Yoram Hazony & the Custodianship Question

Hazony inverts the consensus school’s move at every step. The consensus historians dissolved Jewish particularity into American universalism so they could enter Protestant institutions. Hazony reconstructs particularity to defend a Jewish nation against the universalism those same Jews helped build. The two projects sit at opposite ends of the same Jewish century.
The consensus school needed a thin America. Hofstadter (1916-1970), Hartz (1919-1986), and Boorstin (1914-2004) wrote a history that emptied American identity of its Anglo-Protestant content and refilled it with abstract liberal principles available to anyone. That thinning was the price of their entry and also its justification. If America was Lockean proceduralism rather than Anglo-Protestant inheritance, Jews belonged not as guests but as full participants. The dissolution of particularity served their position by eliminating the ground on which they could be excluded.
Hazony needs a thick everything. He wants thick Israel, thick Jewish identity, thick American Christian conservatism, thick national tradition. His project assumes thin polities collapse and that the consensus historians’ victory was a Pyrrhic one for both Jews and gentiles. The universalist America that made room for assimilated Jews has, in his reading, dissolved the cultural inheritance that gave the country its cohesion, and the dissolution now threatens Jewish security because a fragmenting America cannot continue to underwrite a Jewish state.
On custodianship, Hazony might side with the 1930s WASP gatekeepers on the structural question and against them on the particular exclusion. He thinks custodianship is real, necessary, and ineliminable. Every institution transmits a particular formation. The claim of neutral procedural transmission is always a cover for the actual coalition doing the transmitting. Lowell (1856-1943) at Harvard was right that custodianship is unavoidable and wrong only in thinking it could be limited to Anglo-Saxon Protestants in a country with substantial Jewish populations whose particularist tradition was equally serious.
That last clause is where Hazony’s project gets interesting and also where its tensions emerge. He wants a custodianship model that allows multiple thick traditions to coexist within a constitutional framework drawn from a shared Biblical inheritance. His Hebrew Republic argument runs that American Protestantism and Jewish covenant share enough common Biblical ground to support a national constitutionalism that respects the particularity of both. This is custodianship as confederation rather than custodianship as singular WASP guardianship.
Whether the model holds up under sociological pressure is another question. The consensus historians did real work that Hazony’s framework has trouble accounting for. Hofstadter’s psychology of mass movements caught something true about the relation between status anxiety and political paranoia, even if his Eastern European Jewish formation shaped what counted as paranoid and what counted as legitimate grievance. Trilling (1905-1975) reading of American literature exposed evasions the WASP critics could not see. The outsider’s gift was a real gift, even if it came packaged with the assimilation strategy.
Hazony’s framework treats this gift as a corrosive solvent. The same distancing capacity that lets you see Hawthorne’s repressions also lets you dissolve the cultural inheritance the next generation might have needed. Once you train scholars to read every tradition as a coalition operation, you have eliminated the possibility of receiving any tradition. The hermeneutics of suspicion eats its host.
Can Hazony’s Biblical framework avoids becoming another interested coalition strategy? The honest answer is no, and Hazony might half-concede this if pressed. His framework serves a coalition: religious Jews who want sovereign Jewish nationhood to be philosophically respectable, American religious conservatives who want intellectual ballast against secular liberalism, post-liberal intellectuals who want a critique of universalism that does not collapse into pure ethnonationalism, and Israeli political and donor networks that want a sophisticated case for Jewish particularism in English. Apply your four diagnostic questions to Hazony and the coalition shape becomes visible. The Tikvah Fund, the Herzl Institute, the national conservative conferences, the religious Zionist publishing world all provide the status, the income, and the protection. Speaking plainly against religious Zionism, against American Christian Zionists whose theology he half disagrees with but politically needs, against Israeli ethnonationalism in its harsher forms, might cost him part of his base. The truths that might cost him his position include the awkwardness that his particularism extends to Jews and Anglo-Protestants but not symmetrically to Palestinian Arabs or to White European Christians making structurally identical arguments to his.
The defense Hazony might offer is that all positions are coalition positions and the choice is between honest and dishonest particularism rather than between particularism and neutrality. That is a real argument and possibly correct as a meta-principle. But the move converts coalition operation from something to be analyzed into something to be performed openly, which lets the analyst off the hook for examining his own coalition’s operations. The consensus historians performed neutrality while doing coalition work. Hazony performs particularism while doing coalition work. The performance is more honest in his case, but the underlying logic is the same.
The deepest difference between Hazony and the consensus school is not philosophical but historical. The consensus historians wrote when American Jews needed access to institutions from which they had been excluded. Hazony writes when American Jews have unprecedented access to those institutions and when the institutions themselves have decayed in ways that threaten Jewish security. The consensus framework served Jewish interests in 1955. The Hazony framework might serve Jewish interests in 2025, though only for Jews who locate their safety in Israel and in religiously serious American Christianity rather than in the secular liberal consensus their grandparents helped build. The two strategies represent different Jewish bets about where safety lies, and they cannot both be right.
The WASPs lost their nerve. Hazony has not. He could write a defense of Anglo-Protestant custodianship that no living Anglo-Protestant intellectual would write, and he could write it without the embarrassment that paralyzes contemporary heirs of that tradition.
The reasons are several and they compound.
Hazony does not carry the guilt freight that disabled WASP self-defense after the 1960s. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the immigration debates of the Hart-Celler period taught WASP elites that defending their inheritance sounded indistinguishable from defending segregation, imperialism, and racial exclusion. The vocabulary of cultural particularism became the vocabulary of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, and respectable WASPs spent the next sixty years demonstrating that they had nothing in common with those men by relinquishing the cultural inheritance those men had claimed to defend. Hazony has none of this baggage. He can say that Anglo-Protestant tradition built American freedom, that Puritan covenant theology grounds American constitutionalism, that the King James Bible shaped American moral imagination, and the sentences carry no implication that he personally is defending his own racial privilege. He is a foreigner praising a tradition not his own, which gives him standing the inheritors no longer claim.
He also has theological reasons that WASP intellectuals abandoned. Hazony takes covenant seriously as a political category. He thinks the Hebrew Bible is a political document and that Puritan readings of it produced a tradition of national constitutionalism worth defending. Contemporary mainline Protestant intellectuals cannot say this because they no longer believe it. They demythologized their inheritance two generations ago. Hazony, an Orthodox Jew, treats their grandfathers’ theology with more seriousness than they do. He can defend Cotton Mather’s framework better than any living Congregationalist because he still inhabits a covenantal worldview that the Congregationalists abandoned for ethical culture.
The coalition logic also points this way. Hazony’s project needs American religious conservatives as partners in a common defense of national particularism. He cannot have that partnership if those conservatives have no inheritance to defend. So he has every incentive to talk the Anglo-Protestant tradition back into existence as a living thing rather than a closed museum. He needs the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America and the conservative Episcopalians and the Reformed networks to recover confidence that their tradition is defensible. His Biblical Christian audience cannot be a coalition partner if it is ashamed of itself.
WASP elites cannot perform this recovery because they have spent four generations defining their respectability against it. The transformation Klingenstein describes in literary academia, where the heirs of the Anglo-Protestant tradition first lost confidence and then conceded transmission to outsiders, has its parallel in every other elite institution. The Episcopal Church, the Ivy League boards, the major foundations, the Northeast investment banks, the corporate boardrooms: all of them spent the postwar period demonstrating that they were no longer the parochial institutions of their grandfathers. The demonstration succeeded so completely that they no longer have grandfathers to invoke. To defend Anglo-Protestant inheritance now would require them to reverse the entire course of their family histories over three generations, which is asking a lot of any class.
There is also a personality difference. Hazony has the combative temperament of the Israeli intellectual class, which sees argument as a normal mode of political life rather than a breach of civility. He will say plainly what an American patrician finds vulgar to say. The patrician tradition of understated authority, of letting institutions speak for themselves, of treating overt cultural defense as bad form, was a luxury available only when the institutions were secure. Once the institutions came under sustained attack, the patrician style became a disability. WASP elites continued performing understatement while their inheritance was being analyzed out of existence. Hazony does not perform understatement about anything.
The deeper point is that defending a tradition requires belonging to a community that still believes the tradition is worth defending, and the WASP elite no longer constitutes such a community. They have intermarried, secularized, and dispersed into the general professional managerial class. There is no Boston Brahmin community left to defend Boston Brahmin culture, no Philadelphia Main Line community to defend Main Line manners, no Virginia gentry community to defend Virginia gentry tradition. The institutions persist but the communal substrate has dissolved.
Hazony belongs to a community that has not dissolved. Orthodox Jews retained the dense communal structure, the religious authority, the marriage patterns, and the textual tradition that American Anglo-Protestants lost. He speaks from inside something. When he tells American religious conservatives to recover their tradition, he is modeling something he can do because his tradition is still operational. The model is unavailable to people whose tradition has been on life support since the 1960s.
The grim joke is that the strongest contemporary case for Anglo-Protestant custodianship of American institutions will likely be written by an Orthodox Jew, published by a Jewish institute, funded by Jewish donors, and read by religious conservatives who lack the formation to write it themselves. The consensus historians thinned Anglo-Protestant America to make room for Jews. Hazony might thicken it back up to make room for a different Jewish strategy. The same Jewish community, two strategies apart, working both sides of the WASP inheritance because the WASPs cannot work it themselves.