American Jewish Literature

The Influence of Literature on the Jewish Community

Jewish-American literature is now only about one century old if we include that literature which was written in Yiddish by immigrants between 1885 and 1935. That, however, would have little bearing on our subject, because Yiddish is hardly used in America in the 21st century, so that anything foreign, except some of the works of Goethe and Voltaire, has no influence on the American Jew simply because he cannot read it.

That is not to say that Yiddish writers were not radicals and secularists. On the contrary. From the time of the first volume of Yiddish poetry published in America in 1877 to the end of the Yiddish era in about 1975, Jewish-American writers always exhibited a strong interest in radical and hence secular ideas. Yiddish writers expressed themselves in poetry, in the theater, in novels, in newspapers, and in intellectual books, papers and pamphlets.

Throughout these five media ran, for the most part, a secular attitude most visible in the novel. The first Jewish novels written in America were written by immigrants . This was true, not because there were no Jews here before the last two decades of the nineteenth century, but because those Jews who had come here before 1881 were very few, had arrived in the 17th century from Spain and Portugal and in the nineteenth century from Germany, and had rapidly assimilated the majority American culture . However, 1881 marked a major turning point in Jewish history. On March 13 of that year the Russian Czar, Alexander Il, was assassinated. When his son Alexander Ill ascended the Russian throne, persecution of the Jews became the policy of the Russian government and led to the prompt immigration of millions of Jews to America. These millions of Jews spoke Yiddish , so that it is not at all surprising that the first American Jewish writers included in that migration wrote in that language.

Thus, the Jewish writers of that day brought European Jewishness to America. Among these was Morris Winshevsky , who promoted socialism but had very little Jewish content in his poetry. Instead, Winshevsky was a follower of the Jewish enlightenment, called Haskalah, a movement with a distinct secular emphasis. In fact, Winshevsky represented the revolt against religion at the end of the 19th century when he wrote: "For me...my disbelief and hatred toward all faiths reached a high point of fanaticism...My greatest delight was to prove that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that Joshuah did not cause the heavens to stand still.”

There were of course innumerable other authors but only a few stand out as major contributors to Yiddish writing in the U.S.A.  There was Morris Rosenfeld , prime representative of the so-called "sweatshop" poets, who reflected the Jewish radicalism of his day. That radicalism was the reaction to the misery of living in immigrant slums, of the exploitation of the Jewish workers, and the desperation of the Jewish masses. It was a radicalism which rejected the religion of Europe and sought to rely on the politics of this world instead. Although Rosenfeld was translated into English, his following in the English language was only temporary, so that his fame rests finally on the Yiddish following he was able to attract. He too was an agnostic.

The most important Yiddish writer of the early twentieth century however, was Abraham Cahan . Although he spoke Yiddish better than English, Cahan succeeded in publishing The Chosen People and The Rise of David Levinsky in English in 1917. This book has been called "the most important novel written by a Jewish immigrant." In it, Levinsky becomes an American millionaire at the cost of his Jewish heritage and upon first becoming a thoroughgoing secularist. "Spencer and Darwin replace the Torah , Dickens and Thackeray the Talmud . " Cahan depicts the emptiness of Levinsky's life despite his rise to money and fame.

Other American Jewish writers who wrote in the Yiddish or the English idiom were Sidney Nyburg, Anzela Yezierska, James Oppenheim, Samuel Ornitz, and Ludwig Lewisohn, who was born in the United States, the son of German Jewish immigrants . Al these dealt with the fate of the immigrants. All of these rejected religion and sought to show how pragmatism and realism were far superior in solving man's problems than belief in anything supernatural.

During the depression of the 1930s, American Jewish writers , now mostly born in the U.S.A., were very much affected by the discontinuity of European Judaism with American Judaism. Except for the 1978 Nobel prize winner in literature Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland in 1904, these writers all wrote in English. Singer, although he wrote in Yiddish , was published in English, so that his work is known to almost all Americans in the latter idiom.

Except for Ludwig Lewisohn and Meyer Levin , who defended Jewishness if not Judaism, these writers all rejected Jewish tradition . Instead, these leaned toward the political "left" and viewed their Jewishness as a secular condition. Nelson Algren in Somebody in Boots, Albert Halper in The Foundry, Isadore Schneider in From the Kingdom of Necessity, and many others, viewed socialism as the answer to the Jewish problem, both here and abroad, and disdained religion entirely. Demanding a future free of tradition, writers such as Michael Gold in Jews Without Money, or Charles Reznikoff in By the Waters of Manhattan, all believe that Marxism, not Judaism, is the inevitable answer to the degradations and hardships of the immigrant slums.

The writer Paul Goodman , whom the historian Irving Howe called a "Jewish intellectual alienated to the point of complete reduction," thought that the fellowship of all humans is enhanced by the Jewish tradition , and that the fully Jewish is regarded as the fully human. Judaism as a religion or as a separate experience is hardly credited by Goodman.

Added to these novelists, there were in the in the first part of the 20th century Jewish theologians who also strove to distance theology from the European tradition . Kaufmann Kohler , a reform Rabbi, wrote Jewish Theology Systematically and Historically Considered in 1918, and in 1934, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan , a representative of the conservative movement in Judaism, published his monumental Judaism as a Civilization.

Not only did these rabbis disconnect American Judaism from European Judaism, they also redefined the God concept. Thus, Kaplan presents God as "a chronologically variable social idea, " or as a "struggling ordering force of nature. "

Thus, after the Second World War , i.e., after 1945, a vast number of Jewish - American writers inundated the literature of the United States and have kept this up until the end of the century.

A list of all the American Jewish writers who have contributed to American literature since 1945 cannot be presented here. It is far too long and would involve a discussion of a whole social movement with far reaching consequences for American culture . Some of the most prominent names among American-Jewish fiction writers are of course Saul Bellow , Bernard Malamud , Tillie Olson , Grace Paley , Cynthia Ozick , Herbert Gold , Joseph Heller , E.L. Doctorow , Stanley Elkin , Hugh Nissensen, and Phillip Roth .

The works of Phillip Roth are undoubtedly excellent examples of the rejection of traditional Judaism already exhibited by the Yiddish writers a generation earlier. Like their non-Jewish contemporaries and predecessors, Jewish writers in the last half of the 20th century contributed a great deal to the secularization of America and Jewish life as well, as they created a distinction between Judaism and Jewishness which their grandparents never knew and which has become the Great Divide within the Jewish community in the twenty-first century.

In 1933, when Phillip Roth was born, mass immigration to the United States had come to an end and Jewish immigration, mostly from Germany, was small and involved many newcomers already secularized by their German environment. Numerous Yiddish writers and the philosophical, scientific, and literary world in America had secularized at least the academic world and in particular such institutions as the University of Chicago, where Roth was a student and where American sociology was created.

Like thousands of other Jews who came of age in the '30's, Roth entered into the world of higher education where the challenges to Judaism or any religion were already embedded in the curriculum. And since, as we have seen, over eighty percent of Jews of college age attend an institution of higher education and have done so for most of a century, they, like Roth, found every reason to divorce Judaism from Jewishness and discard "the faith of our fathers."

Many of the Jewish writers with Roth in the forefront now opposed their Jewish heritage and treated it with contempt, disdain and calumny. In fact, since Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, "there are those who still grit their teeth, hoping that the irreverent, satirical Mr. Roth will go away."

Roth, of course, did to the Jewish world what non-Jewish writers had already done to the Christian world for a century. He secularized the sacred. He ridiculed the divine. He insulted the tradition and he vulgarized his "in-group." Thus, Roth, and so many other Jewish - American writers, contributed mightily, not only to the secularization of Judaism and America in general, but also to the de-mystification of the Jewish tradition. This means that both for non-Jews and for Americans of Jewish origins who had left the tradition behind, Roth provides insight into 20th century Jewish life as it was lived each day.

He explains what is important to contemporary American Jews . He shows that Judaism is not one of the important ideas in the lives of American Jews but that Jews have substituted membership in clubs and organizations for membership in synagogues . Roth further claims that synagogues and rabbis are themselves secular institutions at the end of the century, that Jewish ritual emphasizes financial display as in Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, and that the Jewish community in America is governed by the same type of business interests which Sinclair Lewis described governing the Christian community exhibited and shown over and over again in Babbitt .

No doubt it is Portnoy's Complaint , however, which Roth wrote in 1969, that led to the accusations that Roth was a Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hater, and a self-promoter.

This book, which attacks the stereotypical Jewish mother , recites at length and in detail the sexual problems of the protagonist. It has been labeled "pornographic" for good reason and was truly "shocking" on first coming to public attention. Now, in the twenty-first century, nothing else will shock anyone any more. Dreiser and Lewis and their companions also shocked Americans. But by the time Roth began to write, the only means of gaining the reader’s attention among all the competing writers was to do something yet more extreme than what had already been done before the Second World War . Merely proclaiming one’s disbelief in orthodox theology was no longer necessary since innumerable writers in philosophy, science, and literature had already made secularization a most popular attitude. Roth and his contemporaries, particularly his Jewish companions, sought to now attack the core of Jewishness as they understood it.

This Jewishness, in the hands of these writers, consists of being "raving hysterics", nagging "Jewish mothers ," and female shrews of every variety. Thus, the popular Jewish writers in the tradition of Roth were accused of being Jewish anti-Semites , producers of filth and self-hatred , and conveyors of the same calumnies which the Jews of the old world endured for so long.

Roth rejected all of these complaints in an essay he wrote for Commentary in 1963. Roth argues there that his Jewish characters, who are inevitably less than admirable, are never meant to represent all Jews or even a large number. To Roth, each story he wrote refers only to the one person described and without any further implications. Yet, Roth himself quotes a letter he received after the publication of his story "Defenders of the Faith," which says in part."…With your one story, 'Defenders of the Faith,' you have done as much harm as all the organized anti-Semitic organizations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars and connivers. " Roth writes that he was even accused of legitimizing the murder of six million European Jews by stories which, he does not deny, vilify Jews. Yet, his argument is that those who see these things in his stories do not understand them and that it is submission to anti-Semitism to not write about subjects which depict Jews as human beings, i.e., sinners, fools, adulterers, cowards, and connivers.

Now Roth always argued that fiction and reality are different. He did so again in 1987 in The Counterlife and sought thereby to escape responsibility for what are clearly attacks on Jewishness and Judaism. To Roth, Jewish identity cannot be taken for granted. It is always in question as seen once more in his effort called Operation Shylock (1993).

Roth holds that it is "timidity and paranoia" for American Jews to object to his stories about Jewish failure and Jewish moral weakness. He will not accede to the common Jewish view that a Jew must never talk about negative Jewish traits to non-Jews. Roth rejects that anti-Jewish conduct can result from his negative stories about Jews. Referring to a complaining rabbi , Roth writes: "Can he actually believe that on the basis of my story anyone is going to start a pogrom, or keep a Jew out of medical school, or even call a Jewish school child a 'kike'?”

Although it is indeed true that one author cannot provoke a "pogrom," it is also true that those who like to set quotas on Jews in medical schools or call children ethnic names can easily feel themselves justified in that kind of persecution by using a story by Roth. More important is that Roth and his followers have legitimized the distancing of Jews from Judaism and the Jewish tradition and have in that sense contributed immensely to the secularization of Judaism in the United Sates. This may be said of Roth despite the fact that in "Eli the Fanatic" Roth exposes the boorishness of many modern American Jews who find even the survivors of the Holocaust irrelevant in their anxiety to avoid being identified with Jews dressed in the black garb of the Chassidim and speaking with a distinct accent.

This then leads us to consider one more aspect to American -Jewish writing which is unique to Jews and has been very influential in promoting secularization in the Jewish community in the twenty-first century. That is the fiction and the historiography of the Holocaust . This writing has led to the phenomenon in the Jewish community of literally substituting holocaust memorial activities for Judaism, so that for many otherwise utterly secular Jews, ceremony and ritual surrounding the holocaust has become their religion. This phenomenon was instigated by holocaust writers, both fictional and non - fictional. The second way in which holocaust literature has influenced secularization is raised by those who question whether a God can exist in a world which permits such horrors.

Foremost among these writers was Elie Wiesel . Although of a Yiddish speaking background, Wiesel made a name for himself in both French and English. When "Night " was first translated from the French and published in America in 1960 it opened the door to a wide range of such literature thereafter.

It is true that Chaim Grade had already published "My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner" in 1951, but that book was written in Yiddish and only later became available in English. Grade deals with one question in his book. The question is: How can one believe in God after the Holocaust ? Grade renounces religion and belief in God. Saul Bellow , however, in “Mr. Sammler's Planet ," describes in detail the horrors of the Holocaust experience but reaches the conclusion that God does exist and "nihilism is denied."

Many Jews have answered Grade's question by renouncing traditional religion and placing their emotions into "holocausting," which refers not only to attendance at various commemorative events, but also refers to financial contributions to the Washington D.C. holocaust museum, the Los Angeles based Wiesenthal Center , and other such efforts to remember the mass murders of the Second World War . This means in practice that it is much easier for commemorative organizations to raise money concerning the past than it is for Jewish educational institutions to raise funds for the propagation of Judaism among the young.

Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, Bernard Malamud in The Fixer, and Saul Bellow 's Mr Sammler's Planet, all deal with the issue of how the immigrant survivor can deal with his past and his future.

There are many additional Jewish-American fiction writers who have concerned themselves with the Holocaust . The work of Cynthia Ozick , Hugh Nissenson, Richard Elman, Zdena Berger, Norma Rosen, Isaac B. Singer, Joshua Singer, and Daniel Stern are only a small example of all that has been written and is still being produced concerning that heinous crime.

There is also an ever growing non-fiction literature concerning the Holocaust . Best known among these is Lucy Dawidowicz , who received the most attention among historians for her book The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), although Nora Levin, writing in The Holocaust in 1968, was far more detailed in her description of the events collectively so labeled than was Dawidowicz. There is also the book by Hilberg called The Destruction of the European Jews , and, more recently, The Holocaust by Gilbert.

In addition to these major histories, there are innumerable other works dealing with the holocaust such as oral histories, psycho-social analyses, memoirs and diaries. This literature is increasing as the years since that crime go on. Each of these many publications raises the questions anew. Is there a God? Is religion meaningless? Can one be a Jew by showing an interest in that terrible Jewish experience?

The memorializing of the holocaust has yet one more dimension for the vast majority of American Jews who never experienced those horrors. It gives the native American Jewish population a pseudo-martyr status. American Jews, fortunately ignorant of what is really meant by the word "Holocaust " and not really willing to listen to the firsthand accounts of survivors, enjoy the victim status some assume when these nightmares are discussed in public. This kind of stance is evident during the large Holocaust commemorations which secular American Jewish "leaders" like to stage in full view of television cameras and other media coverage. These events are generally chaired by someone known as a "great contributor." Such a personage addresses the crowd and the cameras and creates the impression, at least in his eyes, that he is somehow a victim. In the victim oriented American society in the 21^st century , this stance is sought after and prestigious and achieved by making large financial contributions. All that in face of living holocaust survivors who, by reason of their general poverty , are often ignored because they have neither the education nor the finesse to make a convincing television appearance. Thus, even the Holocaust and all that implies has become banal and absurd in the hands of those who cannot understand that such overused phrases as "the Jews went to their deaths like sheep " are false and nonsense. Even worse is the effort on the part of some native American Jews, and a good number of non-Jews, to trivialize the Holocaust by comparing it to the bombing of Dresden, the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , or the innumerable slaughters that have taken place since 1945 in every part of the world. All of that is the consequence of the perceived need to compete for victim status in a world so secularized that even the most incomprehensible of human experiences is categorized as an occasion to gain status and prestige.

There can be no doubt that the influence of literature on Americans must come almost entirely from English speaking writers, whether American or British. Indeed, there are writers from other English speaking countries who may on occasion be read in American schools and colleges. However, the standard fare of all literature readers in America are first, British writers, and then Americans, in sequence.

Let us therefore take a look at a few major British writers and estimate their influence on the secularization of the English speaking world. It is of course understood that a thoroughgoing review of all such British or American writers is neither necessary nor useful here because our only purpose is to exhibit some examples of some of the curriculum a student in higher education would meet in the twenty-first century.

The biting sarcasm of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), together with jealousy concerning his immense talent, caused him much enmity in his time and endless criticism to this day. A Catholic all his life, he nevertheless contributed greatly to deism and a secular attitude by his writings. The best example of Pope's attitude concerning religion is no doubt his “Essay on Man,” which lends itself easily to a pantheistic or deistic interpretation.

The purpose of this long poem is to illustrate that man is a part of creation and part of the general order of the universe as planned by God. Pope, despite his Catholicism, was a Deist . He denied that man is the final triumph of creation. In met, he called such an attitude a form of conceit and held that reason alone supersedes all other faculties.

"Presumptuous man, the reason wouldst thou find, why formed so weak, so little and so blind?” (Essay On Man, verse 35.) In verse 49, Pope wrote: all the question (wrangle e’er so long) Is only this-if God has placed him wrong. Respecting man whatever wrong we call may, must be right, relative to all.” Reason is celebrated by Pope as well when he wrote: “Without this just gradation could they be subjected, these to those, or all to thee? The pow'rs of all subdued by thee alone, Is not they reason all these pow'rs in one?” (Verse 230) and also, “Two principles in human nature reign, self love to urge, and reason to restrain.” (Verse 53). In verse 195 Pope then writes: “Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride) the virtue nearest to our vice allied : Reason the bias turns to good from ill, and Nero reigns a Titus if he will.” Pope believed that man must submit himself to Providence and is a fool for questioning God's dispensation. The implication is obvious. Religious observance can do man little good, for it will not influence the providence that rules us nor change the fate that awaits us.

Perhaps the most pronounced enemy of Christianity among 18th century writers in the English language was Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), truly a master of expression. Author of A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared in seven volumes between 1776 and 1788, Gibbon held Christianity responsible for the Decline, and in describing how Christianity had affected the Roman Empire, Gibbon revealed his own antagonism to Christianity as well as Judaism.

Gibbon viewed Christianity as a disrupting force. He cites the "zeal and enthusiasm" of the Christians, which he claimed they had gotten from the Jews, and stigmatizes this behavior. Gibbon believed that zeal and enthusiasm caused intolerance on the part of both religions, as both taught that only one religion can be true. A lover of freedom, Gibbon condemned bigotry and gave numerous examples of extreme conduct derived from religious disputes.

He discusses the religious hatred between Christian sects and the terrible fighting and bloodshed which came about in the fifth century over the issue as to whether the words "who was crucified for us" should be added to another prayer frequently repeated in synagogues and churches. Gibbon discusses various church councils which declared a belief to be true or heretical because of one vote. He shows that the word "heretic" has been considered more odious to a Christian than the word "barbarian" and that a “saint" or an "orthodox ” person is one who sides with the winning faction in a religious dispute.

Discussing the Middle Ages, Gibbon showed that Christians, in their zeal to reach the Holy Land during the Crusades, slaughtered thousands of Jews while calling themselves "servants of the Prince of Peace."

Gibbon significantly devoted three chapters of his history to the life and reign of the Emperor Julian, although he ruled Rome for only two years. However, “Julian the Apostate" restored pagan temples and permitted all religions to freely practice. Says Gibbon: "He extended to all the inhabitants of the Roman world the benefits of a free and equal toleration; and the only hardship which he inflicted on the Christians, was to deprive them of the  power of tormenting their fellow subjects...”

The clergy of all religions were the target of Gibbon's extensive criticism as "always the enemy of reason." He goes on to heap scorn on Christian martyrs and claims that Christians committed far greater atrocities upon one another than were ever inflicted on them by the Roman "pagans." Likewise, Gibbon viewed "miracles" as fraud and described theology as superstition and "intellectual bondage." He questioned the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and viewed Jesus as human as Socrates. He also derided prayer but accepted the view that there is a God or Supreme Deity. Thus, he rejected atheism as yet another form of bigotry and held with Xenophanes that if lions were to formulate their idea of God, they would think of him as a lion.

In sum, then, Gibbon was a deist, as were so many other writers, scientists and philosophers of his day and later years so that he contributed as much as anyone to the secularization of the modern world.

Somewhat younger than Gibbon was the poet William Blake (1757-1827.) Inspired by both the American and French revolutions, Blake saw theologians as enemies of virtue. He believed that he could speak to angels and prophets and heavenly messengers. However, he rejected religious orthodoxy but sought to teach the need for love and freedom as the only important values. His religion of imagination had two commandments : be free and love all things. Even more astonishing was Blake's willingness to accept non-Christian believers as worthy of human interest. Indeed he taught ecumenism long before it became popular and at a time when a positive regard for another’s religion was viewed as blasphemy by the established churches. Here is an example of Blake's "The Divine Image ," written in 1789.

Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love all pray in their distress;

And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy , Pity, Peace and Love Is God our Father dear;

And Mercy , Pity, Peace and Love Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face;

And Love, the human form divine and Peace the human dress;

Then every man of every clime, that prays in his distress,

Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form, in heathen, Turk or Jew;

Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too.

Clearly Blake had no room for sectarian dogmas but accused established religion of fearing liberty, supporting restrictive laws, and imposing punishments. In Holy Thursday he denounces the hypocrisy of allowing the poor to live in misery and in The Garden of Love rejects the pretensions of organized religion who turn a garden into a cemetery “where priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires,” and in Jerusalem devotes this poem "To the Deists.”

Another outstanding example of deism and in nineteenth century English literature was the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Although he began his career as an atheist who was expelled from Oxford University because he distributed atheistic propaganda, he became a follower of Spinoza in his later years. Thus he believed in a Soul of the Universe and thought that the liberation of mankind from all evil could be achieved through love and faith. Since Shelley died at age 30, he was young all his life. Yet his views changed somewhat after leaving Oxford. Shelley hated senseless conventions and therefore deserted his wife and children so as to live with Mary Godwin .

His poetry was extensive and conveyed the belief that the liberation of mankind would be achieved by love and faith, not by ritual and obedience. At the close of his great poem Prometheus Unbound, Shelley wrote:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; to forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy power which seems omnipotent; to love and bear; to hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates; neither to change, nor falter nor repent; this like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; this is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

This poem “celebrated the freeing of the human mind from the trammels of outmoded religious belief."

Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland's greatest poet, kept up the attack on religious orthodoxy and hypocrisy. In “Holy Willie's Prayer", and in "Address to the Unco Guide or the Rigidly Righteous" he lambasted religious hypocrisy in part as follows: "O ye wha are sae guid yoursel, sae pious and sae holy, You've nought to do but mark and tell your neighbour's fauts and folly."

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) lived through most of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century and used those years to make a severe attack upon organized religion. Son of a Church Of England clergyman, Butler wrote "The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ ... Critically Examined, " wherein he concluded that Jesus had not died on the cross. Best known for his autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, Butler also found time to write a number of essays including God and the Devil.

In this irreverent essay Butler writes: "God's merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion. The faults are, indeed, on such a scale that, when looked at without relation to the merits with which they are interwoven, they become so appalling that people shrink from ascribing them to the Deity and have invented the Devil, without seeing that there would be more excuse for God’s killing the Devil, and so getting rid of evil, than there can be for his failing to be everything that he would like to be.”

Subsequently, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) attacked priests and piety in this poem 'Man is blind because of sin, Revelation makes him Sure; Without that, who looks within, looks in vain, for all's Obscure. Nay, look closer into man! Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan clear prescribed without your creed? 'No I nothing can perceive! Without that all’s dark for men. That or nothing I believe' — For God's sake, believe it then!

In a similar manner wrote Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), a British aristocrat, poet, and essayist in "God by god flits past in thunder, till his glories turn to shades; God to god bears wondering witness how his gospel flames and fades ... Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed.”

And in "The Altar of Righteousness," Swinburne skewers the clergy in these words: "Priests gazed upon God in the eyes of a babe new-born, and therein beheld not heaven, and the wise glad secret of love, but sin, accursed of heaven, and with the baptism of hatred and hell. " There follows a long indictment of hypocrisy and lies and the sins of clergy contrasted with the pure religion Swinburne saw in love and truth.

Swinburne became the object of derision and denunciation upon the publication of this and other poems in Poems and Ballads in 1866. And yet, this storm of protest was mild compared to the anger with which the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was treated thirty years later. In 1891 Hardy had published his great novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles and in 1896 followed Jude the Obscure. Both books were denounced as pornographic and obscene. Yet, the thrust of these books was the frustration derived from injustice. Hardy became disgusted with the publication of novels which brought him not only fame but also vehement criticism and therefore he turned to poetry after publishing fourteen novels. A deist, but not an atheist, a mechanist but not a rationalist, Hardy refused to be included in the Dictionary of Rationalists.

An example of his attitude towards the supernatural is found in this poem, called "The Impercipient": “That with this bright believing band I have no right to be, That faiths by which my comrades stand seem fantasies to me, and mirage-mists their Shining Land, is a strange destiny.”

Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Alfred E. Housman (1859-1936) wrote Laws, secular writing and antagonism to religion had become so widespread and popular that these lines hardly raised any eyebrows or led to any protests , In fact, some lines from this poem have become so familiar to English speaking readers that they are quoted often, even by those who do not know their origin and have never heard Housman's name.

                                        Laws

The laws of God, the laws of man , he may keep that will and can;

Not I: let God and man decree laws for themselves and not for me:

and if my ways are not as theirs, let them mind their own affairs

Their deeds I judge and much condemn, yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still wrest their neighbors to their will,

and make me dance as they desire with jail and gallows and hellfire.

And how am I to face the odds of man's bedevilment and God's?

I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.

They will be master, right or wrong; Though both are foolish, both are strong

And since, my soul, we cannot fly to Saturn or to Mercury,

Keep we must, if keep we can, these foreign laws of God and man.

Housman lived well into the 20th century and expressed a view that was by then one hundred and fifty years old. Developed in England and popular by the end of the 1920's, English deism and agnosticism came across the ocean in the eighteenth century but was not then popular, but the province of some intellectuals only. In the nineteenth century, philosophy, science and literature continued the crusade for deism not only in Europe but also in the U.S.A., where American writers perpetuated the attack on religiosity and superstition and helped mightily in creating the secular culture of the end of this century.

This secular culture has of course affected all Americans, not only Jewish Americans. An excellent example of this drive towards secularization of religion itself was the result of the telephone survey of American Catholics on April 21-23, 1994, which revealed that Marcel Dumestre, director of the Institute for Ministry at Loyola University of New Orleans, had good cause to say: "We are a church at risk."

We turn now to some major American writers who promoted deism and secularism in the United States. First among these is Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), whose description of Puritan life in both The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is an assault upon that fundamentalist lifestyle, even though no explicit criticism is made. Yet, the description of the practices of the Puritans and their need to persecute anyone with a different view can only be taken as a confrontation with the remnant of Puritanism still visible in America in Hawthorne’s day and as late as 2020. Hawthorne's principal message in these and other books was to convey to the reader an understanding of the sin of pride and arrogance.

Far more direct in his criticism of religion and his proclamation of agnosticism was the great American poet Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849).

Shortly before his death, in 1848, Poe published a long essay which he called Eureka. This essay seeks to describe the material and spiritual universe and discusses Poe's doctrine of immortality. According to Poe, "God is but the perfection of matter."  Poe evidently knew that many of his "scientific" theories were not true and could not be proved. Therefore he wrote at the end the preface to Eureka that "It is as a poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead." By writing Eureka, Poe "proves himself an entirely non-Christian deist.

This work contains many foolish notions which would not be viewed with approval by any 2020’s scientists. Despite the numerous scientific errors made by Poe, he nevertheless succeeded in conveying his undoubted agnostic views to the reader. Again we find that Poe was also a deist, that he rejected the Christian trinity, but that he was nevertheless not an atheist. "In the beginning,” writes Poe, "we can admit, indeed we can comprehend but one First Cause, the truly ultimate principle, the volition of God."

The American novelist William Dean Howells (1837-1920) describes several nineteenth century American writers in his Literary Friends and Acquaintances. First published in 1900, this volume gives the reader a good deal of insight into the religious beliefs of some of the writers Howells describes and is therefore a particularly good source for viewing the attitudes of these writers because Howells was himself an important literary man.

The poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was well known to Howells, as they were neighbors in Cambridge, Mass. Said Howells of Lowell: "As we were passing Longfellow's house, in mid-street, he came as near the of his religious faith as he ever did in my presence." Howells shows that Lowell had liberated himself from all creeds and that religious formulation bored him. Lowell had written some poems which seemed to assert a belief in providence and even a God who "declares vengeance His and will repay men for their evil deeds and will right the weak against the strong.” Despite these assertions, Lowell was evidently uncertain as to any "moral government of the universe and rejected the notion of life after death. 

Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who used the "pen name" Mark Twain, was an agnostic. Howells describes Clemens at length in his essay “My Mark Twain" and shows that Clemens declared that "Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions." Clemens thought that the world was as well off under the pagan civilizations of the past as under Christians and that Clemens was happy to have "broken the shackles of belief worn for so long.” Clemens admired Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), who was undoubtedly the most prolific and influential promoter of "free thought" in the nineteenth century, and with him denied the existence of "hell," leading to a controversy which was carried in the newspapers of that day. Although Clemens attended a church for some years, he later ceased to be a formal Christian and denied immortality of the soul. "All his expressions to me,” says Howells, "were of a courageous renunciation of any hope of living again or elsewhere seeing those he had lost.”

Clemens did assert that the universe could not have come about by chance but he never subscribed to the existence of a divinity, and left that issue to speculation. 

In the course of the early nineteenth century, there developed in America a literary movement called "'transcendentalism.” This view, as we have already seen, was taught by Immanuel Kant, in that he held that ultimate reality can never be known to humans. In the view of its practitioners and followers, there is an essential unity of nature and God, reminiscent of the teachings of Spinoza. Those American authors, such as Emerson and Thoreau, Alcott, Melville, and Whitman, who wrote from the transcendental point of view, encouraged individualism and self –expression. Some of these writers participated in the publication of a journal called "Dial" and in the operation of "Brook Farm," where they sought to combine work with thinking while practicing an egalitarian economics. 

Although this experiment failed for financial reasons, it is important to this discussion that transcendental writers promoted "the secular and equalitarian ideology of the (American) revolution." The outcome Of this kind of writing was the encouragement of such reforms as free public education, local autonomy, and universal suffrage, "Transcendentalism" teaches that morals cannot be derived only from personal habit or private whim but must be derived from a higher ethic. Nevertheless, "transcendentalist" writers reduced God to a universal human principle and held that each individual needs to judge for himself what his actual obligations may be in any given situation. All this was sustained by the belief that secular reason as developed by natural science must be the final arbiter of human action.

The eventual outcome of all this, according to the writers in this tradition , was the hoped for control of nature itself for the satisfaction of human needs. 

In sum, we have here the most developed argument for a secular society in America, an argument which persists to the end of the twentieth century and has permeated American thinking for 150 years.

Thus, "Self- reliance" became the motto of individualism in America, as Emerson wrote in his essay by that name: "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. " 

After Emerson and his followers, innumerable American writers continued to produce literature in that tradition , so that the consequences of the "transcendentalist" movement for American secularization cannot be overestimated.

It is of course a fact that throughout the nineteenth century and at least the first quarter of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Americans had either not read nor heard of these writers or viewed them as "atheists" and in a negative light. This was the case because Americans were mainly small town Calvinist Protestant natives or they belonged to that huge wave of immigrants who came here after the Civil War and who were principally traditional Catholics or orthodox Jews.

There was, however, one man who was very well known to almost anyone who could read anything. That man was Robert Green Ingersoll , a lawyer and public orator who was born in 1833 and died in 1899. Undoubtedly the most vehement proponent of agnosticism in America, he not only called attention to his cause during his lifetime which covered the nineteenth century but he also left behind twelve volumes of lectures, discussions, and interviews, as well as political and legal documents. All this was published in 1900 and in 1911 a biography of Ingersoll was added to these volumes which are influential to this day, the third decade of the twenty-first century, not because they contain very many original or new ideas, but because they popularized the secularist point of view as no other literature has done. The interest in the work of Ingersoll has continued far beyond his death, as evidenced by a 1969 bibliography concerning not only the works of Ingersoll himself but articles, books and pamphlets about Ingersoll. At that time this list numbered 631 items.

Ingersoll, the son of a Protestant minister, became famous because of the speech he gave at the Republican convention in 1876 nominating James G. Blaine for the presidency. Thereafter he lectured throughout the country on such topics as "The Truth About the Holy Bible, "Bible Idolatry," "Blasphemy," "The Clergy and Common Sense," "The Christian Religion, " and others.

The principle message Ingersoll sought to convey in speeches and in writing were a plea for absolute freedom of thought, that religion must relinquish its dominant position to science, and that he merely expressed the ideas of thousands of people not as articulate as he was. In that claim he was undoubtedly right; for as we shall see, the developments of the 20th century provide sufficient proof for this thesis.

Ingersoll became the principle American proponent of Darwin's ideas, so that Walt Whitman commented that the Englishman Huxley and the American Ingersoll could together "unhorse the whole Christian giant. " 

It was Darwin , the theory of evolution, and a host of other scientific discoveries which led Ingersoll to write: "....the Garden of Eden is an ignorant myth." In this view he was supported by at least three quarters of the Harvard faculty which subscribed to "The Apostate’s Creed" in these terms:

"I believe in a chaotic Nebula, self-existent , evolver of heaven and earth, and in the differentiation of the original homogeneous mass, its first-begotten product, which self formed into separate worlds, divided into land and water, self organized into plants and animals, reproduced into like species, rationalized and perfected in man. He descended from the monkey, ascended to the philosopher, and sitteth down in the rights and customs of civilization under the laws of developing sociology. From thence he shall come again by the disintegration of the heterogenized cosmos back to the original homogeneousness of chaos.

I believe in the wholly impersonal absolute , the wholly uncatholic church, the disunion of saints, the survival of the fittest, the persistency of force, the dispersion of the body and in death everlasting.” 

Subscribers to this creed pointed to the evidence Darwin had accumulated concerning the utter neutrality of nature. Nature, it had been shown, has no feelings but operates according to inexorable laws. Said Ingersoll:" They point to the sunshine, to the flowers, to the April rain, and to all there is of beauty and of use in the world Did it occur to them that a cancer is as beautiful in its development as is the reddest nose?"

Ingersoll never tired of listing the innumerable scientific achievements the nineteenth century had produced and insisted that science and religion could not exist in the same society nor in the same mind. " An honest God is the noblest work of Man," said Ingersoll, and horrified believers in an Absolute God by this paraphrase from Pope. Ingersoll was as convinced of the truth of his message that science is the salvation of man as were the religionists of his day and of our day. In the twenty-first century, however, the evidence is that science is not only a great contributor to the happiness of man but also a great destroyer. This is an aspect of science which Ingersoll did not understand, in part because he did not live long enough to see the horrors of the First World War , let alone the atomic bomb and other nightmares invented in scientific laboratories.

There were of course innumerable other writers in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century in America who followed Ingersoll. A bibliography of such writers would include hundreds of books, pamphlets, newspaper accounts, journal articles, and speeches. It would include Paul Blanchard and Harry Elmer Barnes , Madelyn Murray O'Hair, and Clarence Darrow , William Floyd and Corliss Lamont. As the agnostic movement gained momentum various organizations published journals such as The Humanist to promote the cause of secularization.

Among novelists, Herman Melville (1819-1891) can hardly be ignored as a contributor to the secularization of American literature. He was a slightly older contemporary of Robert Ingersoll and his life also spanned most of the 19th century. Melville is without doubt one of the most important and best known American authors. His most famous novel is Moby Dick , although his other works, such as Billy Budd, Omoo and Typee are masterpieces of writing as well. In all of these books, Melville exhibits the influence of his early education in Christianity. However, in all of his books he also shows his disappointment with the teachings of established churches, a disappointment which becomes severe criticism of religion in Pierre: or the Ambiguities, which he wrote in 1851-1852. In his earlier novels, Typee and Omoo, Melville had already unleashed some criticism of Christian missionaries. In Moby Dick, there is a denial of the goodness of God . 

In Pierre, Melville first portrays his "contempt for the spinelessness of the clergy. Melville even reviews the commandment requiring that men honor their fathers and their mothers and “... should I honor my father if I knew him to be a seducer?” Melville also argued that no man would try to live by heavenly standards and that it can be dangerous for man to be guided only by spiritual standards. 

Melville had been a Christian in his youth and continued to be one from his point of view. However, he reduced the divine commandments found in the Bible to what he called "virtuous expediency" and claimed that God required no more of man than that.

Turning to the history of Christianity, Melville wrote: "But if any man that such a doctrine as I lay down is false, is impious; 1 would charitably refer that man to the history of Christendom for the last 1800 years; and ask him, whether, in spite of all the maxims of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence, wrong, and iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world’s story? Therefore, it follows, that so far as practical results are concerned - regarded in a purely earthly light - the only great original moral doctrine of Christianity … gratuitous return of good for evil...has been found a false one; because after 1800 years’ inculcation from tens of thousands of pulpits, it has proved entirely impracticable. 

Thus, Melville contributed mightily to the ever rising crescendo of deism in America. The evidence for that is not only his literary legacy. It is also that the public was very much displeased with Melville and that his reviewers called him "immoral, irreligious, and even insane." 

It was however the American author Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), who won the Nobel Prize in 1930, who succeeded in finally emancipating American literature. His successors in American literature were such great and famous writers as Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser , Pearl S. Buck, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner , Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow , and Isaac Bashevis Singer. This means that since literature reflects social conditions and the beliefs of millions who do not write, it can well be said that Americans in general achieved a degree of emancipation from puritan strictures in the twentieth century which are reflected in the works of those just listed and a host of others such as Thornton Wilder , Sherwood Anderson , Michael Gold , John Dos Passos , William Faulkner , and Thomas Wolfe . Among those of the age who had an equal influence and equally reflect this emancipation are Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Clifford Odets, John Howard Lawson, Maxwell Anderson, and Elmer Rice should be added as representatives of the dramatic art.

Since novelists and short story writers have always dominated American literature, it is important to pay attention to such authors as Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser , who wrote after the First World War and participated in the end of isolationism. Particularly Lewis and Dreiser were the first to criticize American traditions and taboos by exposing the lifestyles and feelings of exactly those Americans who had heretofore always been seen as the supporters of The American Way of Life. Sinclair Lewis dealt with the American middle class whose entire life was concentrated upon business and the chase after the almighty dollar.

This theme becomes visible in The Man from Main Street but finds final expression in Babbitt , a word which is not only the title of Sinclair Lewis ' book but which has become a concept in the American language. Already in Main Street, Lewis concludes that the dollar sign has replaced the crucifix everywhere. In Babbitt, Lewis describes a small town he calls Zenith. Here the dollar is the measurement of all things. The dollar rules over human relations and even the inner life of everyone. Material possessions are signs of power, influence, and prestige for Babbitt and his fellow citizens. Even religion is a business in Zenith, as Lewis displays the minister who describes his religion as "Sort of Christianity Incorporated, you might say.”

The type of car a driver can afford becomes the surest sign of wealth, as in the twentieth century, according to Lewis, the social position of an American family is determined by its car. "In the city of Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a family's motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family -indeed more precisely." 

Lewis also shows how the very middle class Babbitts pride themselves as the protectors of American rights and freedoms, and yet are utterly incapable of dealing with any outsider or non-conformist. “I know of no American novel," wrote H.L. Mencken, “that more accurately presents the real America. It is a social document of a higher order."

While Babbitt earned Lewis a few compliments from a few Americans, it led to a stream of anger upon him from almost every source. He was called a traitor, his work was called a lie, and he was defamed in every conceivable fashion. Yet, even these attacks were mild if compared to the outburst which greeted Lewis upon publication of his novel Elmer Gantry in 1927. These threats even included a threat to lynch him. This novel displays a revival preacher who becomes ever more successful as he becomes more corrupt, hypocritical, and cynical. Religion is displayed as outstandingly bad and intolerable. The “faithful" are shown as fools, as Lewis held them in unconstrained contempt. Thus, the book begins with the sentence: "Elmer Gantry was drunk," and continues with a portrait of religion as popular in the America of the 1920's as in the America of the 2020’s. This is not to say that Lewis does not also portray other types of clergy besides the hypocrite.  However, the conclusion is inescapable. Lewis meant to deliver a blow to organized religion and he succeeded as no other American novelist had done before him unless it was Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), his older contemporary, whose book Sister Carrie was censored and withdrawn from circulation. 

Theodore Dreiser was a professed agnostic. The word profess is used deliberately here because it is directly from the Latin words for declaring something in public. Theodore Dreiser was the twelfth of thirteen children of a Catholic family. In the course of his career he wrote several autobiographical books, including A Traveler at Forty, A Hoosier Holiday, Book About Myself and Dawn. In 1943, he also wrote an essay entitled "The Salve Called Religion" which he defined several times and which he viewed with great skepticism, despite his Catholic heritage.

"It (religion) is a dread of dissolution and a desire for continuance, with the dream and even hope of some method of achieving it. It has allied with itself structures, forms, codes, vestments, and unsubstantiated assertions, all based on the above reactions. And all slowly either vanishing or being transformed into their proper qualities of values or lack of values by the progress of exact and unbiased science.”

Elsewhere, Dreiser writes, “In all times and in all places religion must be entirely freed of ulterior and extraneous aims. It should not pile up wealth. Its ministers and priests should by no means live luxuriously. There is no need of dogma or special revelation.”

Dreiser was of course severely criticized by those whose interests were religious orthodoxy. In addition, however, Dreiser's book The Genius was cited by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and became a hotly debated issue after its publication in 1913. The "Genius" is autobiographical as are others of Dreiser’s works. This book deals with a bad marriage and includes some sexual material which evidently offended the censors of the early century.

It was, however, Dreiser's earlier novel, Jennie Gerhardt , which contains his most outspoken belief in fate as the principal determinant of man's life. Here one of his characters says, "It isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation. I don 't know whether you see what I'm driving at, but all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control.”

Fatalism is, of course, the enemy of religion. For who needs rituals, prayers, and a clergy if fate has already decided the lives of men. This is an age-old dispute and dilemma which has no resolution. However, a novelist who supports fate supports secularism and agnosticism and even atheism, despite the evidence that Americans have, in the 21st century, embraced agnostic deism coupled with a big dosage of individualism and entrepreneurial initiative. Americans are seldom fatalists. But fatalists must be irreligious by the very definition of that attitude.

Although An American Tragedy is a murder story, Dreiser uses that novel as a means of showing how the "American Dream" creates crime. The crux of the story is that a young man is driven to murder precisely because society demands that one succeeds financially and socially. Hence this very demand creates the pressure to do anything at all to gain advancement, be that sharp dealings in business, marriage to someone in a higher social class or anything else. In effect, Dreiser uses a different vehicle than Lewis to exhibit the hypocrisy of blocked opportunities "stifling moralism." Thus, Dreiser teaches that American society has no standards and no values Other than wealth, ease, and social position If that is true, and many indicators support this view, that materialism is the sole measure of all things American, and crime, poverty , illness, alcoholism , drug addiction, delinquency, suicide, and cruelty the price Americans have agreed to pay for the goods the god Mammon can provide.

Sister Carrie , another of Dreiser's novels, earned criticism of the moralists when it was published in 1902, as did almost everything Dreiser ever wrote.

There is at the University of Pennsylvania library an unpublished manuscript by Dreiser called Confession of Faith. Here Dreiser lists nine beliefs which guided his life. It is obvious from these nine statements that Dreiser had repudiated religion and become a thoroughgoing secularist, naturalist, realist, and agnostic. Nature had become his god as he spoke of a "Creative Force" and his respect for it.

In 1945, Dreiser joined the Communist Party in a letter reprinted in the Daily Worker of July 30 that year. Thus he confirmed in his life and in his writings that for him, at least, the supernatural was no more and that man had become the measure of all things. 

It is neither possible nor necessary to review the preponderance of philosophy, scientific thought or western Literature here in order to show how all of these developments have influenced American and hence Jewish-American secularization in this century. It suffices to show by the foregoing examples that in the 21^st century the secular point of view is most popular in the United States.

Shalom u'vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including 30 books and 45 journal articles.

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