Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience
Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and David G. Dalin
Univ. of Notre Dame Press
331 pp.; $40

This carefully selected collection of documents begins with a sharply phrased thesis: "Much of what passes for fact in the field (e.g., 'American Jewry's long-standing historic embrace of separationism') turns out upon careful examination to consist of half-truths, and sometimes pure fantasy." It goes on to present a nuanced argument through both skillful editorial apparatus and the documents themselves. That argument can be summarized like this: While Jews in America have almost all sought "equal footing" before the law, what "equal footing" has meant differs widely depending upon time, place, and circumstance.

For example, until the last third of the nineteenth century, almost all public Jewish voices expressed themselves in favor of government support for religion—whether in education, the military (through chaplains), or other venues. The difficulty for Jews in roughly the first century of United States history was to overcome laws and deeply ingrained cultural habits that, in effect, forced all American citizens to act like Christians. So Jews opposed test acts requiring office holders to believe in the New Testament, they protested when "public schools" mandated praying the Lord's Prayer or promoting faith in Christ, and they urged the right to name rabbis as chaplains during the Civil War alongside Christian clergymen. In these protests, Jews worked against the American grain of the period, but as promoters of a more equitable approach to religion in public rather than as opponents of religion in public life per se.

In its treatment of the last 130 years or so of American history, the great merit of this anthology is to show the vigor of internal Jewish debates over church and state. Beginning with the large-scale Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe after the Civil War, more and more Jews became advocates of strict separationism between religion and public life.

To such ones, strict separationism was the only way to avoid the evil effects of either America's historic cultural Protestantism or the more active promotion of "Christian America" that both proto-fundamentalist and proto-modernist Protestants advocated from the 1880s onward. Thus, for many vocal Jews it was advantageous to seek alliances with all who opposed any form of Christianity in the public schools, in legal practice, or in observance of weekly or annual holy days, however irreligious such allies might be, since this strategy was thought to preserve the most space for Jews.

While the anthology provides ample space to illustrate Jewish strict separationism, its great value is to illustrate how many Jews have been, and continue to be, concerned about the unrestrained advocacy of that position. In more recent decades, Will Herberg's complaint about the thinness of American public life stripped of religion and the campaign by Orthodox Lubavitchers for state support for private Jewish education have been important examples of dissenting positions. In showing that these instances reflect a well-established, if understudied Jewish pattern, Sarna and Dalin improve historical understanding while making an important contribution to current legal controversies. Americans are not known as a nuance-loving people, but the kind of carefully documented argument contained in the pages of this book means that on questions of church and state, the time for nuance has arrived, whether we like it or not.

—Mark Noll