The Jews in the United States are the inheritors of a four-thousand-year-old culture. Into their willing--or unwilling--hands, history has placed the symbolic scepter of this heritage. Will this Jewish culture--entrusted to the American Jews either by blind permutations of events or by a manifest destiny--wither in a wasteland of indifference? Or will there be a renaissance--a humanistic rebirth--to ensure this culture continued growth?

For those who view purist Orthodoxy as the only authentic Judaism, American Judaism is nothing but a wasteland. For those who see medieval concepts of Judaism vanishing and new modes of expressing one's ties to Judaism emerging, American Judaism offers a renaissance. Thus, American Judaism finds itself in a dilemma. Which view of itself should it accept--the former, which threatens extinction, or the latter, which offers hope?

Viewed through the lens of orthodoxy, American Judaism is in grave danger. As one Jewish leader succinctly summarized the threat: "Fewer than half of American-Jewish households belong to synagogues. Close to 40 percent of all Jews are marrying non-Jews (compared to 6 percent twenty years ago). Religious school enrollment has plummeted to 400,000 in the last fifteen years, down one-third from a high-water mark of 600,000.... In recent years 10,000 young Jews have been enticed into joining evangelical sects ... and various other occult movements ... all too often ignorant of their own rich religious and cultural heritage. It has been forecast that the forces of assimilation, lowered birth rate, and increased intermarriage will reduce today's 6 million American Jews to 4.5 million within twenty-five years."¹

[1. Bernice S. Tannenbaum, president, Hadassah: Hadassah magazine, February, 1978.]

These are shocking statistics, but we doubt that greater fertility and more diligent religious school attendance will solve the problems confronting American Jewish youth as long as it remains indifferent to Judaism itself. Kaddish has been intoned on the Jewish people by Jews since the days of Moses for the laxity of their ways. Throughout the centuries, kings, prophets, and rabbis have railed against the tendency of the Jews to share their bedrooms with non-Jews in an amicable exchange of love and religion.

The Jews have survived friendly bedrooms, persecutions, expulsions, concentration camps. But there was always a commitment to Judaism, which permitted Jewish history to march unimpeded into the next challenge. The danger to Judaism today is perhaps the absence of such a commitment, especially among Jewish youth, which is indeed "all too often ignorant of their own rich religious and cultural heritage." One reason for this is that many Jewish educational institutions tend to teach how to be Jewish instead of why. Not finding an answer to the question "Why?" Jewish youth drifts out of religious schools into rootlessness, prey to the forces of assimilation.

One way of discovering one's roots is to read Jewish history. Yet Jewish youth is reading very little of it, perhaps because all too often Jewish history is presented as a dirge of oppression. As one non-Jewish scholar observed: "One thing I could never understand about Jewish historians is why be so proud of being the victim. The sacrificial lamb does not taste good to itself." Jewish history is also all too often isolated from world events, and thus seems to float in a vacuum, unanchored by relevance. It also often tends to be a "public relations history," suppressing anything thought of as unfavorable to the Jews.

In this book, as in our previous works, we have discarded the concept of Jewish history as a specialized saga of suffering so that the real Jewish history may emerge--rich, rebellious, and full of intellectual adventure. We have also discarded the conventional approach to American-Jewish history and based it instead on three new concepts: that American Judaism is a unique outgrowth of the American soil, shaped as much by the American spirit as by the Jewish ethic; that the early Jewish settlers in the Colonies were not devoted Orthodox Jews who came in search of religious freedom, but people who came to seek new business opportunities; and that American Judaism is destined to play the same role in the future of the Jews that rabbinic Judaism played in their past. We will also contend that American Judaism will not only preserve the Jewish heritage but will serve as a vehicle for its enrichment.

As American-Jewish history has evolved within the context of general American history, it must be evaluated within that framework. Thus early American-Jewish history and early American history must be observed as related phenomena.

Generally speaking, there are two ways of viewing the genesis of American history. One school sees the Colonial experience until the Revolution as part of British history, with American history beginning after 1776. The other sees British history ending and American history beginning with the settling of Jamestown in 1607. Though both schools can use the same dates, each will come up with totally different evaluations.

Similarly, there are two ways of viewing early American-Jewish history. The prevalent one is to see it as an extension of European Orthodox Judaism, changing only after 1845, with the arrival of the German Reform rabbis. The new, modern view is that American Judaism began in 1654 with the arrival of the first Portuguese Jews. Just as it can be held that American history began at Jamestown, and that this experience set the framework for future American history, so it can be demonstrated that the Portuguese Jews and their successor immigrants in the Colonial period set the framework for a new Jewish history.

American Judaism was shaped neither by a book nor a blueprint. It evolved not out of what was said, but out of what was done. It lived itself into existence. The Hasidic saying "Judaism did not create the Jews; the Jews created Judaism" describes the American phase of Jewish history, because in America the Jews themselves created their own brand of Judaism.

Because the Jews in Colonial America, like their Christian brethren, were pioneers who grew up with the country, they learned how to innovate. Like the Puritans, the first Jews to arrive in Colonial America showed a willingness to amend the nonessentials in their Judaism but to hold on to the nonnegotiable items. This gave them the same resilience that Congregationalism gave the Puritans, and for the same reason.

The spirit of the frontier influenced the Colonial Jew as much as it did the Colonial Christian. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner stated that each time a part of the West was conquered, America experienced a rebaptism of primitivism, a revival of strength. The frontier, in Turner's view, brought a continual regeneration of the primitive conditions the early Americans experienced. This perennial rebirth, this westward expansion with its new opportunities, unleashed the forces that shaped the American character.

"The frontier takes the colonist," Turner says, "...a man in European dress, with European habits of thought, strips off the garments of his civilized past, puts him almost on par with the Indians, and disciplines and changes him during his long struggle to implant a society in the wilderness."

The same forces that created the Christian colonist also created the Jewish colonist, making him unique in the history of Judaism--a Jew differing as much from the European Jew as the European Jew differed from the biblical. Just as this frontier culture stripped the European Christian of his cultural vestments, so it stripped the European Jew of his. In the same way that the Christian colonist emerged from the wilderness not as a European but as an "American," so the Jewish colonist emerged not as a European Jew but as a distinctly "American Jew." Thus, for both, the frontier meant a steady turning away from the influences of Europe.

To understand the American Jew, then, we must see him as he grew up in the frontier situation. We must assess the impact the frontier situation had on his Judaism, because this experience, rather than events in Europe, laid the psychological and physical foundations for his future Judaism.

This new approach to American Jewish history has left us open to several criticisms. Some conventional scholars still contend that the most notable characteristic of the first Jewish settlers in the Colonies was their orthodoxy and adherence to European modes of Judaism. Others, however, feel that a reexamination of the evidence clearly indicates that this conventional view is superficial, that the life style of the Colonial Jews was completely altered as a response to the radically new conditions of social and economic openness in America. We concur with this second school.

Another criticism has been that we debunk everything Jewish and extol everything Gentile. We trust the reader will find this to be sheer nonsense. We have tried to place things in perspective. We do not view every act against a Jew as incipient anti-Semitism. A stupidity does not become a virtue when committed by a Jew; we counter a stupidity with ridicule whether it is of Jewish or Gentile origin. Jewish history does not need to hide behind the pretense of sensitivity; it will float to the top by the sheer force of its grandeur and achievements, its few follies notwithstanding.

We have also been accused of being harsh with the ghetto Jew. Such is not the case. We have been harsh, not with the Jew who was forced to live in the ghetto, for whom we have the greatest compassion, but with the stereotyped image of the ghetto Jew that persists to the present day. This stereotype was created by the Christians when they imprisoned the Jews in those ghettos. The ghetto Jew does not represent the proud Jew of past history. The authentic Jew is the Jew of the thirty-five centuries preceding the Ghetto Age and of the two centuries after its fall.

The word "Judaism" means many things to many people, all of them no doubt correct. To prevent misunderstanding, however, we wish to stress that in this book "Judaism" refers not only to the religion of the Jews but to their total social, cultural, and religious behavior.

I would now like to offer several acknowledgments.

Drs. Norman and Judith Katz, two modern Orthodox scholars, critiqued the manuscript from a consistent Orthodox viewpoint, yet with total objectivity. If there are still errors in this respect, it is because I failed to heed their advice out of secular considerations.

Mr. F. Garland Russell, historian and attorney, has my heartfelt thanks for his research of all non-Jewish aspects of this book. This work owes many of its insights into American history to his broad knowledge of the subject.

I extend an especial vote of appreciation to Jeffrey B. Stiffman, Rabbi, Temple Shaare Emeth, St. Louis, Missouri, for his perceptive reading of the manuscript and for strengthening it with many cogent comments.

I am grateful to Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, Hebrew Union College, for his pragmatic critique. Regretfully, Dr. Marcus was only able to read part of the manuscript. Though he disagreed with my views on the Marranos (which I have not changed), the manuscript has gained much from his friendly suggestions.

I am indebted to Dr. Julius Nodel, Rabbi, Temple Emanu-El, Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Nodel, never one to inject timidity in his views, caused me to reexamine all aspects he disagreed with. If errors still survive in the path he trod, it is because I dared to persist in views with which he did not concur.

May it be pointed out, however, that usually where one scholar disagreed, another concurred. In heeding one scholar, I always ran the risk of disregarding the good advice of another.

And now it is time to praise two professional editors whose help has been invaluable--Martin Baron, a researcher, and Kathleen Howard, assigned by Simon and Schuster to edit this work. This book owes much of its strength to their careful attention to detail, analysis of content, and editorial advice.

And finally, I wish to pay tribute to three individuals--Mr. Gordon LeBert, who acted as the general editor for this work as he did for my two earlier books, Jews, God and History and The Indestructible Jews; my daughter, Mrs. Gail Goldey, who also critiqued her father's manuscript; and to my wife, Ethel, who was not only my amanuensis, but also a most valued adviser.