THE ANATOMY OF JEWISH IDENTIFICATION: A HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL VIEW.

The article presents information on the history of Jewish people. It further analyzes the structure of Jewish identification and applies this theoretical orientation to recent Jewish history. Studies about Judaism and the Jewish people have, almost uniformly, proceeded at a high level of generality, for the nature of the research problems required the investigator to overlook striking, even obvious, differences within Judaism and to emphasize those characteristics that made Judaism unique. The fallacy of the theory of marginality as it is currently applied to the Jew is that it tacitly defines Jewish identification in terms of the complex of values and beliefs that characterized the religious culture of the ghetto, consequently, any renunciation of this complex is viewed as a tendency to disassociate oneself from the whole of Judaism and to seek integration within the wider American culture. This narrow defnition has led to many errors of interpretation since it excludes from analysis the ways of identification that have evolved to resolve two conflicts that face the contemporary Jew and jeopardize his Jewish identification, the conflict between traditional culture and certain elements of his new environment, and the conflict between his religion and the values and knowledge attendant with a secular education.