Two Hundred Years On

Saturday marks the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Reform Judaism, while today sees the publication of the authoritative finding that, while (indeed, because) Israel is dear to the hearts of British Jews, most of them favour giving up land for peace, and the clear majority supports negotiation with Hamas. It seems that the people who shout the loudest are no more than that. As we all knew, anyway. Nothing about this story on Harry’s Place or on Melanie Phillips’s Spectator blog, for a start. Funny, that.

On the future of Israel, Muhammad is now the single most common name for newborn boys within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. About 14,000 Jews left Israel annually between 1990 and 2005. Half of Israelis aged between 14 and 18 express the desire to live elsewhere. A huge percentage of Israelis holds, or plans to inquire about obtaining, foreign nationality. The Berlin synagogue has 12,000 members, and there are now perhaps 55,000 Jews in Poland, many of whom are immigrants from Israel. Curzon was right when he bemoaned the Balfour Declaration on the grounds that the “advanced and intellectual” Jews would have no desire to live in the Middle East. They cannot wait to go home.

Desperately, Israel is instead flying in Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, Russian Nazis, East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, Peruvian Indians, absolutely anyone at all. Such Jewish births as there still are, are largely and increasingly to ultra-Orthodox who so disdain the Zionist State that they will use physical force against its teenage conscripts of both sexes.

On the future, if not necessarily of Reform, then certainly of non-Orthodox Judaism, one to watch may be the sensibility expressed by Melanie Phillips in The World Turned Upside Down. She seems to believe in the importance, indeed the centrality, of a Judeo-Christian tradition which does not in fact exist. Much of what she writes, almost boilerplate stuff about the historical and cultural importance of Christianity, is simply not true, as a matter of fact, of Judaism, the role of which in Western civilisation, though in many ways no less significant, is quite, quite different. Her enthusiasm for Intelligent Design exhibits a strikingly un-Judaic interest in pure theology, which the rabbis have overwhelmingly regarded as not so much the wrong answers as the wrong questions.

And then there is her increasingly famous or infamous attribution of everything on the neoconservative hate list to anti-Semitism. Now, I am no great fan of several of those things, either. But environmentalism is a product of anti-Semitism? Come on! However, just as we see the wildfire spread of Islam among Afro-Caribbean young men and among deep-thinking middle-class girls, as well as the sixty thousand and more Muslims already classified as White British, might we also see conversion of neoconservatives to some sort of Judaism, on the grounds that everything against which they define themselves is really anti-Semitic, and that "the philosophical, theological and ethical resources of Judaism", or some similar form of words, provide the necessary weapons against those things?

I say "some sort of Judaism", because Phillips is a member of a Reform synagogue, and hose who declared themselves Jews in order to provide a spiritual or ritual framework for their neoconservatism are most unlikely to trouble the Orthodox, or indeed to be troubled by them. But they and the average Reform rabbi or congregant are hardly each other's obvious best fits, either. So, where will they go? Will we be seeing new, Phillipsian synagogues springing up? Contrary to what is often assumed or asserted, that sort of entrepreneurial, bottom-up, and in a purely non-pejorative sense eccentric religious experiment is very, very much a recurring feature of this country's history. We are due a few more. This could very well be one of them.