Excerpt from My First Eighty Years

European Jewry, up to a generation or so ago, was divided into two cultural groupings. Generally speaking, the Jews of Eastern Europe lived under the influence of the traditional Jewish culture and the Jews of Western Europe under the influence of the modern Western culture. The non/jewish environment in the towns and villages of Russia was at a far lower level than that of the Jews, whereas the general cultural and scientific level in Western Europe was higher than that of the Jews. This difference created a profound divergence in mood between Eastern Jews and Western Jews. The Jews of the East naturally concluded that their inherited Talmudic culture was vastly superior in content, mood and educative power to that of the world around them, and therefore, choosing the higher culture, they became intensely Jewish and lived on from generation to generation as if the outer world did not exist. They were quite right in their choice; they had selected the higher culture. The Jews of the West also chose what seemed to them to be the higher culture, which in their case was the culture of the environment. They abandoned the Talmud; they flocked to the universities and became authors of German, French, English literature. They soon grew to be more European than Jewish. The fault of the Eastern Jew was that he scorned modernity; the fault of the Western Jew was that he withdrew from history.

The finest mental and spiritual types in modern Jewish life came from a combination of both tendencies. The Jews of Galicia, for example, had the old East European Talmudic culture but being part of the Austrian Empire, assimilated, likewise, modern scientific thinking. So, too, many of the Jews from Russia and Poland moved into Western environments and the choicest spirits among them, without abandoning the inherited past, added to itthat which was best in the thought and mood of the modern world.

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