Some 70 years ago, a rabbi (Morris Kertzer) described inviting a visiting Japanese army officer to attend a Shabbat service. When it was over, the officer surprised the rabbi by asking, “What kind of Christian are you?” Upon being informed that he was a Jew, the officer inquired, “Jews? What are they?”
Yes, what are Jews? That question arises again today, not because some visiting army officer from Japan, Jakarta or Johannesburg has never heard of us, but because we ourselves need to decide what we are. There are different kinds of answers.
Halachah: The usual answer is halachic, the way Jewish jurisprudence sets boundaries to Jewish Peoplehood: to decide who is in and who is out.
Race: The Nazis used a racial definition: to decide who to murder.
Secular: Israel, a secular state with an admixture of halachah, has struggled with the issue – as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who hid from Hitler in a convent; then was baptized, became a Carmelite Friar, and took the name Father Daniel. In 1959, he sought entry to Israel under the Law of Return. Israel, he claimed, admits born Jews who identify as ethnically Jewish even though they are atheists and practice no Judaism whatever. Then why is he any different? He too was a born Jew who identified as ethnically Jewish. At least one of the supreme court justices who heard the case was inclined to accept his petition, on the halachic grounds that even Jewish sinners remain Jews. But the court rejected a halachic solution. The Law of Return, it said, “does not refer to the ‘Jew’ of Jewish religious law, but to the ‘Jew’ of secular law.”[i]
Gender egalitarian: In 1983, American Reform Judaism decided to honor patrilineal (not just matrilineal) claims of Jewish descent.
Were the Japanese army officer to ask today, “What are Jews?” we would have to answer, “Regarding what? It all depends,” for there are other definitions too, including a moral one. Consider convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, clearly Jewish by any halachic definition. But when the case came to light, several people said, “Well, he’s not very Jewish in my book!” Yes, Jeffery Epstein was legally Jewish but morally, he was not “very Jewish in my book.”
I want to build on that moral answer using the Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.” An ideal type is a hypothetical model, an abstract ideal (positive or negative) against which examples of real life can be measured. Each culture has its own ideal type.
From about the 5th century to the 13th, the ideal type for classical Christianity was the monk, who exchanged the real world for the monastery, a place to work, meditate, and pray. The American ideal type is the capitalist entrepreneur who goes from rags to riches by dint of hard work and business acumen.
Traditionally, ideal types were gendered. The ideal Victorian man succeeded at business, but was also titular master of his home and family; like Mr. Banks (appropriately named) from Mary Poppins. The ideal Victorian woman was a home maker, mother, and moral exemplar for her children.
The classical Jewish ideal type is 1. a Torah scholar, who, however, 2. uses Torah learning to be a good person in the world. It’s not unlike Plato’s ideal of 1. a philosopher, who 2. pursues wisdom to achieve virtue. Yiddish eventually provided a word for the second half of the Jewish ideal: mensch.
With secularization, that ideal was generalized to scholarship in general. Stories abound about immigrant Jewish mothers giving library cards to their little children. To this day, Jews attend college and even graduate school in record numbers. But the Jewish ideal type must also use all this education for good: the “mensch factor,” that is, which shows up in the percentage of educated Jews who are honored for accomplishments that benefit humanity. Between 1901 and 2023, of the 965 winners of Nobel Prizes, at least 216 (22%) have been Jewish.
It is not enough to be highly educated and financially successful. The Jewish ideal must strive publicly for the general good of humanity. We will never know the intimate details of people’s private lives: their messy divorces, their failures as parents, and such. But we expect them to try to live good lives at home; and if their private failures degenerate into moral disasters, they lose all claim to ideal status: The Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins, for example, are out. So too are the Bugsy Siegels and Meyer Lanskys, mob bosses in what has been called the Kosher Nostra.[ii]
I’m willing to bet that Bugsy and Meyer, at least, never claimed to be ideal Jews. But some Jews do claim the mantle of Jewish respectability, even though their actual lives defy the very notion of the historic Jewish type. I think, particularly, of the West Bank settlers bent on violently displacing Arab landowners, to fulfil a dubious biblical promise of a Greater Jewish Land of Israel.
So like the Japanese officer, I ask, “What is a Jew?” – not halachically, racially or ethnicly, but morally. What is the age-old ideal type that Jews for centuries have pursued as the right and proper way to realize their Jewish identity. It is not the west-bank thuggery but scholar mensch who betters the human condition.
[i] Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior [Father Daniel Case] Israel Supreme Court, HC 72/62 PD 16 2428 (1962). Here in the United States, Commentary (the most prestigious Jewish journal at the time) published a dissent, charging that Father Daniel’s commitment to Jewish history and even peoplehood was clear; the court should have admitted that it was specifically Father Daniel’s Christianity that decided the case (https://www.commentary.org/articles/marc-galanter/a-dissent-on-brother-daniel/). Indeed, a Jew who practices Yoga and accepts the dictates of Buddhism would doubtless be admitted today.
[ii] https://mjhnyc.org/events/kosher-nostra-the-life-and-times-of-jewish-gangsters-in-the-united-states/
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 