Jacob Neusner says: “If you talk to any Jew who cares about Judaism, the subject of “assimilation” will surely come up, a term fraught with negative connotations for loyal and devout Jews. They argue that assimilation can only lead to the end of the Jewish people as an autonomous community and to the end of Judaism as a religious or cultural tradition.”

Neusner continues: “Built into this concern is a fear of change. They argue that change is bad. They say that one can define the specific characteristics of Judaism, those that all Jewish communities in the world have in common, and one must strive to preserve these common characteristics, because failure to preserve them means failure to preserve Judaism.”

Neusner says this conception of Judaism is flawed for two reasons. The first is because it sees Judaism as something static, unchanging, with only one dimension and unitary, that can be defined and described in only one way—its only way of being Jewish. But it is not difficult to demonstrate that those characteristics that are considered uniquely Jewish today were not considered so at the time they were adopted from the outside world. Yiddish, a language intrinsically linked to the identity of Ashkenazi Jews, had a non-Jewish origin in medieval German. The current way ultra-Orthodox Jews dress in black was borrowed from the dress of Christian Poles.

The second, says Neusner, is when the fear of assimilation reveals a lack of confidence in the resources available to Judaism and in the Jewish people’s ability to adapt and adopt the best features of universal culture. He says that assimilation, properly channeled, is not a bad thing, as it is a source that has revitalized Judaism. This is precisely the argument of Gerson D. Cohen, former rector of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Cohen quotes from the Talmud (Vaykra Rabah 32:5) what Bar Kappara, a second-century CE sage, said: one of the four factors that led to the Israelites’ redemption from Egypt was that they spoke Hebrew. And it is true that at that time the people of Israel spoke Hebrew. But in the time of the Mishnah, the Jews spoke Aramaic, and many also spoke Greek, like the Jewish community of Alexandria. The name of Hillel’s famous edict, the «prosbul,» comes from the Greek «prosbole.» Later, Arabic replaced Aramaic and Greek. Maimonides wrote his «Guide for the Perplexed» in Arabic. And the Sephardic Jews brought Ladino with them from Spain as their language. The change in language did not end Judaism; on the contrary, it renewed it. This ability to translate, readapt, and reorient oneself to a new situation, while retaining the basic Jewish core, is responsible for the survival and vitality of Judaism, says Cohen.

Cohen concludes: The dilemma of whether assimilation is a good thing or a bad thing comes down to a simple question: if non-Jewish forms of expression are assimilated into Jewish life, then assimilation is positive. Medieval German became Yiddish. But if Judaism and Jews are assimilated into the way of life of other peoples, then Jewishness is lost, and that is no longer a blessing.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Gerson D. Cohen: “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History.” Jacob Neusner: “Understanding Jewish Theology: Classical Issues and Modern Perspectives.”