On Post-Assimilatory Jewry - Gershom Scholem

The definition "post-assimilatory" Jew" applies to me. I am a member of a family that had lived in Germany for a long time; I myself was a fourth-generation Berliner. The transition in our family from Orthodox at the beginning of the 19th century to almost total assimilation at the beginning of the 20th was a matter of three generations - from my grand father, through my father, to my own generation; in the third generation, assimilation was complete - or so it seemed. The Jewish post-assimilatory renaissance meant a revolt against the lifestyle of the parent's home or of the circle of families like it. This was a conscious breakaway, a volitional act, a decision - albeit a childish one... My decisions of that period were not clearly formulated, but the fact is that there was a decision to make a post-assimilatory break, at the time; I did not have an abstract conceptual awareness of assimilation. My awareness was an emotional one. This I shared with my contemporaries who joined the Zionist youth movements...

The revolt or the break - in instances like mine - was against self-deceit. A person living in a liberal-Jewish, German-assimilationist environment had the feeling that those people were devoting their entire lives to self-delusion. We did not come to Zionism in search of politics. It is important to understand that for my contemporaries in Germany, Zionism was only to a limited degree (it would be wrong to say not at all) a political Zionism. Some of us, to be sure, went on to become real political Zionists, but the Zionist choice was a moral one, an emotional one, an honesty-seeking response. The honesty did not express itself in the desire for a state, but in a revolt against the lie that Jewish existence was. Jewish reality seemed alive, flourishing, but those who went over to Zionism saw that reality as rotten. Zionism was a revolt against the life-style of the run-of-the-mill bourgeoisie to which my family belonged. This was the milieu in which hundreds of thousands of young Jews grew up in Germany...

I can't explain why a 15-year old boy decides as he does. Something impels him, draws him, after a situation of emptiness, after being surfeited with things that he felt lacked vitality. The members of the assimilatory generation angrily rejected the charges of the children. Papa certainly didn't enjoy hearing me tell him he was deceiving himself. Friday night was observed as a family night. The uncles - my father, his brothers and their families - would get together the way they used to do, more or less, the way assimilated families do. At the Seder, one of the uncles, who knew how to read Hebrew without knowing what he was reading, would recite the Haggada in some kind of sing-song, and everybody sang "Ehad mi yode'a" and "Had gadya." We made something of a mess of it. The melodies were more popular and better remembered than the words.