What Is a Jew?

Jews like to joke that when three of them get together, they are bound to produce four opinions. As of last week, Jewish leaders with deeply held and vastly differing opinions were involved in a dispute that went to the very heart of Jewry. At immediate issue was the relationship between the U.S.'s 5,500,000 Jews and the proud state of Israel (pop. 2,115,000). But even broader and greater was an old issue revolving around the meaning and purpose of Jewry. Is Jewishness a religion, a nationality or a peoplehood? In sum: What is a Jew?

Most passionately engaged in the debate are Israel's nimbus-haired Premier David Ben-Gurion, 74, and three key Jewish organizations. The three:

P: The World Zionist Organization, whose U.S. affiliates have 750,000 members. Under the presidency of New York's Nahum Goldmann, 66, the Zionists consider themselves the main "bridge" between Israel and the Jews of the U.S. as well as other countries. They argue that a Jew can be a citizen of any country, but that he should feel a strong devotion also to Israel, which he should fulfill with financial contributions, sympathy and emotional attachment. The World Zionist Organization would like to speak for all U.S. Jews--but it does not and cannot.

P: The American Jewish Committee, which is "non-Zionist" but friendly to Israel. It has 28,000 dues-paying members, publishes the well-regarded monthly Commentary, and has as its honorary president Baltimore's Jacob Blaustein, 68. The American Jewish Committee takes an independent position among Jewish factions --and sometimes gets caught in a crossfire.

P: The American Council for Judaism, which is sharply anti-Zionist and has some 20,000 members. The council stands on the credo of its longtime executive vice president, Rabbi Elmer Berger: "We are Americans by nationality, Jews by religion only." It was founded in 1943 by 15 Reform rabbis and some 25 laymen, and is supported largely by Pennsylvania's Lessing J. Rosenwald, philanthropist, art collector and onetime board chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co. It has helped establish religious schools (now numbering about a dozen in the U.S.), donates relief funds for some of the 1,000,000 Palestinian refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli war ($3,000 last year). Arabs consider the council an ally, distribute Rabbi Berger's anti-Zionist pronouncements.

In complete concert with none of these organizations is Israel's Ben-Gurion. Bred in Czarist Poland, Ben-Gurion cannot understand how any Jew can possibly be happy or productive living outside Israel. Thus believing that a true Zionist must necessarily commit himself to settling in Israel, Ben-Gurion has branded U.S. Zionists as hypocrites, and has fenced for years on the issue with Zionist President Goldmann. Speaking to the 25th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem last December, Ben-Gurion threw fresh fuel on the controversy by interjecting a Talmudic passage: "Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God."

U.S. rabbis denounced Ben-Gurion's "erroneous" theology; U.S. Zionist and anti-Zionist leaders alike attacked his politics. Ben-Gurion quickly explained that his statement was meant to apply only to practicing Orthodox Jews, who constitute a minority of U.S. Jews. But the damage was done. Off to Israel to pick up the pieces went Ben-Gurion's old friend, the American Jewish Committee's Blaustein. Playing his familiar conciliatory role, Blaustein persuaded Ben-Gurion to reaffirm a joint statement they had issued in 1950. Its key points: Israel may not presume to interfere with the affairs of Jews living outside Israel, and emigration of Jews to Israel is and should be at their "free discretion."

But Zionist President Goldmann, who equals Ben-Gurion in temperament and scholarship, was not mollified. "I am not opposed to the content of the declaration," he said--but he was clearly piqued because Ben-Gurion proclaimed it through the rival American Jewish Committee. Moreover, Goldmann knew that the statement did not represent Ben-Gurion's feelings as so often publicly expressed. Last fortnight, Polish-born Nahum Goldmann, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1945, took up Ben-Gurion's longstanding personal challenge, said he would give up his U.S. citizenship and join Israel's new Liberal Party to fight Ben-Gurion. Israelis figured that he might run for public office in the future. Two Israeli Cabinet members, also disagreeing with the Blaustein-Ben-Gurion declaration, moved to censure Ben-Gurion.

"Apartheid." Inevitably, into the argument stepped the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, meeting last week in Philadelphia at its 17th annual conference. Executive Vice President Berger urged the U.S. Government to intercede in the Jewish dispute. Said he: "We need --and we are entitled to have--our country's emphatic denial of the Israel-Zionist claim to anything called 'the Jewish people.' " Added Dr. Will Herberg, a professor of social philosophy at New Jersey's Drew University: "The American Jew cannot see himself as an alien in a strange land; he sees himself as thoroughly and entirely an American, whose Jewishness itself is really an aspect of his Americanness."

At that point, up before the American Council rose a gentile with a controversial notion. Said British Historian Arnold Toynbee: If Jew and non-Jew alike were to give up all feelings of ethnic "apartheid," then many gentiles would convert to Judaism. "Judaism presents Jewish monotheism in its original form and not in the derivative forms in which it is presented in Christianity and Islam," he argued. "If the abandonment of ethnic reservations were complete and genuine on both sides, the traditional caste barrier between Jews and non-Jews would be likely to be broken down by more and more frequent intermarriage . . . The positive gain would be that the great spiritual treasures of Judaism . . . would at last become one of the common spiritual possessions of the whole human race."

Orthodox Jews exploded. To them, intermarriage is anathema*--and so, for his strong views on Jews frequently expressed in the past, is Arnold Toynbee. In a battle of press releases, a joint statement was issued by President Charles Weinberg and Honorary President Emanuel Rackman of the Rabbinical Council of America (representing 800 Orthodox rabbis) and President Moses Feuerstein of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (embracing 3,000 synagogues). It said: "To ask us to proselytize by intermarrying is to wholly misunderstand our mission. Anti-Semitism is not the result of any Jewish shortcomings, but rather a weakness in the structure of humanity."

Widening Gulf. Between last week's warring Jewish factions stand the majority of U.S. Jews. Without being committed to any camp, most are enthusiastically friendly to Israel, support it by buying Israeli bonds (an average $40 million worth per year) and contributing to the United Jewish Appeal (1961 goal: $72.7 million), which sends just over half its money to Israel. Why are U.S. Jews so generously committed to aiding Israel? Answers former U.J.A. President Edward Warburg: "First you start with 2,000 years of persecution . . ."

But the gulf between U.S. Jews and Israeli Jews is widening. Native-born Israeli sabras see little difference between U.S.

Jews and U.S. gentiles. For their own part, U.S. Jewish leaders report a diminishing of Zionist sentiment among American Jews, particularly among younger people, and a renewed emphasis on Jewishness as a religion much more than a nationality. Most Jews think that Israel is a nice place to visit--but they would not want to live there. That they have spurned David Ben-Gurion's doctrine is plain. Since the establishment of Israel, an average of fewer than 250 native-born U.S. Jews per year have gone there to settle.

* About 7% of U.S. Jews marry Christians.

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