Jonathan Kay on the importance of Pittsburgh’s Jews in historical terms:
Although the Jewish population of Pittsburgh always has been relatively small, the city has an outsized role in the history of North American Jewry thanks to the “Pittsburgh Platform” of 1885, a landmark in the emergence of Reform Judaism and the broader pattern of Jewish assimilation. Drafted at the city’s Concordia Club (which now serves as a student center for the University of Pittsburgh), the document urged that Jews renounce national aspirations and promote inter-religious bridge-building. While the document has lapsed into obscurity, its signatories’ vision of modern, liberal, assimilated Judaism was prescient:
We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state. We recognize in Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason. We are convinced of the utmost necessity of preserving the historical identity with our great past. Christianity and Islam, being daughter religions of Judaism, we appreciate their providential mission, to aid in the spreading of monotheistic and moral truth. We acknowledge that the spirit of broad humanity of our age is our ally in the fulfillment of our mission, and therefore we extend the hand of fellowship to all who cooperate with us in the establishment of the reign of truth and righteousness among men.
The timing of the Pittsburgh Platform came at a terrible time in Jewish history. The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 had set off waves of pogroms against Jewish communities in Russia and Ukraine. Tens of thousands were slaughtered, and millions of Jewish survivors fled west, swelling Jewish communities across North America and beyond. Between 1880 and 1900, the Jewish population of the United States jumped by a factor of six, from 250,000 to 1.5-million.
Most of the Jews who came to the West didn’t want a new Pale of Settlement, and instead created a new, free kind of Jewish life within majority Christian countries. The vision of co-existence embedded within the Pittsburgh Platform has come to pass — notwithstanding horrific but isolated acts of violence from the likes of Robert Bowers.
The sight of armed state agents swarming a synagogue is hardly a novelty within Jewish history. The difference in Pittsburgh — the aspect of this week’s tragedy that would have shocked many of the 19th century Jews who fled the Cossacks — is that these police officers came to protect besieged Jews, not attack them. There will always be outbreaks of criminal anti-Semitism. The question is what happens when the men in uniform show up.
Eleven Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life. But the casualties also included four wounded (but as yet unnamed) police officers who put their life on the line to defend a Jewish house of worship. That fact is no comfort to the dead and grieving, and the officers themselves no doubt would say they were only doing their jobs. But it’s the one aspect of this whole sad story that, I believe, my own Jewish ancestors would have found uplifting.
