That the relationship of Jews to European culture has been and continues to be a vexed topic should come as no surprise: as a principal piece of the history of the Jews in European society it could not be otherwise. Yet in some ways the subject has been even more fraught than one might expect. The cultural question has served as a lightning rod for all the problems inherent in the last three centuries of European Jewish history. Take any of the central issues of modern Jewish history – emancipation, anti-Semitism, assimilation – and you will find that some of its most pointed expressions or controversial manifestations were in the realm of culture.

In this paper I will focus on the way in which the relationship of the Jews to European culture has been subsumed to the category of assimilation and survey some alternative approaches. I need hardly remind the reader that the category of assimilation has held pride of place in the interpretation of Jewish life in general – and European Jewish culture in particular – since at least the closing decades of the nineteenth century. While at an earlier point in time one might have said that the category's preeminent position was for better or for worse, it is now fair to say that in regard to the Jews and European culture it is overwhelmingly and unequivocally for the worse.

EUROPEAN JEWISH CULTURE AS ASSIMILATION

The origins of the concept of assimilation were decidedly polemical: it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as an indispensable weapon in the intramural warfare between the proponents of liberal and post-liberal or nationalist Jewish ideologies, as well as in the sectarian warfare among the multiple strains of nationalism. It was a nationalist construct whose proponents first and foremost posited an uncompromising notion of the purity of “national” or religious culture. They understood culture in essentialist terms: national cultures were rooted in divisions both ontological and sociological.