A chosen people in a pluralist nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-American experience

Religion and American Culture

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 161-194

  Greene, Daniel ^a  

^a UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43249149302     PISSN: 10521151     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rac.2006.16.2.161     Document Type: Review

References (100)

1. Horace M. Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 108. Kallen's article originally appeared in Nation 100 (February 18 and 25, 1915): 190-94, 217-20. A slightly revised version was published in his 1924 collection of essays, Culture and Democracy in the United States. The page numbers for quotations in this article come from a 1998 reprinting of Culture and Democracy in the United States issued by Transaction Publishers
2. Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 3-4
3. Hansen considers Kallen alongside William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, W. E. B. DuBois, Randolph Bourne, and Louis Brandeis. James was Kallen's dissertation advisor, and Brandeis was a frequent correspondent. See Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
4. quotation on xviii. Hansen's language echoes that of David A. Hollinger, who persuasively has argued that identities are acquired largely through affiliation. See Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995)
5. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955, 1994)
6. and John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
7. See Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
8. An excellent source for understanding chosenness is Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar, eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 2, Membership (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000)
9. Leo Baeck, "Revelation and World Religion," in The Essence of Judaism, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 67
10. See Lila Corwin Berman, "Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920-1960" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2004), esp. chap. 3, "Mission to America."
11. Kaplan developed his ideology, among many other places, in a number of Menorah Journal articles. See Mordecai M. Kaplan, "What Judaism Is Not," Menorah Journal 1 (October 1915)
12. "How May Judaism Be Saved?" Menorah Journal 2 (February 1916)
13. "Where Does Jewry Really Stand Today?" Menorah Journal 4 (February 1918)
14. "A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism," Menorah Journal 6 (August 1920)
15. "Toward a Reconstruction of Judaism," Menorah Journal 13 (April 1927)
16. and "Judaism as a Civilization: Religion's Place in It," Menorah Journal 15 (December 1928)
17. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934; repr., 1994)
18. Eisen, The Chosen People in America, 73-98
19. There is no comprehensive intellectual biography on Kallen, but a number of scholars have published on his life and ideas. See Susanne Klingenstein, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991)
20. Milton R. Konvitz, "Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974)," American Jewish Year Book 75 (1974-75): 55-80
21. Konvitz, Nine American Jewish Thinkers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2000)
22. and Konvitz, ed., The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1987)
23. Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing Company, 1995)
24. and William Toll, "Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity," American Jewish History 85 (March 1997): 57-74
25. See Konvitz, Nine American Jewish Thinkers, 8-9
26. "[I]n the Boston public schools, visiting Bunker Hill and listening to teachers recite the precepts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kallen underwent during the 1890's the common second-generation experience: loss of religion and an uncritical enthusiasm for America." Higham, Send These to Me, 206
27. Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen, 21
28. Konvitz, "Horace Meyer Kallen," 65
29. Kallen articulated these criticisms, among other places, in "Can Judaism Survive in the United States?" The essay was originally printed in two parts in the Menorah Journal 11 (April 1925) and 11 (December 1925)
30. It was reprinted in Horace M. Kallen, Judaism at Bay: Essays Toward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1932), 177-220
31. The relationship between the American Reform movement and Zionism defies simple categorization. As Michael Meyer has explained, "Institutionally, classical Reform Judaism put itself on record as fundamentally opposed to political Zionism. ... Yet it is of interest that, even in its classical phase, American Reform Judaism was by no means uniformly anti-Zionist. ... Some Reform Jews found it easier to be cultural Zionists than political ones, though here too there were some problems." Meyer, Response to Modernity, 293, 294
32. Kallen claimed that, had Princeton known he was a Jew, they likely would not have hired him. Kallen reflected on this episode in 1962, writing: "In short, as the Princeton authorities saw me, I was one who had come to live and work among them under false pretenses: a Jew who had 'passed.'" Kallen was dismissed from the University of Wisconsin for advocating the rights of pacifists during World War I. Kallen also served one semester as an instructor in logic at Clark University. See Horace M. Kallen, "The Promise of the Menorah Idea," Menorah Journal 49 (Autumn-Winter 1962): 12
33. and Kallen's obituary in the New York Times, February 17, 1974, 66
34. Quoted in Toll, "Horace M. Kallen," 58 n. 3
35. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 389
36. See Kallen, "A Convert in Zion," in Judaism at Bay, 64, 65
37. On the history of the Menorah Association, see Daniel Greene, "The Crisis of Jewish Freedom: The Menorah Association and American Pluralism, 1906-1934" (PkD. diss., University of Chicago, 2004)
38. Toll, "Horace M. Kallen," 67
39. On the possibility of Jewish students at Harvard passing as non-Jews, see Kallen, "The Promise of the Menorah Idea," 12
40. See Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
41. "The Third Annual Convention of the Menorah Societies," Menorah Journal 1 (April 1915): 130. As Kallen wrote to Judge Julian Mack in 1915, "Religion is less than life, and as life becomes more and more secularized, the religion of the Jews becomes less and less the life of the Jews. I use the word Hebraism consequently to designate the whole of that life, of which Judaism is a part-in the case of Orthodoxy a major part." Kallen to Mack, January 19, 1915, Kallen Papers, box 20, folder 10, AJA
42. Kallen likely developed an understanding of Hebraism from reading Matthew Arnold. In an 1869 essay, "Hebraism and Hellenism," Arnold argued for a greater balance between Hebraism and Hellenism in the quest for human salvation. He argued that Hebraism was characterized by "conduct and obedience," whereas Hellenism was characterized by the ability to "see things as they really are." In effect, Kallen would reverse Arnold's understanding of Hellenism and Hebraism. Kallen understood a primary component of Hellenism to be its resistance to change, where Hebraism allowed for change as an essential condition of modern life. See Matthew Arnold, "Hebraism and Hellenism," in Culture and Anarchy, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127
43. In 1962, Kallen wrote: "Why 'Hebraic' and not 'Jewish'? Not because, as might be the case today, a prejudice in favor of Hebrew as against the other languages that have figured in the vernacular history of the Jewish people. The reason lay rather in the English tradition of comparing and contrasting Hebraism with Hellenism." Kallen, "The Promise of the Menorah Idea," 13
44. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1909)
45. See Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 5-6, 34
46. Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," 71. For arguments that Zangwill imagined an American melting pot in which Jewish identity would remain distinct, see Neil Larry Shumsky, "Zangwill's The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage," American Quarterly 27 (March 1975): 29-41
47. and David Biale, "The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity," in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
48. A front-page review of the play in the American Israelite of 1909 best summed up American Jews' anxiety. The reviewer wrote, "Ethnologically the Jew is doomed to extinction in America and this perhaps is the real message that lies at the heart of Israel Zangwill's great play." "'The Melting Pot' Will the Jew Become Merged in It and Disappear?" American Israelite 55 (March 4,1909): 1
49. See Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Therstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 31-58
50. James R. Barrett, "Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930," Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 996-1020
51. and Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 524-58
52. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 308-24
53. One of the most useful sources for understanding competing ideologies of Americanization is still Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)
54. William James, "What Pragmatism Means," in his Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1948), 144
55. Horace Kallen, "Introduction," in The Philosophy of William James (New York: Modern Library, 1925), 9
56. James, "What Pragmatism Means," 145, 149, 151, 155. Italics in original
57. The year that Kallen spent studying in Oxford, 1907-1908, was the same year that James delivered the Hibbert lectures at Oxford. The lectures were later published as A Pluralist Universe. See Werner Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 267
58. For a discussion of James's ideas about ethnic identity, see Larry C. Miller, "William James and Twentieth-Century Ethnic Thought," American Quarterly 31 (Autumn 1979): 533-55
59. Although perhaps a bit tangential to Kallen's eventual understanding of the nation as welcoming contributions from a variety of groups, James had made a similar argument about Harvard College itself when Kallen was an undergraduate. Writing in 1903, James argued that Harvard had to be tolerant of "exceptionality and eccentricity" and devoted "to the principles of individual vocation and choice." Indeed, a comment that foreshadowed Kallen's pluralism, James concluded: "The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall." William James, "The True Harvard," Harvard Graduates' Magazine 12 (1903): 7,8
60. This statement was consistent with his promoting tolerance of difference in an 1899 lecture, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." Here, James urged his listeners to "tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see as harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us." The lecture is reprinted in William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 285
61. Horace M. Kallen, "Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism," American Hebrew (June 24, 1910). This article was reprinted in Kallen, Judaism at Bay. All the page citations hereafter refer to the reprinted version of the article
62. Ahad Ha'am (Hebrew for "one of the people") was the pen name used by Asher Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), a Russian Jew who argued against the feasibility of settling a large number of Jews in Palestine but who did "concentrate on fostering a secular Jewish culture based on Jewish national consciousness and the renewal of Hebrew as a means of ensuring the continuity of Jewish creativity." Ha'am became one of the central figures in the movement for cultural Zionism, sometimes referred to as spiritual Zionism. See Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 543
63. See also Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (London: Peter Halban, 1993)
64. Kallen, "Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism," 40
65. Ha'am, "The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem" (1897), reprinted in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 267
66. Randolph S. Bourne, a critic of Kallen, articulated this idea more clearly than Kallen ever did. See especially Bourne, "The Jew and Trans-National America," Menorah Journal 2 (December 1916): 277-84
67. Kallen, "Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism," 35. To be sure, not all "natural" talents should be developed for their own sake - Kallen provides the counter example of a skilled thief - but Kallen's point here is that one would not rightly ask if the fiddler has a "mission" to fiddle
68. Ha'am had written: "In my view our religion is national - that is to say, it is a product of our national spirit - but the reverse is not true. If it is impossible to be a Jew in the religious sense without acknowledging our nationality, it is possible to be a Jew in the national sense without accepting many things in which religion requires belief." See Ha'am, "The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem," 262
69. Kallen, "Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism," 41
70. The text of the untitled speech was reprinted in The Menorah Movement: For the Study and Advancement of Jewish Culture and Ideals (Ann Arbor: Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1914): 81-86. All quotations from this speech hereafter refer to this reprint of the speech
71. Kallen, December 20,1913, speech, The Menorah Movement, 83
72. Werner Sollors's criticism of Kallen is pointed but still more tempered than that of Walter Benn Michaels. See Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism"; and Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. 64-72
73. Kallen, December 20, 1913, speech, The Menorah Movement, 86
74. On the history of American Zionism, see Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
75. Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," 107
76. See Kallen, "Introduction," 47
77. Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," 104
78. Horace M. Kallen, The Structure of Lasting Peace (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1918), 31
79. Werner Sollors has argued that American ethnicity can be understood as a combination of descent and consent. "Descent relations are those defined by anthropologists as relations of 'substance' (by blood or nature); consent relations describe those of 'law' or 'marriage.'" The tension between consent and descent is prevalent in Kallen's writings on Jewish identity during the 1910s and 1920s. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6
80. Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," 260, 273. John Higham and Philip Gleason also have provided convincing criticism regarding the lack of specificity in Kallen's pluralism. See Higham, Send These to Me
81. Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization." Louis Menand has concluded that, for Kallen, "ethnicity is immutable" and, therefore, that Kallen shared "the scientific assumptions of the anti-immigrationists." See Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 392
82. Sollors has written: "Instead of accepting the possibility of a text's many mothers, pluraliste often settle for the construction of one immutable grandfather." See Sollors, "A Critique of Pure Pluralism," 275
83. See Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1920), 88
84. In a later article, Berskon would rephrase Kallen's dictum, writing, "A man dare not fail to know who his grandfathers were." See Berkson, "The Jewish Right to Live," Menorah Journal 7 (February 1921): 43
85. See Franz Boas, "Are the Jews a Race?" World Tomorrow 6 (January 1923): 5-6
86. Hasia Diner has argued that Boas's discrediting (as well as that of two of his students - Melville Herskovits and Alexander L. Goldenweiser) of racially based anti-black thinking also can be read as an effective technique of combating anti-Semitic thinking and racially based assumptions about Jews. See Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 142-49
87. See also Leonard B. Glick, "Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation," American Anthropologist 84 (September 1982): 545-65
88. Geyla Frank, "Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology," American Anthropologist 99 (1997): 731-45
89. The role of ancestry in ethnic identity remains a matter of contentious debate, of course. Historian David A. Hollinger has noted that Alex Haley, the author of Roots, could have chosen to trace his father's bloodline back to Ireland rather than his mother's back to Gambia. As Hollinger explains, a postethnic view would allow Haley "to be both African American and Irish American without having to choose one to the exclusion of the other." This is one of many instances in which Kallen and his critics help to set the terms of debate about diversity in America that would persist long beyond their time. See Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America, 21
90. Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," 43
91. Kallen, "Culture and the Ku Klux Klan," in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 35
92. Kallen, "Can Judaism Survive in the United States?" 178
93. On this point, see, for example, James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
94. Kallen, "Can Judaism Survive in the United States?" 183
95. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 180
96. Eisen, The Chosen People in America, 83, 85
97. Horace M. Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 22
98. See James H. Moorhead, "The American Israel: Protestant Tribalism and Universal Mission," in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election in Western Nationalisms, ed. William R. Hutchinson and Hartmut Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994)
99. On this point, see Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America," in The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation Between Two Cultures, 1800-2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 7-21
100. and Kathleen Neils Conzen, "German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity," in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 131-47