In August, Margi and I attended a seminar on the Roots of Secular Humanistic Judaism, at the Birmingham Temple in Detroit. The course was co-taught by Rabbi Sherwin Wine and Herschel Hartmann, a well-known secularist, Yiddishist, educator, long-time political activist, and leading light in the CSJO. In this note I’ll try to summarize the quite extensive material covered.
The story begins with the Enlightenment. True, we can find some of our roots further back, occasionally in Tanakh or Talmud, certainly in Greek and Hellenistic civilizations, and in other writings at other times. But, especially in early Jewish tradition, we should not make the mistake of taking writings or events out of context and then attributing to them either secular or humanistic intent that they could not actually have shared. However much we may revere and be attracted to aspects of our thousands of years of history, a basic lesson of this course was that our movement is new. We cannot find "I am the master of my fate" in the Torah. It represents new ideas that could not and did not exist before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, urbanization of the bourgeoisie, leisure, and modern sociopolitics.
The Enlightenment, for a brief review, begins in the 17th century, with a mixture of science, philosophy, and religious and political turmoil. Through its major philosophers we can associate it with these questions: What is the best method for the discovery of truth; What is the nature of reality; What is the nature of people; What are right and wrong, and how do we know; What is the best way to organize a society. The revolution reflected in these questions, is recognized by changes in economy (mercantilism and then capitalism), knowledge (science and technology are the fuel for this revolution), secularity (in the sense that religion becomes less necessary and living standards rise), power (the acceptance the human beings are not helpless in the face of the universe), values (deriving from shifts in authority and a developing taste for making personal choices), and political changes (capitalism requires competent managers in government as well as business).
From these movements we see the growth of a number of familiar philosophical movements. We can trace the roots of agnosticism and atheism as far back as Aristotle, whose notion of a deity was a prime mover, more a geometrical concept than a conscious intervening creature. Spinoza got in hot water for saying that God "is" nature and others, in particular Kant, weighed in as well. By the 18th and 19th centuries disbelief was a perfectly acceptable idea in polite society, and God was given a final philosophic death blow by the Logical Positivists, especially A.J. Ayer, who demonstrated that you can’t prove the existence of God because there’s no way to establish exactly what it meant by "god." Materialism, meanwhile, was rejecting the existence of any super-natural world.
Another important movement was humanism. There are two common confusions here (I’ve made them, anyway). Humanism is not humanitarianism, the desire to help and be concerned about people in general and specific. Neither is it quite the same as what was meant in the Renaissance by humanism, which simply meant the appreciation of the human body and mind. The humanism that developed during the Enlightenment affirmed both the significance and the power of humans. Compte spoke of the development of knowledge as a relocation of power, and Feuerbach came right out and said "Man creates Gods." These would have been fighting words a hundred years earlier. Now they were polite salon conversation.
While Jews were becoming enlightened and assimilated (to a lesser extent than today, of course) in Western Europe, the story was quite different in the East. There, although the intellectuals, the maskilim, came from the west to teach, they found themselves learning. They had to learn Yiddish to communicate with the masses, and this began a mirror process of developing depth in the language, which soon led to the great explosion of Yiddish as a language of literature. The people of Eastern Europe were also ready to explode. Packed into the Pale of Settlement, treated badly at the best of times, and much more urbanized and industrialized than the rest of Russia (which was not hard, given that Russia had only two cities of note and maintained its serf-based economy) the Jews were ready for action. Among those actions was labor action, notably the founding of the Jewish Labor Bund in 1897. Given that the Jews were in essence a nation within Russia, as other national groups also were, their aspirations — awakened by the maskilim and their students — focused not on Zionism but on some form of self-determination where they were (A movement called Doh-ikheit, or here-ness). Note though that there was another strong movement the Territorialists, that also wanted to preserve the "nation" as it existed in the Pale, but though to find an unpopulated area in Africa, Western Australia or Pella, IA, to move to. After the Russian Revolution the Bund was able to win its demand to be part of the movement but as explicit representative of the Jewish people. Their further demand that there be Jewish cultural self-determination in any region where Jews were a majority was rejected until the ‘20s, when in those areas all schools and government activities were made officially bilingual. This happy state existed until 1937 when Stalin cut it off and exiled many Yiddish leaders. Among the opposition of the nationalists to the Zionist agenda were the following arguments: (1) Zionism separates Jewish workers from others; (2) Zionist only postpones liberation, since there’s no realistic hope of getting control of Palestine from the Turks; (3) Zionism has bourgeois leaders who were not above dealing with the oppressors, as Hertz had once met with high Czarist ministers.
Let’s note briefly some of the pioneer advocates of Secular Jewishness. One was Moses Hess (1812-1875), perhaps the first to call for a return to Israel from a purely secular perspective. Hess (once a collaborator of Marx and Engels but later estranged from their movement) proposed a return of all Jews to the homeland and the development of a communally owned land based on social justice and other Jewish values. A second was Asher Ginzberg, who called himself Ahah HaAm -- "one of the people" (1856-1912). He became a critic of the early settlements (the First Aliyah), arguing instead for building a single model settlement that would need no philanthropic infusions of cash to survive, and for an enlightened policy of relations with the Arabs. Rather than having the homeland become the single solution to all Jewish problems, he argued for a national spiritual center that would energize Jews throughout the Diaspora. Eliezar Ben-Yehuda (born Eliezar Perelman, 1858-1922) was the person most responsible for the institutionalization and revival of Hebrew. Among his credits are the establishment of girls’ Hebrew schools, sponsoring the use for Hebrew to teach secular as well as Jewish subjects, and publishing the first newspaper in Hebrew to deviate from religious traditions and write about secular subjects. And, to name just one more, there was Leon Pinsker (1821-1891), a doctor from Odessa. Pinsker was editor of a newspaper whose goal was to encourage Jewish readers to learn Russian and become acquainted with Russian culture, and was also specifically involved with a society formed to disseminate the teachings of the Enlightenment to the Jews. However, after a series of pogroms in 1881 he published "Autoemancipation" in which he argued that the Jewish problem would never be solved so long as Jews lived among others and lacked a homeland of their own. He argued that increased tolerance of religion would not ultimately help the Jews because "we are not a religious sect but rather a people that was once a nation." Without a physical territory in which to establish their nationhood — a nationhood open to all Jews, regardless of religious belief — Jews would continue to be oppressed, even when assimilated in Enlightened countries.
All of these secular Jewish movements (and many others!) did not suddenly morph into our movement, Secular Humanistic Judaism, although they did flow more directly into the other secular Jewish movements which I’ll mention below. Despite the successes of the nationalist movement, embodied in the State of Israel (we have slipped ahead, haven’t we?) these successes left a number of problems for the Jews of North America. The destruction of the heart of Yiddish Nationalism and the relative decline in the socialist labor movements as American and Canadian Jews became suburbanized and professional, as well as the decline in anti-Semitism, took the organizing centers away from North American Jews. This left secular Jews with no way to join with others. Thus, the typical phenomenon had them joining Reform or Conservative congregations to get some form of Jewish education for their children, and submerging their personal philosophies in order to do so. In 1963 the Birmingham Temple began with a handful of families, but grew quickly. The "humanistic" approach was adopted both because of its empowering and positive content and to counter the negative message that "secular" standing alone in the title seemed to imply.
But there are other secular Jewish trends in North America that, growing organically from roots in the European traditions, did not follow the same path as the founders (and now 30 communities) of SHJ. In the early days of immigration Jews were bound together by the Landsmanschaften — the social and mutual help societies composed of people from the same shtetl or area — and by the trade unions. These spawned, as their direct usefulness waned, other organizations. The Arbeter Ring was created in 1901 and was an important force that, after some intergenerational decline, is regaining some of its former strength today. There were some union oriented organizations, notable the Jewish National Labor Alliance, that provided their members with complete expressions of their Jewishness. There were also anarchist and socialist groups of various stripes. But in more modern times there have been groups that defined secularism to exclude both religion and politics from their definitions. Among these were the Sholem Aleichem Volks Institute and the International Workers Order. At the peak in the 40’s organizations like these had at least 150,000 members; each had a national Yiddish school. However, as the population moved to the suburbs these organizations largely declined. In isolated places secular Jews banded together to create secular Jewish schools, and these eventually banded together to form the CSJO.