So. For all YHB noodles in this Tohu Bohu about Things Jewish, in fact I know very little. About anything, really; I have enough of a trick memory to have acquired a tremendous breadth of knowledge that is really exceedingly shallow. Good enough for blog work, you know. And as for my knowledge of Jewish thought and history, well, one of the things about being a two-percenter is that although I know very little about our history, I know a lot more than almost all the 98% of people in this country who aren’t Jewish, so it seems like I know a lot. Seems to them, I meant to say, although to be honest it also seems like that to me, fairly often, and so I forget that I don’t actually know very much.
Which isn’t usually a problem, actually. I’m usually in the good position of knowing enough to go on with, but not knowing so much that learning more requires a great deal of work or even specialized resources. When I read half of a biography of Rashi a few months ago, I learned an awful lot, even though it was a terrible book.
It turns out that it was part of a projected series of JPS biographies of Important Figures in Jewish History, aimed at people like me, who know a little but not a lot. I discovered this by reading JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture 1888-1988, by Jonathan D. Sarna. It’s a commissioned centennial volume, but it attempts to be a serious history and to place the work of the publication society in its historical context, that is, the history of Judaism in America over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sadly, I don’t have much of that context. The stuff that I found the most fascinating was the mid- and late-nineteenth century stuff, the attempts by different groups to found and perpetuate a Jewish Publication Society, and of course the eventual success of the particular group of Philadelphia philanthropists. After that there were tidbits of fascinating things (they pretty much bankrupted themselves during WWI printing bibles for soldiers, and then did it again during WWII—as I type this it occurs to me to wonder how much they put into it during the Vietnam years) (also, the story of how they become dissatisfied with the available printing presses for Hebrew/English books, and so buy their own, innovate, and eventually wind up with a hugely successful printing press arm wagging the dog of the JPS, and then have to split that business off into a separate profit-making entity), but my lack of familiarity with the greater context made a lot of the events unintelligible.
The main thing, really, is that the JPS, from the very beginning, was determined not to be the press of the Reform movement or of traditional Judaism, but to encompass all American Jews. Which was difficult, and Mr. Sarna writes well about the personalities and institutions involved. Over the century, though, waves of immigration as well as purely American development lead to the creation of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, as well as chassidic and Reconstructionist and other trends. And Mr. Sarna doesn’t go into how that all happens, which may well be the right choice for this sort of book, but it means that I don’t have any context for the conflicts that the JPS is negotiating.
In fact, my statement up there about what leads to the creations of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism? It’s just crap I made up. I have no idea. I grew up in a Conservative congregation, and I have no idea at all what the history of the Conservative movement is, or who was prominent in founding the major organizations. Solomon Schechter, I assume, although I know nothing about him other than all the schools being named after him. And as for the movers in the various Orthodox movements…oddly enough, I know more about the Lubovitchers and their Rebbe than I do about the more mainstream Orthodox Jews.
Ah, well. There are plenty of books about the history of Jews in America. Mr. Sarna has written one of them, in fact. And, as I say, I’m at the point where an introduction would be greatly informative and presumably easy to read.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.