fact a couple of decades later in the widening of the pantheon of whiteness to include groups that had once been classified as racially other.Footnote ⁶⁹

With respect to race, I think the shortcomings of Kaplan's argument illumine its successes and contemporary importance. As I have read Civilization, Kaplan's most evident contribution is that he helps us see something that can be easy to miss—that is, the costs exacted by whiteness on white people. However, bearing in mind his mistakes, Kaplan's critique of “Jewish racialism” also exposes a problem of whiteness for American Jews even after the fact of whiteness. For Kaplan, race—like “religion only”—is another too-narrow predicate of minority group difference in the modern state. Neither maintains the ties of collectivity and both are available only because acceptable to and promulgated by an anxious white Christian majority intent on clinging to power. When Kaplan admonishes Jews for turning to race, he does so on the basis of reckless speculation with respect to Black people's desire to remain Black. Of course, implicit in this callous speculation is the fact that Black matriculation into whiteness cannot happen. What Kaplan takes for granted here, and is crucial to notice, is the plausibility (even the eventuality, considering Kaplan's notorious pessimism) of Jewish whiteness. It is the Jews who will “be absorbed by the whites.” Notably, for Kaplan, such absorption is not a reason for celebration but a tragic prophecy of a time when Jewish collective otherness will be robbed of its ability to put up any serious fight.

I therefore want to argue that Kaplan gestures at—though of course does not fully grasp—the deeply contemporary issue of predicating Jewish difference from within whiteness. One salutary consequence of his ham-handed invocation of the color line—as opposed to his problematic characterization of Black life—is his intimation of the eventual inefficacy of and confusion surrounding appeals to Jewish difference after the fact of whiteness. American Jewish difference is frequently illegible not because—as Kaplan argues—race is an essentially empty category. Rather, it is because, in America, invocations of difference on the white side of the color line are so frequently unintelligible. Once you're white, what's left to say? As Goldstein helps us understand, this is, of course, a function of white privilege. Yet, recalling Baldwin, it also requires stifling the memory of Christianization that made Jewish whiteness possible in the first place.

Concretely, I think this discussion relates to, among other things, often ugly and incoherent debates about antisemitism and Zionism. Prior to the Holocaust, Kaplan writes about the former in a jarringly upbeat way: “Modern anti-Semitism has, no doubt, served as the chief stimulus to the renascence of the Jewish spirit.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Whether or not there is “no doubt” about this positive role for antisemitism in Jewish life, it is the case that antisemitism is still among the most significant parts of modern Jewish identity and difference. Most basically, the resilience of antisemitism is regularly invoked as evidence of Jewish difference beyond merely religious difference. Like antisemitism, Zionism has been and remains fundamental to modern attempts at demarcating Jewish otherness. Kaplan notes that Reform “incorporated the upbuilding of Palestine into their program for the Jewish future” at the same time as they turned to “Jewish racialism” to salvage “the unity and continuity of Jewish collective life.”Footnote ⁷¹ Put simply, Kaplan highlights the profound connection among antisemitism, Zionism, and “Jewish racialism.” All encourage a thicker notion of Jewish difference and emphasize the value of Jewish collectivity.

Nearly a century after Civilization, Zionism and antisemitism remain uniquely capable of engendering pride in Jewish difference and collectivity. These two elements of modern American Jewish life foster the most dissatisfaction with the modern liberal-Jewish synthesis.Footnote ⁷² Put differently, a modern Jewish identity that emphasizes the prevalence of antisemitism and the importance of Zionism would seem to have the most critical leverage with respect to Jewish whiteness. And yet, just as Kaplan warned against the futility of Reform's turn to “Jewish racialism,” contemporary attempts to predicate Jewish difference from within whiteness have largely failed to recover the kind of Jewish collectivity forsaken in the initial acquiescence to the modern category of religion. Instead, protestations against Jewish whiteness have been marked—understandably—as expressing an increasingly reactionary point of view.

At the same time, Kaplan also helps us see a profound reason for the resiliency, among some, of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. That is, if viewed in the sweep of a coerced divesture of American Jewish collectivity, opposition to Zionism can readily be parsed as yet another assault against Jewish collectivity. Moreover, such a defensive interpretation is compounded by the fact that critics of Zionism frequently associate American support for Israel, often on the basis of “shared values,” with whiteness.Footnote ⁷³ It is undeniably ironic that the foremost attempt by American Jews to predicate Jewish difference after the fact of whiteness has only deepened the association of Jewishness and whiteness. There are, of course, innumerable moral and political questions that I am setting to the side in this particular discussion. Nevertheless, Kaplan's analysis of religion and race still shines as a crucial resource for understanding the peculiar bind of whiteness as it relates to the most complicated and controversial issues of American Jewish life and politics. In Kaplan's day, as in ours, it seems that the bind only tightens in the often-desperate attempts at escape.

Kaplan's Diary and Black Religion

In the spring of 1933, just before submitting the final manuscript of Civilization, Kaplan went to the theater to see Run Little Chillun by Francis Hall Johnson. He came home that night and wrote in his diary: “In the Negro Folk drama we behold the struggle between the official religion which the Negro took over from the white man and the religion which awakens the Negro like a call from the primeval forest in which his ancestors dwelt.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Kaplan's private comment adds an important dimension to his critique of the imperial ambitions of Christendom and the modern category of religion. Here, this category is rendered as the “official religion,” which is what is required for Black acceptance by “the white man.” Indeed, as the play shows, such religion is often zealously adopted in order to catalyze the process of acceptance. However, in Run Little Chillun, a struggle ensues because the official religion is not life sustaining.Footnote ⁷⁵ The terms of acceptance condemn Black religion to an imitation of white religion. The “religion which awakens” is what Kaplan might have called Black nationhood or religious civilization. It bears in it the history stamped out and suffocated by kidnap and enslavement. Notably, Kaplan's seemingly orientalizing language of “a call from the primeval forest” is nearly identical to his description of Jewish nationhood as “a call of the wild.”Footnote ⁷⁶

What Kaplan sees in Run Little Chillun is the ideal of national religious life that has been repeatedly assaulted by Christendom's redactions of collective otherness into white Christianity or racialized identity. Kaplan demonstrates his understanding that the parameters of Black religion have been violently narrowed by the racial nationalism of white Christendom. Johnson's play, as Judith Weisenfeld has argued, “[proposed] a more expansive scope of religious possibilities for African Americans.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Kaplan not only implicitly understands the analogy to the Jewish condition under Christendom, but likens the play to a Hassidic folk tale called “Yoshe Kalb.” On his view, “the Negro folk drama shows off to better advantage because the background of religion against which the story is enacted is of much finer stuff and a more spiritual texture.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Kaplan's juxtaposition here of the Black and Jewish religious experience of modernity is reminiscent of Baldwin's. Anticipating Baldwin, Kaplan compares them with direct reference to their religious lives. This fact is fairly extraordinary. In his context, Kaplan might have been prone to consider both groups as racial minorities. This was certainly true for many of his contemporaries.Footnote ⁷⁹ Kaplan's analogy, with respect to religious identity, however, underscores his understanding of the Black and Jewish position in the modern story as foils to modernity's assault on forms of religious life outside of white Christianity. Kaplan understood—as Francis Hall Johnson understood—that modernity offers “race” to those whom it has denied historically rooted religious life. And then it offers imitation Protestantism to African Americans and (white) Reform Judaism to American Jews.Footnote ⁸⁰ What these religious options offered was quiescence to the “Christian model of American national culture” and a forfeiture of a national culture of one's own.

Unsurprisingly, Kaplan was far from the only one in his context to think about the interpenetration of religion and race in order to salvage and construct difference among the hostile and homogenizing forces of modernity and America. Judith Weisenfeld and Sylvester Johnson have both shown that the period of the Great Migration—roughly coinciding with the period of Eastern European Jewish immigration—was a remarkably dynamic time for Black religion. Both have pointed to a striking tendency for Black religious movements to slough off conventional forms of Protestant Christianity or even to discard Christianity altogether. Instances of the latter gave rise to all sorts of Black religious movements founded between the 1910s and 1940s. Examples include the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the Ethiopian Hebrews. Johnson has referred to this as the “rise of Black ethnics.”Footnote ⁸¹ More recently, Weisenfeld has identified these movements as participating in a “framework of religio-racial identity.”Footnote ⁸²

These histories of Black religion during the Great Migration, and particularly the “religio-racial” framework, bear important similarities to Kaplan's critique.Footnote ⁸³ At bottom, both recognized and attempted to counter America's attack on collective life outside the purview of white Christianity. As I have shown, these attacks consigned religious difference to shallow, ahistorical roots in the soil of modernity. As Kaplan encouraged the cultivation of Jewish folk habits, and even limited autonomy for Jewish institutions, leaders of “religio-racial” movements articulated sacred national histories as “Asiatic Muslims” or “biblical Israelites.”Footnote ⁸⁴ These histories contributed to a sense of true “peoplehood” in a nation that saw Black people as “non-members.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This sense of peoplehood was mediated by an understanding of having received “God-given identities” that “renewed connections to their ancestors.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The notion of peoplehood these movements promulgated, still so central to some kinds of contemporary Black and Jewish nationalisms, was explicitly sacred. Whereas Kaplan—from the outset of Civilization—refused to think of modern Judaism in terms of Jewish election, these religio-racial movements had no such qualms.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the contrary, many of these movements saw Black religious peoplehood explicitly in terms of their being singled out by God for a special mission and a singular intimacy with the divine. This theology, expressed in the Hebrew Bible's characterization of the Israelites as a “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” was crucial to the kinds of religious life and collective identity that could refuse the restrictions imposed by the “official religion.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Ultimately, such theology is no simple salve for Blacks or Jews under the auspices of contemporary whiteness and imbedded—if ambivalent—secularity. Moreover, theological nationalisms come studded with myriad problems that would take us far beyond the aims of this article. And yet, I think we must remain receptive to the idea that a more capacious understanding of religion, so anathema under the restrictive conception imposed by modern liberalism, may help illuminate the linkage between the divergent positions of Blacks and Jews. I think this illumination is especially important now, when that linkage appears increasingly tenuous and occasions more cynicism than hope.

To close, I will reiterate that, despite their myriad evident differences, Kaplan's project of religious civilization and the “religio-racial” framework shared a good deal in common. They shared a commitment to renationalizing religious identity and they both sought to reclaim a premodern capaciousness for religious life under duress from modern American Christian nationalism. At the same time, they were both profoundly modern inasmuch as they responded directly to modern antisemitism and modern racism. They weren't unrealistically nostalgic, but innovative in response to the constraints of their contexts. Finally, both Kaplan and these “religio-racial” movements offer a needed inroad to understanding the often blighted interplay of race and religion in American life. It is the question of this relationship, more than anything else, that links the otherwise deeply distinctive sojourns of Blacks and Jews in America.