Scratch secular Europe today, and you will find long-held Christian
presuppositions and attitudes toward Jews and Muslims present in
subliminal or overt forms. Recently German, Italian, Polish, and
Slovakian delegates demanded that the "Christian heritage" of the
new Europe be writ large in the European constitution. It was only
the post-September 11 anxiety of most states that enabled
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, as president of the convention
writing the constitution, to persuade the group that such a
reference would be "inappropriate." The demand was transformed into
a reference in the preamble to the "cultural, religious, and
humanist inheritance of Europe." No one missed what was meant. What
continues to trouble Europeans about Judaism and Islam is their
all-too-close relationship to Christianity. It is the seeming
similarity of the three "Abrahamic" (the new buzzword including
Islam in the Judeo-Christian fold) religions that draws attention
to the real or imagined differences among them - what Sigmund Freud
called the "narcissism of minor differences." Those differences are
heightened in a secular society that is rooted in the mindset (and
often the attitudes, beliefs, social mores, and civic practices) of
the majority religious community - that is to say,
Christianity.
A Wide Range of Rights, if Only….
Minority religions in a secular society that still has religious
overtones are promised a wide range of civil rights - including
those of freedom of religion - if only its members adhere to the
standards of civilized behavior as defined by the secular society
(and rooted in the desire to make sure that society, with its
masked religious assumptions, redefines the minority's religious
practice). Thus Muslims and Jews have the same rights to public
schooling as Christians, if only they don't insist on wearing
headscarves or coverings. Any differences between majority and
minority religions seem threatening because the majority religion
has already ceded so much ground to overt secularization. Over and
over, the integration of Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries was
decried as a force of "modernization," rather than as the result of
modernization. Today Islam is accused of being a threat to the
modernization Europe wants, but it also highlights the loss of
religious identity that Europeans know comes with modernization.
The West needs to understand these dynamics of change. If we assume
that transformation occurs (or does not occur) only within
communities that are seen as different, we miss the dynamic change
that occurs in society as a whole. Religious experience is an
aspect of all societies - even those that label themselves as
anti-religion. In tracking how religious ritual and practice shift
and rebound, how they are transmuted and become a place for
resistance, we can say as much about the culture in which religion
is found as about religions themselves.
A new project I am beginning will look at the experiences among
Jews from the late 18th century (which marked the beginning of
civil emancipation) to the beginning of the 20th century, and will
ask how those experiences parallel the experiences now confronting
Diaspora Islam in secular Western Europe. The similarities are
striking: A religious minority enters a self-described secular (or
secularizing) society that is Christian in its rhetoric and
presuppositions and that perceives a "special relationship" with
that minority. (That special relationship is marked for Jews by the
Christian appropriation of the Old Testament and the Messianic
prophecy; for Muslims, by the appropriation of the Old Testament
and the New as part of Muslims' claims of a final prophetic
revelation.) The minority speaks a different secular language (for
Jews, it was Western and Eastern Yiddish as well as Ladino; for
Muslims, it is Turkish, Bengali, and colloquial Arabic as well as
others), but also has a different religious language (Hebrew and
classical Arabic). Religious schools that teach in the languages
associated with a religious group are seen as sources of corruption
and illness. Indeed some authorities in Germany and the Netherlands
have recently advocated that only native languages be spoken in
mosques to make the message of the sermon transparent to the
greater society. That is not far from the desire that was expressed
in the 18th century that Jews learn German in order to become
members of civil society.
An Unacknowledged Discomfort
Religious rites are practiced by minority religions that seem an
abomination to the majority culture. Unlike the secular majority,
the minority religions practice the mutilation of children's bodies
(infant male circumcision, and, for some Muslims, infant female
genital cutting); the suppression of women's rights (lack of
women's traditional education, a secondary role in religious
practice, arranged marriages); barbaric torture of animals (the
cutting of the throats of unstunned animals, allowing them to bleed
to death); and ostentatious clothing that signals religious
affiliation and has ritual significance, among a number of other
practices. Centrally relating all of those practices for both
groups is a belief in the divine "chosenness" of the group in
contrast to all others.
The demonization of certain aspects of religious practice has its
roots in what civil society will tolerate and what it will not. Why
it will not tolerate something is, of course, central to the story.
Thus Alan Dundes argued decades ago that the anxiety about the
implications of cannibalism associated with the consumption of the
body and blood of Christ in the Christian Mass shaped the fantasy
that Jews were slaughtering Christian children for their blood. It
was the often unacknowledged discomfort with its own practices that
influenced how Christian society responded to the Jews. Such
anxiety is also present in the anger secular Europe directed at
other Jewish rituals associated with bloodletting, such as the
ritual slaughter of animals. The way that a minority religion's
practices, which differ from those of the majority religion,
highlight the very things that seem confusing or uncomfortable
about that majority religion in a secular society is part of the
story. Thus Muslim women who wear head scarves evoke not just the
repression of Muslim women in Western society but also Western
insecurities about the role of all women in the public
sphere.
Elision of a National Identity
One of the most striking similarities of the process of Jewish and
Muslim integration into Western secular society is the gradual
elision of the national differences among various groups, both in
terms of how they are perceived and how they see themselves.
Muslims in Western Europe represent multiple national traditions
(South Asian in Britain, North African in France and Spain, Turkish
in Germany). But so did the Jews in Western Europe who came out of
ghettos in France and the Rhineland or the rural reaches of Bavaria
and Hungary, or who moved from those parts of Eastern Europe -
Poland, the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - that
became part of the West. To those one can add the Sephardi Jews
from the Iberian Peninsula who settled in areas from Britain
(introducing fish and chips) to the fringes of the Austrian Empire.
The standard image of the Jews in 18th-century British caricature
was the Maltese Jew in his oriental turban. By the 19th century it
was that of Lord Rothschild in formal wear at his daughter's
wedding, receiving the Prince of Wales in a London synagogue. In
the intervening years the religious identity of Jews in European
eyes had become more important than national identity - few (except
the anti-Semites) remembered that the Rothschilds were a Frankfurt
family that had escaped the Yiddish-speaking ghetto. The Jews are
everywhere and all alike; Muslims today seem to be everywhere and
are becoming "all alike." How does such a shift in identity affect
religious practice and belief? Is there a decrease in conflicts
felt among religious groups, or is there a substitution of national
identity for such conflicts?
What to Give Up for Integration?
I am also going to be looking at how Jews and Muslims adapted to
Western society, and what the comparison of the two groups might
tell us. For Jews the stories of integration took different forms
across Western Europe because there were different forms of
Christianity, different levels of tolerance, and different
expectations as to the meaning of citizenship. Different notions of
secularization all present variations on the theme, What do you
have to give up to become a true citizen? Do you merely have to
give up your secular language? Do you have to abandon the most
evident and egregious practices? I hope to understand what Jews
thought possible to change in their religious practice in the 18th
and 19th century, what they accomplished within various national
states, and what they did not accomplish. That is, what was gained
and what was lost, both in terms of the ability of living religions
to transform themselves, and in the understanding that all such
transformations call forth other forms of religious practice in
response.
The history of the Jews in the European Diaspora during the late
18th century called forth three great reformers who took different
approaches to those issues: Moses Mendelssohn and the followers of
the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany who, together with their
predecessors in Holland, argued for accommodation with civil
society in a secularizing world; Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon of
Vilnius, known as the Vilna Gaon, who desired to reform traditional
Orthodox Judaism to make it able to function in a Jewish world that
kept itself separate from secular society; and the first modern
Jewish mystics, the Hasidim, typified by Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem
Tov in imperial Russia, who fought, like their contemporaries in
Berlin and Vilnius, against what they saw as the stultifying
practices and worldview of contemporary Judaism. All lived roughly
simultaneously. In their wake came radical changes in what it meant
to be a Jew in belief and practice.
Today we stand at the beginning of a mass integration of Muslims
into Western European culture. That culture prizes its secular
nature, but the very forms of the secular state range from Britain
(where the queen remains head of the Church) to Germany, which is
still divided between Protestant and Catholic versions of
secularism (and along the dividing lines of the Cold War). There
were islands of Muslim integration inEurope, such as in Bosnia,
that have been transformed over the past decade because of
persecution and external pressure. There are also Muslim
communities, such as in the large urban areas of France, that seem
to be devolving into a permanent underclass. But how the local
pressure for rights, on one hand, and integration, on the other,
will play out in the future is unknown. The very forms of religious
practice and belief are at stake. Perhaps some variants have
already been tried with or without success among European
Jews?
A Tiny Minority vs. a Considerable Minority
Now I know that there are also vast differences between Jews in the
18th and 19th centuries and Muslims today. There are simply many
more Muslims today in Western Europe than there were Jews in the
earlier period. The Jews historically never formed more than 1
percent of the population of any Western European nation; Muslim
populations form a considerable minority today. While there is no
Western European city with a Muslim majority, many recent news
stories predict that Marseilles or Rotterdam will be the first
European city to have one. In France today there are 600,000 Jews,
while there are between 5 million and 6 million Muslims, who make
up about 10 percent of the population. In Germany, with a tiny
Jewish population of under 100,000, almost 4 percent of the
population is Muslim (totaling more than 3 million people). In
Britain about 2.5 percent of the total population (1.48 million
people) is Muslim. Demographics (and birthrates) aside, there are
salient differences in the experiences of the Jews in the past and
Muslims today. The Jews had no national "homeland" - indeed were
defined as nomads or a pariah people. They lived only in the
Diaspora and seemed inherently different from any other people in
Western Europe. Most Muslims in the West come out of a national
tradition in which their homelands had long histories disturbed but
not destroyed by colonial rule. And last but not least, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past century, as well as
the Holocaust, which set the Jews apart from all other religious
groups as essential victims, seem to place the two groups - at
least in the consciousness of the West - in two antagonistic
camps.
Religion as a 'Heritage' in a Secular World
Still there are key similarities. Notably religion for the Jews of
pre-Enlightenment Europe, and for much of contemporary Islam, was
and is a "heritage" to be maintained in the secular world of
Diaspora. What can or must such memory of ritual and practice
abandon? What must it preserve to maintain its coherence for the
group? One of the continuing questions in regard to religious
practices has to do with ritual slaughter of animals, a practice
that still links Jews and Muslims in contemporary thought. For
Muslims, an alternative to the tradition of sacrificing a ram on
Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) has been created on a website
where one can sacrifice virtual rams. That is a direct response to
charges of "inhumanness" lodged against Islamic religious practices
both within and without the Muslim community. Can that be a further
sign of alternative practices developing within Islam? I want to
examine what the solutions were to similar problems raised by
modern Western secular society in regard to Jewish religious
practice; how the Jews responded; how these responses were accepted
or rejected based on local contexts; and how the Jews became or did
not become citizens in the eyes of their non-Jewish contemporaries.
Such questions are echoed in the debates within Islamic groups
today concerning everything from the meaning of jihad to the ritual
preparation of food. Can common experiences provide a natural
alliance between Jews and Muslims?
A Secular Society with a Looming Problem
The central cultural problem of Europe today is not how different
national cultures will be integrated into a European Union, but how
secular society will interact with European Muslims. Anyone
interested in contemporary Europe before September 11, 2001, knew
that the 800-pound gorilla confronting France, Germany, and
Britain, and to a lesser extent Spain and Italy, was the huge
presence of an "unassimilatable" minority. Much attention has been
given recently to the American political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington, and his pronouncements about the dangers of Hispanic
immigrants rejecting American values. Such fears are already being
voiced in Europe about Muslims. But exactly the same things were
said about the Jews for 200 years. What does that tell us? I am
only beginning to seek answers to that question, but I hope they
will help us understand the debates that Western Europe is
increasingly facing and that eventually the United States may face,
too.
A longer version of this article appeared in The Chronicle
Review, April 8, 2005.