7 Representing Polish Jewry

The Golden Tradition

In 1967, Lucy S. Dawidowicz published The Golden Tradition: The Jewish Experience in Eastern Europe. An anthology of autobiographical primary sources translated from Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, and Hebrew, it represented the diversity of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The work earned her instant acclaim among the New York intellectuals and the New York literary public writ large.1 Widely reviewed, the book launched her public career even as it served as dress rehearsal for her major work on the Holocaust, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (1975), and the books that followed, A Holocaust Reader (1976) and The Holocaust and the Historians (1981), which together helped cast Dawidowicz as the “authentic” historical voice of murdered European Jewry and a sought-after lecturer in both academic and public venues.

Dawidowicz wrote The Golden Tradition as a scholarly book for a general audience and was thus instrumental in placing the life and destruction of the European Jews into the American cultural landscape. It emerged from Dawidowicz’s personal experiences in Europe, her study of Jewish history and antisemitism, and her engagement with contemporary American and American Jewish politics in the postwar period. The book’s appearance in 1967 was perfectly tied to cultural and political shifts in American and Jewish culture, including the emergence of the New Left, the growth of the Black Power movement, and the victory of the Israeli army in the Six-Day War, which helped give rise to ethnic politics. In this fraught climate, the East European past and the Holocaust came increasingly to be seen as critical to Jewish identity. The Golden Tradition was pivotal to its construction. The book illuminated the historical agency of East European Jewry by emphasizing its cultural, political, religious, and ideological diversity, all of which informed the American Jewish public’s changing view of its past.

When Dawidowicz set out to collect, translate, and edit the materials included in The Golden Tradition, she drew upon the relatively young tradition of East European Jewish historiography inspired by the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow. Dawidowicz’s debt to Dubnow stemmed from the monumental role his writing and life played in the emergence of modern historical writing in Eastern Europe and also from his long involvement with the YIVO—which lasted from its inception in 1925 until his brutal murder in the ghetto of Riga in 1941. Though prominent Polish-Jewish historians, including Philip Friedman, Jacob Shatzky, Raphael Mahler, Isaiah Trunk, and Elias Tcherikower, among others—some of whom had experienced the Nazi assault—made their way to the United States and devoted their energies to continuing the Dubnowian legacy in their new home, it was Dawidowicz, the native-born and native English speaker and writer who became the key American link in this tradition.2 Her history writing sought to document the life and murder of European Jews, to commemorate the dead, and to imbue her American Jewish readers with a usable past through which they might create a Jewish future in a diaspora far removed from its East European Jewish heartland.

Writing Jewish Communal Life in the Diaspora

Simon Dubnow saw Jewish communal autonomy as the key to his diaspora nationalism, to his historiography, and centrally to the survival of the Jewish people.3 Dubnow argued that the communal institutions of an exilic people embodied its political life. Writing in the multiethnic, multiconfessional, and multireligious context of Imperial Russia, he never lived to apply his optimistic theories of diaspora nationalism to the political conditions of a liberal, tolerant, integrationist democracy such as the United States.4 Dawidowicz picked up that challenge. Her earliest work at the AJC and in Commentary magazine, which predated The Golden Tradition, already reflected her Dubnowian perspective. Dawidowicz set out to plumb the questions of Jewish communal life and politics in an environment of “autonomy and freedom” in postwar America, focusing on the ways in which Jews in the diaspora actively shaped their communal, cultural, and political lives.

In “Middle-Class Judaism: A Case Study,” published in 1960, Dawidowicz surveyed the patterns of Jewish communal life and religious institutions in the second-generation Jewish neighborhood of Jackson Heights, New York, which she called “Garfield Hills.”5 Wary of the Americanization of Judaism, she critically assessed the religious lives of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews in Garfield Hills and concluded that these three groups within American Judaism, despite their assertions of difference, represented variations on the same suburban American middle-class theme. None of them embodied the naturalness and authenticity of East European Jewish life. “As for religion itself, Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reform as practiced in this country have come to resemble each other more closely than any of them do the Halachic Judaism from which they all ultimately derive,” she wrote, adding that their middle-class values created a “pattern of nearly uniform observance.”6 While this seemingly diluted Judaism held little appeal for Dawidowicz, she nonetheless believed that these communal institutions maintained Jewish life in the diaspora. Even without a formal kahal (the Jewish municipality or institution of self-government in Europe) to compel Jewish group identity, postwar American Jews felt a sense of community, and their electoral choices both reflected and maintained those communal bonds. Dawidowicz’s research affirmed her belief that Jewish communal life was a source of Jewish national, political, and spiritual vitality.

The AJC, however, had to walk a tightrope between affirming Jewish communal life and its values and preventing the perception that those values created a “group” political stance, which could lead to anti-Jewish discrimination. In fact, at a Domestic Affairs Committee meeting in September 1960, concern was voiced about the upcoming presidential election and the prospect of anti-Catholicism harming Kennedy’s candidacy7 and about an article in the New York Times that alluded to the existence of a Jewish voting “bloc.”8 The meeting’s minutes called the article “deplorable,” criticizing “the kind of loose talk about an alleged Jewish vote that has been a part of every election campaign since 1940.” They also noted that only in the case of a “demonstrably anti-Semitic” candidate would the AJC counsel “legitimate Jewish partisanship,” stressing that the Committee’s public mission disavowed any specific Jewish group “interest” except combating anti-Jewish discrimination.

The AJC’s discomfort with publicly recognizing the existence of group voting patterns did not prevent the DAC from supporting research on the voting behavior of Jews and other ethnic groups in the 1960 presidential campaign. In 1963, Dawidowicz and Leon J. Goldstein, a professor of philosophy at SUNY–Binghamton, published Politics in a Pluralist Democracy: Studies in Voting in the 1960 Election, a result of a study done on behalf of the DAC because of the anti-Catholicism that had emerged during the presidential race.9 The study was designed “to disabuse the claim that a ‘bloc vote’ is something sinister, manipulatable, or ‘deliverable’ ” when “practiced by Jews or Catholics or Negroes.” Even as the study discredited this fear, it illustrated that a typical voter was influenced by the “historical and cultural features of the group to which he belongs.” Dawidowicz and Goldstein studied a number of cities and rural areas with different religious and ethnic groups, using interviews, poll data, and “restrained speculation.”10 They concluded that religion and ethnicity were significant factors in voting but that their respective influence varied according to socioeconomic and political cross-pressures. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, coauthor of the influential Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963),11 favorably reviewed Dawidowicz and Goldstein’s book in Commentary, noting the challenge of ethnicity’s persistence to American civil society. Calling group rights a “perplexing problem,” he observed that “Groups do not have rights in America; only individuals do. But groups have interests, have problems, have identities, and ought to have responsibilities.”12

Despite the AJC’s discomfort with singling out its community’s political predilections, Dawidowicz and Goldstein devoted a substantial section of their book to Jewish voting behavior, finding that the “Democratic vote among middle-class and upper-middle-class Jews still is much higher than among others of equal status.”13 In chapter 11, “The Jewish Liberal Tradition,” Dawidowicz and Goldstein concluded that the American Jewish attachment to liberalism derived from the European past. American Jews were heirs to the knowledge that the conservative clergy, the nobility, and other traditional elites had opposed the political emancipation of the Jews in the nineteenth century, which encouraged Jews to support liberal political parties. Liberalism, embodied by Roosevelt’s inclusive social welfare politics, knitted Jewish loyalty to the Democratic Party by advocating a society in which individual merit, not family, race, or religious confession, mattered. Dawidowicz and Goldstein speculated that further integration of the Jews into American society, and increased distance from a Europe that linked the Right with anti-Jewish attitudes, would lead to a more decisive role of social class in diversifying Jewish voting patterns.14 Politics in a Pluralist Democracy gave Dawidowicz the opportunity to publish her analysis of the relationship among religion, communal life, and politics in the United States. In The Golden Tradition she turned back to the history of those relationships in the European Jewish heartland: Eastern Europe.

Khurbn Forshung for the American Public

Dawidowicz credited the Polish Jewish rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel with suggesting she write a book on East European Jewry. On the occasion of The Golden Tradition’s reprinting in 1988, she recalled that already in the 1950s Heschel had said to her, “You should write a book about the Jews of Eastern Europe. You’re one of the last people to have been there, to have lived in that world.”15 Heschel, the scion of a prominent Polish Hasidic family, was an intellectual polymath known for his openness to all aspects of Jewish traditional life as well as to secular studies. In the interwar years, he pursued a doctorate at the University of Berlin while simultaneously writing Yiddish poetry and studying for liberal rabbinic ordination at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. In October 1938, he was deported back to Poland, where he lectured on Jewish themes at the Warsaw Institute for Jewish Studies. Six weeks before the Nazi invasion, Heschel made his way to London and then to New York, where he began an illustrious career as a Torah scholar, public intellectual, and civil rights activist. At the New York YIVO conference in 1945, Heschel delivered “Di mizrekh-eyropeishe tkufe in der yidisher geshikhte” (The East European Era in Jewish History), a lecture-cum-eulogy for the murdered Jews of Eastern Europe. It was published in 1950 in English with a new title, The Earth Is the Lord’s.16 (Max Weinreich also spoke at the conference, and his address, “The YIVO Faces the Post-War World,” made a sharp turn away from his prewar emphasis on the rupture between West and East European Jewries, stressing instead the seamlessness of Ashkenazic civilization.17)

Though Dawidowicz was not a literal survivor of the Holocaust, she was haunted by her eleventh-hour flight from Vilna, by the annihilation of her Lithuanian Jewish friends, and by the photograph of her husband’s murdered daughter, Tobtsche, that hung—with her posthumously awarded Silver Medal of Merit from the Polish government—above Szymon’s desk, shrine-like, in their bedroom.18

Dawidowicz considered herself “a survivor only in imagination, in guilt,” telling the novelist Henia Karmel-Wolfe, author of The Baders of Jacob Street, that “People like me live in a shadowy in-between world of pseudo-survivordom,” adding that “Driven by memories not rightfully mine, I now inhabited a shadow world of murdered European Jews.”19 In 1966, she wrote about her fantasies of rescue to the poet Irving Feldman after reading his collection “The Pripet Marshes.” The title poem began: “Often I think of my Jewish friends and seize them as they are and transport them in my mind to the shtetlach and ghettos.”20 Apologizing for “thrusting my confession upon you,” Dawidowicz revealed that the poems “uncovered my secret game.”

I was not there (nor were you), yet what happened there has been central in my life. I am forever putting myself and the people I know in the Warsaw ghetto, testing myself, testing them, pushing myself and them beyond the edge of experience. . . . Sometimes I think we here are not real at all, but we are all merely rehearsing for that time. So you see it was as if you had written my name on “The Pripet Marshes.”21

The Golden Tradition’s original title had been “A Vanished World: Jewish Life and Culture in Eastern Europe, 1860–1939.” The term “vanished” reinforced both the distance between American Jews and the East European Jewish past and the method of salvage anthropology that shaped the works by Chagall, Herzog and Zborowski, Heschel, and Samuel.22 But when Dawidowicz submitted the first draft to her editor, Arthur A. Cohen, it had a new name, The Golden Tradition. The title no longer directly invoked the destruction of East European Jewish civilization but instead offered the American Jewish public a metaphor of shining continuity.23 The response to the reader’s report—an unsigned memo but likely written by Dawidowicz herself—explicitly spoke to the question of audience, noting that the book “would speak meaningfully to the American reader, Jewish and gentile, and . . . would demonstrate the richness of Jewish religious and intellectual life and the multiplicity of ways to express Jewish identity.”24 The book’s pragmatic—and elusive—goal was to foster American Jewish consciousness and identity in the present by a skillful deployment of the Ashkenazic past. The material showed how people had “searched for ways to harmonize tradition and modernity, to preserve their Jewish identity and retain their community.”25 Dawidowicz informed her readers that her book was about “East European Jews in crisis, challenge, and creativity . . . until their cataclysmic destruction in the Second World War.”26 Like Dubnow and the practitioners of khurbn forshung, her anthologizing of the experiences of East European Jewry was meant to serve a national-cultural purpose: “[Though] East European Jewry was cruelly cut down . . . vital elements of its culture survive. Perhaps we, heirs of that culture, can continue its tradition of conserving Jewish identity by fusing the old and the new.”27

Published in January 1967, The Golden Tradition contained a lengthy historical introduction, maps, and an anthology of sixty primary texts in translation, each prefaced by a short biographical and interpretive description.28 Dust-jacket blurbs from four Jewish intellectuals represented a targeted range of American Jewish readers: Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, for the literate nonprofessional Jewish reader; Salo W. Baron, the foremost Jewish historian in the United States, for professional Jewish scholars; Maurice Samuel, Sholem Aleichem’s first English-language interpreter, for the secular Yiddishist intelligentsia; and Heschel for postwar American Jews who defined their identities in religious terms.

The Golden Tradition’s effort to honor the memory of the vital culture of the East European Jews among whom Dawidowicz lived in prewar Vilna was not lost on reviewers. Irving Howe anointed Dawidowicz and her interpretation of East European Jewish life with a glowing evaluation in Book Week on February 12, 1967. Praising her “enormous and splendid anthology” as a “necessary corrective to shtetl romanticism,” and contrasting it favorably with more sanitized descriptions of the old country, he concluded:

Having now read, enjoyed, and suffered with The Golden Tradition over the past few months, I find myself unable to praise it too highly. It is quite as if a whole culture had been rescued from the dust, and all of its inner qualities, its half-forgotten voices and passions, have been brought to vivid life. . . . For here is the world of our fathers,29 or at least some of our fathers, drawn not in the delicate line of idyll or the charcoal softness of nostalgia, but with the heavily textured complications and even harshness of reality.30

Curt Leviant, a scholar, novelist, and translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, praised the book in the New York Times Book Review, also underscoring its lack of sentimentality:

The volume is perhaps as important for what it is not as for what it is. It is not belles-lettres, or an exercise in sentimentality, or a study of shtetl life. “The Golden Tradition” is an anthology that epitomizes the various spiritual crosscurrents that affected East European Jews from the end of the 18th century up to World War II. . . . [The book is] an ideological sampler, a stethoscope to the heartbeat of the Jews, reaction to their encounter with modern Europe, a record of the Jews’ prismatic intellectual experience.31

In her introduction, Dawidowicz herself claimed the mantle of revisionism, stating that “I was guided also by the desire to show the diversity of Jews and their culture, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that moved them, and the variety they brought to Jewish thought and life. East European Jewry was not, as the sentimentalists see it, forever frozen in utter piety and utter poverty.”32 Distancing her book from the folkloristic approaches that conflated shtetl Jewry with all of East European Jewry, she included variegated sources that would add breadth to the static view of the Jewish past. These included selections from the writing of Hasidic masters, traditional rabbis, maskilim, publicists, poets, and even converts (the latter a category of Jewish liminality accepted today but farsighted in her time). Correcting shtetl romanticization meant offering excerpts from urbanized modern Jews, among them visual artists, revolutionaries, and, notably, women writers.33 In the first draft of the introduction, she described the attempt “to make our selection sufficiently varied in time and place, in class and education, in degree of religion and national commitment, to reflect the variety of the era.”34

Dawidowicz chose autobiographical source material for her anthology because, citing the German historian Wilhelm Dilthey, she believed it to be “the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life confronts us.”35 Reflecting years later on her method, Dawidowicz would write that she wanted to be able to narrate history “from the perspective of the participant or the participant-observer,” a perspective, she observed, that “conveys an immediacy and immanence that cannot always be captured in history which is written on the basis of documents alone from a remote past.”36 The first-person narratives allowed the reader to enter the contemporary world of the writers and anchored Dawidowicz’s narration of Jewish history in Jewish sources. Her focus on autobiographical materials may have also owed a debt to her JDC colleague Leo W. Schwarz, who had published several English anthologies of memoir and other first-person material before 1967, including The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People (1949), for which Dawidowicz contributed a translation of “Life in a Bunker” by M. J. Feigenbaum, an activist in the Central Historical Commission.37

Despite Dawidowicz’s claim that autobiography made history intimate, her translation strategy created an invisible layer of distance from the past. The original languages of the selections included Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and Russian, but Dawidowicz’s English translations generally came from secondary Yiddish translations of the originals, resulting in a kind of Yiddishist projection onto the diverse linguistic landscape of modern East European Jewry. The anthology also reflected the credulity of her period regarding autobiographical source material, a perspective that would not hold up now among professional historians.38 Likewise, Dawidowicz included hagiographic accounts of Hasidic rebbes by their disciples that lacked the critical perspective scholars today would require.39

The egalitarian impulse of a “participant-observer” ethos that drew from all segments of East European Jewry notwithstanding, Dawidowicz favored writings by the Jewish intellectual elite, and The Golden Tradition was unrepresentative of Jewish society’s nonliterate groups. As a historian Dawidowicz—in sync with the American historiographic tradition of the postwar period—was interested in “event-making men,” those “whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment . . . that they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or fashion.”40 Dawidowicz viewed ideas and ideology as the most significant forces in history, in contrast to social class or political structure, a perspective she would further develop in all of her later historical writing. In 1975, she wrote to George Mosse: “I am very grateful to you, for you are among that small company of scholars that take ideas seriously.”41

Dubnow’s Other Daughter

Dawidowicz’s fealty to Dubnow’s historiographic ethos is nowhere more explicit than in The Golden Tradition’s eighty-page introduction, “The World of East European Jewry,” which was a virtual catechism of Dubnowian principles. Originally titled “Tradition and Modernity: The Response of East European Jews to the Modern World”42—arguably a more accurate title for the book—it chronicled Jewish modernity in Eastern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century until the Nazi invasion of Poland and focused on the experiences of modernizing Russian and Polish Jews. Dawidowicz presented readers a historical overview of the culture of premodern Polish Jewry. The introduction described a community historically governed by a kahal, which, in encountering the modern world, gave rise to a natural efflorescence of ideological, political, and linguistic creativity that reflected that community’s national-cultural autonomy. Dawidowicz directly cited Dubnow’s view of the Council of the Four Lands, early modern Polish Jewry’s highest administrative body, as “a surrogate for national political activity, [which] thereby sustained its awareness of its autonomy, [and] safeguarded and developed its own individual culture.”43 Assuming a static binary between the modernization of West and East European Jewries, Dawidowicz concluded that Western Jews were largely incapable of maintaining their communal cohesion in the face of Enlightenment and emancipation. But “Eastern Europe was different,” and her anthology aimed to introduce American Jews to the personal experiences of East European Jews who had successfully negotiated the challenges of modernity by preserving their identity and retaining their community.44 Dawidowicz, intellectually and emotionally bound to the Jews of interwar Poland, viewed the history of Polish Jewry as a metonym for the whole East European Jewish past. No other Jewry in the world enjoyed the political, cultural, and social autonomy experienced by Polish Jews in their long sojourn in Europe.45

Dawidowicz’s affirmation of an enduring Jewish historical agency was picked up again in the penultimate section of The Golden Tradition’s introduction, “Jewish Politics: Under Despotism and Dictatorship,” where she assessed the effect of political enfranchisement on the life of Jews in interwar Poland. Agency was a subject she was to engage again in The War Against the Jews, but already here she took it upon herself to defend East European Jewry against charges of political passivity and political collaboration. She argued that despite official Polish political pressure to denationalize the Jewish community by recognizing it as a religious union, Polish Jewry retained its identity as a national-religious community. She characterized the internecine multiplication of Jewish parties that many saw as irresponsible given the extent of antisemitism in Polish society “as an instrumentality for strengthening Jewish identity and increasing Jewish self-reliance.”46 Indebted to Dubnow, she found strength in the Jews’ political powerlessness, which, she concluded, gave them moral authority, “a unique Jewish quality that no other politically powerless minority in Poland exercised.”47 It was the deep diasporic communal identity of Polish Jewry—rooted in its kehillot, in adherence to Yiddish, and in its vibrant national-political life of the interwar years—that shaped its response “under despotism and dictatorship” and preserved its collective solidarity.

Dawidowicz also affirmed Dubnow’s positive view of the role of religion in shaping Jewish culture. By 1967, Dawidowicz had become increasingly dubious about the ability of secularism to ensure Jewish survival in the modern world. In The Golden Tradition, Dawidowicz adduced Dubnow to support her own evolutionary rapprochement with Judaism. Though she knew he was an avowed agnostic, Dawidowicz nonetheless claimed that he was “too much a Jew” to excise Judaism from Jewishness and quoted his own words from “The Doctrine of Jewish Nationalism” (1897) to advance her interpretation. “If we wish to preserve Judaism as a cultural-historical type of nation,” Dubnow had written,

we must realize that the religion of Judaism is one of the integral foundations of national culture and that anyone who seeks to destroy it undermines the very basis of national existence. Between us and the orthodox Jews there is only this difference: they recognize a traditional Judaism the forms of which were set from the beginning for all eternity, while we believe in an evolutionary Judaism in which new and old forms are always being assumed or discarded and which adjusts itself unceasingly to new cultural conditions.48

The inclusion of Dubnow’s comments on Judaism points to a basic paradox in her thinking about the larger project she had undertaken. Dawidowicz hoped The Golden Tradition would show American Jews that in Eastern Europe, nonreligious or even anti-religious Jews were part of the Jewish “world” even if they personally rejected all religious demands. Of course, that they remained an integral part of the Jewish world was only because they inhabited a civilization in which the religious tradition was deeply embedded. She hoped that the increasingly nonreligious American Jewish reader would come to see the necessity of Judaism for the construction of an American Jewishness that, like the integral Jewishness of Eastern Europe, went well beyond the merely religious.

Dawidowicz’s postwar liberalism, discussed earlier, can be seen in her dismissal of utopian, universalist political movements. In her introduction’s section titled “New Religions: Science, Progress, Humanity,” she described their impact: “These ascendant scientific theories and philosophical currents [i.e., nationalism, positivism, socialism, and secularism] had an explosive effect on the emerging educated classes in Eastern Europe. They had a convulsive effect on Jewish traditional society.”49 Three figures in this section emerged as her intellectual heroes: the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-am, Dubnow, and the Yiddishist-turned-Orthodox Jew Nathan Birnbaum. Despite their differences, they shared a belief in the interdependence of Jewish identity and Jewish national existence; in Dawidowicz’s view, they “rejected secular messianism, choosing instead the continuity of Jewish culture and traditions.”50 Without this unified foundation, modernizing Jews in the diaspora could not have sustained themselves when buffeted by modernity’s individualistic and secular assault.

If Dawidowicz owed a clear debt to Dubnow, her introduction also bore the stamp of Max Weinreich’s influence. The Eastern Europe of her book’s title was not a geographic entity, but a mentalité. The term in her usage actually meant “Ashkenaz,” whose roots lie in medieval German lands, but had come to encompass, in Weinreich’s postwar formulation, the ethos of a civilization.51 In her 1969 eulogy for Weinreich, “The Scholarship of Yiddish,” she summarized his definition of Ashkenaz:

[It] was the Jewish community, with its language, literature, culture . . . born some 1,100 years ago in the Middle Rhine-Moselle territory and, in the course of the centuries, slowly moved eastward. Until 1500 its metropolises were in Central Europe: Mayence, Worms, Ratisbon, Prague. Thereafter Ashkenaz shifted to Eastern Europe: Cracow, Lublin, Mezbizh, Vilna, and Warsaw. Consequently . . . Ashkenaz became “freed of its territorial connotations; geography, as it were, has been transformed into history.”52

She cited his 1951 YIVO conference paper, “Ashkenaz: The Era of Yiddish in Jewish History,” in which he concluded that “wonderful transcendental values from both a Jewish and universal viewpoint” were contained in the “culture and language of Ashkenaz” and warned that “it would be a cultural catastrophe” for the future if those values vanished.53 Like Dubnow, whose nationalist historiography was suffused with the Jews’ survival through history,54 and like Weinreich, who in 1941 insisted on the crucial role of the YIVO’s visnshaft (scholarship) in creating a national community,55 Dawidowicz sought existential meaning in the writing of Jewish history.

Grappling with her own existential dilemmas, Dawidowicz found herself drawn to an unlikely source: an autobiographical reflection on religious transformation, Vom Freigeist zum Gläubigen (From a Freethinker to a Believer), written by Nathan Birnbaum in 1919. Birnbaum, a Viennese Jew of East European origins, traveled through the most powerful ideological streams of modern Ashkenazic Jewish life—materialism, secularism, Zionism, diaspora nationalism, and Yiddishism—before landing on the shores of “Tradition.”56 Credited with coining the phrase “Zionism” before Theodor Herzl, Birnbaum was an activist at the Czernowitz conference on Yiddish language in 1908 and a spokesman for Yiddishist autonomism, as well as the editor of Jewish War Archives (the World Zionist Organization’s newspaper documenting the refugee crisis during and after World War I) and an activist in the ultra-Orthodox political party Agudas Yisroel in interwar Poland.

In his Freethinker essay, Birnbaum struggled with the challenges of Jewish modernity and expressed the existential ruminations that had resulted in his personal transformation.57 Disillusioned by the instability of secularist nationalism, he revealed that once he had “discarded” it and began “putting greater stress on peoplehood as a living reality,” he realized that “the innermost nature of the Jewish people ought to be expressed in its religion and that it therefore deserved serious attention and the utmost respect.”58 Modernity’s materialism was bankrupt, and rational philosophy was limited: “Little by little, I realized . . . that there was a higher state of thinking than logic, of which the senses are aware, and a higher level of emotion than pure psychophysical sensitivity, and that, in essence, we cannot interpret the great and elevated revelations of spirit in history as the inevitable effects of senseless dead matter.”59 His former worldview broken, Birnbaum turned to religious observance. Change proved difficult: “I had to surmount strong inner opposition, besides outer obstacles. A man who for decades valued and served individualism in its subservience to matter cannot simply divest himself of the effects of his education, of all Western habits and traits which contravene the meaning and the rigorous will of Judaism, as he would take off clothes he had put on a few hours before.”60

Dawidowicz worked from the Yiddish translation of Birnbaum’s original German pamphlet, and an excerpt of her translation caught the eye of his son Solomon when it was published in The Jewish Observer, an organ of Agudas Yisroel, in the spring of 1967.61 That year, Dawidowicz wrote revealingly to Solomon about the profound impression his father’s pamphlet had made on her:

The essay which I translated had a deep personal influence on me, and on the changes, perhaps small by some standards, in my life. As I worked on it (and I devoted myself painstakingly to that translation), I felt that Nathan Birnbaum was challenging me personally. I had to decide, once and for all, in what direction I was to go. For me this is all quite intimate and precious, and I am rather embarrassed to write about it. But I thought that perhaps you would like to know that translating your father’s essay was not merely a literary or intellectual exercise for me.62

The Birnbaum correspondence is especially poignant because it confirms Dawidowicz’s inner struggle with her Yiddishist-secularist past, a struggle dating back to her year in Vilna before the war.

It bears noting that Dawidowicz’s selections for The Golden Tradition were a reflection of the liberal climate of the time. Made in the early to mid-1960s, they were politically ecumenical. Section 10, “In the Revolutionary Movements,” gave voice to the radical Yiddishism of Chaim Zhitlovsky but also to Leon Trotsky’s aversion to Jewish nationalism and to Sholem Schwartzbard’s violent anarchism. Had Dawidowicz compiled The Golden Tradition in the 1970s, it is almost certain that her rightward political shift in reaction to the rise of the New Left and the counterculture would have led her to exclude left-wing ideologues and activists.63 In the period of the book’s making, however, her only bias in the selections was a “pro-Jewish point of view.”64 She even devoted section 8 to “Marginals” and included Daniel Chwolson, Abraham Uri Kovner, Jan Bloch, Henri Bergson, and Leopold Infeld. In spite of these authors’ formal conversion from Judaism or total distance from normative forms of Jewish life,65 their inclusion underscored her diaspora nationalist sensibilities: regardless of religious affiliation—or lack of it—these men could not erase their Jewishness.

In this regard, The Golden Tradition, in offering a more complex portrait of East European Jewish society than the static and romanticized image of the early postwar works, also presented it as a holistic model for American Jews. In Dawidowicz’s imagination, within East European Jewish society’s diversity lay the integrated unity of Ashkenazic civilization, which bequeathed to East European Jews the ability to fuse “the old and the new.” She positioned her assemblage of Jewish personalities on a spectrum of existential “return” to an identification with the Jewish people. “East European Jews, too, turned and returned,” she wrote. “Their return was toward a more intense form of Jewish identity and a passionate reaffirmation of their ties with the Jewish community and its fate. Every Jewish movement, no matter how secular, offered the possibility of such return.”66 Hearing the diverse Jewish voices contained in The Golden Tradition might stimulate American Jews to reconfigure their Jewishness, to stay their desire to assimilate, and to choose to “return.” She affirmed this hope by citing Heschel’s The Earth Is the Lord’s as evidence of the holistic nature of East European Jewish society: “The Jews had always known piety and Sabbath holiness. . . . The new thing in Eastern Europe was that somewhat of the Sabbath infused into every day. One could relish the taste of life eternal in the fleeting moment.”67 There was, too, the implicit message that postwar American Jews, heirs to the civilization of Ashkenaz, were charged with historic responsibility: the affirmation of positive Jewish identity because their East European Jewish forebears had been “cut down forever.”68 The Golden Tradition could be their guide.

Dawidowicz hoped that by providing postwar American Jews insight into the grandeur of Ashkenazic Jewish civilization, The Golden Tradition would help foster American Jewish historical consciousness and its complement, identification with the Jewish people. In a letter written to Salo W. Baron on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Dawidowicz revealed her great debt to his example of combining historical scholarship with national commitments. “Permit me, then,” she mused,

to write what I would blush to tell. The encounter with your vast erudition and your exacting scholarship has been an enriching intellectual adventure; your generous humanism and ahaves-yisroyel (love of the Jews)69 an inspiration, and your optimism about the Jewish future, so firmly grounded in your creative understanding of the Jewish past, a comfort. And if this were not enough, you have combined scholarship and study with service to the Jewish community and provided a model for all of us to follow.70

Twenty years later, Dawidowicz would again write a letter brimming with gratitude to Baron, informing him of “how large your presence has been in my life.” Calling him her “teacher par excellence, who unfolded the panorama of Jewish history as no one else has ever done,” she summed up his influence on her work:

Two things you taught me. One was that history is the great drama of Jewish existence and that the scholar participates in that drama by reconstructing it. The other was that the scholar should not isolate himself from his community. Being a Jewish historian, that is, a historian of the Jews, means having a commitment to the Jewish people. For teaching me these things and for being what you are, I thank you.71

If Baron was Dawidowicz’s teacher par excellence, Dubnow was her spiritual and intellectual father.72 The latter’s belief that collecting and preserving Jewish historical sources could fuel the development of Jewish national consciousness found a passionate disciple in Dawidowicz. She shared his belief that historical research could further historical consciousness, which, in turn, would foster national belonging and cohesion, particularly for modern Jews who had rejected both religion and assimilation.73 Dubnow’s ideology had informed the work of several generations of Jewish historians in Eastern Europe,74 but it was Lucy S. Dawidowicz who became the critical American link to the East European national-cultural historiographic chain. Dubnow’s influence on her historiography, which resonated throughout The Golden Tradition, became the centerpiece of the book that made her famous, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945.