The following table sets out Roman military deployment, in geographical sequence according to Severan provinces, and lists modern/ancient name (where known), garrison unit (Severan), Notitia Command and individual entry with unit (references are to Notitia Dignitatum, ed. O. Seeck (Berlin 1876)).On Severan and earlier units of the auxilia listed in the Notitia, see Roxan (1976). Dash symbol (–) indicates that no military occupation is presumed, question mark (?) that a presumed occupation has left no record under that heading. Absence of any symbol indicates that no presumption is possible for military occupation or non-occupation.

The three classic works on American Judaism in the twentieth century appeared just after midcentury, all echoing the theme of Jews “fitting in” America and reflecting the rapid upward social mobility of American Jews. In American Judaism, Nathan Glazer noted the trend toward religious identification among Jews as a way to fit in as an ethnic group by using a religious framework. Even though America at midcentury was hostile to ethnicity, it was open to religiosity. In Conservative Judaism, Marshall Sklare observed that this most mainstream of the three movements differed from Orthodoxy in terms of decorum. While the core beliefs and practices of Conservative Judaism mirrored Orthodoxy, the former emphasized decorum in worship that was congruent with American religious life. In Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier, Sklare found that the Jews in the Midwestern suburb of Lakeville were ambivalent about Jewish particularism. The midcentury perspective tended to appreciate American Judaism in terms of assimilation. Adaptations to American life were most readily visible in religious behaviors. This perspective has continued to inform more recent studies such as Steven M. Cohen’s Jewish Identity and American Modernity, which used religious observance to gauge assimilation. Adaptations to American life were most readily visible in religious behaviors. This perspective has continued to inform more recent studies such as Steven M. Cohen’s Jewish Identity and American Modernity, which used religious observance to gauge assimilation. Beginning in the 1980s, American sociologists of religion introduced two new perspectives that have informed the understanding of contemporary American Judaism. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah introduced the notion of religious privatization and the sovereignty of the individual in making religious decisions.

Judaism in America dates to 1654, when twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil arrived at the small Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Two Jewish individuals are known to have been present in the Dutch colony shortly before the newcomers arrived, but it is to the advent of the twenty-three, in flight from the Portuguese recapture of northeastern Brazil after more than twenty years of Dutch rule there, that a Jewish presence in North America is usually traced. Few of the group that arrived in 1654 remained in New Amsterdam for any lengthy period, but during their stay they acquired land for a cemetery in 1656, thereby creating the first Jewish religious institution in North America.

Of the twenty-three refugees who arrived from Brazil, the two who were already present on Manhattan Island, and a few others who appeared in New Amsterdam during the 1650s and early 1660s, only Asser Levy is known with certainty to have remained permanently. A well-known historical figure because of his challenge to Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s attempts to severely restrict the civic rights of the Jews in New Amsterdam (New York after the British seized it in 1664), Levy continued to live there until his death in 1682, serving as a bridge between the refugees who came in 1654 and later Jewish arrivals. By the time of his death, a sufficient number of Jews had settled in New York so that it is possible to date a truly permanent Jewish presence in the colony, and by extension to all the English colonies on the mainland of North America, to the decade of the 1680s. Indeed, the growing Jewish presence in New York necessitated the acquisition of additional land for a cemetery in 1682.

Momentous transformations have taken place in the relationship between the Jewish community and other religious groups in America throughout the twentieth century. Tentatively beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement of interfaith dialogue between Jews and non-Jews served as a catalyst that helped to bring about the changes. This dialogue gained more ground in the decades between the two world wars and advanced considerably following the Second World War. It reached a “golden age”in the late 1960s and 1970s, when an unprecedented momentum for reconciliation and dialogue between the faiths flourished in America. Despite occasional setbacks, the interfaith dialogue helped to improve the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in America, thus helping to advance the well-being of the Jewish community in America.

THE BEGINNING OF THE DIALOGUE

Interfaith dialogue between Jews and non-Jews in America began in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, primarily between liberal Protestants and Jews. Jewish and Christian clergymen cooperated over civic issues, invited each other to give talks in their congregations, and, at times, participated in interfaith conferences. Such interactions were on a sporadic basis and usually entailed personal friendships between Jewish and Christian religious leaders. A special occasion in the history of interfaith dialogue in America took place in 1893, when the World Parliament of Religions (WPR) convened in Chicago, bringing together Protestants, Catholics, Greek Orthodox Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Bahai, Muslims, Native Americans, and representatives of other faiths as well.

The term American Judaism is not as clear as it might seem at first glance. Not too long ago the term Judaism seemed clear enough. People might disagree about its specific contents but agree that Judaism referred to the norms, values, and beliefs that characterized the Jewish religion. There were those who argued that Judaism was basically a culture rather than a religion, and some even argued that the term civilization was more suitable. However, at its core, Judaism - whether a religion, culture, or civilization - contained a set of norms, values, and beliefs, many of which, all would agree, referred to God and to the relationship between the Jewish people and God. These norms, values, and beliefs existed independently of how individual Jews behaved or what individual Jews believed. In other words, there was a structure or an essence called Judaism, and the behavior or beliefs of individual Jews could be measured by the extent to which they conformed to or deviated from the norms and beliefs of Judaism.

Within the confines of these norms existed differences between Judaism in different societies. American Judaism meant the particular customs, or emphases, or variations that were characteristic of the manner in which Judaism was practiced in the United States, distinct from the practice of Polish or German or Yemenite Judaism. This set of understandings had important implications, most especially for differences between the various Jewish denominations, that is, the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and more recently the Reconstructionist movements.

Denominational Judaism did not yet exist when Jews began settling in the American colonies during the seventeenth century. The primary dividing line between Jews at that time was ethnocultural - between Sephardim, who traced their ancestry to Spain or Portugal where their families had in many cases been forcibly converted to Catholicism, and Ashkenazim, who originated from German-speaking lands. Although synagogue ritual for both groups was meticulously traditional, individual religious behavior varied widely. In keeping with European precedent, each American community maintained only one official synagogue, run by a lay board. Since there were no ordained rabbis in the country, knowledgeable congregants conducted services. Gradually, the natural growth and increasing heterogeneity of the Jewish population, internecine conflict, and the American penchant for individualism and freedom of association splintered the unified Jewish communities and led to the founding of multiple congregations in the same city.

REFORM, THE FIRST DENOMINATION

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the Civil War, a stream of Jewish immigrants from German-speaking lands planted the first Jewish “denomination” in America, Reform. Although it was technically the Sephardi congregation, Beth Elohim of Charleston, South Carolina, that first espoused so-called Reform Judaism in the 1820s, the German newcomers made this form of Judaism the primary American expression of the religion until well into the twentieth century.

Denominations existed in American Judaism by about 1880, but only that of Reform was clearly defined and organized. The new period would see the continued growth of Reform and the expansion on a massive scale of Orthodoxy and Conservatism. Controversy and creativity were found within all these movements.

In 1880, there were about 260,000 Jews among the over 50 million inhabitants of the United States, constituting a small minority of only 0.5 percent of the population. They were an articulate and much-noticed group, as their communal activities and synagogue sermons were often reported in general newspapers. Moreover, numerous books, essays, and the weekly Jewish press kept them and their religion in the public eye. America, as a deeply Christian country, could not ignore the Jews in its midst, the ancient denier and challenger of Christianity.

During this era, the Jewish religion as practiced in the America of 1880 was largely Reform Judaism. It had first appeared, but briefly, in 1828 and began its unbroken history around 1845. Of the dozens of Orthodox synagogues that immigrant German and Polish Jews founded in cities and small towns, all but a few “reformed” their worship by approximately 1870. Men and women no longer sat separately; prayers and the reading of the Torah were drastically shortened, and the trop (chant) of its reading was abolished; the two days of festivals were reduced to one; and the vernacular sermon by the rabbi became the center of the service.

Even in comparison with the rest of the history of the Diaspora, the relationship of Zionism and Israel to American Jews has long been notable for its ironies and contradictions. In the prestate era, even though Zionism was largely irrelevant to American Jews, their extraordinary efforts at fundraising and political support made possible the very birth of the Jewish state. Since 1967, once Israel was established, there has been no other country whose citizens have been as committed to the success of another country as American Jews have been to Israel. Nevertheless, the vast majority of American Jews have remained astonishingly ignorant of the object of their devotion. In spite of all of their support for and obsession with Israel, the Jewish state has had relatively little effect on the religious and cultural life of American Jews. The key to these apparent contradictions lies in the fact that, from the beginning to the present, American Jews’ response to Zionism and Israel has been circumscribed by American priorities and needs. From their early indifference to Zionism, through a quarter century of unequivocal support for Israel following its foundation, to the breakdown of consensus in the 1970s and 1980s leading to the present fragmentation, American Jews have related to Israel primarily through their American identity.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, European Zionists and American Jews were diametrically opposed in spirit, ideology, worldviews, and lifestyle. Classical Zionism saw anti-Semitism as all pervasive, ineradicable, and impervious to the liberalism in which American Jews had placed their trust. Believing that diasporic life was inevitably doomed, Zionists maintained that the only solution was for all Jews to emmigrate to Palestine and form a state of their own where they could fully and safely live out authentic, Jewish lives.

To evoke the American Jewish urban experience may seem like an exercise in nostalgia, indulging in a history whose bearing on the lives of American Jews today is debatable. What, after all, is urban about American Jews today? Presently, almost all Jews live in cities, towns, suburbs, and metropolitan areas that are officially considered “urban” by U.S. census standards. However, nowadays, urban holds a rather different meaning from that used in the census; it refers to the central city of a metropolitan area. More specifically, it refers to the dense and historic inner city, which has been steadily eclipsed demographically by the growth of suburbs and exurbs and by migration to developing new cities in the South, Southwest, and West. In fact, urban today has an even narrower meaning and often evokes the city of minorities, the Hispanics and African Americans, who tend to make up the greater part of the central city population. This kind of urban city brings to mind the social problems, regardless of their origins, currently associated with inner-city minorities. With this kind of city, American Jews today have little direct experience.

THE AMERICAN JEWISH URBAN EXPERIENCE

At the close of World War II, two great migrations began emptying the inner cities of Jews, leaving these areas for the most part without a substantial Jewish population. These two migratory waves resulted in a radical redistribution of the Jewish population of the United States in the thirty years after World War II. The first migration was to the suburbs; the second was to cities in California and Florida. The demographic change can be traced in the annual Jewish population statistics of the American Jewish Year Book. The data show a steady rise of the cities of the South and Southwest to the point where the second and third largest Jewish population concentrations today are no longer Chicago and Philadelphia, but Los Angeles and Miami.

Among the questions posed by sociologists of American Jewry, there is one that is perennial and basic but that has always seemed to elude easy answer: What is the content of American Jews’ “Jewishness”?What beliefs and behaviors, self-understandings and commitments do Jews embrace as a consequence of being Jewish?

Writing from the vantage point of the early 1980s, I suggested that, for a large number of American Jews, and especially for those most active in the institutional structures of the American Jewish community, many of the answers to these questions were provided by what I called an American Jewish “civil religion.” This civil religion defined a way of being Jewish that enabled its adherents to give meaning to their identities as Jews by connecting them to a great historic drama of destruction and rebirth. Such Jews made the survival of the Jewish people their sacred cause. They supported Israel and marched to free Soviet Jews. They gave generously to philanthropies in order to express their solidarity with fellow Jews and their commitment to the Jewish value of tzedakah (philanthropy and social justice). They educated their children as Jews, and they gathered at key points during their lives and during the year to publicly acknowledge and celebrate their Jewishness and their attachment to Jewish tradition. They celebrated as well their success as Americans, always wary of anti-Semitism, but feeling that in America they had found a congenial home, not just another way station in a long journey. With mostly good humor, these Jews accepted the fact that, when it came to theology and observance of Jewish law, two Jews meant three opinions.

Every religion, ancient and modern, has special rites of passage tied to both biological and sociological events that typify life. These rituals flow seamlessly from birth through puberty, marriage, and death. During the past half-century, rites have been created to match newly recognized passages. As people live longer and, in America, become more affluent and thus gain leisure time, newly conceptualized stages emerge, such as adolescence, midlife, empty nest, menopause, and golden age. In addition, family formations have shifted, leading to new rituals. In Judaism, special life cycle rituals have surrounded birth, puberty, marriage, death, and mourning. At the same time, traditional rites have been revised and expanded, particularly as a result of the influence of the women’s movement. Mothers, as well as fathers, have sought and even demanded inclusion in birth, adolescent, and marriage rituals for themselves and for their daughters.

This essay is focused on factors within and outside of the communal life of twentieth-century American Jewry that enhanced the salience of the traditional rites of passage accompanying birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Particular attention is paid to developments in the American Jewish cultural and religious context of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The contraction, expansion, and transformation of rites of passage is explored within several of the many expressions of American Judaism. The impact of the Jewish feminist movement that grew out of the Conservative movement and spread to Modern Orthodoxy and Reform, the empowering of laity through the Havurah and New Age spirituality movements, and the reintroduction of traditional rituals to Reform Judaism are considered as formative elements enhancing the significance of life cycle rituals in contemporary American Jewish life.