Jonathan Sarna is among the leading historians of Judaism in America, and perhaps the most able in placing the Jewish experience into the larger American experience. This book was ten years in the making. Half way through, the author had to battle cancer, so it is some kind of miracle that the book exists at all. We should be grateful for Sarna's recovery, because this book—issued on the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jews to come to America—belongs on the small shelf of outstanding books on American religion that have appeared over the past 15 years.

When the Jewish community of greater Boston wanted to honor Sarna (who teaches at Brandeis) and his book, they gathered a star-studded panel at Temple Keihillath Israel in Brookline, located at the top of the road where one finds the John F. Kennedy birthplace. I warmed to the thought of that event because Keihillath Israel was "my" synagogue growing up. Not that I was a member—my family was Christian—but everyday on the way to my school across the street I passed "Temple KI," as we called it. I was in and out of KI all the time as a kid. I often walked with my neighborhood friends to shul after our baseball games when they had their biweekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for their Bar Mitzvah. I attended several Bar Mitzvahs at KI. The rabbi called me "the good gentile friend" of his students. Around the Jewish Thanksgiving (Succoth) the rabbi sometimes saw to it that I received some nice candy. So it was with great personal warmth of recollection that I imagined the celebration at Keihillath Israel of Sarna's achievement.

And an achievement it is. The breadth of scholarship displayed here is immense, yet the prose is accessible. The sources used, both literary and quantitative, are extensive, and a lesser writer might have gotten bogged down in them. There is a further achievement worth mentioning. Early on the author says he writes as both an insider and as a scholar: "I have endeavored to balance my passionate Jewish commitments with my dispassionate scholarly ones." As believer and as critic Sarna repeatedly focuses clearly on important historical and contemporary issues. But, just when the text might have become apologetical, Sarna backs off and gives readers interpretive tools and options, encouraging us to think for ourselves.

The author's general orientation gladly honors the style of his teacher at Yale, Sydney Ahlstrom, who saw all denominations and religious groups as part of "the great tradition of American churches." In the American context, then, there are certain overarching social and cultural questions that would have great impact on all religious groups: with no exclusive privilege given to any religious group, all would have to compete for adherents in a religious market economy unknown to Europeans; with no leader acknowledged by the state, there could be no version of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief Rabbi of England, so authority patterns would be democratic; with massive waves of immigration, all churches and groups reeled, sometimes recoiled, from the competing desires of ethnically varied co-religionists.

While Sarna's subject is Judaism's varied experience in the new world, he nevertheless sees the essential context of the larger Protestant culture. He likens the Jewish difficulties with differing ethnicities to the problems that "rattled" Protestantism in America. Sarna sees the essence of the Protestant quest for identity formulated in negative terms (they weren't Catholics) and relates it to the Jewish identity quest (they weren't Christians). Moreover, by the 1880s, Jewish spirituality was like its Protestant counterpart in that it had been "feminized." And again like the Protestants, Jewish "denominations" would divide in the 20th century under the pressures of modernity. Jews even borrowed directly from Protestants: wanting to hold their youth, and noting the success of "Christian Endeavor," religious leaders founded "Jewish Endeavor." In sum, Sarna's history in the Ahlstrom manner is a work in American religious and cultural history in which Jews are the subject matter. The underlying motif is the way in which the market revolution after, say, 1840, forced Jews into a religious situation for which there had been no preparation in two millennia of Jewish life and thought. From concentration in a few states, the expanding economy made Judaism a national, not merely regional, faith. Jews responded well to the religious aspects of the free market with an attraction to free will, as did their Arminian neighbors, the Methodists and the Baptists.

For all the paralleling Sarna offers between Jews and Protestants, there is of course a distinctive Jewish refrain in the overall story. While all non-English-speaking immigrant groups had to decide how much of their group identity to try to preserve, those groups had more of a choice in terms of their ethnic boundaries and assimilation. For Jews, balancing several ethnicities within their religion made it far more complicated to distinguish between preserving their Jewish faith and the "Yiddishkeit," their sense of peoplehood as Jews. Sarna observes that Jews did not really resolve the question of preservation and assimilation any better than their Protestant neighbors: nearly all people of faith in America kept one foot in both religious and secular worlds.

Moving into the 20th century, Sarna writes with great insight and sensitivity about the way the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany spread to America after about 1880, and how it shook and shocked American Jews. Addressing the threat of anti-Semitism kept together Jews who might have drifted apart. At the same time, the Great Depression and World War II brought American-born Jewish children of the great migration period into American life in the same way it did for Catholic ethnics from eastern and southern Europe. By 1950, there were abundant signs that Jews had "arrived" in American culture. One of "theirs" was crowned Miss America (Bess Myerson), another was a baseball hero (Hank Greenberg), while others were noted authors (Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer). Moreover, a best-selling book by Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, published in 1955, signaled the fact that, from then on, Jews would be regarded as permanent major players on the American religious scene.

As Jews moved further and deeper into the fabric of American life, two themes would characterize their public face to their Christian neighbors: remembering the Holocaust and supporting the State of Israel. On the first concern, this book may well ruffle some feathers in official Judaism, saying that most American Jews were not immediately galvanized by the Holocaust. Indeed, Sarna writes "during the immediate postwar years, refugees stood almost alone in a determination to memorialize what they had lost," and that "a full generation passed before the Holocaust was moved from the periphery of American Jewish life to its center." Zionism was also a major thread in the modern Jewish story. The American Jewish leadership typically does not accept that the normative position is that Jews move "home" to Israel, but that they are "at home" now in America. At the same time, there is massive support for the new state in Israel, among both observant and non-observant Jews. Strangely, in view of Sarna's good eye on the question of Judaism in its Protestant, American context, he doesn't really discuss much about Protestant premillennialism and the fondness for Israel in the Fundamentalist-Evangelical movement.

The last theme Sarna discusses is the contemporary religious revival among observant Jews. After several generations of apparent religious decline in the 20th century, the last 25 years have seen a deep and broad renewal in Jewish traditions and liturgies, albeit done in an American manner of democratic participation and congregational autonomy. Even the most "American" movement in Judaism (Reform) has moved to the putative "right" and embraced some traditions it had long eschewed, while Conservative and Orthodox congregations have grown markedly. Once again, Sarna sees the larger cultural context here and likens the Jewish renewal movement to similar movements among "born again" Christians in "Bible" churches.

The author ends his book with a poignant reprise of his main theme: whether a fully religious Jewish culture can survive in a nation that idolizes the marketplace and in which everything is about choice. It is a conclusion similar to what Chris Smith has written about evangelical Christians and John McGreevy about Roman Catholics, thus another index of the salience of Sarna's work.

Some mild criticisms must be made. The strength of Sarna's book may also be a weakness. This history in the Ahlstrom style is mostly about ideas, institutions, and clergy, in which the shifting fates of the main "denominations" of Judaism get more than enough attention. We are introduced to a very large number of rabbis, many recently arrived from Europe, whose work may or may not amount to very much. Their names are similar and it is hard to follow them without a very carefully designed scorecard. This is history from the top—or perhaps the middle—down. While Sarna gives some good demographic information, we glean less than we might want of the feelings of ordinary Jews trying to make sense of their complex lives in America. What did parents feel when their only daughter came home from university and introduced them to a sandy-haired boy named McCaffrey? What did the Holocaust survivor feel in telling the "good gentile family" in his neighborhood about the meaning of his imprisonment in Mauthausen? What is the sense of loss felt by the parents of a boy, fresh from his Bar Mitzvah, who attended his gentile friend's confirmation, and said it seemed like all the same to him? These questions are real, not imagined ones, that emerged in my own growing up in a "mixed" American community in which my own Protestant, immigrant parents were themselves struggling to find religious meaning in a largely Jewish-American neighborhood. I would have liked Jonathan Sarna's keen eye to look into and comment on such situations in the real lives of ordinary American Jews, and of the gentile neighbors who wished them well.

Finally, on the revivals that recently have swept through American Judaism, it would have been helpful if Sarna could have made concrete in the life of an actual congregation just what this looked and felt like. Since Sarna's overall thesis is to portray Jews in their American, and Americanizing, context, the functional similarities of Jewish and Protestant "renewal" movements cannot help but be noted. For example, Sarna's own synagogue – Congregation Shaarei Tefillah – seems to be a gathering of like-minded Jews of Orthodox background, spontaneously organized in the renewal mode on Thanksgiving (Succoth) in 1983. They first met in homes, then in a school gym, and now they have a building of their own and a full-time rabbi. If one visits their website [www.shaarei.org] the sense of dynamic and fervor is unmistakable, in a congregation that describes itself as both "orthodox" and "modern." I think it unfortunate that the author's laudable goal of balancing his religious and his scholarly commitments could not allow some space to illustrate more fully religious feelings he apparently knows very well.

Notwithstanding these few criticisms, one comes away from Jonathan Sarna's book with a sense that something very important has been written about here, and presented with great skill and clarity. A subtle but important shift has gone on in America, religious life that Sarna has identified and illumined like few others: American self-understanding in religious terms has moved from that of a Christian culture to a Judeo-Christian culture. Readers of American Judaism will be rewarded in plumbing the depth and exploring the breadth of that insight.

Ronald Wells teaches history at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.