World Jewry as a Polity
Daniel J. Elazar
This paper is devoted to understanding the Jewish community as a polity, as a commonwealth that transcends, at it were, space, in the same way that, as a people, Jews have transcended time. As an organized people, Jews partake of an exceptional kind of political life, which if still unusual today, may well be a form to which the world in general is moving. If Marshall MacLuhan is correct, the world is undergoing some retribalization. In many respects, the Jews are the modern tribe par excellence, the tribe that has kept pace with the movement of civilization without sacrificing its kinship structure while still managing to create a commonwealth that transcends territorial limits.
The Greeks, as usual, had a word for it. The Hellenistic world coined the term politeuma to describe phenomena such as the worldwide Jewish polity of that age, in which Jews simultaneously maintained strong political links, including citizenship, with their territorial polities, the Hellenistic cities, and with one another across lands and seas. A politeuma was an autonomous polity located within another polity but not federated with it. Baron defines a politeuma as "an organization of men of the same political status outside their native habitat..." and indicates that the term was also applied to the Greek, Idumean, Cretan, and Phyrygian diaspora communities.1
The characteristic form of political organization in the modern epoch was the territorial nation-state, politically sovereign within clear boundaries, encompassing a territory over which complete authority was exercised by a particular government ostensibly in the name of the single nation that inhabited that territory. This is not the place to go into this theory of national territorial sovereignty and its consequences. At its best it was a founding and sustaining myth for states that were far from homogeneous despite their striving for homogeneity, often at the price of earlier identities, loyalties, and cultures. At its worst, it became a vehicle for unprecedented barbarism in the name of national unity and ethnic or racial purity.2
The Jews were caught in the middle of the struggle for modern statehood, particularly in Europe. First they lost their communal autonomy to the new nation-states and only after a struggle were they able to gain civil rights and citizenship in the new states in recompense. In the process, the Jewish people almost lost its polity. But the realities of Jewish existence were such that, even as emancipation of Jews as individuals was spreading throughout the world, new devices for Jewish corporate organization in the diaspora e;merged, based on the exercise of necessary functions in the limited sphere that remained open for collective Jewish activity. In the postmodern epoch, these functions coalesced into activity spheres in which voluntary collective Jewish action was considered acceptable.
This development is simply a more blatant example of a general reality that has resurfaced in the postmodern epoch. If the modern epoch was characterized by a relentless pursuit of the territorial nation-state, the postmodern epoch is one in which humanity is trying to come to grips with an ineluctable pluralism that has prevented all by 10 percent of the world's states from having even a chance to become homogeneous. As Ivo Duchacek pointed out, the other 90 percent of the world's politically sovereign states have substantial minorities, which must be accommodated. Even many of the remaining 10 percent have links to members of their nation who constitute minorities in surrounding states. As a consequence, simple territorial arrangements are increasingly being supplemented by nonterritorial ones to accommodate these minorities.3 The Jews are both pioneers and beneficiaries of the new situation.
The study of the Jewish people as a polity is a proper, if neglected, element in the corpus of Jewish studies and a worthy subject of political research generally.4
The Jewish people has the distinction of being the longest lasting and most wide-spread "organization" in the history of the world. Its closest rival is the Roman Catholic Church, half its age. Curiously -- and perhaps significantly -- the two are organized on radically opposed principles. The Catholic Church is built on hierarchical principles from first to last and gains its survival power by their careful and intelligent manipulation.5 The Jewish people is organized on federal principles from first to last and enhances its survival power by applying them almost instinctively in changing situations. The contrasting characteristics of these two modes of organization are intrinsically worthy of political and social investigation. So, too, is the role of the Jewish polity in the development and extension of federal principles, institutions, and processes.6
The Jewish polity emerges out of two sources: kinship -- Jews are born Jews and, as such, are members of the tribe -- and consent -- they agree to be bound by their transcendent covenant. Most Jews cannot choose the ties of kinship. However, what Jews do with those ties is a matter of choice. Individually, every Jew in every age has consented to be Jewish -- has voluntarily assumed the ties of citizenship, not simply the ties of kinship. This combination of kinship and consent lies at the very basis of the Jewish polity.
In modern times, the option not to consent expanded considerably in every respect. Today, it stands at what is probably the all-time high, even though modest counterpressures have begun to reemerge. Although modern civilization has influenced Jews to the extent that "being Jewish" is no longer an all-embracing way of life for most members of the Jewish community, the concept of and behavior involved in "being Jewish" remains far more broad-gauged in its scope and reach than the concepts of and behavior involved in being a member of a religious group only, hence its political dimension.
Consequently, the maintenance of Jewish life can be understood as a matter of familial solidarity, but it must also be understood in the light of the active will of individual Jews to function as a community. The "Jewish community" in the largest sense is defined as all those people born Jews or who have consciously and formally embraced Judaism though born outside the Jewish fold. At the same time, Jews can be fully understood only when they are linked by a shared destiny and a common communications network whose essential community of interest and purpose is reflected through an at times bewildering panoply of organizations.
In the end, though associational activity provides the motive thrust for the maintenance and continuation of Jewish life, the organic ties persist and are strengthened when the survival of the community seems to be at stake. Jews, even marginal ones, have a "sixth sense" about threats to their security and survival as Jews. Since the Holocaust of World War II, when the Jewish people lost one-third of its total number, that "sense" has been sharpened considerably.
What follows is a discussion of how the contemporary Jewish community has responded to the problems of transforming the passive bonds of kinship into active associational ties based on the bonds of consent; how its responses have been stimulated by the "sixth sense" mentioned above; and how the responses themselves relate to traditional patterns of Jewish organization. Organizationally, contemporary Jewry has made great strides in the past forty years, and progress on that front seems to be continuing. Nevertheless, the organizational progress of the Jewish polity must be viewed in the context of the crisis of Jewish survival now besetting world Jewry. At times the gap between the organized life of the community and most of the Jews in it seems to be growing to unmanageable proportions. The community's organizational success may obscure its failure to mobilize most Jews to take their Jewishness with utmost seriousness. It should be borne in mind that the following discussion is presented with the knowledge that organization alone cannot solve that problem.
In this paper, we are concerned with the foundations of the world Jewish polity and its reemergence as an active force on the world scene in our time, the reconstitution of the countrywide and local communities within it, which constitute that polity, the spheres of activity through which that polity carries out its functions, the domains into which those activities are organized, and the institutions, dimensions, and tasks of the renewed Jewish polity. We touch on the new Jewish public that has emerged in the postmodern epoch as citizens of that polity. We do not focus on the individual countrywide communities, which together constitute the Jewish polity: beginning with Israel as a Jewish state and focusing in turn on the Jewish communities of the Western Hemisphere and the British Commonwealth, Europe, the Muslim world, and the far-flung diasporas of Africa and Asia. We need to examine the institutions of each Jewish community and its organizational dynamics in the context of its overall Jewish condition. The paper concludes with an examination of the problem of building citizenship in the Jewish polity now that it has been renewed under postmodern conditions.
The Foundations of the Jewish Polity7
Jews can be fully understood only when they are recognized as members of a polity -- a covenantal community linked by a shared destiny, a promised land, and a common pattern of communications whose essential community of interest and purpose and whose ability to consent together in matters of common interest have been repeatedly demonstrated. In traditional terms, Judaism is essentially a theopolitical phenomenon, a means of seeking salvation by constructing God's polity, the proverbial "city upon a hill" through which the covenantal community takes on meaning and fulfills its purpose in the divine scheme of things.8 Jewish peoplehood has been the motivating force for communal life and creativity throughout the long history of the Jewish people. The power of this force has certainly been demonstrated in our own time with the restoration of the State of Israel.
The Jewish polity has some special characteristics. It is worldwide in scope but only territorial in a limited sense. It is not a state, although a state is an essential part of it.9 It is authoritative but only for those who accept citizenship within it. It does not demand the exclusive loyalty of those attached to it, because many of its members share multiple loyalties.10 And, finally, it exists by virtue of a mystique, an orientation toward a future that looks to the redemption of mankind.
Preeminently, the Jewish polity survives because of the Jews' will to carve out an area of autonomous existence amid polities that would absorb or eliminate them.11 As it turns out, this is as true of Israel in its own way, as it has been of the diaspora Jewish communities, just as it was true of all the earlier Jewish commonwealths. The seeds of whatever Jews are today were planted at the very birth of the Jewish people. Certain key characteristics visible then and deriving from those original conditions have persisted over time despite all the subsequent changes in the Jewish situation.
The Jewish polity is a product of a unique blend of kinship and consent. The blend is already reflected in the biblical account of its origins: a family of tribes that becomes a nation by consenting to God's covenant.12 The term federal is derived from the Latin foedus meaning covenant.13 That Jews were born Jewish puts them in a special position to begin with, one which more often than not forced them together for their self-protection. Yet sufficient opportunities for conversion, assimilation, or the adoption of a posture of simple apathy toward any active effort to maintain Jewish life were almost always available as options. The survival of organized Jewish life, then, can only be understood in the light of the active will of many Jews to function as a community, in itself a form of consent ratified by repeated consensual acts over the millennia.
Beyond the sheer fact of communal survival, consent has remained the normal basis for organizing of the Jewish polity. Jews in different localities consented (and consent) together to form congregations and communities -- in Hebrew the terms are synonymous.14 They did (and do) this formally through articles of agreement, charters, covenants, and constitutions. The traditional Sephardi term for such articles of congregational-communal agreement, askamot, conveys this meaning exactly. The local communities were (and are) then tied together by additional consensual arrangements, ranging from formal federations to the tacit recognition of a particular halakhic authority, shtadlan, or supralocal body as authoritative.15 When conditions were propitious, the de facto confederation of Jewish communities extended to wherever Jews lived. When this level of political existence was impossible, the binding force of Jewish law served to keep the federal bonds from being severed.
Covenantal Foundations
Jews have traditionally organized their communities into coherent bodies politic on a constitutional basis. In Jewish law, every Jewish community is a partnership of its members. Legally, communities do not exist apart from their members. There is no such thing as "the state" existing independently of the people in halakhah, or Jewish tradition. The ultimate constitutional basis of that partnership is the original covenant establishing the Jewish people, the covenant that tradition records as having been made between God and the twelve tribes of Israel at Sinai. From that covenant came the Torah, the traditional constitution of the Jewish people.
Until modern times, nobody disputed the traditional constitution. Jews accepted the Torah. They may have argued over its interpretation, but they accepted it. And out of that acceptance the Jewish polity was given constitutional form.
A covenant is a morally informed agreement or pact between parties having an independent and sufficiently equal status based on voluntary consent and established by mutual oaths or promises involving or witnessed by a transcendent authority. A covenant provides for joint action to achieve defined ends, limited or comprehensive, under conditions of mutual respect in a way that protects the respective integrities of all the parties to it. Every covenant involves consenting, promising, and agreeing. Most are meant to be of unlimited duration, if not perpetual. Covenants can bind any number of partners for a variety of purposes, but in essence they are political in that their bonds are used principally to create relationships best understood in political terms.
As much as covenant is a theological and a political concept, it is also informed by a moral or ethical perspective that treats political relationships in the classical manner. That is, it links power and justice -- the two faces of politics -- and preserves the classic and ancient links between ethics and politics. Again, the emphasis is on relationships rather than structures as the key to political justice. Structures are always important, but ultimately, no matter how finely tuned the structures, they come alive (or fail to) only through the human relationships that inform and shape them.
Covenant is tied in an ambiguous relationship to two related terms, compact and contract. On one hand, both compacts and contracts are closely related to covenant, and sometimes the terms are even used interchangeably. Moreover, covenantal societies tend to emphasize contractual arrangements at every level of human affairs. However, there are real differences between the three terms. Covenants and compacts differ from contracts in that the first two are constitutional or public and the last private. As such, covenantal or compactual obligation is broadly reciprocal. Those bound by one or the other are obligated to respond to one another beyond the letter of the law rather than to limit their obligations to the narrowest contractual requirements. Hence, covenants and compacts are inherently designed to be flexible in some respects and firm in others. As expressions of private law, contracts tend to be interpreted as narrowly as possible as to what the contract explicitly mandates.
A covenant differs from a compact in that its morally binding dimension takes precedence over its legal dimension. In its heart of hearts, a covenant is an agreement in which a higher moral force, traditionally God, is either a direct party to or guarantor of a particular relationship. A compact, based as it is on mutual pledges rather than guarantees by or before a higher authority, rests more heavily on legal as well as moral grounding for its politics. In other words, compact is a secular phenomenon.
This is historically verifiable by examining the shift in terminology that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although those who saw the hand of God in political affairs as a rule continued to use the term covenant, those who sought a secular grounding for politics turned to the term compact. Though the distinction was not always used with strict clarity, it does appear consistently. The issue was further complicated by Fousseau and his followers, who talk about social contract, a highly secularized concept, which, even when applied for public purposes, never develops the same moral obligation as either covenant or compact.
In its original biblical form, covenant embodies the idea that relationships between God and humans are based on morally sustained compacts of mutual promise and obligation. God's covenant with Noah (Genesis 9), which comes after Noah had hearkened fully to God's commands in what was, to say the least, an extremely difficult situation, is the first of many examples. In its political form, covenant expresses the idea that people can freely create communities and politics, peoples and publics, and civil society itself through such morally grounded and sustained compacts (whether religious or otherwise in impetus), establishing thereby enduring partnerships.16
The covenantal approach is clearly connected with constitutionalism. A covenant is the constitutionalization of a set of relationships of a particular kind. As such, it provides the basis for the institutionalization of those relationships; but it would be wrong to confuse the order of precedence. Again, the biblical model whereby a covenant provides the basis for constitutional government by first establishing a people or civil society which then proceeds to adopt a constitution of government for itself, is paradigmatic. Here the constitution involves the translation of a prior covenant into an actual frame or structure of government. Sometimes the constitution includes the covenant within it, serving both purposes simultaneously.
Covenant theory emphasizes human freedom because only free people can enter into agreements with one another. It also presupposes the need for government and the need to organize civil society on principles that assure the maintenance of those rights and the exercise of power in a cooperative or partnershiplike way.
Covenantal (or federal) liberty, however, is not simply the right to do as one pleases within broad boundaries. Federal liberty emphasizes liberty to pursue the moral purposes for which the covenant was made. This latter kind of liberty requires that moral distinctions be drawn and that human actions be judged according to the terms of the covenant. This does not preclude changes in social norms, but the principles of judgment remain constant. Consequently, covenantal societies, founded as they are on covenantal choice, emphasize constitutional design and choice as a continuing process.
The Edah as a Classic Republic
The Jewish polity has followed the covenant model since its inception, adapting it to variegated circumstances in which Jews have found themselves over the millennia -- as a tribal federation, a federal monarchy, a state with a diaspora, a congress of covenantal communities, a network of regional federations or confederations, or a set of voluntary associations.
The classic Hebrew name for this kind of polity is edah. the edah is the assembly of all the people constituted as a body politic. Edah is often translated as congregation; that term has a religious connotation today that it did not have when introduced in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century biblical translations. Then it had a civil meaning as well. It was a "congregation" -- an institutionalized gathering of people who congregate (come together) that meets at regular times or frequently for common action and decision making.17
In Mosaic times edah became the Hebrew equivalent of "commonwealth" or "republic", with strong democratic overtones. The idea of the Jewish people as an edah has persisted ever since and the term has been used to describe the Jewish body politic in every period to the present. In this respect, the term parallels (and historically precedes) similar phenomena such as the landesgemeinde in Switzerland, the Icelandic althing, and the town meeting in the United States.
The characteristics of the original edah can be summarized as follows:
The Torah is the constitution of the edah.
All members of the edah, men, women, and children,participate in some appropriate way in constitutional decisions.
Political quality exists for those capable of taking full responsibility for Jewish survival.
Decisions are made by an assembly that determines its own leaders within parameters of divine mandate.
The edah is portable and transcends geography.
Nevertheless, for it to function completely, the edah needs Eretz Israel.
These basic characteristics have been preserved with such modifications as were necessary over the centuries. Thus, in biblical times, taking full responsibility for Jewish survival meant being able to bear arms. Subsequently, the arms-bearing measure of political equality gave way to one of Torah study. Today the diaspora measure is contributing to the support of Israel, while arms-bearing is again the measure in Israel. The principles of assembly, leadership, and decision making have remained the same although modes of assembling, leadership recruitment, and leaders' roles and responsibilities have changed from time to time. The portability of the desert-born edah is as notable a characteristic as is its attachment to Zion. The Torah has persisted as the edah's constitution albeit with changing interpretations.
The regime most common in Jewish experience has been the aristocratic republic, in the classic sense of the term -- rule by a limited number who take upon themselves an obligation or conceive of themselves as having a special obligation to their people and to God. For Jews, this has been manifested in some combination of a perceived obligation by those of greater status or wealth to use their privileged position to help other Jews and by those learned in Torah who serve the will of God by serving the community.
Jewish republicanism is rooted in a democratic foundation based on the equality of all Jews as citizens of the Jewish people. All Jews must participate in the establishment and maintenance of their polity, as demonstrated in the Bible -- at Sinai, on the plains of Moab, before Schchem, and elsewhere -- in Sefer HaShtarot, and in many other sources. Nor is that foundation merely theoretical; even where power may not be exercised on a strictly democratic basis, it is generally exercised in light of democratic norms.
There are problems associated with the use of these terms, but they do help us understand that the Jewish polity often has been governed by a kind of trusteeship. It is a trusteeship because the community is republican, because it is a res publica, a public thing or a commonwealth -- a body politic that belongs to its members. The Jewish people is a res publica with a commitment to a teaching and law, which its members are not free simply to alter as they wish but must be maintained to be faithful to principles.
Still, an aristocratic republic always has a darker side in that it has a tendency to degenerate into oligarchy. The history of governance in the Jewish community has been one of swinging between the two poles of aristocratic republicanism and oligarchy. Though this is a perennial problem, the basic aristocratic republicanism of the Jewish polity has worked equally well to prevent absolutism or autocracy.
The Three Arenas of Jewish Political Organization
From earliest times, the Jewish polity has been organized in three arenas. Besides the edah, or national, arena, there are countrywide or regional, and local arenas of organization. The immediately local arena comprises local Jewish communities around the world of varying sizes, under varying forms of communal organization. The local community remains the basic cell of Jewish communal life. Here the institutions that serve the Jewish community are organized and function.
Beyond the local arena, there is a larger, countrywide arena in which the Jews in particular regions, countries, or states organize for common purposes. The organizational expressions of that arena have included such phenomena as the Resh Galuta (Exilarch) and Yeshivot of Babylonia, the Vaad Arba Aratzot (Council of the Four Lands) of late medieval Poland, the State of Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, and the congeries of "national" (meaning countrywide) organizations of American Jewry framed by the Council of Jewish Federations. Fund-raising for Israel, for example, depends on work in local communities but is generally organized in this second arena on a country-by-country basis.
Beyond the second arena, there is the third, that of the Jewish people as a whole: the edah. This arena was extremely weak for nearly a millennium but has been given new institutional form within the last century, most particularly in our time. The edah is the main focus of the reconstitution of the Jewish people in our time.
This threefold division into separate arenas of governance, once formulated in early Israelite history, has remained a permanent feature of Jewish political life. This is so despite frequent changes in the forms of organization of the several arenas and in the terminology used to describe them.
The Three Ketarim
Classically, leadership in the Jewish polity has been divided and shared among three domains known in Hebrew as the three ketarim (crowns); the keter torah, the domain of the Torah; the keter kehunah, the domain of the priesthood; and the keter malkhut, literally, the crown of kingship, but more correctly understood as the domain of governance. Each of these ketarim has functions it must perform if Jewish life is to be complete; hence, all are necessary for the survival and development of the edah.18 There has never been a time when the edah has not in some way functioned through some kind of division of authority and powers among the three ketarim. This is not separation of powers in the modern sense. The ketaric division is for comprehensive polities that embrace more than the organs of government in the modern sense. Hence it comes before the executive-legislative-judicial division. Each keter combines a range of functions, institutions, and roles within its domain.
The keter torah embraces those responsible for the maintenance and application of the Torah, its laws, principles, and spirit of the life of the Jewish people and governance of the edah. Its roots go back to Moses, the first navi (prophet) and, as such, the first to bear that keter. After the age of prophecy, it passed to the soferim (scribes) and then to the Sanhedrin with its hakhamim (sages) and rabbis. In the traditional Jewish polity, its bearers functioned primarily as teachers and judges.
The keter kehunah embraces those who are responsible for the ritual and sacerdotal expressions of Jewish being, designed to bring Jews closer to Heaven individually and collectively (and hence to each other as Jews). From a public perspective, the functions of this crown play a major role in determining the fact and character of citizenship in the edah. Originally granted in the Torah to Aaron and his heirs, it is principally identified with the cohanim, but after the destruction of the Second Temple, its functions passed to other religious functionaries, principally hazzanim and, more recently, congregational rabbis, and generally were confined to the most local arena of Jewish organization.
The keter malkhut embraces those who are responsible for conducting the civil business of the edah: to establish and manage its organized framework, its political and social institutions, to raise and expend the money needed for the functioning of the edah, and to handle its political and civic affairs. Although, like the others, it is bound by the Torah-as-constitution, this keter has existed as a separate source of authority since the beginning of the edah, with its own institutions, responsibilities, and tasks. It is the oldest of the ketarim, emerging out of the patriarchal leadership of the original Israelite families. Later, it passed to the nesi'im (magistrates), shofetim (judges), and zekenim (elders), and then to the melekh (king). After the end of Jewish political independence in Eretz Israel, it was carried on by the Nasi (patriarch) in Eretz Israel and the Resh Galuta (exilarch) in Babylonia, the negidim of Spain, and the parnassim of the kehillot.
This traditional pattern underwent many changes in the modern epoch but continued to be the basic model for the edah and its kehillot, if only out of necessity because the classic division persisted in new forms. In the nineteenth century, the institutions of the keter kehunah became stronger at the expense of the others as Jewish life was redefined under modernity to be primarily "religious," even as Jews ceased to rely on the Torah as binding law. The synagogues became elaborate institutions and their rabbis the principal instrumentalities of the keter kehunah. Today, however, as we shall see, the Jewish polity is amid a resurgence of the keter malkhut. This is principally because of the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, but it also reflects changes in the orientation of Jews in the diaspora.
The increasing narrowness of approach of the traditional bearers of the keter torah, coupled with the growing secularization of Jews, which made that sphere and the sphere of keter kehunah less attractive to them, all contributed to this power shift. In the political world, the domain with the key to political power obviously had an advantage. In addition, as the other two domains were fragmented among different movements, each claiming to be authoritative, the keter malkut became the only domain in which all groups would meet together, at least for limited political purposes, further strengthening the latter's position in the edah.
These shifts in power are only several of many in the history of the edah, part of the continuing and dynamic tension among the ketarim.
Representative Government in the Edah
Representative government in the edah subsequent to the biblical period represents, in many respects, a continuing effort to maintain ancient forms of participation in new guises, forms that have disappeared in other modern polities and are only now beginning to change for the edah. The basis of governance in the original edah (ca. 1280-1000 B.C.E.) was the assembly of all its citizens for covenanting and other fundamental constitutional questions, all adult males for deciding basic policy questions (such as declarations of constitutionally permitted wars), and the tribally selected nesi'im on an ad hoc basis for special tasks and a permanent basis for continuing ones. Governance between edah-like assemblies was in the hands of notables designated apparently by some form of consensus, based on the recognition of some families as leading ones. By the time of the institution of kingship (1000-722 B.C.E.), it was already apparent that the edah no longer attempted to assemble as a whole, although there were still assemblies of notables drawn from all the functioning tribes to play the role of the assembly of the whole. This system may have persisted in Judah after the fall of the northern kingdom (ca. 721-440 B.C.E.) -- evidence is scanty -- with assemblies of the Am Ha-aretz, consisting of local notables replacing assemblies of tribal leaders.
When Ezra and Nehemiah reconstituted the Jewish polity (ca. 440 B.C.E.), most of world Jewry continued to live outside Eretz Israel; hence assembly of the entire edah was impossible even in theory. It was then that a system of virtual representation was formally introduced through the establishment of the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, which assembled in Jerusalem. This new body comprised 120 members symbolically representing a minyan (quorum of ten) from each of the twelve tribes, and, hence, the edah as a whole, a sign that virtual representation was the intent behind its formation. It was really composed of people who lived in Judah plus one or two members from the communities of the exile who came to settle in Judah and could be added to the body, who spoke for the rest of the edah. The transportation technology at the time made any other system impossible.
This system of virtual representation continued through the next nine hundred years of Jewish history, even after the diaspora Jewish communities developed fully articulated governing institutions of their own. The only changes were that in some periods there was regularized representation from the diaspora in the edah's sitting decision-making body, located in Jerusalem until 70 C.E., and subsequently in other parts of Eretz Israel. It ended only with the abolition of the Nesiut (patriarchate) by the Romans, ca. 429 C.E.
The yeshivot in Babylonia continued this pattern when power was passed to them. They became the virtual representatives of the edah in its rule-making and adjudication functions, paralleling the Rosh HaGolah (exilarch), who was the edah's chief magistrate. The yeshivot continued the tradition of bringing in people from around the Jewish world to the extent possible on a voluntary, personal choice basis, consisting of those who decided to come, study, and stay. This arrangement persisted for six hundred years, until the system was disrupted by the abolition of the office of Rosh HaGolah in 1042 C.E.
After that, the edah was unable to sustain equivalent common institutions, surviving as a communications network for halakhic decision making through correspondence rather than an assembly. Political organization was confined to local, countrywide, or, in rare cases, multicountry regions. Hence the system of virtual representation existed in principle rather than practice. The structure of the edah changed during the next nine hundred years, being expressed through a handful of notable halakhic figures whose decisions gained edah-wide acceptance or a handful of shtadlanim whose influential services were recognized edah-wide.
The problems of transportation and communication encountered by Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century B.C.E. remained unchanged until well into the nineteenth century C.E. At times, deterioration of conditions made the problems even greater. Not until the development of the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph did new technology make continental and intercontinental links feasible.
It was not until the World Zionist Congress in 1897 that an effort was made to establish a body representative of the edah in modern terms: through constituency elections of delegates to a worldwide congress in which all communities were potentially if not actually to be represented. Since that time, there has been a striving to establish such institutions. The WZO was and is a membership organization. It became worldwide in scope but never embraced a majority of the edah as members. The World Jewish Congress, established in 1936, tried to overcome that problem by being based on country affiliates, the major representative bodies from each countrywide Jewish community. However, its strength was and is concentrated in Europe and Latin America with no real presence in the world's largest Jewish communities -- the United States, Israel, the Soviet Union and France.
Framing organizations were established in the local and countrywide arenas by the end of the modern epoch or during the first generation of the postmodern epoch as a culmination of the modernization process. They were accompanied by a general revolution in transportation and communications based on air travel and the airwaves. Jews are now engaged in the reestablishment of effective, continuing edah-wide framing institutions, principally through the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency and the WZO. Because transportation and communication technologies now permit this, it is likely that something serious will come out of the effort. Nevertheless, this will not be the whole story, for there are structural limitations to the degree to which formal representatives of all segments of the edah can assemble on a regular basis. Thus we are returning to the situation of ancient Israel but on a worldwide scale. Leading figures representing the elements of the edah come together at regular intervals and are involved in consultations in between; but the day-to-day business is still conducted by virtual representatives, including people co-opted into the governing circles who might not be formally chosen through the standard process because of their proximity or wealth.
It should be noted that the effort to reconstitute the Jewish Agency as an edah-wide instrument was not initiated without a struggle. Initially, the reestablished State of Israel was viewed by many, especially Israelis, as the sole institutional embodiment of the edah. Hence the Israeli Knesset was established with 120 members in imitation of Anshei Knesset HaGedolah and with the clear intention of being the virtual representative of all world Jewry because of its constituent position as the center of authority in the Jewish state. This did not happen because the diaspora would not -- could not -- accept the Israeli legislative body as its spokesman; hence there was the need to go back to the WZO/Jewish Agency to develop a more broadly representative body, though one in which Israel would play the leading role.
Jewish Communities in the Modern World
The Jewish polity has undergone many changes since its inception somewhere in the Sinai Desert, but none have been more decisive than those that have affected it in the past three centuries.19 The inauguration of the modern epoch, born out of the revolution in science, technology, politics, economics, and religion that caused the Western world to take a radical turn in the mid-seventeenth century, initiated a process of decorporatization of Jewish communal life that gained momentum for the following two centuries.20 Jewish corporate autonomy, a feature of diaspora existence in one way or another since the Babylonian exile, never even took hold in the New World, whose Jewish settlements are all products of the modern epoch. World War I brought down the last remnants of that kind of autonomy in Europe, where it had been on the wane for two centuries. Only in certain of the Muslim countries did the old forms persist until the nationalist revolutions of the period after World War II eliminated them.
Decorporatization -- perhaps denationalization is a better term -- brought with it efforts to redefine Jewish life in Protestant religious terms in western Europe and North America and socialist secular ones in eastern Europe and, somewhat later, in Latin America. In Europe the process was promoted form within the Jewish community and without by Jews seeking wider economic and social opportunities as individuals and by newly nationalistic regimes seeking to establish the state as the primary force in the life of all residents within its boundaries. In the Americas, it came automatically as individual Jews found themselves in the same position as other migrants to the New World.
Out of decorporatization came new forms of Jewish communal organization in the countrywide and local arenas: (1) the consistoire of postrevolutionary France, which spread to the other countries within the French sphere of influence in Europe and the Mediterranean basin -- an attempt to create a Jewish "church" structure parahe Catholic Church; (2) the nineteenth-century Central European kehillah or kultesgemeinde, essentially a religious and social agency chartered and regulated by the secular government to provide an official framework for all Jews lparallel to the frameworks binding Christians to the state; (3) the united congregational pattern of Britain and its overseas settlements by which Jews voluntarily banded together to create a board of notables ("deputies") to represent Jewish interests to the government of the host country; (4) the radically individualistic "congregational" pattern of the United States by which individual Jews voluntarily banded together, principally in the local arena, to create whatever kinds of Jewish associations they wished without any kind of supralocal umbrella organization even for external representations; and (5) separate communal associations based on the landsmannschaft (country of origin society) principle, which became the basis for voluntary affiliation of the Jewish immigrants to Latin America. The common denominator of all these different forms was their limited scope and increasingly voluntary character.
While these organizational changes were taking place, a two-pronged demographic shift of great importance began: the live birth and survival rate among Jews rose rapidly, causing the number of Jews in the world to soar, and the Jews began to migrate at an accelerating rate to the lands of the Western world's great frontier (the Western Hemisphere, southern Africa, and Australia in particular but also in smaller numbers to east Asia), thus initiating a shift in the balance of Jewish settlement in the world.21
Finally, the modern epoch saw Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel. The first settlers to come as founders of new settlements began to arrive in the seventeenth century and continued regularly thereafter, pioneering new communities of a traditional character within the framework of the Ottoman Empire's millet system.22 They were followed by the Zionist pioneers who, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, created new forms of communal life as part of the latest stage in the transformation of the Jewish people.23
Beginning a New Epoch
World War II marked the culmination of all the trends and tendencies of the modern epoch and the end of the epoch itself for all peoples. Sometime between 1946 and 1949 the postmodern epoch began. For the Jewish people, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel provided the pair of decisive events that marked the crossing of the watershed into the postmodern world. In the process, the entire basis of the Jewish polity was radically changed, the locus of Jewish life shifted, and virtually every organized Jewish community was reconstituted in some way.
Central to the reconstitution was the reestablishment of a politically independent Jewish commonwealth in Israel. The restoration of the Jewish state added a new factor to the edah, creating a new focus of Jewish energy and concern precisely at the moment when the older foci had reached the end of their ability to attract most Jews. As the 1967 crisis demonstrated decisively, Israel was not simply another Jewish community in the constellation but the center of the world for Jews.
The Jewry that greeted the new state was no longer an expanding one that was gaining population even in the face of attrition of intermarriage and assimilation. On the contrary, it was a decimated one (even worse, for decimated means the loss of one in ten; the Jews lost one in three); a Jewry whose very physical survival had been in grave jeopardy. Moreover, the traditional strongholds of Jewish communal life in Europe (which were also areas with a high Jewish reproduction rate) were those that had been wiped out.
At the end of the 1940s the centers of Jewish life had shifted decisively away from Europe to Israel and North America. By then, continental Europe ranked behind Latin America, North Africa, and Great Britain, as a force in Jewish life. Its Jews were almost entirely dependent on financial and technical assistance from the United States and Israel. Except for those in the Moslem countries that were soon virtually to disappear, the major functioning Jewish communities all had acquired sufficient size to become significant factors on the Jewish scene only within the previous two generations. In many cases, the original shapers of those communities were still alive, and many were still the actual community leaders. The Jewish world had been willy-nilly thrown back to a pioneering stage.
This new epoch is still in its early years, hardly more than a single generation old; hence, its characters is still in its formative stages. Nevertheless, with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish polity began a constitutional change of revolutionary proportions, inaugurating a new epoch in Jewish constitutional history. For the first time in almost two millenia, the Jewish people were presented with the opportunity to attain citizenship in their own state. Israel's very first law (Hok Ha-Shevut, the Law of Return) specified that every Jew had a right to settle in Israel and automatically acquire Israeli citizenship.
To date, only part of the edah has taken advantage of Israel's availability. Most continue to live in the lands of the diaspora of their own free will. Hence the dominant structural characteristic of the edah continues to be the absence of a binding, all-embracing political framework, although it now has a focus. The State of Israel and its various organs have a strong claim to preeminence in fields that touch on every aspect of Jewish communal life. The Israeli leadership have argued consistently that Israel is qualitatively different from the diaspora and hence its centrality must be acknowledged. The American Jewish leadership, in particular, have taken the position that Israel is no more than first among equals. Nevertheless, the reestablishment of a Jewish state has crystallized the edah as a polity, restoring a sense of political involvement among Jews and shaping a new institutional framework in which the business of the edah is conducted.
The diffusion of authority and influence that continues to characterize the structure of the edah and its components has taken various forms in the new epoch. The keter malkhut has been transformed into a network of single and multipurpose functional authorities, most of which do not aspire to do more than serve their particular functions, but all of which acknowledge the place of the State of Israel at the fulcrum of the network. The keter kehunah has become a conglomeration of synagogue movements and their rabbinates, who are mainly responsible for ritual and pastoral functions. Each manages -- independently -- various ritual functions in a manner it deems appropriate to its own traditions, perspectives, and environment. That each of these movements has established a framework with worldwide aspirations, such as the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the World Council of Synagogues, merely underlines the new organizational character of the edah.
Sectoral segmentation is most pronounced in the keter torah. Contemporary Jews take their cues in this domain from a kaleidoscopic spectrum of authorities. Their range stretches from the Jewish professors and scholars who influence contemporary Jews' understanding of what is expected of them as Jews to the rabbinical leadership of the Conservative and Reform camps, who may use the traditional devices for ruling on matters of Torah but often in untraditional ways, to the heads of very traditional yeshivot and the rebbes of various emigre Hassidic communities who have reestablished themselves in the principal cities of Israel and the United States from which they have developed multicountry networks.
The fragmentation of the keter torah is both a reflection and an expession of the absence yet of a clear-cut, commonly accepted constitutional basis for the entire edah. The tendency toward a wide variety of interpretations of the Torah, which emerged during the modern epoch, has now become exacerbated. It is a sign of the times that if the Torah is to be included in the definition of the constitution, it has to be reinterpreted for the Jews. The reality is that the norms by which Jews live their lives are interpreted through various prisms, of which the traditional prism is now only one. Still, it seems that most Jews perceive the Torah to be a constitutional referent in some way.
This fragmentation is further reflected in the mulitplicity of camps and parties that exert influence on the life of the edah and its constituents. Broadly speaking, the principal camps can be termed: the Orthodox, the Masorati (traditional), who see themselves as continuing the ways of the Pharisees, the Liberal religious, and the Neo-Sadducees. The last includes Israelis seeking to express their Judaism through Israeli Jewry's emerging civil religion -- Zionists -- and those diaspora Jews who find their best means of Jewish expression in the communal institutions. These camps are separate but not mutually exclusive. Presented diagrammatically, they ought to be viewed as a triangle, a device that stresses their points of overlap as well as their distinctiveness. The Mizrahi Party, for instance, straddles the Zionist and the Orthodox camps, viewing its Zionism as one expression of its Orthodoxy. Increasingly, too, do the Conservative (Masorati) and Reform (Liberal) movements find themselves linked with Zionism. At the same time, the Neturei Karta, the secular Zionists, and the surviving classical Reform elements remain separated in their respective camps.
Whatever its form of organization, the primary fact of Jewish communal life today is its voluntary character. Although there are differences form country to country in degree of actual freedom to be Jewish or not, the virtual disappearance of the remaining legal and even social or cultural barriers to individual free choice in all but a handful of countries has made free association the dominant characteristic of Jewish life in the postmodern era. Consequently, the first task of each Jewish community is to learn to deal with this freedom. This task is a major factor in determining the direction of the reconstitution of Jewish life in this generation.
The new voluntarism also extends into the internal life of the Jewish community, generating pluralism even in previously free but relatively homogeneous or monolithic community structures. This pluralism is increased by the breakdown of the traditional reasons for being Jewish and the rise of new incentives for Jewish association. This pluralistic Jewish polity can best be described as a communications network of interacting institutions, each of which, while preserving its own structural integrity and fillings its own functional role, is connected to the others in a variety of ways. The boundaries of the polity, insofar as it is bounded, are revealed only when the pattern of the network is uncovered. The pattern stands revealed only when both its components are: its institutions and organizations with their respective roles and the way in which communications are passed between them.
The pattern is inevitably dynamic. There is rarely a fixed division of authority and influence but, instead, one that varies from time to time and often from issue to issue, with different entities in the network taking on different "loadings" at different times and relative to different issues. Because the polity is voluntary, persuasion rather than compulsion, influence rather than power, are the only tools available for making and executing policies. This, too, works to strengthen its character as a communications network because the character, quality and relevance of what is communicated and the way in which it is communicated frequently determine the extent of the authority and influence of the parties to the communication.
The reconstitution of the edah is only in its beginning stages; its final form for this epoch cannot yet be foreseen. At this writing, the Jewish people is in the buildup period of the second generation of the postmodern epoch and is actively engaged in trying to work through a new constitutional synthesis, both political and religious. It is likely that the constitution for the new epoch will find its source in the traditional Torah as understood and interpreted in traditional and nontraditional ways. The continued reliance on the Torah as a constitutional anchor could not have been forecase during the first generation of the new epoch, when the late modern trend of secularization was still alive. But it is now fair to conclude that for most Jews, the Torah continues to serve as a constitutional foundation even though they no longer feel bound by its commandments as traditionally understood.
A second element in the new constitutional framework is the commitment to Jewish unity and peoplehood as embodied in the network of institutions serving the edah. This commitment is basically founded on a people-wide consensus. However, it is also acquiring a documentary base through congeries of quasi-covenantal constitutional documents generated in the new institutions of the edah. These may develop into a comprehensive postmodern constitutional supplement to the edah's historic constitution, following the pattern of earlier epochs.
Postwar Reconstitution
Jews are know to live in 121 countries, 82 of which have permanent communities. At least 3 and perhaps as may as 12 others are remnant communities where a relative handful of Jews has custody of the few institutions that have survived in the wake of the emigration of most of the Jewish population. Fourteen more are transient communities where American or Israeli Jews temporarily stationed in some Asian or African country have created such basic Jewish institutions (for example, religious services and schools) as they need. Only 21 countries with known Jewish residents have no organized Jewish life.
The eleven largest countrywide communities contain more than 90 percent of world Jewry.
For nearly two decades after World War II, the reconstruction and reconstitution of existing communities and the founding of new ones were the order of the day throughout the Jewish world. The Jewish communities of continental Europe underwent a period of reconstruction in the wake of their wartime losses, changes in the formal status of religious communities in their host countries, immigration to Israel, internal European migrations, and the introduction of new, especially Communist, regimes.
The Jewish communities of the Moslem countries were transformed in response to the convergence of two factors: the establishment of Israel and the anticolonial revolutions in Asia and Africa. The greater portion of the Jewish population in those countries immigrated to Israel, and organized Jewish life beyond the maintenance of local congregations virtually ended in all of them except Iran, Morocco and Tunisia.
The English-speaking Jewries and, to a lesser extent, those of Latin America, were faced with the more complex task of adapting their organizational structures to three new purposes: to assume responsibilities passed to them as a result of the destruction of European Jewry, to play a major role in supporting Israel, and to accommodate internal changes in communities still in the process of acculturation.
Many of the transient Jewish communities in Asia and Africa were founded or given organized form in this period while others, founded earlier by Jews who followed the European colonial powers into Africa, transient merchants, and refugees were abandoned.
At first, the patterns of countrywide Jewish communal organization followed those of the previous epoch with some modifications. But as the postmodern epoch begins to plant its own iprint on the edah, the differences in status and structure are diminishing. A common organizational pattern is emerging, consisting of several basic elements, including:
Governmentlike institutions, whether "roof" organizations, framing institutions, or separate organizations serving discrete functions, that play roles and provide services on all planes (countrywide, local, and intermediate), which, under other conditions, would be played, provided, or controlled -- predominantly or exclusively -- by governmental authorities. They are responsible for tasks such as external relations, defense, education, social welfare, and public (communal) finance. They include:
A more or less comprehensive fund-raising and social planning body.
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A representative body for external relations.
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A Jewish education service agency.
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A vehicle or vehicles for assisting Israel and other Jewish communities.
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Various comprehensive religious, health and welfare institutions.
Localistic institutions and organizations that provide a means for attaching individual Jews to Jewish life on the basis of their most immediate and personal interests and needs. They include:
Congregations organized into one or more synagogue unions, federations, or confederations.
Local cultural and recreational centers, often federated or confederated with one another.
General purpose mass-based organizations, operating countrywide on all planes, that function to (a) articulate community values, attitudes, and policies, (b) provide the energy and motive force for crystallizing the communal consensus that grows out of those values, attitudes, and policies, and (c) maintain institutionalized channels of communication between the community's leaders and "actives" ("cosmopolitans") and the broad base of the affiliated Jewish population ("locals") for dealing with the problems and tasks facing the community in the light of the consensus. They include a Zionist federation and its constituent organizations and fraternal organizations.
Special interest organizations, which, by serving specialized interests in the community on all planes, function to mobilize concern and support for the programs conducted by the community and to apply pressure for their expansion, modification, and improvement.
The first two of these types are embodies in the institutions that form the structural foundations of the community and the last two in organizations that function to activate the institutional structure and give it life. Institutions of the first type are easily identifiable in most communities. They include the boards of deputies founded by Anglo-Jewish communities, the American Jewish community federations and Council of Federations, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Fonds Social Juif Unifie in France, and the like. The most important localistic institutions are the synagogues, which, by their very nature, are geared to be relatively intimate associations of compatible people. Even the very large American synagogues that lose their sense of intimacy are localistic institutions in this sense, in the overall community context.
The most important localistic organizations are family clubs, landsmanschaften, and other similar groups. In the United States, B'nai B'rith and Hadassah come closest to performing these functions, with a number of smaller countrywide organizations sharing in the task; in South Africa and much of Latin America the Zionist federations have assumed that role. The special-interest organizations are also readily identifiable in the various communities.24
In the smaller countrywide communities, the four kinds of roles may be compressed with fewer institutions and be filled incompletely as a consequence. However it is done, the functions must be institutionalized for an organized community to exist. The mapping of the community's organizational structure along the lines of this typology reveals many of the more permanent channels into which the community's communications network is set and also exposes the ways in which the channels are used.
Israel and the diaspora communities have retained or restored the tripartite structure of the three ketarim. For most, functions in each domain are now fulfilled by a variety of institutions, headed by formally elected officers and staffed by a professional civil service. Those institutions can be grouped into five activity spheres
The government-like institutions are almost invariably associated with the keter malkhut. Until World War II those of the consistorial communities may have had to be classified under the keter kehunah but since then, with one or two exceptions (Romania, for example, where the Communist regime has insisted on preserving the principle that being Jewish is exclusively a matter of religion), other institutions associated with the keter malkhut have superseded them in this capacity. Only in the case of Agudath Israel can one find an example of such institutions growing out of the keter torah.
The localistic organizations and institutions are primarily connected with the keter kehunah, secondarily with keter torah, and only occasionally with keter malkhut. That is because most of them are synagogues, schools, and yeshivot. Localistic bodies like landsmanschaften, which were strong in the days of the great Jewish migrations, have lost much of their role as Jews have settled into their new places of residence. Today even Jewish emigrants are more likely to seek ties with peers through synagogues and schools than through secular country-of-origin societies, in part because of the decline of secularism as a motivating force in Jewish life and in part because mutual aid societies are less needed in the era of the welfare state. The few secular localistic bodies that remain may fall in the domain of the keter malkhut to the extent that they serve public purposes.
The general purpose mass-based organizations also fall principally within the keter malkhut, although some, like the Hassidic groups, are more appropriately classified under the keter kehunah and others like Agudath Israel fall into the keter torah. Special-interest organizations are to be found in all three domains by their very nature.
Local communities, or kehillot, are organized in a manner suitable to each country following regional patterns. Usually they are organized as federations of local organizations or institutions. Increasingly, they share a basic tripartite structure based on (1) synagogues, (2) communal-welfare institutions, and (3) representative or Zionist institutions, but the emphasis is different in different lands. Some of the more prominent variations include: (1) formal municipal governments functioning according to laws of the state (Israel); (2) Jewish community federations that link functional agencies for fund-raising and community planning (United States, Canada); (3) single congregations (for example, New Zealand); (4) congregations linked through community boards (for example, Stockholm); (5) federations of congregations (for example, Istanbul); and (6) federations or associations of social, political, and welfare institutions (for example, Buenos Aires).
First Steps Toward Jewish Polity in Modern Times
A primary characteristic of the Emancipation era was the effort of Jews in the Western world to redefine themselves politically as citizens of their states, though of a different religious persuasion. With that came the effort by many to detach themselves from the common fate of fellow Jews. Nevertheless, the Jews were at least ambibalent about this aspect of their search for emancipation and citizenship as individuals. No longer comfortable speaking about their brethren as members of a common nation, English-speaking Jews in the nineteenth century coined the term coreligionists, a philological barbarism designed to reflect the persistance of ties but on a limited and careful basis.25
A change in name did not change reality, however; the common interests of Jews the world over did not disappear. Those interests intensified during the nineteenth century. Significantly, the attitude of the European nation-states, new or old, where most Jews lived, did not shift either. Despite their demands that "their" Jews become citizens or subjects on an individual basis, they still viewed the Jews as separate group. Thus, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 addressed the "Jewish question" as part of its agenda; since then hardly any important international meeting has been without some Jewish issue before it.26
At first, the Jewish question was addressed without direct involvement of the Jews themselves. This was not a situation that the Jews could tolerate. Even under conditions of emancipation and denationalization, they were not prepared to allow others the exclusive right to determine their interests and destiny. Moreover, not even all emancipated Jews had abandoned the sense of nationhood. It was precisely in the United Kingdom and the United States, where Jews were most free to become citizens on an individual basis, that many felt least constrained to abandon the sense that a Jewish nation existed. Early in the twentieth century, the term peoplehood came into use to provide a more acceptable expression of that sentiment.
The first Jewish political responses (as distinct from philanthropic ones) to transtate Jewish problems were made through individual notables working quietly behind the scenes on behalf of Jewish interests -- a revival in new form of shtadlanut, which had prevailed in medieval Europe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Board of Deputies of British Jews made representations to the British and foreign governments about the situation of Jews in other lands, but they were more symbolic than real until the shtadlanim began acting with the board's blessing. The greates Jewish shtadlan of the nineteenth century was Sir Moses Montefiore, but he was by no means the only one.
By and large, these shtadlanim were activated on behalf of Jewish brethren in lands not yet touched by emancipation or where promises of emancipation were not fulfilled, chiefly in Eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, plus North Africa. The first intervention to attract worldwide attention came in 1840 in the case of the Damascus blood libel. It was undertaken strictly by individual shtadlanim, but, significantly, the shtadlanim from the major western European countries found it in in their interest to coordinate their work in what was perhaps the first modern edah-wide expression of Jewish political activity. The construction of the first housing outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem was a classic example of this trend. Montefiore of Great Britain was entrusted with money bequeathed by Judah Touro of the United States to be used for the Jewish porr of Eretz Israel. The result: Mishkenot Sha'ananim.
As the western European great powers became increasingly involved in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish notables capitalized on their positions in their respective powers (particularly Austria, France, Great Britain, and later, Germany) to intervene on behalf of their brethren. Similarly, the Board of Deputies of American Israelites, founded in 1859, included among its purposes the defense of Jewish interests overseas. Nevertheless, even though it was the first countrywide Jewish body organized on democratic principles, its efforts were made meaningful (as much as they were) by quasi-shtadlanic methods. The offices of the United States government were used to obtain consular or ministerial appointments for American Jewish notables in countries where they had an interest in working for the improvement of the condition of the Jews. Thus armed with American government credentials, the notables could enhance their shtadlanic roles.27
Between the 1840s and the 1870s the number of problems requiring such joint action grew, or, at least, the concern of the western Jewish communities with those problems expanded. As involvement increased and a pattern of response emerged, more institutionalized methods of handling the increased work load were introduced in the form of shtadlanic organizations. They also found it advantageous to cooperate with one another. In this way, interventions were regularly carried out in Russia, in Romania, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa and in other countries as needed.
Shtadlanut was able to hold its own as long as the large body of Jews was not awakened politically. The emergence of the Zionist movement changed all that. Theodor Herzl's convening of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 marked a turning point in worldwide Jewish organization. Herzl transformed the basis of Jewish contacts with foreign powers and the character of the demands Jews made by the establishment of the World Zionist Organization. One of the principles of the Basel program was "the organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry, by means of appropriate institutions, both local and international," thus serving notice that the Jews were prepared to act as a body, organized democratically on a worldwide basis to achieve their political goals.
The Zionists were opposed by the notables and their organizations as much for ideological reasons as for any others. The notables were committed amancipationists and bitterly opposed to the revival of Jewish nationalism. For the remainder of that generation, the struggle between the two approaches continued, culminating in the victory of the Zionists during World War I in the course of the struggle over the Balfour Declaration.28 After the end of that war, shtadlanut, even in its institutionalized form, receded into the background, and the field of worldwide Jewish activity was taken over by multicountry organizations with avowedly, if not exclusively, political goals. The basis for a worldwide Jewish polity was now in place.
In the interim, the first worldwide Jewish fraternal organization had also emerged, significantly, an American Jewish creation. The B'nai B'rith was founded in New york in 1843 as a modern expression of the Jewish desire to maintain communal bonds in a secular age. It rapidly spread to every part of the United States where Jews lived. In 1882, the first overseas lodge was founded in Germany and, by the turn of the century, even Eretz Israel had a lodge. In the United States, B'nai B'rith was a broad-based organization; in Europe and the Middle East it became an elite group. Until the end of the nineteenth century, its leaders also played local roles as shtadlanim. In some countries they still do. Subsequently, the international leadership became active in the world Jewish arena.29
The victory of the Zionists meant far more than the ultimate establishment of a Jewish State. It marked the reestablishment of a Jewish political consciousness, either willingly or reluctantly, and the reestablishment of a sense of Jewish peoplehood with all that this implied. The form of the Jewish polity today is the direct product of the Zionist victory; Jewish responsibilities to contemporary events are based on the "facts" that the Zionists established among the Jews within the non-Jewish world.
The Forging of a New Jewish Polity in the Twentieth Century
While the beginnings of an institutionalized structure for world Jewry were developing, massive demographic changes were taking place in the Jewish world. The world Jewish population grew geometrically as the conditions under which the Jews lived improved. From an estimated 2.5 million in 1800, the number of Jews in the world increased to 10.5 million a century later and to 16.5 million in 1939.30
The Jews also began to evacuate what had been the major centers of Jewish life in the Old World and to establish new centers in the New World of the great European frontier, North and South America, South Africa and Australia, or in France and Great Britain -- areas utterly peripheral to Jewish life for centuries. This process, which had become a flood by the end of the nineteenth century, was given additonal impetus by World War I and the Russian Revolution. It received its final aspects as a result of World War II, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel.
By the middle of the twentieth century, not a single Jewish area of settlement that had been prominent at the time of the American and French revolutions remained in the forefront of Jewish life, and hardly a single Jewish community remained undisturbed anywhere in the world. The eastern European Jewish centers were destroyed, either physically or socially. Even in the Soviet Union, most Jews were no longer located in the areas of traditional Jewish settlement. The establishment of the State of Israel effectively ended organized Jewish life in the Arab lands. Even the centers that had emerged in continental Europe in the nineteenth century were either physically destroyed or so reduced in numbers and morale as a result of the Holocaust that they were unable to play their earlier role. The United States had emerged as the largest Jewish community functioning as a unit under one government in all Jewish history. Most Jews of the world lived in English-speaking countries and had adopted English as their native language. Hebrew, the language of Israel and Israelis, had been restored to its premier place in Jewish civilization. Yiddish, Ladino, and other diaspora Jewish languages survived as remnants, primarily in Latin America, Canada, and (paradoxically enough) Israel, rather than in the lands of their origin.
While this process was going on, new organizations had emerged to serve world Jewry.31 The Americans contributed to the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). In 1929 the Jewish Agency was organized to unite world Jewry in the effort to rebuild Eretz Israel. In 1936 the World Jewish Congress (WJC) was organized, mostly by the Jewries of Europe, to try to protect Jewish rights in an age of growing Fascist anti-Semitisim. From the beginning, these organizations developed areas of functional specialization, the first two by design and the last by virtue of its situation.
Crowning the creation of new centers and new organizations was the renewal of indpendent Jewish national existence in Eretz Israel within a politically sovereign state. As a state, Israel transformed all previous relationships among Jewish communities. A state, possessing political sovereignty with the powers and responsibilities that go with it, could not be treated simply as another Jewish community on the world scene. At the same time, because it had a relatively small percentage of the total number of Jews in the world (only in the 1970s did it become the second largest Jewish community, today approximately four fifths the size of the largest), it could not become the sole voice of the Jewish people, either internally or externally, much as its leaders would have liked it to. Thus the blessings of statehood brought a new set of political problems for the Jewish people -- good problems but problems nevertheless.
The first formal effort to define the role of the state as the spokesman for the Jewish people took the form of an exchange of letters between David Ben-Gurion, the Israel's prime minister, and Jacob Blaustein, then president of the American Jewish Committee, in 1950. The committee was at that time the leading shtadlanic organization in the United States and was known as non-Zionist. Following a modified version of the emancipationist ideology, Blaustein wanted to make it clear to the world and to the Israelis that Jews of the diaspora were citizens of their respective countries, owed no political allegiance to Israel, and did not see Israel as their political spokesman in Jewish affairs. Ben-Gurion, interested in strengthening Israel's alliance with the Jewish notables in the United States and not eager to start a war with them, more or less accepted Blaustein's terms and limited Israeli claims along those lines.
A generation later their correspondence reads like an anachronism, but it must be remembered that the first generation of leaders to face these problems was a product of the last generation of the nineteenth century when the struggle between the Zionists and the shtadlanim was at its height. Thus the understanding and assumptions they brought with them were those of a much earlier age. The Ben-Gurion-Blaustein agreement reflects the effort of two men of good will trying to come to grips with a new situation, but bound by their own experience and even the phraseology of an earlier age.32
What characterized the first two generations of the twentieth century, when this new Jewish polity was being forged, was growing collective political action on a wide variety of fronts, coupled with strenuous denials of its being political. Only now, in the second generation of Jewish statehood and postwar reconstitution, has a generation of Jewish leaders emerged whose formative experiences have taken place in this new context and who are able and willing to face up to it and its implications. This new generation is not afraid to talk about Jewish political interests and to make Israel the major subject on their political agenda.
The Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War six and a half years later did much to end this dichotomy. If anything, the Jewish people in their numbers demonstrated how open they were to recognizing the political realities of the State of Israel and their attachment to it. Jews who in no overt way differed from their neighbors in their private lives were prepared to go into the streets in frankly political demonstrations for Israel. This marked a reversal of the emancipationist dictim of Haskalah poet Y. L. Gordon, "Be a Jew in your home and a man in the street"'; Jews who no longer knew how to be Jews in their homes went into the streets to demonstrate their Jewish attachments.33
New Structures and Relationships
During and after World War II, other Israeli and American Jewish organizations and institutions also became involved in the world Jewish scene. The American Jewish Committee undertook to develop an international program of some scope after World War II. The B'nai B'rith and ADL expanded their operations outside the United States. The three American synagogue movements established worldwide associations. Israel, in the meantime, was busy establishing offices or tributary organizations to raise money to assist in the rebuilding of the land or to provide support in other ways. Thus, in the years between 1945 and 1955, a subsidiary network of worldwide organizations was developed, focusing either on the United States or Israel, but also involving Jewries in many other countries.34
The multiplication of organizations led to a concern for restructuring the institutional framework of the emerging Jewish polity to limit duplication and promote coordination. Some bodies, new and old, were working at cross purposes with one another, some in the pursuit of different goals, but many in the pursuit of the same ones. In a manner familiar to American Jews, the community relations organizations presented the biggest problem. The number of defenders of Jewish interests that came forward was such that, at times, the efforts at defense were jeopardized. For example, once the Jewish-Catholic rapprochement began, it became difficult for the Vatican to decide which among the many Jewish claimants to talk to. In time, a coordinating body was established to speak with a harmonious set of voices, if not a single voice.
In the aid-to-Israel sphere, the multiplicity of organizations seeking to assist the Jewish state also led to demands for coordination. As Israel began trying to assist the diaspora in strengthening Jewish life, it initially did so in a manner that paid little attention to the established framework within the various diaspora communities. The Israelis were called to task and demands for coordination were raised.
One possible focal point for coordination might have been the World Jewish Congress, but the Holocaust had destroyed whatever base it had be reducing the European Jewish communities to secondary or tertiary status on the Jewish map. Nahum Goldmann, the founder and leader of the WJC, remained the preeminent political figure in the diaspora. He was successful in coordinating the efforts to secure German reparations through the World Conference on Material Claims against Germany (1951). Among its other activities, it entered into partnership with the JDC to assist in the rebuilding of Israel. Goldmann, recognizing the new limits on the WJC, took the lead in trying to stimulate a coordinating agency for those Jewish organizations involved in multicountry activities, out of which emerged the now defunct World Congress of Jewish Organizations (COJO) in 1958. At the time, this move was welcomed by the Jewish Agency, which underwent reconstitution itself to include non-Zionist elements in 1970.35
At first, those advocating structural changes to reflect the new realities sought an overarching framework that would united all bodies serving the Jewish people. This dream has never been abandoned in theory, but in practice the Jewish people has come to make do with a far looser structure, a number of separate "authorities" with specialized areas of activity loosely tied together through coordinating councils. The Claims Conference, the JDC, and the Jewish Agency are examples of such authorities.
This situation has developed pragmatically on a de facto basis. It has never been formally recognized or given any formal legitimacy by participants in or commentators on the world Jewish scene. Now, however, it is fair to suggest that for the indefinite future, world Jewry will be united only through the formal mechanisms of coordinating councils and the more important informal mechanism of overlapping leadership. Apparently, the Jewish people does not seek a more comprehensive framework on a worldwide basis, particularly given the nature of contemporary Jewish life (most Jews are not even aware that the network exists, even if they are interested in Jewish survival), while Jewish leadership is extremely wary of anything that gives rise to thoughts of the "elders of Zion." Moreover, the religious and ideological differences that divide Jewry prevent unity on anything other than a loose confederative basis.
The authorities that do exist and their coordinating organizations are dominated by Israel and American Jewry, sometimes by the one, sometimes by the other, and sometimes on a shared basis, depending on which authority is involved. The structure of the authorities is such that other Jewish communities are represented and even well represented, and the representatives of the stronger among them can play important roles.
Perhaps the major problem facing multicountry Jewish bodies other than the functional authorities is not how to coordinate activities among themselves in a better way, but how to link themselves with the realities of Jewihs life in a world in which most Jewish activity is carried on locally in a large number of communities. Even the countrywide organizations and institutions of most Jewries are weak except insofar as they confine their activities to purposes that require the concentration of a critical mass (e.g., fund-raising for Israel, representation before the government, support of a seminary, or a placement service providing assistance to localities seeking professional personnel) or serve, for all intents and purposes, one very large local community. If the countrywide bodies tend to be weak, the worldwide ones are no more than forums where leaders in their respective communities can regularly meet to exchange views, almost totally outside the awareness of the communities they purport to lead and with minimal effect on the activities or the quality of life within them.
The Constitutional Structure of the Edah36
Today's world Jewish polity comprises a network of single and multipurpose functional authorities, no single onle of which encompasses the entire gamut of Jewish political interests, although several have attempted to do so. They include the following categories:
National institutions -- for example, The Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization, Jewish National Fund
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Multicountry associations -- for example, ORT, World Jewish Congress
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Education institutions under the auspices of the entire Jewish people -- for example, the universities in Israel
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Organizations under local sponsorship whose sphere of activity is multicountry -- for example, the Joint Distribution Committee
Ernest Stock has grouped the multicountry associations by their principal goals:
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Principal Goal Characteristics
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Organization
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Political -- general purpose |
World Zionist Organization (WZO) World Jewish Congress (WJC)
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Political -- special purpose
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World Conference of Soviet Jewry |
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Distributive |
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany
Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture
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Services -- operational
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World ORT Union |
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Services -- coordinating
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European Council of Jewish Communities |
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Religious |
World Union for Progressive Judaism
World Council of Synagogues
Agudat Israel World Organization
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Association -- fraternal
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B'nai B'rith International Council
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Association -- special interest
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World Sephardi Federation
World Union of Jewish Students |
Instruments of the Keter Malkhut
The most concrete manifestation of the shift to preeminence of the keter malkhut was the emergence of a coherent set of institutions for that domain on an edah-wide basis. Those institutions are increasingly tied together by a sense of common purpose, shared leadership, and programmatic collaboration. Most of them are outgrowths or continuations of the organizations that emerged toward the end of the previous generation, including such key or exemplary bodies as:
Jewish Agency for Israel. Originally established by the World Zionist Organization and selected non-Zionist community leaders in 1929 to represent world Jewry in mandated Palestine, the Jewish Agency (JAFI) became the principal body of the Jewish "state within a state" before 1948. With the establishment of the state, many of its original functions and most of its key people were transferred to the new government. For a while, it seemed as if the very existence of the agency as a separate organization was in doubt. It survived because of the convergence of two needs. Those who remained with the WZO wanted to keep it as their vehicle for political participation, and the United States tax laws required a nongovernment vehicle for channeling American moeny into Israeli development.
Its status as the arm of world Jewry was reaffirmed in 1952 through a covenant between the WZO and the State of Israel affirmed in a constitutional act of the Israeli Knesset. Its principal responsibility under the covenant was to handle the immigration and settlement of Jews into Israel.
Because it also remained entirely in the hands of the WZO, the agency's position was ambiguous to say the least. According to the Zionist theory, the WZO spoke for the Jewish people, but in reality Zionist organizations in most diaspora communities were then already losing power and influence, thus making it impossible for them to speak for their communities. This was particularly true in the United States where the Zionist movement never achieved a power position that came close to the Zionist model and after 1948 rapidly lost whatever influence it had.
During the next fifteen years, the agency became rooted-in as part of the system of governance of the Jewish state while at the same time becoming more and more an arm of the state as its independence diminished. This led to dissatisfaction on the part of the diaspora contributors to the UJA and Keren Hayesod, which, in turn, stimulated the constitution of 1969-70 under the leadership of the late Louis Pincus and of Max Fisher. They saw the need to overcome the agency's problematic position and to give it a proper one in the contellation of the world Jewish polity as well as the State of Israel.
The reconstitution separated the WZO and the agency and restructured the agency's governing organs so that the "non-Zionist" representatives of the diaspora communities through their fund-raising arms were included in them as equal partners. The change was formally marked by a second covenant between the agency and the state. The agency that emerged this time was not simply an instrumentality of the Israeli government, designed to achieve limited political and institutional ends; it was, at least potentially, an instrumentality of the Jewish people and a key element in the reemerging world Jewish polity.37
A new structure emerged from the reorganization. The Jewish Agency Assembly of more than four hundred members was established to be the basic sounding board and policy-making body, the Board of Governors of more than sixty members became the principal governing body, and the Executive the body handling day-to-day matters. As is always the case in parliamentary systems, the Executive became the body with the real power. The Board of Governors struggles valiantly to find a governance role for itself, inasmuch as its members were scattered over the world and could meet only a few times a year for brief periods. The assembly at best briefly reviewed policy matters but did not really find an effective role, something that generated much frustration for many diaspora members who wanted their participation in the assembly to be meaningful, especially because it came at substantial personal expense.
The Jewish Agency functions in education, housing, immigration, settlement and urban rehabilitation, and provides social services. It remains closely tied to the WZO, which is, in many respects, its alter ego for work in the diaspora. More recently, the assembly has found its voice, the Board of Governors has found ways to effectively assert its authority, and the Executive has become more responsive to both.38
Because the Jewish Agency has become the principal forum for diaspora Jewry to participate in edah-wide activities and especially the common tasks of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel, its status and importance have risen rapidly since its reconstitution. It has become the major arena for the internal politics of the edah and has attracted many talented and effective diaspora leaders who come to it through a network of organizations -- Zionist, fund-raising and communal-welfare -- of which it is rapidly becoming the nexus for edah-wide business. The expansion of its mandate in the early 1980s to include work in the diaspora to promote Jewish education and Aliya has been paralleled by the increase in diaspora community interest in its workings, which strengthens it further.
World Zionist Organization.39 The WZO was founded at the first Zionist Congress (1897) to attain a "legally secured, publicly recognized national home for the Jewish people." That goal was reached when the Balfour Declaration became part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922). Britain acknowledged the WZO as the "Jewish agency" charged with representing the world Jewish interest in the implementation of the Mandate. It transferred that status to the separately constituted Jewish Agency in 1929. The two merged again in the 1940s after the withdrawal of the non-Zionists from the Agency over the question of Jewish statehood. In 1971, when the Jewish Agency was reconstituted, the WZO resumed its independent status. The WZO retains a 50 percent partnership in the Jewish Agency, thereby preserving for itself a key -- some would say dominant -- role in the agency's work.
Today the WZO is charged with implementing the "Jerusalem Program" of 1968, which defines the aims of Zionism as "the unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life;...the preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the fostering of Jewish and Hebrew education and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values; (and) the protection of Jewish rights everywhere." This makes explicit the new role of the WZO as a diaspora-oriented body, though its original purpose had been to harness efforts of world Jewry for the Yishuv. In part, its functions are those that cannot be subsumed under the headings for which tax-exempt philanthropic money in the United States and elsewhere is contributed. For example, although agricultural settlement money for new immigrants is the domain of the Jewish Agency, the WZO finances and administers agricultural projects in the administered territories, because it is understood that the United States Internal Revenue Service does not want tax-exempt money to be used across the 1949 armistice lines.
Structurally, the WZO is a federation of ideological movements. Most of these constituent bodies have been linked with an Israeli counterpart since the development of the prestate Zionist party system. Increasingly, however, they imperfectly reflect the changes that have occurred in the Israeli party system. The World Confederation of General Zionists, for example, retains nomenclature that ceased to exist in Israel in the 1960s and is often referred to as the "nonparty party." In addition, there is a second tier of nonparty member organizations including the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO), the three worldwide synagogue movements, the World Maccabi Union, and the World Sephardi Federation, which have limited voting rights.
The WZO is governed by the World Zionist Congress, which, in theory, is an elected parliament. The more than six hundred seats in the congress, which meets every four years, are allocated geographically in the following proportions: 38 percent for Israel, 29 percent for the United States, and 33 percent for the other diaspora countries. In Israel, delegates are allocated to the Zionist political parties (that is, all except the Communist and exclusively Arab parties) in proportion to their representation in the Knesset. Each party then designates its delegates accordingly. The voting outside Israel is largely by party lists. In recent years, the parties in the various countries have negotiated the division of their country delegations roughly in proportion to their respective memberships, to avoid holding elections. This led to serious problems of credibility so, in 1986 the Zionist General Council voted to require actual elections as provided by the WZO constitution. Accordingly, elections were held for the 1987 Congress.
The Congress elects the Executive, in which the major parties are represented, and the General Council. The General Council meets once a twice a year between congresses. Governance of the WZO is in the hands of a wall-to-wall coalition on the principle that Zionist work is above party wars, with the chairmanship of the Executive and the Congress normally in the hands of the party at the head of the Israeli government at the time or a party in coalition with it.
The party composition of the Zionist movement long antedates the establishment of the state. Almost from its inception, the congresses were assemblies of parties as well as of delegates. Despite a widespread desire for structural changes after 1948, the WZO found it impossible to transcend the party structure, which undoubtedly reduced its effectiveness as a mass movement in the diaspora.
The WZO, as an edah instrumentality, never functioned as a representative body in Eretz Israel. After 1917, democratically elected parliamentary bodies were introduced to speak for the Jewish Yishuv. The Zionist parties contested with one another for seats in those bodies.
Periodically, attempts have been made to dilute the political character of the WZO by permitting individuals to affiliate directly with countrywide Zionist federations without first joining political groups and through the affiliations of the nonpolitical groups mentioned above as associate members. Full membership, however, remains reserved for the political groups while offices and rewards are distributed according to a modified party key.
In the federated structure that is the WZO, the influence of the Israeli center is greater than the sum of its parts. This is because the center represents Israel to the diaspora bodies: it originates programs, has a highly articulated bureaucracy, and allocates the financial resources. The status of the WZO in the diaspora is weakened by the lack of clarity about its tasks in the era of statehood. The effect of the late David Ben-Gurion's openly critical attitude toward the WZO has not yet worn off. The aims of the WZO are broad enough, and its apparatus wide-ranging enough, for it to assume the character of a conglomerate among multicountry Jewish organizations; but its party political structure sets limits to its acceptance on a broad popular basis.
World Jewish Congress.40 The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has as its main purpose the defense of Jewish rights, and to that end it aims to be representative of the widest possible spectrum of world Jewry. It is an avowedly diaspora-oriented organization. Its specific activities in recent years have included intervention on behalf of Jews in Arab countries; pressure for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and for indemnification payments to their victims; contacts with Christian church bodies on questions of Israel and anti-Semitism; cultural assistance to small Jewish communities; relations with international organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Organization of American States, and the Council of Europe; espousal of the cause of Soviet Jewry; maintaining Jewish contacts with the Third World; and support of Israel in its diplomatic struggles.
Like the WZO, the World Jewish Congress has a federative structure. In theory it is a confederation of countrywide representative community bodies, with the general body deliberately limiting itself in scope. The members -- independent community organizations -- are free to determine their own policies locally. The WJC's constitution prohibits it from operating or speaking in a country unless its local constituents agree, except where no organized community exists or where a community cannot freely express it will.
On the other hand, the WJC may set up branches in countries without representative organizations or where the leading groups are unwilling to participate. Thus, when the Board of Deputies of British Jews refused to affiliate, the WJC established a British Section. In the United States, the American Jewish Congress initially functioned as the American arm of the WJC. When differences arose between the two groups, the WJC established a North American Section, which has recently begun to enroll rabbinical and congregational associations as affiliates. Conversely, the Canadian Jewish Congress and DAIA (the representative organization of Argentine Jewry) are, as representative organizations, directly affiliated with the WJC.
The WJC Executive works through four regional branches, each with its constitution -- in North America, South America, Europe, and Israel -- that mediate between the parent body and affiliates. The European branch, which operates primarily in western Europe, also maintains ties with community organizations in the Communist bloc. The Israeli branch does not have constituent organizations. Composed in keeping with the ubiquitous party key, its eighteen members are drawn from the spectrum of parliamentary parties.
Because its members are organizations, the number of individuals actually associated with the WJC is small. Some 400 or 500 delegates attend the quadrennial assemblies. Between assemblies, an executive committee of 120 meets annually, to which every member organization sends at least one delegate. There are also a governing council of 35, a secretary-general in Geneva, and a director-general in New York, since 1981 the center of its governance. Its cultural department is headquartered in Israel, its political department in Paris, and its policy research institute is in London. Among the members of the governing council is a strong contingent of prominent rabbis and diaspora Zionist leaders.
The WJC has complemented the WZO in areas where the latter could not operate, but it has also been the WZO's potential rival. For this reason, the Zionist leadership's attitude toward the WJC has always been one of ambivalence. In the 1930s, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, as the WZO president, stayed away from the founding assembly of the WJC, persisting in his resolve to avoid diaspora Jewish politics. Although most of the Zionist Congress voted to designate the WJC as the most suitable instrument for the protection of Jewish rights, thereby ensuring WZO representation in (and in recent years subsidization of) the WJC, the concern that diaspora interests might compete with those of the Yishuv was never far submerged and has surfaced again in the era of the state. The notion of an organization representing world Jewry which might hold a position independent of Israel has little appeal to the state's policymakers.
A second, equally substantial element in the inability of the WJC to become the representative organization of world Jewry was the unwillingness of the major Jewish organizations in the United States and Britain to become part of the WJC structure. The real bases of the WJC are in Latin America and Europe. It may well be the dominant regional Jewish organization in Latin America, but that region is not strong enough on the world Jewish scene to be a real power base. The diminution of Europe's strength after the Holocaust, coupled with the emergence of the European Council of Jewish Community Services as an increasingly important regional force, has weakened the role of the WJC on that continent. Finally, the dominance of the WJC by Nahum Goldmann and his coterie of supporters for the entire postwar generation weakened the organization internally by discouraging new leadership and externally by making Goldmann's agenda -- and quarrels -- its own.
Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany.41 The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) is a model of an effective, special purpose, multicountry association. It was formed to undertake two tasks: to press (in conjunction with the government of Israel) Jewish claims against Germany and to distribute the funds received among eligible beneficiaries. The conference was established in 1951 on the initiative of the Israeli government and the WZO-Jewish Agency and with the assistance of the WJC. Twenty-two organizations from the United States, England, Canada, Australia, South Africa, France and Argentina participated. Protracted negotiations led to separate agreements by the German Federal Republic with Israel and with the Claims Conference.
In its distributive phase there was remarkable consensus among the many divergent organizational interests represented -- this despite strong ideological opposition to the idea of accepting payments from Germany, which only gradually receded. The success of the Claims Conference in both its diplomatic and distributive tasks can be attributed to the following factors:
Its representative character.
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Its clearly delimited.
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The challenge of bona fide diplomatic activity with two sovereign states in place of the lobbying and shadowboxing that is normally the lot of nonsovereign entities.
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The opportunity to be a full-fledged partner of Israel in the negotiations.
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The high caliber of the negotiators.
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The early agreement on criteria and priorities for the distribution of money.
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The utilization of established facilities rather than becoming an operating agency or creating new instrumentalities.
The Claims Conference ended its active role in 1965 with the fulfillment of its goal. Its formal existence is maintained for the performance of certain limited, ongoing tasks. Among these are monitoring the implementation of German legislation on restitution; pressing for further legislation, especially in East Germany; administering a fund for former community leaders; and supporting non-Jews who had helped rescue Jews and who are in financial difficulty.
By 1965 the Claims Conference had allocated $110 million, of which three-fourths was applied to the relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement of Nazi victims outside Israel and the rest used mainly for cultural and educational reconstruction. Grants were made to some 250 Jewish communities and institutions in thirty countries, primarily in Europe, and for research and publications by authors who were Nazi victims. Institutions for the commemoration of the Holocaust were also beneficiaries.
Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.42 In 1964 the Claims Conference established the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture to serve as a living memorial to the six million who perished in the Holocaust and transferred to it the funds that had remained after German payments ceased. This base endowment of about 10$ million was augmented by additional amounts in subsequent years, so that the foundation has been able to distribute about $1.25 million annually. The Memorial Foundation maintains quite an elaborate apparatus for the implementation of a financially modest program. It has forty-seven member organizations, each of which sends three representatives to the board of directors. Eighteen organizations are of the multicountry type (thirteen have "World" in their names) and twenty-nine are territorial, the latter including five academic and cultural groups in Israel. Thus the Memorial Foundation is even more inclusive than the Claims Conference. Like the latter, it has a small professional staff, whose job consists mainly of sifting applications for support (these amount to several times the available financing) and making recommendations for allocations to the board and the 25-member executive committee.
World ORT Union.43 The World ORT Union is a service agency that is multicountry in all aspects: functional, administrative and financial. ORT now trains Jews and others in sophisticated technological specialties. Operations are conducted in twenty-four countries, and more than 100,000 students are enrolled in vocational training courses of a wide variety, making ORT the largest nongovernmental system of vocational education in the world. ORT also conducts training programs in Third World countries, sponsored and financed by the United States foreign aid program, the Swiss foreign ministry, and by various international institutions, primarily the World Bank.
Its major center of activity is Israel, with an enrollment of some sixty thousand. Other programs are in Iran, Ethiopia, Morocco and India; in Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay; in France, Italy and the United States.
The World ORT Union, seated in Geneva, is a federation of autonomous national organizations, constituted as an association according to the Swiss civil code. It provides its local affiliates with financial subsidies, training of personnel and overall planning. The union is governed by a congress meeting every six years, to which member organizations send elected delegates. A central committee of 150 meets between congresses; it elects an executive committee of twenty to forty members, which convenes biennially. The president of the World ORT Union is an American, as is its executive director; the executive chairman if French. In the lower administrative echelons, the staff is multinational.
The World ORT is an effective multicountry body because:
It is a single-purpose organization that has been able to adapt its program to changing circumstances and requirements.
Its nonpolitical nature has assured its entry and acceptance in nonwestern countries, especially in the Moslem world. (Operations in eastern Europe, which continued in the postwar period, have since been phased out.)
Its major emphasis has shifted to Israel, making a substantial contribution to filling that country's need for technically trained people.
In its training program, ORT has maintained professional standards that have given it international recognition.
In its financing, it has combined local support for local programs, inter-edah allocations (in the United States through the JDC), and non-Jewish financing.
It accomplished a shift in leadership from eastern Europe to the United States and by that succeeded in selling the ORT idea to the American public and becoming a beneficiary of federated fund-raising in the United States.
Its federal structure makes possible participation by representatives from all its multicountry membership and provides a forum for bridging differences in approach.
Joint Distribution Committee.44 A major share of multicountry activity in education, welfare, and community organization is performed by organizations sponsored by individual countrywide communities. Outstanding among them is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the chief overseas welfare agency of American Jewry and one of the two partners in the United Jewish Appeal. Although sponsored and governed by American Jews, its staff is multicountry and its range of operations is probably greater than that of any other Jewish body.
The JDC organizes and finances rescue, relief, and rehabilitation programs for imperiled and needy Jews throughout the world; conducts a wide range of health, welfare, education and rehabilitation programs; and provides aid to cultural and religious institutions. It serves some 430,000 Jews in twenty-five countries, including Israel. It contributes financially to the support of many other Jewish organizations, and it works with most of the other edah bodies in the fulfillment of its mission. Its headquarters are in New York, with regional headquarters in Paris and Jerusalem.
The evolution of the JDC since its founding in 1914 reflects the transformations that have taken place in Jewish life din the twentieth century. Its beginnings were in ad hoc relief, an American Jewish response to World War I, the first of the great crises to bring disaster to Jews in the twentieth century. As such, it became the embodiment of Jewish unity when under siege, as American Jews from all the ideological camps -- Socialist, Orthodox and Progressive -- found a way to join with one another despite their great ideological differences to provide relief and rescue for fellow Jews.
After the war's end, the Russian Revolution and the various eastern European regional wars created new needs, and the JDC was institutionalized as a permanent instrument for American Jewish relief efforts. It became a classic emancipationist institution, committed to enabling and even encouraging Jews to find their way within the countries in which they were located. In part, this was an American Jewish response to the severe limitations place on immigration to the United States, but it is of great significance that effectively the response was anti-Zionist.
This orientation did not change until the impact of Nazism became apparent and the JDC had to reevaluate its stance. Even so, not until the takeover of the eastern European countries by Soviet-sponsored Communist regimes that sooner or later expelled the JDC, charging it with being a foreign agent, did the "Joint" truly shift its orientation. At approximately the same time, early in the 1950s, Ben-Gurion persuaded the JDC to undertake major responsibilities for the relief of the elderly and chronically ill refugees who had come to Israel as part of the mass immigration in the years immediately following the establishment of the state. This brought the "Joint" to Israel in a major way. Wince then, there has been a consistent expansion of the JDC role in the Jewish state, most recently moving from relief, rehabilitation, and institutional support to concerns such as the improvement of civic life ;and local government in Israel.
In the meantime, the major thrust of the JDC relief activities outside Israel was shifted to the remnant Jewish communities in the Islamic world. In addition, the JDC played a major role in rebuilding European Jewry in the aftermath of World War II and continues to play a significant, if reduced, role in encouraging European Jews to strengthen their Jewish institutions. The JDC also returned to eastern Europe during a thaw in the cold war and continues its work there in a low-key way.
The JDC is held in high respect within the Jewish world and has succeeded in penetrating into places where Jewish institutions are usually forbidden or severely limited. Its success stems from its constant striving to a professional rescue and relief organization, nonpolitical and dedicated to maintain as low a profile as needed to achieve its tasks.
Alliance Israelite Universelle.45 The France-based Alliance Israelite Universelle has an illustrious record of establishing educational institutions in the Moslem world. With the demise of Jewish communities in those countries and shift in the locus of Jewish life from the Francophone and Anglophone communities, it declined on the world scene although it continues to do important work in Israel.
By keeping a low profile, the Alliance has managed to maintain schools in those Arab and Islamic countries where Jews are severely restricted or even persecuted. In this it has no doubt enjoyed support from the French government, which tends to maintain close ties with those regimes. Most recently it has tried to stimulate an institutional revival through serving Jews from North Africa and western Asia who have settled in France, providing them with educational institutions and assistance for existing institutions, particularly through its teachers seminary.
Like the JDC, the Alliance is a living witness to the change that has taken place in Jewish thinking about emancipation and nationhood. Alliance schools were originally known for their emancipationist and assimilationist orientation. In many cases, their effect was to weaken Jewishness in the name of modernization.46 Now its major activities are in Israel where its most successful new project has been the sponsorship of a teachers seminary linked with the Hebrew University, designed to train teachers for Jewish subjects in Israeli nonreligious schools in such a way that the curriculum of those schools will be more Jewishly informed.
European Council of Jewish Community Services.47 The most recently established multicountry association of consequence is the European Council of Jewish Community Services, a regional body serving as a forum for European Jewry. Its membership includes some seventy communities in eighteen European countries. The council is the successor to the Standing Conference of European Jewish Communities, which was organized by the JDC in the 1950s. Its purpose was to stem the slow disintegration of Jewish life in postwar Europe and to help the communities transcend their local preoccupations in the search for common solutions. When the conference was transformed into the council, its offices were moved to Paris and a French communal worker was appointed as secretary general in place of a JDC staff member, completing the organization's "Europeanization." (As a sing of the times, English is the predominant language, and the council's publication, Exchange, is in English.)
The turning point in the council's role from a liaison body into a larger multicountry Jewish organization came in May 1972. At a meeting in Berlin, its governing assembly adopted a five-year program, which provided for commissions on fund-raising, young leadership training, and social services, and activated a Europe-wide community center association. In scope and functions, the European Council is similar to the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF) in the United States and maintains consultative contact with its American counterpart.
Government of Israel. The government of the State of Israel now acts as a principal defender of the physical welfare of the Jewish people under certain circumstances (for example, dealing with Nazi war criminals and terrorists) and maintains that it does so in the name of the edah. Thus, the security forces of Israel sometimes defend all Jews, the Knesset of Israel plays a major role in defining their status as Jews, and the prime minister or president sometimes speaks in their name.
Instruments of the Keter Torah and Keter Kehunah
Because the new pluralism in Jewish life has generated differing interpretations of the Torah-as-constitution, the keter torah is organized on clearly sectoral lines. Within it, older institutions ways. At the same time, o
