We Jews tend to see ourselves in a particular way. There’s a spectrum of Jewishness, with Charedi Jews at one end, secular Jews at the other, and the various shades of religiosity — Orthodox, Traditional, Progressive — situated between them.
When Jews move across the spectrum, in either direction, we intuitively “know” that they are becoming more or less frum, more or less assimilated, and we commonly judge them accordingly, often from our own vantage point on the spectrum.
There are empirical grounds upon which to justify this.
Research consistently shows that Progressive Jews score lower than Orthodox ones on most standard measures of Jewishness, including their likelihood to attend a Passover seder, participate in Jewish community activities, feel part of the Jewish people and give to Jewish charities.
So, viewed in simple and generalised terms, the further to the religious “left” people are, the less likely they are to be engaged in the particularities of Jewish life, and the more likely they are to acculturate to wider society.
Of course, we could view that dynamic differently. Research also shows that Progressive Jews consistently outscore Orthodox Jews on more universalist issues, such as climate-change consciousness, gender equality and support for disadvantaged or oppressed non-Jewish minorities. So one could equally make the case that the further to the religious “right” people are, the less likely they are to be engaged in the general issues that concern humanity as a whole, and the more likely they are to separate themselves off from wider society.
But recently published data gave me a whole new perspective on denominational distinctions which, I think, compels us to think anew. In 2022, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published a landmark report about the Jewish identities of European Jews, based on research undertaken with more than 16,000 Jews from 12 countries, including the UK.
Among the numerous questions posed in the survey, respondents were asked to report the type of Judaism in which they were brought up, and then the type with which they associate today. The data generated a composite picture of Jews across Europe, and the ways in which they move — or not — across the denominational spectrum over the courses of their lives.
The results showed something rather remarkable, particularly about the three groups who described their upbringing as either “Orthodox”, “Traditional”, or “Reform/Progressive”.
First, in all three cases, about six in ten had remained exactly where they had started, identifying with the identical brand of Judaism into which they had been inducted as children.
Second, in all three cases, about one in ten had shifted “rightwards”, choosing to identify with a more halachically observant label.
And third, again in all three cases, about three in ten had shifted “leftwards”, now identifying with a more liberal-minded label.
So Jews within these broad denominational groups all behave in the same way. No denomination is more responsible than any other for assimilation or dissimilation.
They are all having an identical effect, albeit from their different places on the denominational spectrum.
Once we understand this and accept that our Jewish identities are often based on the accident of our birth, perhaps we should regard different denominations and their adherents with rather more compassion than we often do.
There seems to be something larger at play affecting all of us — perhaps our personal proclivity to live with the status quo or to search for something different (sociologists of religion call the former group “dwellers” and the latter one “seekers”), or perhaps the wider secularist environment that leads more of us to move religiously leftwards than rightwards, even as most stay put.
It’s difficult to say for sure. But at the very least, the extraordinary similarities in the results for these three denominational groups should stop us in our tracks and prompt us to revisit our views. Maybe we’ve been thinking about denominational distinctions in a far too simplistic way?
