We live in a modern Jewish world. The world that existed before modernity was a very different kind of a world, organized in a totally different way, based on different premises. In this chapter we are going to try and survey the changes in the Jewish world and the reasons for those changes.
We will be looking at themes connected with the idea and the practice of Jewish community within the historical framework that we have already established. The development of the Jewish community is an inseparable part of that story. The question that we are going to examine in this chapter is ‘why?’ Why was the Jewish community such an important part of the historical story? What was it in the Jewish community that made it so central in Jewish history?
In this chapter we will examine how the Jewish community was structured and how the values and beliefs that lay behind the whole Rabbinic system produced an institutional structure that reflected them. We will examine the institutions of the community and we will acquaint ourselves with the main types of personality that could be found in such communities. We will then go on to examine the way that individual communities fitted into a wider structure within a given center and finally we will look at the issue of relations between different centers.
In the previous chapters, we have dealt with all four of these themes – Jewish identity and the relationship of the individual to the community, the structure of the community, the relationships between different communities and different centres and the relationship with Eretz Israel – in relation to the pre-modern world. Now we bring the story forward and turn to them, systematically, one at a time, to create an understanding of the Jewish community in the world surrounding us today.
In this section we will bring ten Jewish communities in the contemporary Jewish world. They include seven of the largest communities according to the demographic estimates currently accepted in the Jewish world (in order of size, the United States, France, Canada, Great Britain, Argentina, Germany and Australia) and two others, Hungary and South Africa that we think are particularly interesting in the context of the Jewish world today.
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The United States is the largest Diaspora community in the world and has been since the mid twentieth century. It is an extraordinarily successful community, on the whole, and there are many who argue that it represents a totally new chapter in Jewish history in that there has never been a community where life has been so good for the Jews and where Jews have been able to create such a strong community and at the same time contribute so greatly to the wider society. As with all the contemporary Diaspora communities we will examine the community by asking twelve questions about it. So, welcome to America!
The American Jewish community is fifteen times larger than the community of Canada. But this disguises the fact that the Canadian community is one of the largest in the world, third among Diaspora communities behind the U.S.A. and France. In addition, the Canadian community, as we shall see, is in many ways far more cohesive and conscious of its Jewish identity than the American community as a whole. Far larger percentages of the Canadian community are educated in Jewish schools, far larger percentages visit Israel and all in all, the community is a remarkably successful and vibrant Jewish community.
With a little under 190,000 Jews, the community in Argentina is the sixth largest Diaspora community in the world. It is also the most troubled. Despite many times of challenge and difficulty, up to the early 1990’s, it was a vibrant and very successful community. But a whole series of events shook up the community and sent it spiraling downhill in a dive from which it has not recovered. Major international Jewish rescue operations are now taking place in Argentina.
The Jewish community of France, the second largest Diaspora community in the world, is in many ways unique among the Jewish communities of the world. It is, on the one hand, the earliest community in the world to be fully emancipated, freed from restrictive laws after many centuries of limitations and discrimination. On the other hand, it is a community that still conspicuously suffers from anti-Semitism, and which lives in constant apprehension, conscious of its vulnerability. Thus it is a community of surprises and many contradictions.
Hungary is one of the most interesting and dynamic centres in the Jewish Diaspora. It is a centre in the process of returning to life after more than a generation of cultural and religious silence. Only after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980’s did democracy return to Hungary. The Jews were now free to resume their life as Jews openly. But things were not so simple. A generation of Jews had forgotten what it meant to be Jewish. Jewish life slowly and warily resumed. It had to be learned and many Jewish organizations from the west and Israel came in to try and help the community fight its way back to life and health. Hungarian Jewry is still in the process of finding itself, defining itself and fighting its way back to life.
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