Abstract
Both scholars of American Jewry and advocates working in American Jewish communities have linked a moral commitment to greater inclusion of ethnically and racially diverse Jews with a constructivist approach toward the study of American Jewish identity. What has gone unquestioned is the applicability of this constructivist approach to the study of all types of American Jews. In this article, I examine the assumptions embedded in the social scientific constructivist notion of Jewish identity and argue for acknowledgment and interrogation of its liberal grammar. Drawing on original field data, I examine a Syrian Sephardic Jewish community in the United States and posit that the Jewishness negotiated in this group cannot be properly understood through this perspective and must instead be viewed through the framework of tradition. I argue that interpreting American Jewish identity through a subjective liberal lens is itself a construction that not only cannot capture traditional notions of Judaism but in fact excludes them. This analysis and these findings shed light on the discrepancy between constructivist social scientific categories of study which are presented as not only proper but also more ethical due to their supposed universality and the way these categories can end up omitting groups they are meant to include.
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Notes
The categories Sephardic and Ashkenazi are used colloquially and by scholars in ways that are contested. In my research, I approach these as pan-ethnic categories which develop differently in divergent times and spaces. In the contemporary American context, I define ‘Sephardic’ as a pan-ethnic category for those self-identifying Sephardic Jews from Spain, the former Ottoman Empire, and present-day Greece, North Africa, and the Middle East. I define Ashkenazi as self-identified Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern, Western, and Central Europe. I use these names to refer not to the identity work that’s described in this article as that of an individual mindset and meaning-making but to group belonging. Although not grammatically consistent, I use the terms Sephardic and Ashkenazi reflecting the way these descriptors are commonly used in North American Jewish communal discourse.
Throughout this article I use the term ‘Jewishness’ to escape the colloquial and scholarly assumption that being Jewish is an identity. I resist defining it narrowly myself to avoid premature theorizing about alternatives to ‘Jewish identity’.
Let me be careful to not overstate here the alignment between self-identified liberal Jews in America and the assumptions embedded in a scholarly orientation towards Jewish identity that is underpinned by a liberal grammar. Although I will not argue the point here, there can be (for instance) traditional negotiations of Jewishness enacted by self-identified liberal Jews that are not captured by the liberal grammar underlying the constructivist study of Jewish identity.
Especially pertinent for this discussion is Wald’s (2019) theorization about the relationship between American Jews’ self-identification as liberals and liberal principles.
The history of how Judaism ‘became’ a religion (Batnitzky, 2011) contributes to our understanding of this development.
Jews arriving in Israel from Muslim-majority countries did not identify as Mizrahim [Heb: easterners or orientals] pre-immigration. They used local categories relating to their cities and native lands, for example identifying as Iraqi Jews. In Israel, however, they were soon most commonly seen by the hegemonic Ashkenazi population as “bnei Edot Hamizrah” [Heb: descendants of the eastern/oriental communities], which reflected broader social marginalization (Chetrit, 2000). In the early 1990s, non-Ashkenazi scholars and activists and community leaders began re-appropriating the category of Mizrahim to self-identify. The term came to evoke “the specific experience of non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel” (Shohat, 1999, pg. 13) and was characterized by a sense of resistance towards the Ashkenazi hegemony. Today, the category of Mizrahim intersects but does not overlap with the category of Sephardic in Israel; while a Mizrahi Jew is often also Sephardic, not all Sephardic Jews are Mizrahi. With some exceptions, I consciously do not use the category of Mizrahi in an American context due to its Israeli origins.
This approach to tradition is similar in spirit to the theoretical contributions of anthropologist Saba Mahmood. She argues that the liberal presuppositions in feminist and anthropological scholarship cannot capture the experiences of her nonliberal subjects, for whom “socially prescribed forms of behavior constitutes the conditions for the emergence of the self as such and are integral for its realization” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 149).
Contrasting this understanding of tradition with the constructivist notion of Jewish identity carries with it the potential for scholarly over-correction by positing essentialized alternatives to constructivist categories. Therefore, those of us who critique a purely subjectivist approach towards Jewishness must take special care to avoid an essentializing trap. Investigations of Jewish tradition(s) should explore its internal pluralities. Relatedly, while in this discussion I posit tradition as contrasting with the liberal grammar of the self, there are many ways in which liberalism itself could serve as its own tradition— discussion beyond the scope of this article.
I have chosen to privilege the language of my subjects who use the term “the community” or “community” to refer to their group, knowing fully that it is a social construction (i.e., a “category of practice”). I also alternate between calling it the “Syrian community” and the “Syrian Sephardic community,” reflecting the way community members speak of it.
See Jiménez (2009) for a discussion of the canonical literature on ethnic assimilation in America and its gaps.
As a general rule, religious expectations in this community are gendered and this synagogue ritual is one of many reserved only for men.
The practice of aliyot in this community contains many elements that are less common in other Jewish synagogue settings, but many other elements are similar to the way that other (including liberal) Jews practice synagogue ritual. I offer this as an example of traditional Jewishness without precluding that it can also shape the development of those who self-identify as liberal Jews. In other words, studying the practice of tradition in settings populated by what we would call nonliberal subjects could help expand our repertoire as social scientists with self-identified liberal subjects as well.
There is an additional layer to understanding the way in which tradition is engaged with in this group and in other communities, which is the dialogical relationship between an individual and their tradition. As Yadgar (2015) rightly notes, tradition is not something calcified or rigid that one merely inherits, but is something that is engaged with, shaped and negotiated by individuals. While in this article I do not depict the way in which my research subjects are in dialogical relationship with their tradition, my dissertation (2019) explores it at considerable length.
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Bitton, M. Liberal Grammar and the Construction of American Jewish Identity. Am Soc 53, 625–643 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09535-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-022-09535-2