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Across the Bowery, where Europe and America constantly mingle in
everyday life, the annual conflict between the Jew orthodox and the
Jew apostate is now going on. It is a minor war, this year polemic.
Its greatest havoc is wrought in printers' ink and Russian coffee,
and yet it is a characteristic phase of Ghetto life. Moreover, it is
the atheist and not the champion of orthodoxy who provokes the
quarrel. He is a cantankerous fellow, this Jewish apostate, happy
only when he is attacked and miserable when suffered to go his way
in peace. At the precise moment when the devout are busy with their
religious observances, he bursts into his fiercest verbal excess,
lashes the Yiddish press into venomous editorial warfare, and in
noisy mass meetings formulates resolutions of blood curdling
impiety. Last year, when the orthodox were celebrating the Day of
Atonement, the most solemn festival of the Jewish year, the
atheists, with characteristic malice, were assembled in a Brooklyn
hall, voicing plans for a Temple of Reason to be set among the
synagogues of the East Side and far to outshine them all. this was
the atheist's triumphant excess of last year; the East Side is now
waiting for this year's sensation.
For all his noise the Jewish atheist who
causes the annual disturbance is not a representative of any
numerous body. There are several millions of Hebrews in America, but
the polemical atheists number only then thousand, nearly all members
of the Arbeiter Ring. Small as this number is, however, its quarrels
are many, for the fighting apostate on the Jewish Sabbath has other
combats on his hands for common days. He has the Hibernian
characteristic of being "agin' the government," religious as well as
political. An atheist on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, he is a
Socialist on the other six days. His hatred for the capitalist is no
less bitter than his aversion for the orthodox. His atheism is of
foreign origin, and the average number of the Arbeiter Ring bade
defiance to the religion of Moses and the laws of the Czar at the
same moment. Harmless as he is in America, this Jewish iconoclast
has dangerous potentialities in Russia. There he is the backbone of
the revolutionary movement, and supplies the leaders for the Bund.
He may be satisfied with verbal firecrackers in New-York, but he has
used dynamite with fatal effect in Warsaw and Moscow.
AN IMPORTED PLANT.
It is his foreign origin which
constitutes one [of the] striking characteristics of the local
members of the Arbeiter Ring. His activity has served [to
confuse] many students of East Side life. In [performances] these
observers have imagined, they beheld a new and widespread revolt
from the Mosaic religion. But this has proved to be a mistaken view.
The polemical apostate of the East Side, the member of the Arbeiter
Ring, does not in any sense represent the American born generations
of Hebrews. Nor do his doctrines find proselytes among this new
generation, which has an apostasy of its own far different from the
aggressive and bitter unbelief of the members of the Arbeiter Ring.
The Arbeiter unbelievers are almost without exception foreign born,
representatives of the more intelligent of the workingmen of Russia,
Galicia and Rumania. Their code of religious and economic brigandage
was developed by conditions faced abroad and fancied to exist in
America.
The philosophical attitude manifested
by the vast bulk of the East Side orthodox toward the sputtering
apostate is well founded. Long observation has made it clear that
his days of activity, of fierce and aggressive warfare, are
numbered. Little by little that tolerant spirit characteristic of
American life, even on the East Side, saps his joy in battle. Amid
persecution he grows strong, but in a world that ignores him he
relapses little by little into silence. A decade in America is the
span of time careful observers allot to the fiercer activity of the
member of the Arbeiter Ring. By that time he has usually prospered
too well to have any bitter resentment for the economic system about
him. His vociferous apostasy has also been quieted, not by
persecution or by convincing argument, but by the complete
indifference of the world about him. Thus it happens that he leaves
to his newly arrived brethren the work he undertook. The foundation
stone of that Temple of Reason so urgently advocated a year ago has
not bee laid. Even the young agitator whose eloquent speech in
advocacy of the project attracted widespread attention is no longer
prominent n Arbeiter circles, and the whisper is going around that
he is already an apostate from apostasy.
ACRIMONIOUS DEBATES.
The newspaper polemics of the Jewish
atheist are almost humorous in their acrimony. Last year one radical
organ printed six hundred letters. In all these documents the
writers gravely discussed the eligibility to membership in the
Arbeiter Ring of a Jew who went to a synagogue on the Day of
Atonement. The majority of correspondents agreed he was ineligible.
This year the Yiddish press is discussing another burning question
with equal thoroughness. The present discussion deals with the
proposition of expelling from the Arbeiter members found
surreptitiously observing religious rites. The consensus of opinion
seems to be that they should be prevented from joining rather than
treated to a system of espionage after joining. But the Arbeiter has
other methods of disciplining its weak kneed brethren. It collects
and distributes a fund for the sick, and members who do not work on
Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, may not enjoy its benefits. Not a
labor organization itself, the Arbeiter Ring is after all made up
almost entirely of workingmen representing almost every trade.
Moreover, not all of its activities are either polemical or
iconoclastic. Its primary purpose is education, and its meetings are
designed for the improvement of its members. Even the famous Temple
of Reason was to be, first of all, a seat of educational activity.
Despite its protests, however, the Arbeiter Ring is not in any sense
representative of the irreligion of the American Jews.
A careful student of East Side conditions, a Hebrew himself,
recently declared that not more than 40 per cent of American-born
Jews observed the dietary laws and religious ceremonies prescribed
by the Mosaic law.
In such a percentage the handful of members of the Arbeiter Ring
plays only a small part. The vast bulk of Jewish apostasy represents
no revolt, intellectual or moral.
ORTHODOXY INCONVENIENT.
"Convenience," said this Jewish student of his race, "convenience
and the customs of the society about him - write that down as the
explanation of the irreligion of the American-born Jew. No
intellectual protest against the traditions of his race moves this
class of apostate. The public school; the business world, adjusted
to the observation of the Christian, not the Jewish Sabbath; the
Saturday night dance; and the complete ignoring of all Jewish
holidays by the mass of people surrounding him - these, and a score
of similar reasons, explain the situation. The Jew of the second
generation does not become a Christian. He is as far from any such
conversion as his father, but he finds that to live in a business
world adjusted to a Christian calendar is hopelessly inconvenient,
if not practically impossible, if he clings to his racial religious
observances.
"So long as the boy is in school and lives with his parents, he
more or less willingly submits to the parental training, but when he
goes out to work and becomes self-supporting, then conditions
change. He finds that to keep his job he must work on Saturday, the
Jewish Sabbath, and rest on Sunday, the Christian holiday.
Similarly, he learns to surrender his celebration of other religious
days for business reasons. Thus, little by little, the Jewish boy is
transformed into a workaday member of the American business
community. Natural as such a result is, it brings with it endless
unhappiness to Jewish homes on the East Side. The father, with
bewildered sorrow, sees his child steadily becoming estranged from
him, not merely in education and in the ordinary things of American
life, but even in the observance of rites and laws peculiar to his
race through countless centuries. Moreover, since every Jewish
ceremony is more or less patriarchal in character and comprehends
the whole family in its festivities, sacred days, such as the
approaching Day of Atonement, are fraught with extreme sadness,
because, from their observation, the second generation will in
countless instances be absent. Even in homes where both generations
are together, the chasm between Asia and America will not
infrequently separate father and son sitting at the same table."
THE JEWISH CHILD.
Apart from matters of religion the gulf between father and son on
the East Side is broad. Students of local conditions have declared
that the vast majority of Jewish immigrants live and die obeying the
laws and following the customs of their native land. American
language and ways alike remain unintelligible to them, and they
depend with almost pathetic helplessness on their children for
association with the world about them. Indeed, the precocious
Americanism of the Jewish child is at once the wonder and the
despair of his parents.
"He is an American-born American not a greenhorn like me." This
is the fashion in which the average Jewish immigrant describes his
child. From the very start, this child unconsciously acquires a
contempt for the un-American habits and characteristics of his
father. The American public school and associations with business
life do the rest. The average Jewish boy of fifteen lives the life
of New York, contemporaneous to the minute; his father still
slumbers in the existence of Kishinev, Lemberg, or Jassy. The
separation in habits of religion follows as a natural sequence that
earlier separation in all the common phases of life. What is the
polemical activity of the Arbeiter Ring has not accomplished the
ordinary current of American daily life brings about to a very great
extent. With all its European prejudices and bitterness, the
Arbeiter Ring has no appeal of deep significance to the American
Jew. On the other hand, the
laissez-faire spirit of our national life seems in many cases to
accomplish what the persecution of ages has failed to bring about -
namely, the alienating of the Jewish child from the strict
observance of his racial religious rites. Such a situation as is
described above does not escape the attention and the consideration
of that large element of the Jewish world which still remains
orthodox. One great organization, the Jewish Endeavor Society, is
gallantly struggling to stem the tide of indifference. It has
organized scores of branch clubs, revived and endeavored to
popularize the study of the Hebrew language, and unquestionably set
in motion a reaction toward orthodoxy. There are, moreover, other
Jewish societies doing a similar missionary work, the results of
which cannot yet be foreseen. In this way the Jew himself is
manfully attempting to check a movement threatening the
individuality of the race.
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