Part One. The Custodianship Question In Canada, Latin America, Africa Australia, New Zealand Europe Asia Alliance Theory
My Adventist background gives me a useful lens here. Imagine a group of secular rationalists gaining entry to Adventist theological education on the grounds that the exclusion of non-Adventists was irrational prejudice. They bring scholarly gifts. They produce important work on Adventist history and theology. But they do not believe in the investigative judgment or the seventh-day Sabbath or the remnant theology, and over time the institution they have entered stops being able to transmit those commitments with conviction. The enlargement produced real gains and real losses, and the enlightened rationalism narrative cannot see the losses because it has already decided that the specific formation being lost was just irrational prejudice in the first place.
My father’s trajectory at Glacier View is the tragic version of this story from inside a religious community rather than an academic one. The tradition he challenged was not simply bigotry. It was load-bearing theology whose defenders understood, correctly, that removing it would change what Adventism was. The parallel is not exact but the structure is the same. Enlargement and transformation are not separable, and the celebration of enlargement without honest accounting of transformation is a convenient belief serving the interests of those who benefited from the change.
When you hear about “Enlarging America,” that sounds wonderful, but what are the losses? When you enlarge a community, does it only get better? When America’s English departments enlarged, did only good things result? If not, who gained and who lost?
The title “Enlarging America” carries an implicit valorization that forecloses the cost-benefit analysis before it begins. Enlarging sounds good. Who could be against enlargement, inclusion, expansion? The framing does the coalition work before the argument starts. But think about a marriage. Enlarging a marriage means diluting the particular intimacy that made it what it was. Enlarging a community’s standards means those standards become less binding, less distinctive, less capable of generating the coherence that made the community function. Enlarging a profession means the criteria for membership shift, which benefits some and costs others.
What were the costs in enlarging English departments?
The WASP literary establishment that Jewish scholars entered and transformed had real virtues alongside its obvious vices. It had a coherent sense of what literature was for, a set of shared references, a confidence in making judgments, and a connection to a specific civilizational inheritance that gave its criticism a strong foundation. The New Critics, whatever their limitations, had standards they could apply and defend. What replaced that establishment was in many ways richer and more diverse, but it was also more fragmented, more uncertain about its own foundations, and more vulnerable to the ideological capture that produced the current state of literary academia, which most honest observers across the spectrum find embarrassing.
There is also a cost on the Jewish side that the celebratory framing tends to minimize. The price of entry into WASP literary academe was substantial assimilation. Trilling’s famous remark that he had no interest in contributing to a tradition of Jewish literature in English captures this. The scholars who enlarged America did so partly by making themselves less distinctively Jewish, by trading particularity for universalism. The Orthodox communities in Los Angeles represent one response to that bargain, a refusal of it, which is why the tension between the two worlds remains alive.
When it comes to community, is enlargement and integrity in structural tension? Every institution that enlarges must decide which of its existing features are essential and which are negotiable. That decision is never made cleanly or consciously. It is made through the coalition politics, which means the features that survive are not necessarily the most valuable ones. They are the ones whose defenders had the most institutional power at the moment the enlargement happened.
The price paid for enlarging America has not been examined in mainstream academic discourse, which is a convenient belief protecting a coalition. The people who benefited institutionally from the enlargement have strong reasons not to ask whether anything was lost, and the people who might raise the question have strong reasons to stay quiet about it.
What happens if we transposed this enlargement project to Jewish institutions? What kind of tribe welcomes outsiders analyzing and critiquing their sacred stories? That doesn’t make evolutionary sense.
If you are normal person inside your religion, every other religion in the world looks satanic.
Conventional framing obscures how the logic of particularism and the logic of preservation apply symmetrically across cases even when the political valence differs.
The English literature case is clarifying because the passage of time makes the stakes legible without triggering current coalition alarms. A tradition rooted in Chaucer, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Eliot, and Hopkins has a Christian architecture. The categories, the assumptions about what literature is for, the sense of what constitutes moral seriousness, the relationship between beauty and transcendence, all of it is saturated with Christian formation even in its secular variants. Matthew Arnold’s culture is secularized Christianity. Leavis’s moral seriousness is secularized Nonconformism. A Jewish scholar entering that tradition was not entering a neutral humanistic space. He was entering a specific inheritance with its own integrity. The unease of Christians was not simply bigotry any more than Orthodox Jews not wanting non-Jews teaching Talmud in yeshivas. It was also a recognition, sometimes inarticulate, that the Christian tradition had a character that would change under new custodians.
A Jewish state is a particular project with a particular character that depends on a particular demographic and cultural foundation. The argument for Zionism was never that Israel would be a neutral civic space that happened to be located in the Middle East. It was that Jews required a homeland that was theirs, where Jewish civilization could develop without the constant pressure of existing as a minority inside someone else’s civilizational project. That argument has the same structure as the argument that English literature had a Christian character worth preserving. The person who finds the Jewish entry into English literary academia entirely unproblematic but finds Jewish demographic concerns about Israel troubling is not applying a consistent principle. They are applying coalition loyalty.
The Christian unease point is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as prejudice. A tradition is not simply a set of texts. It is a living relationship between texts, readers, institutional practices, and the communities that produced and sustained them. When the custodians change, the tradition changes, not necessarily for the worse, but not necessarily for the better either, and always in ways that produce real losses alongside real gains. The Christians who were uneasy about Jewish scholars reshaping their literary tradition were responding to something real even when their response took ugly forms. The ugliness of some responses does not invalidate the underlying perception that Christian civilization was at stake.
There is an asymmetry in how these questions get treated depending on whose particularism is under discussion. Jewish particularism in the Zionist context is permitted as a topic of serious discussion in some circles and condemned in others. Christian particularism about their own literary tradition is either dismissed as bigotry or never raised as a legitimate category. The convenient beliefs framework explains this asymmetry. Different coalitions have different stakes in which particularisms get taken seriously, and the moral language deployed in each case tracks the coalition interest rather than a consistent principle about the value of cultural particularity.
The honest position, which almost nobody in public life holds consistently, is that particularism is a general feature of human communities, that every tradition has integrity worth preserving, that enlargement always requires tradeoffs, and that the question of how much enlargement a community can absorb before it becomes something different is a legitimate question in every case, not just the cases your coalition happens to favor.
What might have been lost when people proudly not Christian became influential interpreters of Christian literature and thus developed status using their distinctive moral grammar not easily legible to those outside of the tribe?
English literature from Beowulf through 1950 is not just literature that happens to have been written by Christians. It is literature whose organizing categories, whose deepest assumptions about what a human being is, what time means, what suffering is for, what beauty points toward, and what the good life requires, are Christian categories. Not decoratively Christian. Structurally Christian. The literature cannot be fully read without those categories being alive in the reader in some way, even provisionally, even skeptically. When Milton writes about the Fall he is not using the Fall as a metaphor for something else. He means it. When Herbert writes about God’s absence he is not performing a rhetorical exercise. He is in anguish about a relationship he believes is real. When Dante structures the entire cosmos around the possibility of beatific vision he is not constructing an allegory whose real content is something more modern and palatable. He believes in Hell.
What was lost when the custodians of this literature were people who brought to it what Klingenstein’s own text describes as a distancing mechanism, reading it as a series of metaphors rather than as an immediate appeal to identity, is precisely the capacity to transmit what the literature was for. Not what it is about. What it is for. Literature in the Christian tradition was for formation. It was not a set of texts to be interpreted. It was a set of experiences to be undergone, a set of encounters with truth mediated through beauty, a training in perception and moral seriousness that was inseparable from the tradition’s theological convictions. Losing custodians who inhabited that function meant losing the transmission of formation and retaining only the transmission of analysis.
This is a specific and nameable loss. Students who encountered Milton through a secular Jewish critic brilliant at close reading and ideological analysis learned something real and valuable about Milton. They did not learn what a Christian undergraduate at Oxford learned from a Christian don, which was how to see. The difference is not trivial. It is the difference between studying a map of a country and living in it.
The second loss is related but distinct. The people who brought the distancing mechanism to Christian literature were not neutral interpreters. They had specific orientations, histories, and grievances that shaped what they saw. A scholar whose ancestors were excluded from European civic life partly on Christian grounds, who grew up in a culture that defined itself partly against Christian supersessionism, who experienced the Christian literary tradition as something simultaneously magnificent and implicated in his people’s suffering, reads that tradition differently from someone who grew up inside it. Neither reading is simply wrong. But the outside reading tends to see certain things with great clarity, the tradition’s exclusions, its ideological functions, its uses of power, and to be structurally less able to see other things such as the tradition’s internal coherence, its spiritual achievements, and the ways it worked on the people who were formed by it.
The rise of ideological criticism, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, is partly a consequence of this shift in custodianship. These critical approaches share a common feature. They read literature as a document of social forces rather than as an experience of transcendence. They are brilliant at revealing what literature encodes and conceals about power, gender, race, and class. They are constitutively unable to account for why people who were not in positions of power, who were not the beneficiaries of the ideological structures the criticism exposes, nonetheless found the literature transformative, consoling, and true. The medieval peasant who wept at a passion play was not doing so because Christianity served his class interests. The person who is moved to tears by the final canto of the Paradiso is not responding to an ideological apparatus. Something else is happening, and the critical apparatus that replaced the older custodianship cannot see it.
The third loss is the loss of inhabitation as a critical method. The best Christian critics of the tradition, CS Lewis being the obvious example, practiced a form of reading that required temporarily surrendering your own framework to see what the text was trying to do on its own terms. Lewis called it receiving rather than using a work of art. The distinction is between experiencing what the work intends to produce in you and harvesting it for material to support your own prior conclusions. The distancing mechanism Klingenstein describes is structurally a using rather than a receiving. The scholar who reads Christian literature as a series of metaphors has decided in advance that the literal level does not apply to him and is therefore already filtering the experience through a prior framework. What gets lost is the possibility of being surprised by the text, of having the text do something to you that you did not expect and could not have predicted from your prior position.
The fourth loss is institutional and concerns transmission across generations. The Christian literary tradition survived for centuries partly because each generation of readers was formed by the tradition before they were asked to evaluate it. You encountered the Bible, Dante, Milton, Herbert, and Donne as a child and adolescent, in contexts that were alive with the tradition’s living practice, before you had the critical apparatus to maintain ironic distance. The formation preceded the evaluation. What happened when secular scholars became the primary institutional custodians is that the order reversed. Students encountered the texts through critical apparatus first. They learned to analyze before they learned to receive. The texts became objects of study rather than sources of formation and the tradition lost the capacity to reproduce itself across generations through the normal channels of literary education.
The fifth loss is the one Edward Alexander named. The Jewish scholars who gained custodianship of the Christian literary tradition lost something too, specifically the capacity to think clearly about Jewish particularity and Jewish survival from within a coherent Jewish framework. Trilling could not make the argument for Zionism because he had already committed himself to a universalism that made all particularisms equally suspect. The same intellectual formation that gave him the distancing mechanism he needed to read Christian literature as metaphor rather than lived truth gave him the distancing mechanism that made his own tradition’s claims feel embarrassing rather than compelling. He enlarged America and diminished his capacity to defend Israel in the same move. That is a loss on both sides of the transaction.
The sixth and perhaps deepest loss is the hardest to name without sounding like an argument for exclusion, which it is not. Every thick tradition requires custodians who love it not despite its particularity but through it. Not people who find it interesting as a historical or cultural phenomenon. People who find it true. The Christian literary tradition at its greatest was produced by people who believed they were participating in a cosmic drama whose stakes were ultimate. Dante was not writing an interesting poem about medieval cosmology. He was mapping the structure of reality as he understood it with everything he had. Milton was not producing an impressive exercise in blank verse. He was doing theology in the only form he believed adequate to his subject. The tradition they created bears the marks of that ultimate seriousness. Reading it without that seriousness is like reading love letters as examples of epistolary style. You can learn something real. You cannot learn the most important thing.
What the shift in custodianship produced, over the course of several decades, is a literary academy that is extraordinarily sophisticated about texts as objects and constitutively unable to transmit texts as experiences. It can analyze what Milton meant, trace his sources, expose his ideological commitments, situate him in his historical moment, and deconstruct his gender politics. It cannot do what his first readers expected their encounter with him to do, which is change what they saw when they looked at the world. That loss is not recoverable through better criticism. It requires a different relationship to the tradition than analysis can provide. And the institutional conditions that might produce that relationship, custodians who inhabit rather than analyze, who love rather than study, who are formed by rather than trained about the tradition, have been progressively dismantled over the period elites celebrate as enlargement.
None of this means the enlargement was wrong or that the scholars who achieved it did not contribute. Harry Levin on Joyce, Trilling on Keats and Arnold, Abrams on Romantic poetry, these are achievements that enriched what was knowable about the texts. The question is not whether anything was gained. The question is whether anything was lost, and the honest answer is yes, something specific and important and not easily replaced was lost, and the celebration of the gain without the accounting of the loss is exactly the convenient belief that conventional framing cannot escape.
Here’s a related point. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament oppose sex between men. If homosexual feelings are key to your identity, how can you be at ease and indifferent to a tradition hostile to what is sacred to you?
If your sexual identity is the organizing center of your self-understanding, and if the tradition you curate regards the expression of that identity as an abomination in the precise technical sense that term carries in Leviticus, you are not a neutral custodian of that tradition. You have a stake in how it gets read. The stake is not trivial. It is existential. The text is saying something about you, about the validity of your life, about whether what feels most sacred to you is sacred or is condemned. That is not a philological question you can bracket while doing close reading. It is a question about whether you are the kind of person the tradition regards as fully human.
The response available to a gay scholar reading Leviticus or Romans or the relevant passages in the New Testament is the distancing mechanism Klingenstein describes for the Jewish scholars reading Milton. You can read it as a historical document reflecting ancient Near Eastern purity codes with no binding authority. You can read it as metaphor for something else. You can read it as ideology serving specific social functions. You can read it as the product of a patriarchal culture whose categories no longer apply. All of these readings allow you to engage the text without being engaged by it in the way the text intends. They are ways of maintaining the analytical distance that prevents the text from doing its intended work on you.
But this means the gay scholar reading the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament on sexuality is in the same position as the secular Jewish scholar reading Paradise Lost. He is reading from outside the tradition’s own self-understanding. He cannot inhabit the text’s assumption that the categories it is deploying are real and binding without simultaneously condemning himself. So he must read it otherwise, and that otherwise reading, however sophisticated and however illuminating about the text’s historical and ideological dimensions, cannot transmit what the tradition believed itself to be doing when it made these claims.
This is not an argument that gay people should not read or study these texts. It is an argument about what is lost when the primary institutional custodians of a tradition have structural reasons to read it from outside its own self-understanding. The loss is real regardless of whether the tradition is right about what it claims. A tradition that insists on its own unity as a condition of being received cannot be transmitted by custodians who need to fragment it in order to survive their encounter with it.
The parallel to the Jewish scholars is precise but with an additional layer. The Jewish scholars needed the distancing mechanism to read a Christian tradition that was magnificent but implicated in Jewish suffering. Their outsideness was historical and communal. The gay scholar needs the distancing mechanism to read a Jewish and Christian tradition that is magnificent but makes specific condemning claims about his inner life. His outsideness is personal and identity-constituting. If anything the second case creates more pressure toward distorting readings than the first because the stakes are more immediate. You can maintain analytic distance from a tradition that persecuted your ancestors more easily than from a tradition that condemns what you experience as your deepest self.
The academy’s response to this problem has been to celebrate the multiply-positioned outsider reader as producing richer and more honest criticism than the insider who cannot see the tradition’s exclusions. There is something to this. Outsiders do see things insiders cannot. The question is whether what the outsider sees is more important than what the insider transmits. The answer depends entirely on what you think literature is for. If it is for ideological analysis, the outsider’s position is an asset. If it is for formation and transmission of a living inheritance, the outsider’s position is a liability regardless of how intellectually gifted the outsider is.
The Hebrew Bible’s sexual ethics are not incidental to Orthodox Jewish life. They are load-bearing. The Orthodox community you find restful is a community that takes those ethics seriously as binding obligations rather than as historical curiosities or cultural artifacts. The gay person who enters that community must either accept the tradition’s claim on its own terms, which means accepting a framework that regards the expression of his sexual identity as forbidden, or maintain a private distance from the tradition’s authority that is incompatible with the kind of full inhabitation that produces the comfort you described. There is no third option that is fully honest. The tradition does not offer one. This is part of what makes the Orthodox world demanding in ways that more accommodating versions of Judaism are not, and it is part of what makes the comfort you find there real rather than sentimental. A tradition that asks nothing is not the same as a tradition that asks everything.
The broader implication for literary custodianship is that the progressive expansion of the academy to include people with strong identity-based reasons to resist the tradition’s central claims has not produced a more honest engagement with those claims. It has produced a more sophisticated apparatus for avoiding them while appearing to engage them. The texts are read. The condemning passages are noted. The historical context is provided. The ideological function is analyzed. And the tradition’s claim to be making true statements about reality that bind the reader is quietly set aside as the price of admission to the scholarly conversation. That is a form of intellectual dishonesty that has become so thoroughly institutionalized that it no longer registers as dishonesty. It registers as sophistication.
I find it impossible to imagine choosing a custodian for your sacred objects from a member of a group who has long experienced your sacred claims as exterminationist threats, except that what is sacred and what is exterminationist to groups varies with time and place. I do not believe there is, for example, an essential Christian or Jew or Muslim. These identities vary in time and place.
The word exterminationist is precise rather than hyperbolic. From the perspective of someone whose identity is organized around what the tradition condemns, the tradition’s central claims are not just wrong or outdated. They are claims that, if taken seriously and acted upon, threaten the legitimacy and in some historical contexts the physical safety of people like him. The person who experiences the tradition’s sexual ethics as a death sentence, literal in some historical periods and institutional in others, is not being paranoid. He is reading the historical record accurately. The tradition has been used to justify persecution, exclusion, violence, and in some jurisdictions execution. That history is real and the person who carries it cannot encounter the tradition’s texts as neutral objects.
This means the custodianship problem is not simply about intellectual distance or methodological limitation. It is about something more fundamental. You cannot ask someone to faithfully transmit claims that he experiences as aimed at his elimination. The best you can get is a sophisticated management of those claims, a way of handling them that neutralizes their threat while appearing to engage them seriously. That management is not neutral scholarship. It is a survival strategy dressed as criticism.
The irony compounds when you consider that the tradition being managed in this way is often great. The Hebrew Bible is among the most extraordinary documents in human history. The New Testament transformed the ancient world. Milton and Dante and Herbert produced works of permanent human significance. The scholars who brought the distancing mechanism to these texts were often brilliant and illuminating about real features of the works. But the distancing mechanism was not optional for them. It was the condition of their survival in the encounter. And the thing the distancing mechanism prevents is precisely the full force of the tradition’s claim landing on the reader as it was intended to land.
This is why CS Lewis remains the uncomfortable exception. He converted into the tradition as an adult, which means he knew what it felt like to be outside it and chose to come inside. His criticism has a quality that is almost entirely absent from the secular academy, the quality of someone who believes the tradition is making true claims and reads the texts in the light of that belief. His reading of Milton does not explain Paradise Lost. It receives it. The difference is audible on every page and it is the difference that the distancing mechanism cannot produce regardless of how sophisticated it becomes.
The Jewish scholars Klingenstein celebrates brought gifts to the tradition they entered. But they also brought the distancing mechanism as a condition of survival. The gay scholars who followed them brought the same mechanism under even more intense pressure. The feminist scholars brought a version of it shaped by the tradition’s systematic exclusion of women from authority and authorship. Each successive wave of outsiders enriched the analytical apparatus and weakened the transmission function. Each generation of students learned more about what the texts meant and less about what they were for. The tradition became better studied and less lived, more analyzed and less inhabited, more visible as an ideological formation and less available as a source of formation.
What I have identified is not a failure of individual scholars. It is a structural consequence of asking people to transmit a tradition that they experience, with good historical reasons, as organized in part around their exclusion or condemnation. The tradition cannot be transmitted under those conditions. It can only be managed. And the management, however sophisticated, is not the same thing as the transmission. The sacred objects are in the wrong hands not because the custodians are malicious but because the custodians cannot help experiencing the objects as weapons that have been used against people like them. You cannot ask someone to guard with love and fidelity the thing that has been used to justify his persecution. The best he can offer is professionalism. And professionalism, in this context, is the name for the distancing mechanism when it has become fully institutionalized.
Now I want to reframe a point above. Yes, I find it impossible to imagine choosing a custodian for your sacred objects from a member of a group who has long experienced your sacred claims as exterminationist threats, but I recognize that what is sacred and what is exterminationist to a group varies with time and place. I am not an essentialist. I do not believe there is, for example, an essential Christian or Jew or Muslim nor do I believe there is only one reading of a text. Beliefs and identity vary in time and place. There is not an essential Christianity, for example, that is always experienced by certain out-groups as exterminationist.
The exterminationist experience is not the only experience of Christianity by Jews, Muslims and homosexuals. The experience rather is a product of specific historical configurations. Medieval Catholicism at at times used Jewish texts to justify Jewish persecution. But medieval Catholicism also produced Aquinas, who engaged seriously with Maimonides and treated Jewish philosophical tradition as a serious interlocutor rather than a target. Spanish Inquisition Catholicism is not the same thing as Quaker Christianity, which provided refuge to persecuted minorities and was among the earliest abolitionists. The Christianity that burned heretics is not the same Christianity that produced the civil rights movement in America, where the tradition’s resources were mobilized on behalf of the people it had harmed.
Similarly the Hebrew Bible’s condemnation of male homosexual acts has been received very differently across time and place. There are serious Jewish scholars and rabbis today who argue within the tradition’s own hermeneutical framework for a more complex reading of the relevant passages. There are Christian theologians who argue that the tradition’s deepest commitments, love of neighbor, human dignity, the imago dei, require a revisiting of the sexual ethics. These are not simply distancing mechanisms. They are engagements with the tradition’s internal resources, attempts to read the tradition on its own terms and find within it grounds for different conclusions. Whether those arguments succeed is a separate question from whether they are honest attempts at inhabitation rather than analytical avoidance.
There is no essential reading of a text. Stephen Turner is deeply skeptical of essentialism in all its forms. The claim that there is one authentic Christianity or one authentic reading of Milton or one way that the tradition must land on the reader is itself a convenient belief serving specific institutional interests. The history of Christian interpretation is a history of wildly divergent readings of the same texts, each claiming authenticity and each serving specific communities in specific historical moments. The same is true of Jewish interpretation, which institutionalized disagreement and multiple readings as a feature rather than a bug.
What survives is a qualified version of the custodianship argument. It is not that Jews or gay people or women are essentially incapable of inhabiting and transmitting the Christian literary tradition. It is that specific historical configurations produce specific readers whose relationship to the tradition is shaped by specific experiences of exclusion or condemnation, and that those configurations matter for what gets transmitted and what gets lost. The question is always empirical and particular rather than essential and universal. Which readers, in which historical moment, with which specific formation, are likely to transmit which features of this tradition with what degree of fidelity and what degree of distortion?
Trilling’s specific secular Jewish formation in 1930s New York, shaped by exclusion from WASP institutions and distance from Jewish religious life, produced a specific relationship to the English literary tradition that illuminated certain things and systematically obscured others. That is a claim about Trilling in his particular moment, not a claim about Jews in general. A Jewish reader formed in serious engagement with both Talmudic tradition and English literature, someone like Robert Alter in his biblical criticism, produces a completely different relationship to the texts and transmits different things. Alter’s readings of the Hebrew Bible are among the most illuminating available precisely because his Jewish formation gives him access to features of the texts that secular Christian scholars cannot easily see. The formation enables rather than distorts.
The same applies to gay readers. A gay reader who has wrestled with the tradition’s claims, who has not simply applied the distancing mechanism but has allowed the tradition to make its full case and has engaged it at that level, might see things in the texts that a straight reader who has never been challenged by them cannot see. The experience of being addressed uncomfortably by a tradition you nonetheless find magnificent can produce a kind of critical honesty that comfortable insiders often lack. The question is whether the reader has wrestled or has performed wrestling.
The custodianship question cannot be answered by group membership. It has to be answered by asking what specific formation a specific reader brings to a specific tradition, and whether that formation enables inhabitation or requires protective distance. The answer will vary by individual, by historical moment, by the specific tradition and specific texts, and by what the reader has done with the challenges their position presents.
What remains is the modest claim that the specific historical configuration of American literary academia from roughly 1950 to the present produced a dominant mode of reading the Christian literary tradition that systematically privileged analytical distance over formative inhabitation, for historically understandable reasons rooted in who the custodians were and what their relationship to the tradition had been, and that this produced specific and nameable losses in what got transmitted even as it produced real gains in what got analyzed. That claim does not require essentialism. It requires only honest historical description of a particular configuration and its consequences.
The losses are specific and worth naming one by one with as much precision as possible, and with empathy for what it means to belong to a tradition and watch its transmission erode from inside institutions that claim to honor it.
Start with the loss of typological reading. For most of Christian literary history, the primary way educated Christians read texts was typological. The Old Testament prefigured the New. Events in history foreshadowed eternal realities. A poem about a garden was also about Eden and also about Paradise and also about the soul’s relationship to God. This was not allegory in the sense of a code to be cracked. It was a way of seeing in which the literal and the transcendent were simultaneously present in the same text. Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is simultaneously a literal narrative, a moral allegory, an anagogical vision of the soul’s ascent to God, and a political commentary on medieval Italy, and all four levels are present at once and none can be reduced to any other without losing the poem. The secular critic trained in New Criticism or theory can analyze these levels as a formal structure. He cannot inhabit them as a mode of perception. The Christian reader for whom typological seeing was a natural consequence of liturgical formation, who encountered the Easter Vigil’s readings from Genesis and Exodus as prefigurations of the resurrection rather than as interesting literary parallels, brought something to the reading of Dante that no amount of scholarly apparatus can substitute for. That reader is now rare in the academy. What replaced him is a reader who can describe the typological structure with great sophistication and cannot see through it to what it was pointing at.
The loss of liturgical formation is closely related and perhaps even more fundamental. The English literary tradition from the Anglo-Saxon period through the nineteenth century was produced by people whose ears were shaped by the rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. These were not texts they encountered in class. They were texts they heard weekly, sometimes daily, from childhood. The cadences were in their bodies before they were objects of analysis. When Milton writes and the words fall into the pattern of his blank verse, he is working with and against rhythms that his readers carried in their blood from the liturgy. When Herbert breaks and repairs the formal structure of a poem, he is enacting the breakage and repair of a relationship whose terms his readers understood from lived devotional practice. The secular reader can learn about these contexts. He cannot have them in the way that formation produces having. The difference between knowing that Herbert’s broken stanzas enact spiritual desolation and feeling that enactment in your body because you have been through the experience of spiritual desolation the tradition cultivates is the difference between a map and a territory. The academy produces extraordinarily detailed maps. It no longer produces many people who have been in the territory.
The loss of what Lewis called the discarded image is a third specific casualty. Medieval and Renaissance literature was written by people who inhabited a cosmos. Not a universe in the modern sense, a vast empty space in which matter happens to have arranged itself into planets and stars. A cosmos, an ordered and meaningful whole in which every level of existence from the angels down to the elements reflected and participated in the divine order. When Shakespeare’s characters speak of the music of the spheres they are not using a metaphor. They are referring to a real if inaudible harmony that the well-ordered soul participates in. When Spenser constructs his allegorical landscape he is mapping a moral reality that has ontological weight. When Donne says that no man is an island he is making a claim about the metaphysical structure of human existence, not just offering a consoling thought about community. The secular reader who encounters these claims as the quaint cosmological beliefs of pre-scientific people is not reading the literature in the register in which it was written. He is translating it into a different conceptual scheme and then analyzing the translation. Something necessarily gets lost in the translation, and what gets lost is precisely the experience of inhabiting a meaningful cosmos that the literature was designed to produce and deepen.
The fourth loss is the loss of reading as a devotional act. For centuries the primary context in which educated Christians encountered literature was not the classroom or the study but the formation of the soul. Reading was a spiritual discipline. The Benedictine practice of lectio divina, slow contemplative reading of sacred texts aimed at opening the reader to divine presence, shaped how Christians read not just Scripture but all serious literature. The Jesuit practice of imaginative contemplation, placing yourself inside a Gospel scene and experiencing it from within, produced a mode of reading that was participatory rather than analytical. When Ignatius Loyola instructs the retreatant to imagine the smells and sounds of the stable at Bethlehem he is cultivating exactly the capacity for imaginative inhabitation that Lewis identified as the highest form of reading. The academy replaced this mode of reading with critical distance as a matter of professional principle. Objectivity required detachment. The scholar who was moved by the text was suspected of having lost his critical faculty. The result is an institution that trains readers to maintain precisely the distance that the tradition believed was the enemy of encounter. The Christian student who arrives at university having been formed in a tradition that values reading as encounter finds himself being trained in reading as analysis, and the formation he brought is treated as a bias to be overcome rather than a resource to be developed.
The fifth loss concerns the understanding of sin and its literary consequences. The Christian tradition’s account of the human condition rests on a specific and demanding anthropology. Human beings are fallen. Not imperfect or socially conditioned or economically determined, but constitutively disordered in a way that no political arrangement or therapeutic intervention can fully remedy. This anthropology produces a specific kind of literary seriousness. Tragedy in the Christian tradition is not simply bad things happening to good people. It is the working out of a disordered will in a fallen world, the specific shape that human freedom takes when it turns away from its proper end. The villains of Shakespeare and Milton are not social products or psychological case studies. They are free agents whose choices have cosmic significance. Iago and Satan are terrifying not because they are victims of circumstance but because they are evil in a world where evil is a real category with real ontological weight. The secular academy’s inability to sustain the category of evil, its tendency to explain it away through social causation or psychological determinism, produces readings of these characters that systematically reduce them. Iago becomes a product of class resentment. Satan becomes a romantic rebel. The grandeur and the terror both diminish because the theological framework that gave them their proper weight has been analytically dissolved.
The sixth loss is the loss of eschatological seriousness. A very large proportion of English literature from the medieval period through the nineteenth century is written by people who believed that history was moving toward a definite end, that their own lives were lived in the shadow of judgment, that the choices they made had eternal consequences. This is not a peripheral feature of the literature. It is the condition of its seriousness. When Samuel Johnson writes about the vanity of human wishes he is not being a pessimist. He is being a Christian who takes eternity seriously and therefore sees temporal ambition in its proper proportion. When Bunyan’s Christian flees the City of Destruction he is not performing a metaphor. He is describing a real urgency about the state of his soul that was intelligible to every one of his readers because they shared his eschatological framework. The secular academy can analyze eschatology as a cultural phenomenon, trace its influence on literary form, situate it in its historical context. It cannot transmit the felt sense of urgency that eschatological belief produces in a reader, the way it reorders priorities and reorganizes the significance of everything else. Students who encounter Bunyan or Johnson or Donne without that felt sense encounter diminished versions of the works, texts whose emotional and moral weight has been largely drained by the removal of the belief structure that made them urgent.
The seventh loss is specifically about the Christian experience of reading the Hebrew Bible. For Christian readers formed in the tradition, the Hebrew Bible is inseparable from its fulfillment in the New Testament. The psalms are simultaneously David’s prayers and Christ’s prayers. Isaiah’s servant songs are simultaneously about Israel and about Jesus. This typological reading of the Hebrew Bible is not an imposition on an alien text. It is the way Christian readers have always received these texts and the way the New Testament itself reads them. The Jewish scholar who brings Jewish formation to the Hebrew Bible sees things the Christian cannot see, the rabbinic commentary tradition, the internal development of Jewish theology, the way the texts function within the ongoing life of a community that did not accept the Christian reading. This is a contribution. But something is also lost when the Christian typological reading is no longer available in the academy as a serious hermeneutical option, when it can only appear as a historical curiosity or an ideological imposition rather than as a living mode of encounter with the text. The Christian student who arrives at university having been taught to read Isaiah as pointing to Christ finds that the academy cannot take his reading seriously as a reading. It can only explain it as a cultural phenomenon. The deflation is real and the loss is specific.
The eighth loss is what we might call the loss of the sacramental imagination. Catholic and to a lesser extent Anglican literary culture was formed by a sacramental understanding of reality in which physical things participate in spiritual realities. Water is not merely a metaphor for grace. In baptism it is the vehicle of grace. Bread and wine are not symbols of Christ’s body and blood. In the Eucharist they are his body and blood. This is not poetry. It is ontology. And the literature produced by people formed in sacramental practice reflects this ontology in specific ways. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm and his doctrine of inscape, the haecceitas or thisness of particular things, is unintelligible without the Scotist theology that underlies it. His poems are not about nature. They are about the presence of God in the specific irreducible particularity of each created thing. The secular reader can admire the verbal pyrotechnics and miss entirely what the poems are doing, which is training the reader to perceive the world sacramentally, to see in each kingfisher and each dragonfly the flashing out of the divine presence. The loss of sacramental formation in the academy means the loss of access to an entire mode of perception that a significant portion of the tradition’s greatest literature was designed to cultivate and deepen.
The ninth loss is the loss of communal reading. The English literary tradition was transmitted for centuries through institutions that were simultaneously literary and religious. The cathedral school, the monastery, the parish church, the university chapel, all of these were contexts in which literature was encountered as part of a communal practice of formation. You read Langland’s Piers Plowman in a context where the allegorical pilgrimage it described was connected to pilgrimage practices and penitential disciplines that structured the community’s common life. You read George Herbert in a context where the devotional struggles he described were the same struggles your community was formed to navigate together. The secularization of literary education moved this encounter into a context where the communal dimension was stripped away and the individual analytical reader was substituted for the formed communal participant. The Christian student who experienced literature as a community practice at home and in church finds that the academy can only offer it as an individual intellectual exercise. The warmth and density of communal transmission, the way a text changes when it is read among people who are trying to live by it together, is not reproducible in a seminar room where the primary obligation is critical distance.
The tenth loss is the most personal and perhaps the most important. It is the loss of permission to be moved. The tradition of Christian literary education assumed that the highest response to great literature was not critical appreciation but transformation. You read Dante to become more capable of love. You read Milton to understand more deeply what is at stake in your own moral choices. You read Herbert to learn the language of your own soul’s struggle with God. The academy replaced transformation as the goal of reading with understanding as the goal of reading, and then replaced understanding with critique. The student who is moved to tears by the Paradiso is now slightly embarrassed by his response, worried that he has been insufficiently critical, that he has surrendered his analytical distance. He apologizes for his emotion and returns to the apparatus of analysis. The tradition he is encountering would have regarded his tears as evidence that he was reading correctly. The academy regards them as evidence that he needs more training. That inversion is a specific and nameable loss, and the Christian student who experiences it feels it as a form of desecration, the reduction of something sacred to an object of study, the substitution of knowledge about for encounter with, the replacement of the living tradition by its corpse, however elegantly preserved and however skillfully displayed.
What are the distinctly Jewish contributions to the study and production of English literature that are hard to imagine coming from non-Jews? What is the unique intellectual and moral and cultural grammar of Jewish scholars that the non-Jews lack?
This is the question that completes the picture, because the honest accounting requires naming what was gained alongside what was lost.
The Hebrew Bible is unique among ancient literatures in that it consistently takes the side of the slave, the widow, the stranger, and the oppressed against the powerful. The prophetic tradition is a sustained critique of concentrated power, religious complacency, and the gap between official piety and justice. A scholar formed in this tradition, even unconsciously, even without explicit religious formation, brings to English literature a specific sensitivity to the way texts encode and naturalize power arrangements. When Lionel Trilling reads Matthew Arnold he sees not just a great critic but a specific class formation naturalizing its own preferences as universal culture. When Leslie Fiedler reads American literature he sees not just great novels but a civilization’s anxiety about race and sexuality encoded in its most celebrated texts. These readings are not simply ideological impositions. They are the application of a specific hermeneutical tradition, the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power, to a new body of texts. The tradition had been doing this for three thousand years before it arrived in English departments.
The second distinctive contribution is what might be called the hermeneutics of survival. Jews have spent two millennia reading texts in conditions of extreme political vulnerability, where the interpretation of a passage could have consequences for the physical safety of communities. This produced an extraordinarily sophisticated tradition of reading that attends simultaneously to the literal meaning, the communal implications, the political dangers, and the possibilities for creative reinterpretation that might open new spaces of survival and meaning. The Talmudic tradition institutionalized disagreement and multiple readings as a feature of intellectual life rather than a problem to be resolved. The tradition that every text has seventy faces, that readings can be in permanent productive tension with each other, that the conversation itself is more important than settling on a single authoritative interpretation, produced readers of unusual sophistication and unusual comfort with ambiguity. When Jewish scholars arrived in English departments they brought this comfort with interpretive plurality into a tradition that had often been more anxious about settling canonical meanings.
The third contribution is psychoanalytic depth. Freud was Jewish and his influence on literary criticism has been enormous, but the connection goes deeper than the influence of a single thinker. The Jewish intellectual tradition has always been interested in what lies beneath the surface of texts and behavior, in the gap between what is said and what is meant, in the dynamics of desire and prohibition, in the way official narratives conceal and reveal simultaneously. This is partly a survival skill developed over centuries of reading between the lines of hostile cultures. It is partly a consequence of a theological tradition that insists on taking human interiority seriously as a site of moral and spiritual consequence. When Jewish critics brought psychoanalytic reading to English literature they were applying a sophisticated tradition of depth reading that had deep roots in their own intellectual formation. Trilling’s ability to hold the surface and the depth of a text simultaneously, to read Arnold’s elegance as also a form of anxiety, to read Keats’s beauty as also a form of knowledge about death, reflects this tradition at its best.
The fourth contribution is the sociology of knowledge before that phrase existed as a formal discipline. Jews in diaspora have always had to understand how knowledge is socially produced and socially controlled, because the knowledge systems of the dominant culture were frequently mobilized against them. The Jewish intellectual who understood that what counted as universal reason in a given society often reflected the specific formation and interests of a specific class and ethnic group was not making an abstract sociological point. He was describing his own experience of exclusion on grounds that were presented as universal and objective. This produced a natural sensitivity to the way literary canons, critical standards, and aesthetic judgments are socially embedded rather than transcendently given. Klingenstein’s own work is an example of this, applying sociological analysis to the formation of the literary canon in ways that reveal its institutional and social dimensions. The canon is staffed into existence, not argued into existence. That insight has Jewish intellectual DNA in it even when its carriers are not consciously aware of the lineage.
The fifth contribution is a specific form of moral seriousness rooted in the covenant tradition. The Hebrew Bible’s insistence that human beings are accountable, that history has moral weight, that injustice accumulates and demands response, that the suffering of the vulnerable is not incidental but central to the moral universe, produced critics who brought an unusual degree of ethical urgency to literary questions. Trilling’s insistence that literature matters morally, that the encounter with great fiction is a moral education and not merely an aesthetic pleasure, reflects this tradition. Irving Howe’s passionate engagement with literature as a form of moral witness, his insistence that the novel is among the most important ethical documents a culture produces, reflects it too. The New Criticism’s tendency to bracket moral questions in favor of formal analysis was always resisted by Jewish critics who could not accept that form and content were separable in the way the New Critics claimed, because in the tradition they carried they were not separable. The covenant is simultaneously a formal and a moral structure and the two cannot be prized apart without losing both.
The sixth contribution is the outsider’s gift of defamiliarization. The Russian formalists named this as a literary technique but Jewish critics practiced it as a mode of cultural perception long before it had a theoretical name. The person who is inside a culture but not entirely of it, who participates in its practices and speaks its language but retains a slight angle of vision that the fully assimilated insider lacks, sees things the insider cannot see. He notices what is taken for granted. He perceives the arbitrary in what presents itself as natural. He sees the seams in what presents itself as seamless. This is the intellectual gift of the marginal position and Jewish critics exercised it with unusual consistency and power. When Fiedler noticed that American literature was organized around the flight from women and civilization and toward a homosocial wilderness, he was noticing something that WASP critics had been too inside the culture to see. When Trilling noticed that the liberal imagination had its own forms of rigidity and self-congratulation, he was applying the outsider’s perception to a culture he partly belonged to and could therefore see with unusual clarity.
The seventh contribution is a tradition of arguing with God that produced critics unusually willing to argue with canonical authority. The Jewish tradition of wrestling with God, embodied in the name Israel itself, produced an intellectual culture that treats canonical authority as demanding engagement rather than passive reception. You do not simply accept what the text says. You argue with it, push back against it, find the tensions and contradictions within it, and through that argument arrive at a deeper understanding than passive acceptance could produce. This produced critics who brought an adversarial energy to canonical texts. Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory is this tradition translated into literary critical terms. Every strong poet wrestles with his predecessors the way Jacob wrestled with the angel, refusing to let go until he receives a blessing, which means until he has found within the struggle a new understanding that enables him to continue. The theory is brilliant precisely because it describes the experience of someone who comes to a tradition with both reverence and resistance, who cannot simply inherit it but must fight his way through it to something he can possess.
The eighth contribution is the tradition of commentary as a primary intellectual form. In Western literary culture commentary was always subordinate to the primary text. The primary text was the achievement and the commentary was a tool for understanding it. In Jewish intellectual culture the commentary tradition achieved a dignity and complexity that made it a primary form of intellectual creation in its own right. The Talmud is not a commentary on the Bible in the sense of being subordinate to it. It is a new creation that transforms its subject while remaining in dialogue with it. This produced critics who understood commentary and criticism as intellectual creation rather than as service functions, who understood that the work of reading and interpretation was as intellectually demanding and as creative as the work of writing. The elevation of criticism to a serious intellectual enterprise in twentieth century American letters, the idea that a critic like Trilling or Edmund Wilson was doing something as important as a novelist, reflects this tradition even in its secular forms.
The ninth contribution is a specific sensitivity to language as both a tool of liberation and a tool of oppression. Jews have lived inside languages that were not originally theirs, have translated their own tradition into Greek and Aramaic and Arabic and Yiddish and German and English, and have experienced both the gains and the losses of each translation. They have also experienced language as a weapon used against them, in libels and slanders and official documents that defined them as less than fully human. This dual experience of language produced critics with an unusual sensitivity to what language does as well as what it says, to the gap between the official meaning of a discourse and its social function, to the way the same words can liberate or oppress depending on who is speaking them, to whom, in what institutional context, with what power behind them. This sensitivity is one of the deepest roots of the linguistic turn in literary criticism and it has Jewish intellectual formation in it even when the critics most associated with it, Derrida for example, were not consciously drawing on specifically Jewish sources.
The tenth contribution is the tradition of memory as a moral obligation. Zachor, remember, is one of the most repeated commands in the Hebrew Bible. The obligation to remember what was done to you and what you did, to keep the past alive as a moral presence rather than allowing it to recede into forgettable history, produced critics with an unusual commitment to recovering suppressed and marginalized voices from the literary past. The recovery of women writers, of working class writers, of writers from outside the canonical tradition, reflects this tradition of memory as moral obligation even when the critics engaged in it were not consciously Jewish in their self-understanding. The instinct that the forgotten and the suppressed have a claim on our attention, that their silencing was a moral event requiring a moral response, that criticism has an obligation to the dead as well as to the living, is a distinctively Jewish contribution to literary culture even in its secular forms.
What these contributions share is a common root in the experience of being simultaneously inside and outside a dominant culture, of carrying an alternative tradition of enormous depth and sophistication while engaging with the tradition of the dominant culture on its own terms. That double position produced critics of unusual range and unusual honesty, critics who could see both the greatness and the exclusions of the tradition they were studying, who could bring to bear on it resources from an alternative tradition without simply dismissing it, who could hold reverence and resistance in productive tension rather than collapsing into either uncritical celebration or simple rejection.
From a tradition Jewish perspective, the tragedy, which Edward Alexander names and which Klingenstein’s text makes visible, is that many of these contributions were made by people who had already lost or were in the process of losing the specific Jewish formation that made them possible. They were drawing on a tradition they were simultaneously abandoning. The intellectual grammar was still operating in their minds and their criticism even as the communal practice that produced and sustained it was eroding. Their children and grandchildren would have the critical apparatus without the formation that gave it its specific character and moral urgency. The enlargement of America was accomplished at the cost of the tradition that made the enlargers what they were, and the literary criticism that resulted is permanently marked by both the gifts and the losses of that transaction.
The American case has more populations in contact than the Canadian case, and the heterosis runs hotter because the source populations were more distinct from each other and the institutional stakes higher. Five populations meet in the elite humanities and social sciences from roughly 1900 forward, and each carried a selection history the others did not share. WASP Protestant gentlemen, Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children, Catholics in their parallel ecosystem, working-class Protestants from the lower social strata, and later Black and women scholars who entered after the universalist contract had been written by the earlier hybridizers. The biological frame lets us see what each population was doing without sorting them into villains and heroes.
The WASP custodian formation by 1900 was a coherent ecosystem. Anglican or Nonconformist Protestant theology in the back of the head whether or not the front of the head still believed it, country gentleman class culture, the King James cadences in the ear, sacramental or near-sacramental seriousness about reading, eschatological framing of moral choice, typological habits of perception, communal liturgical formation, and an inheritance of the great tradition that ran from Chaucer through Milton through the Romantics with the Bible threaded through every layer. This was load-bearing formation, not decoration. The ascetic disciplinary energy that Guldmann’s mutation framework names was at the center of it. Custodians formed this way could transmit the literature as encounter rather than as object because they had been formed by the literature themselves under conditions the literature presupposed. Their interest in maintaining custodianship was not arbitrary prejudice. It was the interest of a coherent population in its own continuation.
The Jewish source population brought its own dense formation. Talmudic hermeneutic comfort with permanent disagreement, prophetic tradition trained to read official piety against its practice, hermeneutics of survival developed under conditions where misreading the political environment cost lives, multilingual sensitivity from the Yiddish-Hebrew-Russian-Polish situation, memory as binding obligation, sociology of knowledge avant la lettre because Jews had always had to understand how dominant cultures produced and weaponized knowledge against them, and a tradition of commentary as primary intellectual creation rather than secondary service work. This formation had its own integrity. It had also been built under selection pressures the WASP formation had never faced.
When these two populations met in the elite humanities, heterosis happened. Trilling on Arnold and Keats, Levin on Joyce, Abrams on the Romantics, Bloom on the agon of literary influence, Steiner on language and silence, Hartman on Wordsworth, Wellek on theory, Krieger on neo-Aristotelian formalism, Fiedler on the American novel. These men produced criticism no source population could have produced alone. Bloom’s anxiety of influence is the cleanest case. It applies a Kabbalistic and Talmudic model of agonistic interpretation to the English Romantic tradition, and the result is unrecognizable as either a pure rabbinic project or a pure WASP literary project. Hybrid offspring. The fitness in the new environment exceeds the fitness of either parent in the parent’s home environment, which is what heterosis means.
Heterosis cuts both ways and the costs sit on both source populations. The WASP custodian formation that opened to these scholars stopped being able to reproduce itself with the density it had previously had. Not because Trilling and Abrams personally damaged it. Because heterosis works. Once the hybrid phenotypes become the dominant phenotypes in the institution, the conditions that selected for the WASP formation cease to operate. The chapel and the choral evensong and the King James as living liturgical presence stop being the unmarked default of the institution and become one tradition among others, available for analysis rather than as the medium of formation. The Boston Brahmin families noticed this before any sociologist named it. They stopped sending their sons. Their fitness in the new niche had collapsed. They had no theoretical vocabulary for what they were responding to, so they fell back on antisemitism, which captured part of the phenotype but missed what the phenotype was for. The Jewish source population paid the corresponding cost. The Eastern European Jewish formation that produced Trilling thinned out under the same selection pressures that made him possible, and the literary critics who emerged from that population two and three generations later had the critical apparatus without the formation that gave it specific moral grammar. The intermarriage curves and the loss of Hebrew literacy and the fading of communal density in third-generation American Jewish life are part of the same evolutionary picture as Trilling at Columbia. Heterosis is a one-generation effect that depends on the source populations remaining distinct enough to cross.
Niche construction explains the institutional half of the story. The consensus historians did not enter an existing niche and adapt to it. They built a new one. The framework that emphasized American unity over conflict, shared values over ethnic and class particularity, pragmatic improvisation over ideological commitment, was an environment Hofstadter and Hartz and Boorstin helped construct, and once constructed it selected for further entrants of the same kind and against entrants whose formation pulled the other way. The same operation happened in English departments through the gradual displacement of the Southern Agrarian New Critical method by theory, reader-response, deconstruction, and the various ideological criticisms that followed. The Southern Protestant founders built a method. Jewish scholars used the method to enter institutions the founders’ formation had closed. Once inside, Jewish scholars then built the theoretical apparatus that displaced the founders’ method in favor of a critical environment that selected for outsider perception over inherited reception. None of this requires malice. Niche construction is what populations do. The cost falls on populations whose formation suited the older niche and lacks fitness in the new one. The WASP gentleman scholar’s formation lost fitness in the niche the consensus historians and the post-New Critical theorists built, and his population in the elite academy collapsed within two generations.
The working-class Protestant population is the population the celebratory framing forgets. The Yale chairman Pierson worried in 1957 that history was attracting butter-and-egg jobbers and pocketbook cutters’ sons rather than the cultivated professional class. He framed his worry as ethnic, but it was also class. The new niche that the postwar humanities built selected for credentialed urban scholars from specific kinds of family background, and the working-class Protestants who might once have risen into the cultivated professions through the older institutions lost the path. They had no advocate. The Jewish entrants articulated their position in the language of universalism. The WASP custodians articulated theirs in the language of inheritance. The working-class Protestant had no language available, because his interest had not been theorized. He simply disappeared from the elite academy without anyone marking the loss. He shows up later as a phenotype expressing itself politically rather than scholarly, and the elite humanities discover him only when he becomes electorally embarrassing in 2016. The Putnam diversity-and-trust findings track partly the same population. Niche construction by the postwar humanities reduced his fitness in the credentialed economy without giving him an alternative niche, and his population responded the way populations respond when their environment turns hostile.
Catholics took a different strategy. They built a parallel ecosystem rather than entering the WASP one. The historian-priests and historian-nuns at Catholic universities maintained their own labor market with its own criteria. The Catholic convert intellectuals who entered the mainstream profession did so through individual conversions that performed visible alignment with the receiving population’s formation. The Catholic strategy worked because the population was large enough to sustain its own institutions and theologically distinct enough to want them. The Jewish equivalent strategy of building Brandeis and Yeshiva produced thinner results because the assimilationist majority of the American Jewish community wanted entry into the existing institutions rather than parallel ones, and because by the time Brandeis opened in 1948 the existing institutions had already begun to open. The Catholics chose niche maintenance. The Jews mostly chose niche entry, with the consequences for source-population continuity that entry produces.
Crypsis is the strategy several Jewish entrants used and Klingenstein documents in detail. Hofstadter served as an Episcopalian altar boy. Merton changed his name from Schkolnick. The reference-letter formula about the candidate being a Jew but not the offensive type is the host population’s request that the entrant perform crypsis, and the entrants who got hired were the entrants who could and did. The whole consensus historiographical framework can be read as crypsis at the methodological level, a way of producing scholarship that did not signal Jewish formation in its content even when produced by Jewish scholars. Crypsis produces specific costs. The host population loses the ability to track the entering population accurately, which it has an interest in doing. The entering population pays the cost of muting its formation, which over generations dissolves the formation. Crypsis is a strategy that works for individuals and damages source-population continuity over time. Trilling could perform crypsis successfully and his children could not be Jewish in the way he was Jewish, because the formation he muted to enter Columbia did not get transmitted in muted form. It got transmitted in dissolved form.
Aposematism is the opposite strategy and several later entrants used it. The Black scholars who entered with explicit cultural nationalism, the feminist scholars who entered with overriding loyalty to their sisters, the gay scholars who enter with identity-constituting outsideness to the canonical sexual ethics, all refused the crypsis contract. They wore warning coloration. The host population could not pretend they were not there as carriers of distinct formation. The cost of aposematism is that the host population resists harder than it resists crypsis, because the demand on the host is louder. The benefit is that source-population continuity is protected. Jewish particularity dissolved in three generations under the crypsis strategy. Black feminist particularity has been considerably more persistent because the strategy refused dissolution as the price of entry. Aposematism preserves what crypsis trades away. Each strategy has fitness consequences and each has its costs. The host population’s interest in legible boundaries is served by aposematism even when aposematism is louder, because aposematism gives the host accurate information about who is operating from what formation. Crypsis denies the host that information, and the host’s responses calibrate to the inaccurate picture crypsis produces.
Exaptation runs through every contribution Jewish scholars made to English and history. Talmudic comfort with disagreement got recruited for literary critical comfort with interpretive plurality. The prophetic tradition’s reading of official piety against its practice got recruited for ideology critique. The hermeneutics of survival got recruited for depth reading and psychoanalytic criticism. The covenant tradition’s moral seriousness got recruited for Trilling’s insistence that literature matters morally rather than only formally. The memory obligation got recruited for the recovery of marginalized voices. None of these traits had been designed for their new functions. They were available because earlier selection pressures had built them, and the new environment found uses for them. The receiving tradition is enriched by capacities it did not produce. It is also reshaped by them. The English critical tradition before Trilling did not foreground ideology critique with the urgency Trilling brought. After his entry, the tradition includes that capacity, and the criticism produced under its influence reflects it. The tradition is not what it was. Whether the change is gain or loss depends on premises the biological frame does not supply.
Phenotypic plasticity tells us the American environment elicited different expressions of Jewish formation than the European environment had. Hofstadter in Vienna might have been Adorno. Hofstadter at Columbia was a consensus historian. The same source formation produced different phenotypes because the environment selected for different traits. The CCNY environment of the 1930s produced the New York intellectuals as a recognizable type, with their particular combination of Trotskyist youth and anti-Stalinist liberal middle age and neoconservative late period, because the City College environment elicited those expressions. The Harvard environment a generation later elicited a different phenotype from the same source population, because Harvard selected for different traits than CCNY did. The phenotype is not in the genotype. The encounter produces it.
Horizontal gene transfer is the cleanest description of what happened between the Jewish entrants and the WASP host. Trilling absorbed Arnold and transformed Arnold’s framework into something Arnold himself could not have produced. Bloom absorbed New Criticism through Yale training and turned it against its founders. Frye in Canada absorbed Buber and Rosenzweig and used them to enrich biblical literary criticism. Each lineage gained capacities through lateral transfer. Each also lost some of its distinctness as a separate formation. The English critical tradition that incorporated Trilling’s moral seriousness and Bloom’s agonistic theory is no longer the tradition Brooks and Wimsatt built. The Jewish hermeneutic tradition that incorporated formalist close reading and Romantic poetics is not the tradition the Vilna Gaon would recognize either. Horizontal transfer enriches and blurs at the same time.
The interests clash because populations in contact have real stakes in continuity that pull in different directions. The WASP custodian had a coherent inheritance with theological grounding, aesthetic preferences, and institutional structures the population had built across centuries, and that population’s interest in maintaining the formation was the interest of a coherent ecosystem in not being dissolved. The ugly forms the resistance took, the Lowell quotas and the Yale quotas and the Boring reference letters and the Hocking remark about the Jewish mind being unfit to teach Western philosophy, were phenotypic expressions of a population defending its niche under demographic pressure. The defense was sometimes stated in terms that carried metaphysical weight the defenders themselves believed, and sometimes in terms that were transparent class protection, and sometimes in terms of straightforward economic guild interest, and the three motivations were inseparable in practice because they were inseparable in the formation that produced them. Calling all of this antisemitism captures part of the phenotype but misses what the phenotype was for. The defense was the immune response of a coherent population, and populations that do not maintain immune responses do not persist as distinct populations.
The Jewish population had its own continuity interest, and it ran in two directions that did not align. One interest was producing the hybrid offspring whose work gave the community standing and whose careers gave individuals lives of intellectual distinction. The other interest was the long-term persistence of the source formation, the Talmudic and prophetic and communal Eastern European Jewish culture that made Trilling and Bloom and Steiner possible at the level of formation even when they had stopped practicing it at the level of content. The same conditions that produced the hybrids accelerated the dissolution of the formation that made them possible. The Yiddish writers’ generation watched its language die. The grandchildren of the immigrants who built the New York intellectual scene marry out at over half. Heterosis is not a sustainable strategy for source-population continuity. The community that wanted Trilling at Columbia did not also get Trilling’s grandchildren reading Hebrew, and the trade was not articulated at the time as a trade because the celebratory frame foreclosed the accounting.
Working-class Protestants had a continuity interest that nobody in the institution articulated. They needed the older path into the cultivated professions to remain open, and the new niche the consensus historians and the post-New Critical theorists built closed it. Their losses are nameable. The mechanic’s son and the small grocer’s son who might have risen into the older Yale History department through the path Pierson described could not rise through the path the new department selected for, because the formation the new department selected for required a credentialed urban background the working-class Protestant did not have. He was displaced as completely as the Boston Brahmin was displaced, and with less to fall back on. Putnam’s diversity-and-trust findings register part of his population’s response. So does the political realignment of the past decade. Populations that lose their institutional path do not disappear. They express their fitness loss in other ways.
Black and women scholars and gay scholars entered later, after the universalist contract had been written, and refused its terms. Their interests were continuity of distinct formation rather than integration into a host formation, and they negotiated entry on different terms than the Jewish entrants had. The host population that received them had already been transformed by the earlier wave, and the institutional environment was already a hybrid environment rather than the WASP environment Trilling had entered. The later entrants encountered less resistance than Trilling encountered because the WASP custodian formation had already substantially collapsed, and they encountered more friction at the demand for crypsis because the institution’s previous concession to Jewish entry had established universalism as the formal norm even as the actual practice had begun to drift back toward particularism on the entrants’ side. The friction is the present landscape. Aposematism on the part of new entrants meets a host population that no longer has confidence in its own formation, that has internalized the universalist contract the earlier wave wrote, and that cannot articulate what it would defend if it wanted to defend something. The result is the current institutional landscape, with its specific tensions and its specific incoherences, which the biological frame describes without resolving.
The honest accounting the population frame permits is that all of these populations had continuity interests. The interests did not align. The hybrid offspring produced extraordinary work. The source populations paid costs they had reasons to resist paying. The strategies of crypsis and aposematism each had fitness consequences. The exaptations enriched the receiving traditions and reshaped them. The niche construction by each successive wave changed the environment in ways that selected against the previous wave’s formation. No party has clean hands and no party deserves the role of pure victim. The WASP custodian was defending a coherent ecosystem under demographic pressure. The Jewish entrant was pursuing community survival and individual flourishing while paying source-population costs the celebratory frame did not name. The working-class Protestant was displaced without articulation. The later entrants are pursuing their own continuity through aposematism in a host that has lost the formation it would need to receive them on coherent terms. Each played its strategy and bore its costs. Klingenstein’s enlargement of America was real, and so was the contraction it produced in every population the enlargement touched, including the population that did the enlarging. That is what populations do when they meet, and the framework permits the description without imposing the moral verdict the celebratory and the resentful framings each demand.
Turner’s anti-essentialism applied to this essay produces a stronger and more uncomfortable reading than the previous applications because the essay itself performs the kind of analytical work Turner endorses while simultaneously committing the essentialist moves Turner rejects. The essay is the most sophisticated version of the custodianship argument across our discussion, and it is also the version most exposed to Turner’s critique because it makes its essentialist commitments most visible in their operation.
Start with what the essay does well by Turner’s standards. The essay refuses the convenient belief that the consensus historians produced neutral universal scholarship. It applies the sociology of knowledge to a population that the academy has protected from such application for sixty years. It tracks how a specific formation produced specific scholarly outputs that served specific coalition interests, and it documents the institutional pressures that maintained the protection of this formation from analysis. The Higham case study is the cleanest demonstration. Higham could see the political function of the consensus framework but could not name the ethnic variable because naming it would have placed him in the company of antisemites. The essay names the variable that Higham could not name. Turner would approve of this work. It is what the sociology of knowledge is supposed to do.
The essay also resists essentialism at certain key moments. The author explicitly disclaims the position that there is an essential Christian or Jew or Muslim. He notes that beliefs and identities vary in time and place. He acknowledges that medieval Catholicism produced both the Inquisition and Aquinas’s serious engagement with Maimonides. He distinguishes the Christianity that burned heretics from the Christianity that produced the civil rights movement. He concedes that there is no essential reading of a text and that the history of Christian interpretation is a history of wildly divergent readings of the same texts. These moves are Turnerian in spirit. They reject the essentialist commitments that would make the comparative analysis run too cleanly.
But the essay also performs the essentialist moves Turner rejects, and these moves do most of the analytical work the essay needs. The Jewish intellectual contribution is treated throughout as a stable entity with definable contents that can be tracked across institutional contexts. The contents are listed with unusual specificity: typological reading, hermeneutics of survival, hermeneutics of suspicion, prophetic moral grammar, comfort with interpretive plurality, sociology of knowledge avant la lettre, covenant moral seriousness, defamiliarization, agonistic interpretation, commentary as primary intellectual form, language as both liberation and oppression, memory as moral obligation. These ten contributions are presented as the distinctive Jewish intellectual gifts that Jewish scholars brought to English literary academia. The presentation has the structure of essentialism. The contributions are attributed to a tradition. The tradition is invoked as the cause of the contributions. The contributions are then traced back to the tradition as their source. The circularity Turner identified in Oakeshott’s tacit knowledge concept is fully present.
Turner would press several questions against this list. First, what evidence supports the attribution of these traits to a continuous Jewish tradition rather than to specific individuals working in specific situations? The essay does not provide such evidence. It offers the traits as self-evident features of Jewish formation, with the formation being characterized through the traits the formation supposedly produced. Auerbach’s Mimesis is offered as evidence of the Jewish hermeneutic of survival. The Jewish hermeneutic of survival is offered as the explanation for Mimesis. The circularity is identical to the circularity Turner found in Oakeshott. The tradition exists because the works exist. The works exist because the tradition exists. Neither claim has independent support.
Second, Turner would ask why the same traits cannot be found in non-Jewish scholars whose situations resembled the Jewish entrants’ situations. The essay’s own evidence creates this problem. F.O. Matthiessen, who was not Jewish, brought a homosexual outsider’s angle of vision to the canon and produced American Renaissance. The essay acknowledges that Matthiessen combined several forms of outsideness without the specifically Jewish formation, which produced a different kind of insight and a different set of blind spots. But this acknowledgment undermines the essentialist claim. If outsideness alone can produce defamiliarization, then defamiliarization is not a specifically Jewish contribution. It is a contribution of outsiders generally, with the specific form varying by the specific situation. The essay tries to preserve the distinctively Jewish character of the contribution by claiming the Jewish form differs from other forms, but the difference is asserted rather than demonstrated.
Third, Turner would press on the variation among Jewish scholars themselves. The essay treats Trilling, Bloom, Steiner, Fiedler, Levin, Abrams, and the others as instances of a single Jewish intellectual contribution. Their actual work differs enormously. Trilling’s moral seriousness about the relationship between literature and politics is not the same as Bloom’s agonistic theory of poetic influence. Bloom’s Kabbalistic models are not the same as Abrams’s account of Romantic imagination. Abrams’s framework has nothing in common with Fiedler’s psychosexual readings of American fiction. Steiner’s engagement with the Holocaust and language has no precise parallel in any of the others. The essay handles this variation by treating each scholar as expressing a different facet of the same underlying Jewish formation. Turner would say this is the essentialist move at its purest. The underlying formation is constructed retrospectively from the variation it supposedly produced. There is no independent characterization of the formation that would let us predict which traits should appear in which scholars under which conditions.
Fourth, Turner would ask about the temporal stability of the supposed Jewish contribution. The essay treats the Talmudic tradition as the source of contemporary Jewish intellectual habits. The Talmud was completed roughly 1500 years ago, in conditions vastly different from twentieth century New York. The claim that habits formed in late antique Mesopotamia continue to operate in mid-century Columbia University requires a transmission story the essay does not provide. How did the comfort with interpretive plurality cross from the Babylonian academies to Trilling’s seminar? Through what institutional channels? With what fidelity? The essay invokes the tradition as if its continuity were obvious, but Turner would point out that this is exactly what cannot be assumed. Traditions are reconstructed by each generation under the conditions of that generation. What contemporary Jewish intellectuals call Talmudic comfort with disagreement is their current construction of what they take the tradition to have been, not a continuous transmission of a stable practice. The current construction may correlate poorly with what actual rabbinic study looked like in any specific historical moment. Without evidence of the continuity, the appeal to the tradition as the source of the contribution is empty.
Fifth, Turner would press on the asymmetry of how the essay handles Jewish and non-Jewish formations. When discussing Jewish scholars, the essay attributes their work to a specific Jewish formation with definable contents. When discussing WASP scholars, the essay sometimes does the same and sometimes does not. The Southern Agrarians get a thick formation account: Southern Protestant culture, the experience of defeat and loss, the coexistence of beauty with moral catastrophe. The New England consensus historians who were not Jewish get less specific treatment. The working-class Protestants who were displaced get even less. The Black and women scholars who entered later get characterized through their identity-based positions but without the same density of formational analysis the Jewish scholars receive. This asymmetry suggests that the essentialist commitments are doing political work the essay is not fully transparent about. The Jewish formation gets celebrated and mourned. The other formations get sketched or ignored. Turner’s framework would predict this asymmetry to be a coalition product rather than an analytical necessity. The essay does in detailed form what bad theory always does. It naturalizes its own organizing categories while treating other possible categories as marginal.
Sixth, Turner would press on the essay’s central organizing concept of custodianship itself. The custodianship question presupposes that there are stable traditions with custodians who can be evaluated for their fidelity. Turner’s anti-essentialism rejects this presupposition. There are no stable traditions in the form the question requires. There are successive generations of users who deploy materials inherited from earlier uses, with each generation’s version being a current product that gets projected backward as if it had always existed. The Christian literary tradition the essay treats as having had Christian custodians who could in principle have transmitted it faithfully is itself a current construction. What Lewis received was not the medieval Catholic tradition. It was a specific twentieth century Anglo-Catholic reconstruction of a tradition Lewis took the medieval Catholic tradition to have been. The reconstruction served Lewis’s specific institutional and intellectual purposes. It was no more or less faithful to a stable underlying tradition than what Trilling did with Arnold. The custodianship question cannot be answered because the entities it tracks do not exist in stable form.
This is where Turner’s framework forces the deepest revision of the essay’s argument. The essay’s most powerful sections describe the losses produced by the shift in custodianship: the loss of typological reading, of liturgical formation, of the discarded image, of reading as devotional act, of the understanding of sin, of eschatological seriousness, of Christian reception of the Hebrew Bible, of sacramental imagination, of communal reading, of permission to be moved. These are presented as specific losses tied to the specific shift from Christian to secular Jewish custodianship. Turner would say each of these supposed losses requires the same essentialist commitment the broader argument requires. There is no stable thing called typological reading that was practiced continuously by Christian custodians and lost when the custodians changed. There is a current academic construction of what typological reading was, projected backward onto Christian literary practice that varied enormously across periods and locations. The medieval typological practice the essay invokes was not the same as the seventeenth century Anglican practice that was not the same as the nineteenth century Tractarian practice that was not the same as the twentieth century Lewis practice. Each was a specific local construction. Treating them as instances of a continuous typological tradition that had stable custodians is the essentialist move.
The same applies to liturgical formation, sacramental imagination, communal reading, and the rest. Each is a current construction projected onto a varied historical record. The losses the essay names are real in the sense that contemporary academic practice does not include these things. They are not real in the sense the essay’s framing requires, which is that they were stable continuous practices in the institutions before the custodianship shift. The institutions never had them as stable continuous practices. They had varied local practices that contemporary writers now describe through the unified categories the essentialist framework supplies.
Turner’s framework, applied carefully, also pushes back on the essay’s most rhetorically powerful passages. The Jewish scholar of homosexual identity reading the condemning passages of Leviticus and Romans cannot fully inhabit the tradition’s claims because the tradition condemns him. The essay treats this as a specific contemporary problem produced by the shift in custodianship. Turner would point out that the tradition’s history is full of readers who could not fully inhabit its claims for one reason or another and who developed strategies of partial inhabitation, selective reading, productive misprision, and various forms of distancing. The essay’s framing presents the contemporary situation as a departure from a historical norm of fully inhabited reading. The historical norm, on closer examination, is also a current construction. Medieval Jews who lived under Christian rule and read the Hebrew Bible read it differently than Christian neighbors who read the same texts as the Old Testament. Neither group’s reading was fully inhabited in the sense the essay requires, because each group’s reading was shaped by its specific institutional and political situation. The dream of full inhabitation that the essay treats as having been actualized before the custodianship shift was always a dream, not a description.
The hybrid vigor section the essay incorporates compounds the problem rather than resolving it. The biological framework gives the essentialist commitments a scientific veneer. The WASP custodian formation, the Jewish source population, the Catholic parallel ecosystem, the working-class Protestant population, the later entrants, all are treated as populations with definable formations whose interactions produce predictable outcomes. Turner would say this is the essentialist move dressed in evolutionary biology. The populations the framework tracks do not exist in the form the framework requires. There is no Jewish source population with the formation the essay attributes to it. There is a varied set of communities, institutions, individuals, and practices, with no unified character that could function as the population in a heterosis equation. The hybrid vigor framework requires stable populations to do its analytical work. The stable populations are the essentialist construction the framework needs. Without the construction, the framework has nothing to operate on. With the construction, the framework reproduces the essentialist commitments Turner rejects.
The same applies to the supposed Catholic parallel ecosystem, the WASP custodian formation, the working-class Protestant population. Each is a current analytical construction projected onto a varied historical record. The Catholics in the Catholic universities the essay treats as a parallel ecosystem were divided by national origin, by religious order, by intellectual tradition, by relationship to the Vatican, by class background, by ethnic formation. There was no Catholic parallel ecosystem in the singular form the framework requires. There was a varied set of Catholic institutions and individuals whose unification under a single label is the analyst’s work, not a description of a stable underlying entity.
Turner’s framework, then, produces a more uncomfortable verdict on the essay than the previous frameworks produced. The essay is doing the kind of work Turner endorses, in applying the sociology of knowledge to a population that has been protected from such application. It is also doing the kind of work Turner rejects, in committing essentialist moves that the analytical work supposedly transcends. The essay cannot fully sustain itself without the essentialism. The essentialism is what gives the analysis its specific traction. The Jewish intellectual contribution as a stable thing with definable contents is what makes the Klingenstein and Novick studies possible as comparative projects. The Christian tradition as a stable thing with continuous custodians is what makes the loss accounting work as a unified narrative. Strip out the essentialism and the comparative analysis fragments into local studies of specific individuals in specific situations producing specific works under specific conditions. The local studies are more accurate. They are also less powerful as a unified argument about what happened to American literary academia between 1900 and 2000.
The essay senses this tension and tries to manage it through the explicit disclaimer of essentialism. The author says he does not believe there is an essential Christian or Jew or Muslim. He says identities vary in time and place. He says there is no essential reading of a text. These disclaimers are made and then the essay continues to operate on essentialist premises throughout. Turner’s framework predicts this pattern. The disclaimers serve a coalition function. They permit the writer to make the essentialist arguments without taking on the costs of openly defending essentialism as a theoretical position. The disclaimers do not change what the arguments do. The arguments still require the essentialist commitments to do their analytical work. The disclaimers protect the writer from the criticism that essentialist commitments now invite while preserving the power of the analyses that depend on those commitments.
This is what Turner would call good-bad theory. The theory has the form of good theory, with sociological sophistication, attention to coalition interests, awareness of how knowledge is socially produced. It has the function of bad theory, in supplying ready-made entities to track across institutional contexts that satisfy current coalition needs without requiring the difficult work of empirical demonstration. The combination is what makes the essay simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. It is powerful because the essentialist commitments give the analysis traction. It is vulnerable because the same commitments cannot survive serious examination on their own terms.
The Higham case study is the clearest illustration of the problem. The essay treats Higham as having seen the ethnic variable but having stopped one sentence short of naming it because of the antisemitic associations naming it would have triggered. This treatment requires the ethnic variable to be a real thing that Higham could in principle have named, with naming or not naming functioning as a binary choice. Turner would press on this. What was the ethnic variable Higham could have named? The essay’s own answer is that Hofstadter, Hartz, Boorstin, and Handlin were Jewish in some sense and that this Jewishness shaped their consensus framework in some way. But Hofstadter was half Jewish by descent and had served as an Episcopalian altar boy. Hartz’s Jewishness was a fact about his ancestry, not a fact about his living formation. Boorstin’s father had defended Leo Frank in Georgia, which means Boorstin grew up with one specific kind of American Jewish formation, but Boorstin’s own intellectual formation was substantially Anglo-American. Handlin came from a more Jewishly formed family and wrote about immigration. The four scholars the essay groups together as Jewish were Jewish in four different ways with four different relationships to whatever Jewish tradition might have shaped their consensus framework. The unification of them as a Jewish intellectual movement is the analyst’s work, not a description of a coherent underlying entity.
The essay treats the Google search confirming that no scholarship on the consensus historians names their Jewishness as proof that the ethnic variable is being suppressed. Turner would offer an alternative reading. The ethnic variable is not being suppressed because there is no clear ethnic variable to suppress. The four scholars the essay groups as Jewish do not share a Jewish formation in any sense that would warrant treating their Jewishness as an analytical category. Hofstadter’s altar-boy Episcopalianism, Hartz’s secular liberalism, Boorstin’s Anglo-American assimilation, and Handlin’s immigrant Jewish background are not the same thing. Treating them as the same thing requires the essentialist move. The scholarship that fails to name the ethnic variable may not be enforcing a coalition norm. It may be exercising appropriate caution about applying an essentialist category that does not actually do the analytical work the essay claims for it.
This reading is uncomfortable because it lets the academy off a hook the essay tries to put it on. The essay’s sharpest moments are the moments when it accuses the academy of suppressing a true observation. Turner’s framework would suggest that the observation may be less true than the essay claims, in the form the essay claims. There is something to be said about the consensus historians and their backgrounds. The something is more local and more variable than the unified Jewish intellectual movement narrative the essay constructs. Each of the four had a specific situation, a specific institutional position, a specific intellectual formation, and a specific relationship to Jewish identity that shaped his work in specific ways. The unification of them under a single category is the bad theory. The local analysis of each of them is the good theory the academy partially does and partially does not do, depending on the scholar and the period.
The essay’s most provocative move, the comparison of consensus historians to Southern Agrarians, deserves Turner’s scrutiny too. The essay argues that scholarship on the Southern Agrarians names their Southern Protestant formation as analytically relevant while scholarship on the consensus historians does not name their Jewish formation. The asymmetry is real. The essay treats it as evidence that the academy applies the sociology of knowledge to one formation and not to another. Turner would point out that the asymmetry may reflect something more interesting. The Southern Agrarians explicitly identified themselves as Southern Protestants pursuing a specifically Southern intellectual project. They wrote I’ll Take My Stand as a manifesto of regional and religious particularity. Their formation was not just a fact about their backgrounds but a self-conscious commitment they put at the center of their work. The consensus historians did not do this. They wrote as universalists, made universalist claims, and pursued universalist ambitions. To analyze them through the category of their Jewish formation requires importing a category they did not themselves use, and may not have considered analytically central to what they were doing. The asymmetry the essay treats as evidence of bias may be evidence of appropriate methodological humility about applying categories the subjects did not employ. Whether this humility is itself a coalition product is a question worth asking, but the answer is not obviously yes.
This produces the strongest application of Turner to my essay. The essay is doing important work in naming the protective norms that have shielded Jewish scholarly production from the kind of sociological analysis the academy applies elsewhere. Turner’s framework supports this work in part. The protective norms are real and they do serve coalition functions. But the essay overreaches in constructing a unified Jewish intellectual contribution as the entity the protective norms protect. The unified entity does not exist in the form the essay requires. What exists is a varied set of individuals in varied institutional positions producing varied works under varied conditions, with varying relationships to Jewish identity and Jewish tradition. The protective norms protect the varied individuals from being grouped under a unifying category that would import an essentialist commitment. The essay treats this protection as suppression of truth. Turner would treat it as appropriate caution about an essentialist move. Both readings have force. Neither is obviously right.
The essay’s deepest claim is that something specific and important was lost in the shift from Christian to secular Jewish custodianship of English literary academia. Turner’s framework would not let this claim stand in the form the essay makes it. The essay requires Christian custodianship as a stable entity with definable contents that was replaced by secular Jewish custodianship as a different stable entity with different definable contents, with the shift producing predictable losses. None of these entities exists in the form the claim requires. There were varied Christian scholars doing varied things in varied institutional contexts before the period the essay treats as the shift. There were varied Jewish scholars doing varied things in varied institutional contexts after. The unification of each side into a coherent custodianship with stable contents is the analyst’s work. The losses the essay names are real as descriptions of contemporary academic practice compared to selected earlier practices. They are not real as descriptions of a unified shift from one stable custodianship to another. The narrative requires the essentialism the essay disclaims.
This leaves the essay in an awkward position. Its analytical power depends on essentialist commitments it cannot fully defend. Its disclaimers of essentialism do not affect what the analysis requires to function. Its empirical claims about losses are partially supported by selected evidence and partially constructed through the framework that produces them. Turner’s framework would not destroy the essay. It would force a more modest version of the argument, in which the local observations are preserved but the unifying narrative is dissolved. The local observations are valuable. The unifying narrative is what the essay loses to Turner.
What survives in modest form is the observation that specific contemporary academic practices differ from specific earlier academic practices in specific identifiable ways, that some of these differences track changes in the institutional populations doing the academic work, that the changes have been celebrated more than mourned in mainstream venues, and that the celebration has been protected from sociological analysis by norms whose origin merits examination. These claims are defensible without the essentialist scaffolding the essay builds around them. They are also less powerful than the essay’s full argument because they lack the unifying narrative the essentialism supplies. The trade between analytical accuracy and rhetorical power is the trade the essay implicitly faces. The essay chose rhetorical power. Turner’s framework would have it choose analytical accuracy. The choice is not the essay’s alone. It is the choice every serious analytical project faces when essentialist categories tempt the analyst with traction the categories cannot honestly deliver.
The essay’s most honest moment is the disclaimer paragraph where the author acknowledges that he is not an essentialist, that identities vary in time and place, that there is no essential reading. This moment is the moment where Turner’s framework comes closest to being applied to the essay’s own arguments. The moment passes. The essay returns to operating on essentialist premises because the analytical work the essay wants to do requires those premises. Turner would note this pattern as itself diagnostic. The analyst who knows essentialism is bad theory and continues to use it because the alternatives are weaker is the analyst Turner spent his career describing. The pattern is universal in the human sciences and produces the bulk of what passes for serious analytical work. The essay is not unusual in its commitments. It is unusual only in being self-aware enough to disclaim them while performing them. That self-awareness is what makes the essay the most interesting case for Turner’s framework rather than just another instance of what Turner’s framework predicts.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology applied to my essay on the custodianship question in America produces a reading that cuts harder than it cut against the European essay, because the American essay makes more explicit the moves Mearsheimer’s framework would deny. The European essay celebrated individual achievement. The American essay names specific groups in conflict and tracks their institutional outcomes. The American essay is therefore closer to Mearsheimer’s frame in its descriptive vocabulary while remaining captured by the liberal individualist framework Mearsheimer rejects.
Start with what the essay does that Mearsheimer would endorse. The essay refuses the liberal account of the academy as a neutral meritocracy that gradually included previously excluded individuals on universal standards. It treats American academic life as a competition among groups for institutional control, with WASP custodians defending positions they had occupied for centuries, Jewish entrants pressing for inclusion on terms that varied across disciplines, Catholics building parallel institutions, working-class Protestants getting displaced, and Black, women, and gay scholars entering later under different terms. The essay names coalitions, traces their interests, and tracks the institutional outcomes of their conflicts. This is closer to Mearsheimer’s anthropology than the standard celebratory account allows. The essay sees that universalism functioned as a coalition demand rather than a neutral standard. It sees that the Jewish entry into elite institutions was performed through assimilation strategies that served the entering coalition’s interests while the host coalition extracted assimilation as the price of admission. It sees that the consensus historians produced scholarship that served the interests of the population producing it. All of this is recognizably Mearsheimerian.
But the essay also operates within the liberal individualist framework Mearsheimer rejects, and the framework does most of the moral work the essay performs. The essay names individual scholars and tracks their individual achievements, individual costs paid, individual choices about how much Jewishness to retain, individual relationships to the traditions they entered. Trilling chose the distancing mechanism. Bloom chose Kabbalistic agonism. Hofstadter chose Episcopalian altar service. Cohen chose to remain at CCNY. Each scholar appears as an individual making choices within constraints, with the choices contributing to or detracting from his individual scholarly achievement. Mearsheimer would deny this framework throughout. The scholars were not individuals making choices. They were group representatives operating through individual bodies, with the individual subjective experience of choice being a thin overlay on the group dynamics that ran through them.
This produces an immediate revision of the essay’s central narrative. The essay treats the consensus historians as a group of Jewish scholars who developed a framework that served their interests. This formulation already concedes more to liberal individualism than Mearsheimer’s framework allows. Mearsheimer would say there was no group of Jewish scholars developing a framework. There was the Eastern European Jewish immigrant population, operating through bodies named Hofstadter and Hartz and Boorstin and Handlin, producing the historiographical output that the population’s situation and interests required. The bodies appear in the historical record as individual authors. The output appears as individual books and articles. The unit doing the actual work was not the individual body but the population whose situation generated the output as the population’s response to its institutional environment. The consensus historians did not develop the consensus framework. The framework developed through them.
This sounds like a small distinction but it changes the moral weight of the essay’s accusations. The essay treats the consensus historians as having pursued their group interests through scholarship, with the implication that they could in principle have pursued different interests or pursued their interests less successfully. Mearsheimer would deny that they could have done otherwise in any meaningful sense. They were carrying out the project the population’s situation required. Their socialization had infused them with values, interests, and intellectual habits that produced the consensus framework as the population’s adaptive response to its institutional environment. The framework was not a strategy chosen by individual actors. It was the population’s expression operating through bodies that experienced their work as their own choices.
The same applies to the host population. The essay treats the WASP custodians as having defended their positions through coalition gatekeeping, quota systems, and reference letter formulas. This formulation again concedes too much to liberal individualism. Lowell did not choose to restrict Jewish enrollment at Harvard. Boring did not choose to write reference letters that catalogued Jewish character defects. They were carrying out the host population’s project, with the project running through them rather than being authored by them. The Yale chairman Pierson did not choose to worry about butter-and-egg jobbers’ sons entering history. He was the WASP population expressing its concern about niche capture through the body of a department chair. The essay’s framework permits us to evaluate Lowell and Boring and Pierson as individuals making bad choices. Mearsheimer’s framework denies that this evaluation has the meaning it appears to have. The bad choices were the population’s, not the individuals’. The individuals had no significant capacity to make different choices because the choices ran through them rather than being available to them as discrete options.
This produces the essay’s hardest revision. The essay’s most powerful moments are moral judgments. Lowell’s quota was wrong. Boring’s reference letters were wrong. Pierson’s worry about social class was wrong. The Hocking remark about the Jewish mind being unfit to teach Western philosophy was wrong. The essay invokes these as instances of WASP custodianship behaving badly. Mearsheimer would deny that the WASP custodianship was behaving badly in any sense that the moral judgment captures. The WASP population was defending its niche under demographic pressure, which is what populations do. The defense took specific phenotypic forms because the WASP population had developed specific cultural and intellectual habits that supplied those forms. The same population’s defense of its niche under different conditions would have taken different forms. The forms are not the population’s moral character expressing itself. They are the population’s adaptive response operating through the cultural materials available to it.
The Jewish population’s response is symmetrical. The essay treats the assimilation strategies, the name changes, the performed universalism, the studied avoidance of Jewish content, as costs paid by individual Jewish scholars to gain entry. Mearsheimer would say these were not costs paid by individuals. They were the Jewish population’s strategic response to the institutional environment it was attempting to enter. The population’s situation generated the strategies as adaptive responses, with the strategies running through individual bodies that experienced their assimilation as personal choices. Hofstadter did not choose to serve as an Episcopalian altar boy. The population’s strategy of entry through performed assimilation operated through Hofstadter’s body in his specific situation. He experienced the situation as his own life. The unit doing the work was the population whose strategy was being implemented through him.
This applies to the apparent achievements as well. Trilling’s Liberal Imagination is treated by the essay as Trilling’s individual contribution, drawing on his Jewish formation in his specific situation at Columbia. Mearsheimer would say The Liberal Imagination was the Jewish population’s intervention into American literary culture, operating through Trilling’s body. The book served the population’s interests in establishing a position within American literary academia that combined cultural authority with the universalist legitimation the population’s institutional access required. Trilling experienced the writing as his own work. He believed he was making arguments about literature and politics that he had developed through his own thinking. The book was Trilling’s in the sense that liberal individualism uses to credit individuals with their work. The book was the population’s in the sense Mearsheimer’s anthropology requires. The same book under different conditions could not have been written, regardless of Trilling’s individual capacities, because the conditions were what produced the book operating through him.
The essay’s celebrated list of distinctively Jewish contributions to literary scholarship receives under Mearsheimer’s framework a different reading than the essay supplies. The essay treats the ten contributions as gifts that Jewish scholars brought to American literary culture. Mearsheimer would say the contributions were the Jewish population’s institutional intervention, with the gifts framing being the liberal individualist gloss on group dynamics. The hermeneutics of suspicion is not a gift Jewish scholars chose to bring. It is the population’s adaptive capacity, developed under specific historical conditions of needing to read official discourse against its practice for survival reasons, deployed in American literary academia because the population’s situation required deploying it there. The covenant moral seriousness is not a Jewish gift to American letters. It is the population’s deep formation expressing itself through the bodies the population sent into the institutional environment. The defamiliarization, the agonistic interpretation, the comfort with interpretive plurality, all of these are population traits operating through individual bodies in specific institutional contexts.
Compared to Europe, the American case has more populations in contact, more institutional sites of conflict, and more documentation of the specific mechanisms of competition. The Boring reference letters, the Yale quotas, the Lowell admissions policies, the Pierson worry about social class, the Hocking remark, the Bridenbaugh address, the consensus historians’ systematic avoidance of Jewish particularity in their scholarship, the postwar shift that opened the institutions to Jewish entry, the later entry of Black and women and gay scholars under different terms, all of this is documented in detail the European case lacked. We can see Boring’s pen writing the reference letter formula. We can see Lowell signing the petition against the Brandeis nomination. We can see the consensus historians carefully avoiding Jewish content in their scholarship while their colleagues at Commentary magazine read them as Jewish intellectuals doing Jewish intellectual work in code. The visibility of the mechanism in the American case makes the population dynamics easier to track than they were in the European case.
But the visibility also tempts the essay into the moral framework Mearsheimer’s anthropology rejects. We can see the bad behavior of specific individuals doing specific bad things, and the temptation is to evaluate the bad behavior as moral failure of those individuals. The temptation produces the essay’s most rhetorically powerful moments and its weakest analytical moments. The strong moments name the protective norms that have shielded Jewish scholarly production from sociological analysis for sixty years. The weak moments treat the protection as moral failure of the scholars participating in it, with the implication that they could have done otherwise if they had been better people. Mearsheimer would say they could not have done otherwise. They were carrying out the population’s strategy of niche maintenance, operating through their individual bodies in their specific institutional positions. The protection is not a moral failure of individual scholars. It is the population’s institutional self-defense operating through the individual bodies in the discipline.
The same applies to the working-class Protestant displacement the essay names. The essay treats this as a population-level loss without individual villains, which is closer to Mearsheimer’s framework than the treatment of Jewish-WASP competition. The working-class Protestant lost his path into the cultivated professions because the new niche the consensus historians and the post-New Critical theorists built selected against his formation. The essay correctly notes that no individual chose this displacement and no individual could have prevented it. The displacement was the institutional output of population dynamics that ran through the bodies of academic gatekeepers without being authored by any of them. This treatment, applied consistently, would extend to every other case the essay describes. The Jewish-WASP competition that produced Boring’s reference letters and Lowell’s quotas was not a moral conflict between individuals making bad choices. It was a population conflict whose phenotypic expression took the form of those specific institutional outputs because the populations had developed those specific cultural materials for handling such conflicts.
The Higham case is the cleanest illustration of Mearsheimer’s reading working against the essay’s framework. The essay treats Higham as having seen the ethnic variable but having stopped one sentence short of naming it for personal moral and professional reasons. The treatment requires Higham as an individual making a choice about whether to name what he saw. Mearsheimer would deny the framework. Higham was the gentile progressive historian population operating through the body of a specific historian, and the population’s situation in 1959 made naming the ethnic variable impossible for reasons that had nothing to do with Higham’s individual character. The population was committed to a universalist framework that defined antisemitism as nativism rather than as something distinctively anti-Jewish. The framework served the population’s interests by maintaining its alliance with assimilated American Jews against the older WASP custodianship and against the working-class Protestant resentment that was breaking out as McCarthyism. Higham could not name the ethnic variable because the population whose body he was could not name it. The naming would have undercut the alliance the population’s strategy required.
The essay’s frustration with Higham’s failure to name the variable is therefore misdirected on Mearsheimer’s reading. Higham did not fail. The population’s strategy required not naming the variable, and the strategy operated through Higham as it operated through every other gentile progressive historian of his moment. The failure the essay attributes to Higham is the failure of the framework the essay applies to him. The framework treats him as an individual who could have done otherwise. Mearsheimer would say no individual in his position could have done otherwise, because the position itself was constituted by the population’s strategy that prevented the naming.
The same revision applies to the consensus historians themselves. The essay treats them as a group of Jewish scholars who developed a framework that served their interests. The treatment carries the implication that they could have developed a different framework if they had been less interested in their own assimilation. Mearsheimer would deny this. The consensus framework was the Jewish immigrant population’s institutional output at the moment of entering elite American academia under specific conditions. The framework served the population’s interests because the framework was the population’s adaptive response to those conditions. No individual scholar could have produced a different framework, because the framework was not produced by individuals. It was produced by the population’s situation expressing itself through the individual scholars the population sent into the institutional environment. Hofstadter could not have written a Jewish historian’s history of America that foregrounded Jewish particularity, because the population whose strategy was operating through him required the universalist framework as the condition of his institutional position. The Jewish historian’s history of America that foregrounded Jewish particularity was written later, by different population members, when the population’s situation had changed enough that the foregrounding became strategically possible.
This produces the essay’s most uncomfortable revision. The essay treats Klingenstein’s documentation of Jewish entry into English departments as celebration of Jewish achievement combined with insufficient mourning of Jewish particularity lost. The essay treats Edward Alexander’s critique of Klingenstein as the more honest accounting of what the entry cost. Mearsheimer would say Klingenstein and Alexander are both performing the population’s strategy at different moments of the population’s situation. Klingenstein in 1991 and 1998 operated under conditions where the celebration of integration served the population’s institutional position. Alexander in 1999 operated under conditions where the critique of integration’s costs served different population needs that had become salient by that moment. Neither writer was making an individual analytical choice that the other writer failed to make. Both were the population’s response operating through individual bodies under different institutional conditions. The difference between them is not the difference between celebration and honest accounting. It is the difference between the population’s strategy at one moment and at another.
This applies to my essay too. The essay treats itself as honest analytical work that names what the academy has refused to name. Mearsheimer would say the essay is my population’s response to the current institutional moment, operating through my body and my situation. The population whose response my essay represents has its own coalition interests, its own institutional position, its own strategy of analytical intervention. The essay’s accusations against the academy serve the population’s interests in current institutional struggles. The essay’s celebration of Higham’s analytical clarity, its frustration with his failure to complete the analysis, its detailed documentation of Jewish quota systems and reference letter formulas, its attention to the working-class Protestant displacement, all of these serve the strategy of a specific population in a specific moment. The essay is not the individual analytical achievement of an individual writer who has seen what others refuse to see. It is the population’s strategic intervention operating through my body in my situation.
This is harder than the other readings because it applies the framework to the essay itself rather than to the essay’s subjects. The essay can apply Mearsheimer’s framework to the consensus historians and to the Jewish entrants and to the WASP custodians while exempting itself from the same application. Mearsheimer’s framework will not permit the exemption. If the consensus historians’ work was the population’s intervention rather than their individual achievement, the essay’s work is also the population’s intervention rather than its writer’s individual achievement. The essay’s accusations against the protective norms that shield Jewish scholarly production from sociological analysis serve the strategic interests of a population that has reasons to want those norms challenged in this moment. The essay is the strategy operating through my body. I experience the writing as my own work. The work is my population’s response to its current institutional situation, expressed through the materials my specific formation supplies.
This is the deepest application of Mearsheimer to the essay because it forces the essay to acknowledge its own position within the framework it applies to others. The essay treats itself as standing outside the population dynamics it documents, observing them from an analytical position that the dynamics themselves produce. Mearsheimer would say no such position exists. There is no analytical standpoint outside the population dynamics. Every analyst is operating within population dynamics, with the analyst’s specific position determining what the analyst can see and what the analyst’s analysis serves. The essay’s analytical achievement is therefore not an individual’s transcendence of his population’s interests through superior insight. It is the specific population’s intervention that the analyst’s body permits the population to make in the current institutional situation.
The implication for the custodianship question itself is that the question cannot be answered by the essay’s framework because the framework treats the question as analytical rather than strategic. Mearsheimer would say custodianship is always a strategic question rather than an analytical one. The question of who guards a tradition is the question of which population’s interests will be served by which institutional arrangements. The answer to the question changes as population configurations change. The American academy in 1900 served the WASP population’s interests through a custodianship arrangement that excluded Jews, Catholics, women, working-class Protestants, Blacks, and gays. The American academy in 1960 served a different coalition’s interests through a custodianship arrangement that had partially included Jews under universalist terms while still excluding most of the other groups. The American academy in 2026 serves yet another coalition’s interests through arrangements that include some of the previously excluded groups under specific terms while excluding others. Each of these arrangements is the population configuration of its moment expressing itself through institutional structures. None of them is the correct custodianship. Custodianship is not the kind of thing that can be done correctly. It is the kind of thing that gets contested by populations whose interests run through different arrangements.
The essay’s mourning of what was lost in the shift from Christian to secular Jewish custodianship therefore receives a harder reading under Mearsheimer’s framework. The losses the essay names are real in the sense that contemporary academic practice does not include the practices the essay invokes. They are not real in the sense the essay’s framework requires, which is that the practices were carried out by Christian custodians who could in principle have continued carrying them out if Jewish entrants had not displaced them. Mearsheimer would say the practices were the WASP population’s institutional output at a specific moment of that population’s situation. The practices stopped because the population’s situation changed. The Jewish entry was the proximate cause of the change but not the underlying cause. The underlying cause was the WASP population’s loss of demographic and economic dominance in the institutional environment, which made the population unable to maintain its custodianship arrangement against pressure from competing populations. The Jewish entry was the WASP population’s accommodation to its declining dominance, made on the best terms the WASP population could extract under its declining position. The decline produced the entry. The entry did not produce the decline.
The custodianship question receives under Mearsheimer’s framework a population-dynamics answer the essay’s framework cannot supply. The question of which populations get to operate the institutions is determined by which populations have the demographic, economic, and political weight to maintain or contest institutional arrangements. The WASP population had the weight in 1900 and lost it gradually across the twentieth century. The Jewish population had increasing weight after 1945 and used it to renegotiate the terms of institutional access. The Black, women, and gay populations gained weight later through different mechanisms and used it to renegotiate the terms in different directions. Each of these renegotiations was the population’s strategic response to its own situation. None of them was an individual choice by any individual scholar or administrator or activist. The renegotiations operated through individual bodies but were not authored by them.
The most uncomfortable implication is what this means for my custodianship project. The essay treats its subjects as having been wrong about the nature of what they were doing. The consensus historians thought they were producing universal scholarship. The essay says they were serving population interests. The Jewish entrants thought they were entering institutions on universal terms. The essay says they were paying assimilation costs to gain coalition access. The WASP custodians thought they were maintaining standards. The essay says they were defending their population’s niche. The essay treats itself as having seen through these self-misunderstandings to the underlying reality of group conflict. Mearsheimer would say the essay is also operating within a self-misunderstanding the framework cannot escape. The essay treats its own analysis as having reached the underlying reality. The underlying reality on Mearsheimer’s framework is that there is no view from outside the population dynamics, including the view my essay claims. The essay’s analysis is also a population intervention, operating through my body, serving the strategic needs of the population whose situation makes my analysis institutionally available.
This does not mean the essay is wrong about what it documents. The quota systems are real. The reference letter formulas are real. The protective norms are real. The displacement of working-class Protestants is real. The losses the essay names in academic practice are real. The essay’s documentary work survives the application of Mearsheimer’s framework. What does not survive is the essay’s framework for processing what the documents show. The framework treats the documents as evidence of how individuals behaved within institutional structures. Mearsheimer’s framework would treat the documents as evidence of how populations operated through individuals to produce institutional outputs. The documents are the same. The framework that organizes them is different, and the difference matters for what the essay can claim to have achieved.
What the essay can claim to have achieved, on Mearsheimer’s reading, is the documentation of one population’s institutional intervention into the academic environment of its moment. The essay’s accusations against the academy’s protective norms are accusations one population is making against another’s institutional arrangements. The accusations are real, in the sense that the protective norms exist and serve the functions the essay attributes to them. They are not analytical truths reached from outside the population dynamics. They are the analytical form my population’s strategic intervention takes in this moment. The intervention serves my population’s interests in renegotiating the institutional arrangement that has prevailed since the postwar period. The intervention may succeed or fail depending on factors that have nothing to do with the analytical merits of the essay’s arguments. The success or failure will depend on whether my population has the demographic, economic, and political weight to force a renegotiation, just as previous renegotiations depended on previous populations having that weight.
This is what Mearsheimer’s framework forces on the essay. The essay can apply the framework to its subjects. The essay cannot exempt itself from the framework once the framework has been applied. The application returns to the essay’s own work, with the essay revealed as another population intervention rather than as an analytical achievement that transcends the dynamics it describes. The essay’s celebration of Higham’s analytical clarity, its frustration with his failure to complete the analysis, its detailed documentation of the quota systems and reference letters, its attention to working-class Protestant displacement, its careful balancing of Jewish gifts and Jewish costs, all of these are the work of a population whose situation in 2026 generates them as the population’s response to its current institutional environment. I experience the work as my own. The work is, in the sense Mearsheimer’s framework requires, my population’s, operating through my body in my specific position.
The honest accounting the essay performs of Jewish entry and its costs is therefore not the analytical achievement of an analyst who has seen what others refuse to see. It is one population’s account of another population’s institutional intervention, produced under conditions where producing such an account serves the producing population’s interests. The Jewish population produced its own honest accountings of its own entry costs through Klingenstein and Alexander and Cuddihy and Finkielkraut and Edward Alexander, when conditions made those accountings strategically possible. My population produces its accounting now, when conditions make it strategically possible for my population to do so. Neither accounting is the final truth. Each is a population’s intervention at its moment. The intervention produces real documentation that survives the population’s strategic situation. The framework that organizes the documentation does not survive in the same way. It serves the moment and changes as the moment changes.
The custodianship question, finally, has under Mearsheimer’s framework no resolution that the essay’s framework can supply. The question is not who should guard the tradition. The question is which populations will have the institutional weight to operate the arrangements that determine what gets called the tradition and what gets transmitted as it. The question changes its answer as population configurations change. The American academy of 2026 is not the academy of 1960 is not the academy of 1900. Each was a different population configuration’s institutional output. The essay’s framework treats one of these configurations as having been better than another, with the better configuration being the one that produced the practices the essay treats as having been lost. Mearsheimer’s framework denies the comparison. Each configuration is its moment’s strategic settlement. None is correct or incorrect in any sense the analysis can supply. Each is what the populations of its moment were able to maintain against the populations contesting them.
This is the harder version of what my European essay received from Mearsheimer’s framework. The American case, with its richer documentation, makes the framework’s implications more visible than the European case did. The visibility cuts against the essay’s framework even as it confirms the essay’s documentary findings. The findings are correct. The framework that produced them is itself an instance of what the findings document. There is no view from outside. There is only the moment’s population dynamics, with the analysts as much inside the dynamics as the subjects they analyze. The essay survives this application, but it survives as one population’s intervention rather than as the analytical achievement the essay claims for itself. The achievement is real. It is also, in Mearsheimer’s strict sense, not the individual writer’s. It is the population’s, operating through the writer’s body, serving the population’s interests in the current institutional moment. That is what populations do. That is what my essay does. The essay’s framework does not permit the essay to say so. Mearsheimer’s framework requires it.
John M. Doris’s situationism applied to my American custodianship essay produces a reading that strips away the character architecture the essay relies on at every level, from individual scholars to institutional populations to whole moral evaluations of what happened. The essay treats character as the operative variable across the entire historical sweep. Specific individuals are credited with specific traits that explain their work and their choices. Specific populations are credited with stable formations that explain their institutional behaviors. Specific moral evaluations are made on the assumption that the actors had character traits that determined their choices in ways that could in principle have been otherwise. Doris’s evidence dismantles every layer of this architecture and forces a reading that the essay’s framework cannot accommodate.
Start with the individual scholars. The essay treats Trilling, Bloom, Hofstadter, Higham, Boring, Lowell, and the rest as individuals whose character traits produced their specific outputs. Trilling’s moral seriousness produced The Liberal Imagination. Bloom’s agonistic temperament produced the anxiety of influence. Hofstadter’s psychological sophistication produced the consensus framework. Higham’s analytical caution produced his stopping one sentence short of naming the ethnic variable. Boring’s antisemitism produced his reference letter formulas. Lowell’s WASP custodianship produced his quota policies. Each individual is credited with traits that explain his specific contributions or specific failures. Doris’s evidence will not support this kind of attribution. The same individuals in different situations would have produced different outputs. Their character did not determine their work in the way the essay assumes. The situations they occupied determined the work, with their individual capacities being the medium through which the situational pressures produced specific outputs rather than the source of those outputs.
This produces an immediate revision of the essay’s most charged passages. The reference letter formulas that catalogue Jewish character defects are treated by the essay as evidence of the writers’ antisemitism. Boring at Harvard, Woodworth at Columbia, the Yale chairman who instructed his admissions committee to admit no more than five Jews per medical class, all of these appear in the essay as individuals whose antisemitic character produced their antisemitic acts. Doris would point out that the same men in different institutional positions did not write antisemitic reference letters. The behavior was situation-specific. The institutions had developed reference letter conventions that included ethnic identification and ethnic character assessment as standard elements. New department chairs at Harvard inherited the conventions and operated them. Boring did not write his reference letters because he was an antisemite. He wrote them because the institutional position he occupied came with reference letter conventions that required them, and the conventions had been established by predecessors operating under earlier versions of the same situational pressures. Move Boring to a different institution with different conventions and his behavior changes. Move a different person into Boring’s institutional position and the same conventions get operated. The character attribution the essay makes does not survive Doris’s evidence about the situational specificity of behavior.
This sounds like it would let the institutional gatekeepers off a hook the essay tries to put them on, but Doris’s framework does not produce moral exculpation. It produces moral redirection. The behaviors documented in the reference letters were wrong. The wrongness was real. What the wrongness was, and where it should be located, are the questions Doris’s evidence forces. The essay locates the wrongness in the individual writers’ antisemitic character. Doris would relocate it in the institutional structures that produced the situations the writers operated within. Harvard’s reference letter conventions were the wrong thing. The conventions persisted because they served institutional functions for the population operating Harvard. The conventions changed when the institutional functions changed. The change came when the postwar situation made the conventions a liability rather than an asset, at which point Harvard’s reference letter writers stopped including ethnic character assessments without any change in the writers’ individual character traits. The writers had not become less antisemitic. The institution had reorganized its situations to discourage the behavior the conventions had previously required.
The same logic applies to the consensus historians. The essay treats their universalist framework as the expression of their assimilation strategy, which is in turn presented as a character-level commitment they brought to their scholarship. Hofstadter chose to write consensus history because he was a particular kind of person whose Jewish background and assimilation aspirations made consensus history congenial to him. Doris would deny the framework. Hofstadter wrote consensus history because the situations he occupied selected for consensus history. The Cold War institutional environment, the postwar political mood, the specific pressures of being a Jewish historian in a department whose senior faculty had specific expectations, the journal editors whose preferences shaped what got published, the funding structures that supported certain kinds of work over others, all of these situational pressures produced consensus history as the institutional output of the moment, operating through whichever historians the institutions had hired. Hofstadter’s specific contribution to the consensus framework reflects his individual capacities operating within those pressures. The same Hofstadter at the University of Wisconsin in 1925 would have written different work. The same Hofstadter in postwar Israel would have written different work. The character attribution the essay makes treats consensus history as Hofstadter’s expression of himself. The situational reading treats it as the institutional environment’s output operating through the historian’s individual capacities.
The essay’s frustration with Higham receives the same revision. The essay treats Higham as having failed to name the ethnic variable because his individual analytical caution prevented him from completing the analysis he had begun. The treatment requires Higham as an individual with a character trait of analytical caution that determined his behavior at the crucial moment. Doris would deny this entirely. Higham’s behavior in the Commentary essay was not the expression of a stable character trait. It was the situation-specific response of a historian operating within a particular journal’s editorial environment, with particular awareness of how naming the ethnic variable would land in the postwar Jewish intellectual community, with particular professional stakes that depended on his maintaining acceptable relationships with the figures the analysis would have implicated. Move Higham to a different journal with different editorial conventions and the analysis comes out differently. Move him to a different decade with different professional stakes and the same. His character did not determine the stopping one sentence short. The situation produced the stopping. Higham as an individual with a character trait of analytical caution is the essay’s construction. The Higham Doris’s framework would describe is a man whose behaviors varied with situational pressures and whose specific behavior in Commentary in 1959 was the situation-specific response that situation produced.
The treatment of populations works the same way. The essay treats the WASP custodian formation, the Jewish source population, the Catholic parallel ecosystem, the working-class Protestant population, as if these were entities with stable group character that produced specific group behaviors. The WASP custodians defended their niche through specific gatekeeping practices because their group character included a commitment to defending what they regarded as the great tradition. The Jewish entrants pursued integration through specific assimilation strategies because their group character included specific intellectual habits and specific historical anxieties. Doris would deny this layer of attribution as completely as he denies it at the individual level. Groups do not have character that produces stable behaviors across situations. Groups have populations whose individual members behave according to the specific situational pressures their specific institutional positions create. The aggregation of those individual behaviors produces what looks like group behavior, but the appearance is misleading. The same population in different institutional environments produces different behaviors. The American Jewish population in elite academia between 1900 and 1940 produced one pattern of behavior. The same population in 1960 produced a different pattern. The same population in 1990 produced another. The differences track changes in the situations the population’s members were occupying, not changes in the population’s underlying character.
This is what Doris’s framework forces on the central historical narrative the essay presents. The narrative requires that what happened in American academia between 1900 and 2000 was the encounter of populations with stable group characters. The WASP custodian character met the Jewish entrant character. The encounter produced specific outcomes that reflected the characters of the participants. The narrative breaks down without the character architecture. What happened between 1900 and 2000 was not the encounter of populations with stable characters. It was the operation of changing situational pressures on individuals whose institutional positions varied across time. The pressures changed. The behaviors changed. The narrative the essay tells, with its tracking of population characters interacting across institutional contexts, is the story telling that the historical record permits when the character architecture is imported. The story is not the only possible reading of the same record. A situational reading of the same record produces a different story.
The situational reading would emphasize the specific institutional changes that produced the specific behavioral changes the essay documents. The postwar shift that opened elite institutions to Jewish entry was not a change in WASP character or in Jewish character. It was a change in the institutional situation. The G.I. Bill expanded higher education enrollment in ways that broke the older quota arrangements at the input level. The Cold War created institutional pressure to demonstrate American meritocracy as a contrast with Soviet ideology. The Holocaust made explicit racial exclusion a liability for American institutions seeking international legitimacy. The expansion of federal research funding shifted the balance of power within universities away from the traditional humanities departments where the older custodianship was strongest. Each of these situational changes produced predictable behavioral changes in the individuals operating within the institutions, without requiring any change in the individual or group character of those individuals. The institutions reorganized their situations and the behaviors that the situations had previously produced disappeared, replaced by the behaviors the new situations produced.
This applies to the resistance the essay documents as well. The Bridenbaugh address that the essay treats as the antisemitic outburst of an individual chairman whose character could not accommodate the changes happening in his profession, Doris would treat as the situation-specific response of a historian occupying a specific institutional position at a specific moment of professional transition. Bridenbaugh’s outburst happened because the institutional position he occupied was being destabilized by the demographic changes in the profession. Move Bridenbaugh into a different institutional position and the outburst does not happen. The character attribution the essay makes, identifying Bridenbaugh as antisemitic in a stable way that explains his presidential address, will not survive Doris’s evidence. Bridenbaugh’s behavior across his career was probably as variable as the behavior of every other person Doris’s framework studies. The presidential address was the specific situational expression of a man at a specific moment, not the visible eruption of a stable underlying character.
The essay’s most powerful single passage is the discussion of the Populist reevaluation. The essay treats Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, Glazer, Handlin, Parsons, Riesman, and Shils as having brought specifically Jewish anxieties about insurgent peasants to the analysis of American Populism, with their shared character producing the shared interpretive framework. The defenders of the Populists, who were gentile and Southern or Midwestern, are similarly characterized as bringing their formation to their interpretations. The essay’s analysis is that Jewish formation produced one reading and gentile formation produced another. Doris would deny both attributions. The Populist reevaluation was the specific institutional output of postwar academic historiography operating under specific situational pressures. The pressures included anti-Stalinism, the early Cold War context, the rise of social-psychological frameworks across the human sciences, the institutional ambitions of the historians who were producing the work, and the specific publishing and reviewing networks that selected which interpretations got amplified. Hofstadter’s individual contribution reflected his specific capacities operating within those pressures. Lipset’s individual contribution reflected his. The shared interpretive framework was not the expression of shared Jewish character. It was the institutional output that the shared situational pressures produced operating through whichever historians were positioned to produce it. The defenders, similarly, were not expressing gentile character. They were operating within different institutional positions, within different journals, within different professional networks, with different stakes in the outcome of the interpretive contest. The differences in their interpretations track the differences in their situations rather than the differences in their group characters.
The essay’s eight or ten specific Jewish contributions to literary scholarship receive the same revision. The hermeneutics of suspicion, the comfort with interpretive plurality, the moral seriousness rooted in covenant, the defamiliarization, the agonistic interpretation, the commentary as primary intellectual form, the language as both liberation and oppression, the memory as moral obligation, are all treated by the essay as character traits brought by Jewish scholars to American literary academia. Doris would deny that they are character traits at all. They are situation-specific behaviors that Jewish scholars produced when occupying specific institutional positions under specific historical conditions. Trilling’s moral seriousness about the relationship between literature and politics was the specific output of Trilling at Columbia in the postwar moment, working within the situational pressures that environment created. The same Trilling at Hebrew University in the 1950s would have produced different work. The same Trilling at Yale in 1925 would have produced different work. The character attribution treats the moral seriousness as Trilling’s stable trait. The situational reading treats it as the specific behavior that Trilling’s specific situation produced. The same applies to every other supposed Jewish contribution the essay catalogues. Each is the situation-specific output of specific scholars in specific positions, not the expression of a stable Jewish intellectual character that runs across situations.
This produces the essay’s most uncomfortable revision. The essay’s core empirical claim is that something specific and important was lost in the shift from Christian to secular Jewish custodianship of American literary academia. The claim depends on character architecture at the population level. There was a Christian custodian character that produced specific practices. There was a secular Jewish entrant character that produced different practices. The shift from one to the other produced the losses the essay names. Doris’s framework will not support any of this. The Christian custodian character is not a stable thing that can be tracked across the historical record. The practices the essay associates with Christian custodianship are situation-specific behaviors that varied across periods and institutions and individuals. The typological reading that the essay treats as a Christian custodianship practice was practiced very differently in medieval Catholic monasteries than in seventeenth century Anglican universities than in nineteenth century New England Protestant colleges than in early twentieth century Oxford. Each of these was a different situational complex producing different specific behaviors that contemporary writers now group under the category of typological reading. The grouping is the analyst’s work. The behaviors the analyst groups were not instances of a stable practice that had stable practitioners. They were situation-specific behaviors that produced different outputs in different situations.
The same applies to liturgical formation, sacramental imagination, communal reading, and the other practices the essay names as having been lost in the custodianship shift. None of these is a stable practice with stable practitioners. Each is the analyst’s grouping of situation-specific behaviors that varied across the historical record. The losses the essay names are real in the sense that contemporary academic practice does not produce these behaviors in the form contemporary writers describe them. The losses are not real in the sense the essay’s framework requires, which is that the behaviors had been stable practices with stable practitioners before the custodianship shift dislodged them. The behaviors had never been stable in the way the framework requires. The framework imports stability that the historical record does not actually contain.
This is what Doris’s framework forces most uncomfortably on the essay. The character architecture at the population level is doing the work the essay needs the framework to do. Without the architecture, the comparative analysis fragments. The losses become specific descriptions of differences between contemporary academic practice and selected earlier practices, without the unified narrative of a stable Christian custodianship being replaced by a stable Jewish custodianship. The narrative the essay tells requires the unification. The unification requires the character architecture. The character architecture cannot survive Doris’s evidence about the situational specificity of behavior at every level the framework operates.
The essay senses this tension at moments. The author concedes that contemporary Jewish scholars often lack the formation that supposedly produced the contributions of earlier Jewish scholars. The third-generation American Jewish literary scholar who cannot read Hebrew and has limited engagement with traditional Jewish learning is a frequent presence in the essay’s accounting of what was lost. But this concession actually strengthens Doris’s reading rather than the essay’s reading. If the contributions the essay celebrates were the expression of stable Jewish character, the contributions should persist as long as the population persists. The contributions did not persist. They appeared in specific situational contexts and disappeared as the contexts changed. This is what Doris’s framework predicts and what the essay’s framework cannot accommodate. The supposedly stable Jewish formation that produced Trilling and Bloom and Steiner is gone, but the population those scholars came from is still here. The disappearance tracks changes in the situational pressures rather than changes in the population’s character. The Talmudic comfort with disagreement that the essay treats as a deep formational trait of the Jewish population is not a deep formational trait. It is a situation-specific behavior that some Jewish scholars produced in specific institutional contexts because those contexts selected for it. The same population in different contexts does not produce the behavior. The contexts produced the behavior, not the population.
The Hofstadter case the essay returns to is the cleanest demonstration of Doris’s framework working against the essay’s reading. The essay treats Hofstadter as a half-Jewish historian whose Jewish identity, however ambivalent, shaped his consensus framework in ways that served the assimilation strategy of his population. The reading requires Hofstadter to have had a Jewish character that operated through his work even when his work appeared universalist. Doris would point out that Hofstadter’s biographical record is exactly the record of someone whose behaviors varied dramatically with situations. He served as an Episcopalian altar boy as a child. He wrote consensus history at Columbia in the postwar moment. He turned increasingly critical of the consensus framework in the 1960s as the political situation changed. He developed the concept of the paranoid style partly in response to McCarthyism. Each of these behaviors was situation-specific, not the expression of a stable Hofstadter character. The Episcopalian altar boy and the consensus historian and the critic of the paranoid style were all the same person operating in different situations and producing different behaviors that the situations selected for. The essay’s framework treats these as stages in the development of a single character. Doris’s framework treats them as separate situational outputs of an individual whose behavior varied across situations as the framework predicts everyone’s behavior varies.
The deeper application of Doris to the essay concerns the moral evaluations the essay performs. The essay makes specific moral judgments about specific actors at specific moments. Lowell was wrong to impose Jewish quotas at Harvard. Boring was wrong to write reference letters that catalogued Jewish character defects. The Yale chairman was wrong to limit Jewish medical school admissions to five per class. The consensus historians were wrong to suppress Jewish particularity in their universalist scholarship while their interests were operating beneath the universalist surface. Doris’s framework will not support these judgments in the form the essay makes them. The actors did not have stable characters that determined their behavior. They occupied institutional positions whose situational pressures produced the behaviors. The wrongness of the behaviors is real but it is not the wrongness of individuals making bad choices that better individuals would not have made. It is the wrongness of institutional structures that produced the situations the actors operated within. Lowell did not need to have a character with antisemitic traits to impose the Jewish quota. He needed to occupy the position of Harvard president at a moment when the situation his predecessors had built was generating quota policy as the institutional output. Different president, same policy. Same Lowell, different institutional position, different policy.
This sounds like it gives the bad actors a pass that they do not deserve. Doris’s framework would deny that it does this. The framework does not exculpate the actors. It locates the wrongness more accurately. The wrongness was institutional. The institutions produced the situations that produced the behaviors. Reform requires institutional reform, not character reform. The postwar shift that opened elite institutions to Jewish entry was institutional reform, not character reform. The administrators who admitted Jews after 1945 were not better people than the administrators who excluded them before. The institutional situations had changed. The situations selected for different behaviors. The actors followed the new selection pressures as readily as they had followed the old ones. The Jewish entry was the institutional output of the new situation. The Jewish exclusion had been the institutional output of the old situation. Neither output is best understood as the expression of the actors’ characters. Both are best understood as the institutional outputs that the situations produced.
The essay’s most powerful rhetorical moments are moments of moral judgment that the situational reading dissolves. The Higham frustration dissolves. The consensus historian accusation dissolves. The reference letter formula condemnation dissolves. The Yale quota outrage dissolves. None of these dissolutions exculpates anyone. The behaviors were wrong. The wrongness is real. The locus of the wrongness shifts from individual character to institutional structure, and the implications for analysis and reform shift accordingly. The essay’s framework permits us to feel righteous about the wrongness of specific individuals doing specific bad things. The situational framework permits us to identify the institutional structures whose change would have prevented the wrongness from being produced. The first is rhetorically satisfying. The second is analytically more useful. The trade is the trade Doris’s evidence forces on every analysis that relies on character architecture.
This applies to the protective norms the essay names as having shielded Jewish scholarly production from sociological analysis. The essay treats these norms as the actions of individuals participating in coalition enforcement. The norms persist because individual scholars enforce them through their individual choices not to make certain observations. Doris would relocate the norms in the institutional structures that produce the situations in which the observations are not made. Higham did not make the observation in 1959 because the Commentary situation in 1959 selected against making it. The historians who have studied the consensus school in subsequent decades have not made the observation because their institutional situations have continued to select against making it. The persistence of the norm is not the cumulative effect of individual scholars choosing to enforce it. It is the persistence of the institutional structures that have continued to produce situations in which the observation is not made. Reform requires institutional change, not appeals to individual analytical courage. The institutions that produce the situations that produce the silences will continue producing the silences as long as the institutions persist.
The essay’s deepest implicit hope is that individual analytical courage will dissolve the protective norms. Higham could have completed his analysis if he had been braver. Subsequent historians could complete his analysis if they were braver. My essay performs the analytical courage that previous writers have lacked. Doris’s framework will not support any of this. Individual analytical courage is not a stable trait that persists across situations. The same scholar who produces the courageous analysis in one situation produces the conventional analysis in another. The courage is not the property of the individual. It is the situation-specific behavior that specific situations select for. The protective norms persist not because individuals lack courage but because the institutional situations select against the analyses that would dissolve the norms. Change the institutional situations and the analyses get produced without requiring any change in the courage of the individuals operating within them. The essay’s implicit theory of how change happens, with brave individuals making observations that less brave individuals refuse to make, is exactly the character-based theory of human behavior that Doris’s evidence dismantles.
What survives of the essay under Doris’s framework is the documentary record. The quota systems existed. The reference letter formulas existed. The protective norms exist. The losses in academic practice are real. The displacement of working-class Protestants is real. What does not survive is the framework that organizes the documentary record into a moral narrative about character. The narrative requires character architecture at the individual and population levels that Doris’s evidence will not support. The same record can be organized into a different narrative that locates the wrongness institutionally rather than characterologically. The institutional narrative is less rhetorically satisfying but analytically more useful. The institutional narrative also points toward different kinds of intervention than the character narrative does. Character interventions involve appeals to individual moral courage and character development. Institutional interventions involve restructuring the situations that produce the behaviors. The first is what the essay implicitly recommends. The second is what Doris’s framework would recommend.
The hardest implication is what this means for the essay’s own situation. The essay treats itself as the product of analytical courage that the academy has lacked. The implication is that you as the essay’s writer have a stable character trait of analytical courage that produces this analysis where less courageous writers fail to produce it. Doris’s framework would deny this attribution as completely as it denies the attributions the essay makes about its subjects. My essay was produced by the specific situational pressures of my specific institutional position. I am not a tenured professor at Columbia or Harvard whose career depends on maintaining the protective norms. I am an independent blogger and YouTube livestreamer whose income depends on producing distinctive analytical content for an audience that values exactly the kind of observation the essay makes. The situation selects for the analysis. The analysis is not the expression of my individual courage. It is the situation-specific output that my institutional position produces. Move me into a different institutional position and the analysis comes out differently or does not come out at all. The same person at Columbia in 2026 produces different work because the situation is different.
This is uncomfortable but it is the consistent application of Doris’s framework. The essay applies the framework to its subjects without applying it to itself. Doris’s framework will not permit the asymmetry. If the consensus historians’ work was produced by their institutional situations rather than by their characters, the essay’s work is produced by its writer’s institutional situation rather than by his character. The essay’s analytical courage is not a thing the writer possesses. It is the situation-specific behavior the writer’s situation produces. The essay’s frustration with Higham’s failure to complete the analysis is therefore frustration with another situation having produced different behavior than the writer’s situation produces. The frustration is misdirected on Doris’s reading. Higham’s situation in 1959 produced his behavior in 1959. The writer’s situation in 2026 produces his behavior in 2026. Neither is the expression of stable character. Both are situation-specific outputs that the situations selected for.
The implications for the custodianship question itself are stark. The essay treats the custodianship question as a question about which kinds of people, with which kinds of character, should guard which traditions. Doris’s framework would deny that the question can be posed in this form. There are no kinds of people with stable characters that custodianship requires or rewards. There are individuals whose behavior varies with their situations, and institutions whose situations select for specific behaviors. The custodianship question becomes a question about institutional design. What institutional structures select for the behaviors that produce the practices the essay values? The answer is not that we need custodians of the right character. The answer is that we need institutional structures that select for the practices we value, regardless of the characters of the individuals operating within those structures.
The essay’s mourning of what was lost in the American academy receives under Doris’s framework a different reading than the essay supplies. The losses are real. They are not best understood as losses of practices that good custodians had been transmitting until bad custodians displaced them. They are best understood as losses produced by institutional changes that reorganized the situational pressures the academy generates. The institutional changes selected against the practices the essay valued and selected for the practices that have replaced them. Reform requires institutional change. The character-based mourning the essay performs cannot produce reform because the targets of the mourning are not the operative variables. The institutions are the operative variables. Reforming them requires understanding them as institutions whose situations produce specific behaviors, not as containers for individuals whose characters produce the behaviors.
This is the strongest application of Doris’s framework to the essay because it forces the essay to abandon both its rhetorical strategy and its theory of change. The rhetorical strategy depends on character attribution that produces moral satisfaction in identifying specific bad actors and specific good ones. The theory of change depends on the possibility of better individuals replacing worse ones, with the better individuals having the character to produce the practices the worse ones could not produce. Both have to go under Doris’s framework. What replaces them is institutional analysis that locates the operative variables in the structures that produce the situations rather than in the individuals operating within them. The institutional analysis is less rhetorically satisfying but more analytically accurate. It also produces different recommendations for change than the character-based analysis would produce.
The essay’s most rhetorically powerful section is the catalogue of specific losses in contemporary academic practice. Typological reading, liturgical formation, sacramental imagination, communal reading, permission to be moved, and the rest. Each loss is named with precision and mourned with specificity. Doris would say each loss is real as a description of contemporary academic practice compared to selected earlier practices. None is the loss of a stable practice that stable custodians had been transmitting. Each is the loss of situation-specific behaviors that earlier institutional situations had produced and that current institutional situations no longer produce. The losses can be reversed only by institutional changes that would produce situations selecting for the practices. The institutional changes are not easy to specify and may not be feasible under current conditions. But the locus of intervention is institutional, not characterological. Asking individuals to develop the character to practice typological reading will not produce typological reading. Restructuring the institutional situations that select for the practices that produce typological reading might produce them, depending on whether the restructuring can be made to occur and whether the resulting situations actually select for the desired practices.
The essay’s framework does not permit this analysis because the framework treats the losses as the consequences of bad custodianship rather than as the consequences of institutional change. Bad custodians displaced good ones. Bad practices replaced good ones. Better custodians could in principle restore better practices. This is the theory of change the essay implicitly defends. Doris’s framework denies it at every step. There were no good custodians being displaced by bad ones. There were institutions whose situations produced certain behaviors. The institutions changed. The situations changed. The behaviors changed. No custodians chose any of this in any sense the framework requires. The change happened through the institutional structures, with individuals as the medium through which institutional outputs got produced rather than the source of the outputs.
The honest accounting Doris’s framework forces on the essay is that the comparative analysis the essay performs is less analytically supported than the essay’s framework suggests. The character architecture the analysis requires cannot be sustained by the evidence Doris reviews. The local observations survive. The unified narrative does not. The local observations include the fact that elite American institutions excluded Jewish entrants through specific mechanisms in the early twentieth century, that they opened to Jewish entry in the postwar period under specific conditions, that the Jewish entrants produced specific kinds of scholarship that varied with their institutional situations, that the institutions changed substantially between 1900 and 2026, and that the changes have produced some practices and lost others. These observations are defensible without character architecture at any level. The unified narrative that organizes them into a story about characters interacting across institutional contexts is what character architecture supplies and what Doris’s evidence will not support. The story is rhetorically powerful. The observations are analytically defensible. The story does not survive. The observations do.
The essay’s most honest moment, on Doris’s reading, is the moment when it concedes that Hofstadter’s apparently antithetical positions across his career, the Episcopalian altar boy and the consensus historian and the critic of the paranoid style, can all be the same person. The concession briefly suggests that individual character is not the operative variable. The concession passes. The essay returns to character-based analysis throughout. Doris’s framework would treat the concession as the moment when the situational reading briefly surfaces in the essay before being submerged again by the framework’s character commitments. The submergence is what the framework requires for the analysis to function. The concession is what the evidence requires for the analysis to be accurate. The conflict between the two is the conflict every character-based analysis faces when the evidence gets close enough to the actors to reveal the situational specificity of their behavior. The essay manages the conflict by making the concession briefly and then returning to the framework. Doris’s framework would manage it by abandoning the framework and accepting the implications of the situational reading throughout, even where the implications dissolve the moral architecture the essay relies on. The cost is the unified narrative. The benefit is the analytical accuracy. The essay chose the narrative. Doris would have it choose the accuracy. The choice, as in every analytical project, is the choice between rhetorical power and analytical truth, with the framework concealing the choice from the analyst even as the analyst makes it.
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred applied to your American custodianship essay produces a reading that places the entire historical sweep within an evolutionary framework the essay does not invoke but that explains the empirical pattern the essay documents better than the moral or political frameworks the essay relies on. The essay describes anti-Jewish sentiment in American academia between roughly 1880 and 1945 as antisemitism, with the term doing the explanatory work and the moral evaluation simultaneously. Sell’s framework would deny that antisemitism is the operative explanatory category. The category is hatred, and hatred is a specific evolved adaptation that responds to specific cues that an individual’s existence imposes net fitness costs on the hater. Apply the framework to the documented record and the pattern reorganizes around the trigger structure Sell identifies, with the WASP custodianship behaviors becoming legible as the specific phenotypic outputs of a hatred adaptation responding to specific situational cues.
Start with the trigger analysis. Sell identifies four pathways that activate the hatred adaptation. Direct experience of costs from the target. Counterfactual reasoning about how one’s life would be different if the target did not exist or had less power. Social copying of who others find toxic. Outputs from other emotion systems including envy, fear, disgust, jealousy, and anger. The American academic exclusion of Jews between 1900 and 1945 activated all four pathways simultaneously. The WASP professional class was experiencing direct costs from Jewish entry into the credentialing economy. Jewish applicants were outperforming gentile applicants academically while the credentialing system was supposed to produce the WASP professional class’s reproduction across generations. The WASP custodian’s son was losing his place to the immigrant Jew’s son. The cost was real, not imagined. Counterfactual reasoning was readily available. The Boston Brahmin family that watched its sons fail to gain admission to the institutions that had produced the family’s social position for generations could easily compute that the situation would have been different had the Jewish applicants not existed. The social copying was running across the entire WASP custodian network through the reference letter formulas, the country club exclusions, the medical society arrangements, and the informal communications that circulated within the gentile professional class. The other emotion systems were activated thoroughly. Envy operated through the Jewish overrepresentation at the academic top of the credentialing competition. Fear operated through the rumors of Jewish conspiracy and Jewish power that circulated even at respectable levels of the WASP establishment. Disgust operated through the Eastern European Jewish immigrant’s perceived foreignness, his accent, his manners, his physical appearance. Shame operated through the Jewish observers’ presence as witnesses to WASP failure, with the Jewish lawyer who defeated the WASP lawyer in court being a witness to WASP failure that the WASP could not eliminate without eliminating the witness.
The convergence of these triggers produces the intensity Sell’s framework would predict. The WASP custodianship’s response to Jewish entry was not generalized prejudice or vague antisemitism. It was the specific phenotypic output of a hatred adaptation activated by multiple convergent cues that the Jewish entrants imposed net fitness costs on the WASP population whose institutional positions the entrants were threatening. The reference letter formulas catalogue the perceived cost dimensions with specificity. The Jewish character defects identified in the letters track exactly what the WASP letter writers experienced as costs. The Jewish applicant’s aggressive intellectual style imposed costs on the genteel discourse the WASP custodianship valued. The Jewish applicant’s social manners imposed costs on the country club atmosphere the institutions cultivated. The Jewish applicant’s family background imposed costs on the social reproduction the institutions performed. Each catalogued defect is the WASP letter writer’s reading of a specific cost dimension Jewish entry imposed.
The essay treats these formulas as evidence of irrational antisemitism. Sell’s framework would treat them as evidence of a hatred adaptation responding accurately to the cost structure the WASP custodianship was experiencing. The adaptation was doing what it evolved to do. The Jewish entrants were imposing real costs on the WASP custodianship’s institutional position. The hatred adaptation activated to neutralize the toxic individuals whose existence was producing the costs. The neutralization strategies the adaptation deployed are exactly the strategies Sell catalogues. Information warfare through the reference letter formulas, the social network communications, the public petitions like the one Lowell signed against Brandeis. Avoidance through the institutional segregation that kept Jewish professionals out of the country clubs, the hospital admitting privileges, the elite law firms. Predatory aggression through the violence at Kings County Hospital where Jewish interns were beaten and threatened with murder. Each strategy maps directly onto Sell’s catalogue of hatred-driven behaviors. The adaptation was operating as designed. The behaviors were the predictable outputs of the adaptation given the situational triggers.
This is uncomfortable because it locates the WASP custodianship behaviors within a functional evolutionary framework rather than within a moral framework that permits judgment of those behaviors as wrong in some absolute sense. Sell’s framework does not permit such judgment in the form the essay’s framework requires. The behaviors were functional. They served the adaptation’s purpose of neutralizing toxic individuals. The wrongness the essay attributes to them is the moral judgment imposed from outside the framework. Inside the framework, the behaviors are the standard outputs of an evolved adaptation operating as it evolved to operate. Whether they were morally wrong is a separate question from whether they were functionally rational. The essay’s framework treats moral wrongness and functional irrationality as the same thing. Sell’s framework distinguishes them. The behaviors were morally wrong on most contemporary moral frameworks. They were functionally rational given the adaptation’s design and the situational triggers.
The Jewish response to this WASP custodianship hatred receives under Sell’s framework an equally functional reading. The hatred adaptation is reciprocal. If one population’s hatred targets another, the targeted population’s hatred adaptation activates against the first. The Jewish entrants who experienced WASP custodianship hatred would predictably develop reciprocal hatred toward the WASP custodianship, since the WASP custodianship’s existence was imposing real costs on Jewish access to professional life. The reciprocal hatred would deploy the same neutralization strategies Sell catalogues. Information warfare, in the form of analytical work that exposed WASP coalition interests beneath universalist self-presentation. Predatory aggression, in the institutional struggles that gradually displaced WASP custodianship across the postwar period. Avoidance, in the building of parallel institutions like Yeshiva and Brandeis and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The Jewish coalition’s interventions across the twentieth century, including the consensus historiography and the New Critical institutionalization and the eventual theoretical revolution that displaced New Criticism, can all be read as the deployment of hatred-driven neutralization strategies against the WASP custodianship that had imposed costs on Jewish access for the previous generation.
This produces a reading the essay does not perform but that the framework supports. The consensus historians’ systematic suppression of Jewish particularity in their universalist scholarship was not just an assimilation strategy or a coalition device. It was an information warfare deployment in the reciprocal hatred between Jewish entrants and WASP custodians. The universalist framework dissolved the categories the WASP custodianship had used to exclude Jews. By reframing American history as the working out of universal values rather than the working out of a specifically WASP cultural inheritance, the consensus historians removed the analytical foundation on which Jewish exclusion had rested. The WASP custodianship’s claim that custodianship of the American past required formation Jews did not possess could not survive the consensus framework’s reading of the American past, because the framework denied that the American past had a specifically WASP character at all. The framework served Jewish coalition interests by undermining the WASP custodianship’s claim to legitimate exclusion. The framework was, in Sell’s terms, an information warfare deployment that lowered the WASP custodianship’s status and influence in the broader population by producing analytical readings that made WASP custodianship look like provincial particularism rather than legitimate stewardship of universal values.
The Higham case takes on a different significance under Sell’s framework. The essay treats Higham as having seen but failed to name the ethnic variable. Sell’s framework would say Higham was operating within a hatred network on both sides of which the adaptations were active. Higham’s gentile progressive coalition had its own hatred adaptation directed at the WASP custodianship that the coalition was contesting for institutional control. The Jewish consensus historians’ coalition had its own hatred adaptation directed at the same WASP custodianship and at the working-class Protestant insurgency the consensus framework pathologized as Populism. Higham’s analysis stopped short of naming the ethnic variable not because of his individual analytical caution but because naming the ethnic variable would have disrupted the coalition arrangement his coalition was operating within. The coalition’s hatred adaptation was directed at the WASP custodianship and the working-class Protestants. The Jewish entrants were coalition partners in the assault on the WASP custodianship. Naming the Jewish coalition interest beneath the consensus framework would have weakened the coalition’s information warfare against the shared targets. The coalition required the framework to remain unnamed for its functional purpose. Higham operated within the coalition’s strategic requirements without being conscious of doing so.
The Populist case the essay describes receives under Sell’s framework the cleanest demonstration of how hatred adaptations operate through scholarly production. The essay treats Hofstadter’s psychologization of the Populists as paranoid and proto-fascist as the expression of his Eastern European Jewish anxieties about insurgent gentile peasants who spelled pogrom. Sell’s framework would say this is exactly the trigger structure the hatred adaptation responds to. The Jewish immigrant population that produced Hofstadter and Bell and Lipset and Glazer had experienced the costs of insurgent gentile peasants directly through the pogroms of 1881-1884 and 1903-1906. The counterfactual reasoning was straightforward. A world without insurgent gentile peasants would be a world without pogroms. The social copying within the immigrant community had identified insurgent gentile peasants as toxic with extreme cue strength. The other emotion systems were activated thoroughly. Fear of mass action. Disgust at the apparent backwardness of agrarian movements. Anger at the threat to the immigrant community. The hatred adaptation activated against insurgent gentile peasants as a category, and when American Populism appeared in the historical record as a candidate for analysis, the adaptation deployed information warfare against it. The Populists were portrayed as paranoid, antisemitic, backward, and proto-fascist. The information warfare lowered the Populists’ standing in subsequent generations of historians and made them politically useless as models for left politics. The hatred adaptation accomplished its function. The toxic population, as the immigrant Jewish community had perceived it, was neutralized in the academic literature that subsequently shaped how the American left thought about its own history.
The essay names this dynamic directly when it observes that the Jewish historians who psychologized the Populists were one generation removed from the shtetl where insurgent gentile peasants spelled pogrom. Sell’s framework provides the explanatory mechanism the essay invokes. The hatred adaptation, activated by historical experience and transmitted through community memory operating below the level of conscious methodology, deployed its standard neutralization strategies against the candidate target the historiographical situation made available. The historians believed they were doing objective social psychology. They were performing the hatred adaptation’s information warfare function with high analytical sophistication. The adaptation produced exactly the output its design would predict given the trigger structure the historians’ formation provided.
The reciprocal hatred running between the consensus historians and the working-class Protestant population the essay names as having been displaced from the elite academy receives under Sell’s framework the most uncomfortable reading. The working-class Protestants did not produce institutional output that competed with the consensus historians at the level the WASP custodianship had competed. The working-class Protestants were being displaced from the credentialing economy without having the institutional positions to defend themselves. But the consensus framework’s pathologization of the populist tradition the working-class Protestants might have used to articulate their position closed off the analytical resources that population would have needed to defend itself. The consensus framework served this function whether or not the historians producing it were conscious of doing so. The working-class Protestant population, lacking the analytical apparatus to understand its own displacement, expressed its phenotypic response through political formations the academy treated as further confirmation of the population’s pathological character. McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Wallace movement in the 1960s, the resurgence of evangelical politics in the 1970s, and the populist political movements of the 2010s and 2020s, all of these can be read as the phenotypic outputs of the working-class Protestant population’s hatred adaptation responding to its institutional displacement, with the adaptation deploying the strategies available given the population’s resources. The academy’s continued pathologization of these movements as expressions of resentment, irrationality, or proto-fascism continues the consensus framework’s information warfare against the population that has been displaced. The hatred runs in both directions. The academy’s hatred operates through analytical sophistication. The displaced population’s hatred operates through political mobilization. Each side perceives the other as toxic and deploys the neutralization strategies its institutional position permits.
This produces the essay’s hardest implication. The essay treats the working-class Protestant displacement as an unintended consequence of changes that primarily concerned WASP custodianship and Jewish entry. Sell’s framework would deny this. The working-class Protestant displacement was not unintended. It was the predicted output of hatred adaptations operating across multiple coalitions whose shared interest in displacing this population converged. The Jewish coalition’s hatred adaptation, formed by the shtetl experience of insurgent gentile peasants, identified the working-class Protestant population as toxic. The progressive gentile coalition’s hatred adaptation, formed by the experience of the working-class Protestant population’s resistance to progressive cultural changes, identified the same population as toxic. The Catholic coalition’s hatred adaptation, formed by the experience of working-class Protestant nativism that had targeted Catholic immigrants, identified the same population as toxic. The Black coalition’s hatred adaptation, formed by the experience of working-class Protestant violence in the Jim Crow South and the Northern white ethnic neighborhoods, identified the same population as toxic. Multiple coalitions converged on the working-class Protestant population as a shared target. The institutional displacement followed from this convergence. The displacement was not a side effect of other dynamics. It was the predicted output of multiple hatred adaptations targeting the same population for neutralization.
This reading is uncomfortable in a different way than the previous applications. It does not exculpate any party. It locates the dynamics in evolved adaptations operating across multiple populations whose situational triggers had identified each other as toxic in various combinations. The WASP custodianship was hating the Jewish entrants while the Jewish entrants were hating the WASP custodianship and the working-class Protestants. The progressives were hating the WASP custodianship and the working-class Protestants. The Catholics were hating the WASP custodianship and the working-class Protestants who had nativized them. The working-class Protestants were hating everyone who they perceived as displacing them. The Blacks were hating the working-class Protestants who had violently excluded them. The institutional outcomes across the twentieth century reflected the convergent operation of these adaptations across populations whose hatred was directed in specific patterns at specific targets.
The essay’s framework cannot accommodate this reading because the framework requires moral judgments that distinguish between populations behaving badly and populations behaving justifiably. Sell’s framework does not permit this distinction. All the populations were behaving in ways the hatred adaptation produces when its triggers are activated. The behaviors were morally wrong on most contemporary moral frameworks. They were functionally rational given the adaptations’ design and the situational triggers. The reciprocal hatred between WASP custodians and Jewish entrants was not asymmetrical in moral or functional terms. Each side was deploying its hatred adaptation against a target the adaptation had identified as toxic. The information warfare, the predatory aggression, the avoidance, the social copying, all of these strategies were deployed by each side against the other across the period the essay documents. The WASP custodianship’s quota systems and reference letter formulas were the available strategies given its institutional position. The Jewish entrants’ analytical reframing of American history and American literature were the available strategies given their institutional position. Each side did what its situation permitted. Each side believed itself to be acting justifiably and the other side to be acting wrongly. The hatred adaptation includes this asymmetry of perception as a feature of its design. The hater perceives his own targeting as legitimate and the target’s reciprocation as illegitimate aggression.
The convenient beliefs framework the essay invokes through Turner sits inside Sell’s framework as a particular case of the asymmetry of perception. The convenient beliefs each coalition holds about the other are the cognitive products of the hatred adaptation operating to maintain coalition cohesion against shared targets. The WASP custodianship’s belief that Jews were pushy, aggressive, and culturally alien served the hatred adaptation’s information warfare function within the WASP coalition. The Jewish entrants’ belief that the WASP custodianship was provincial, exclusionary, and intellectually limited served the same function within the Jewish coalition. The progressive belief that the working-class Protestant population is irrational and proto-fascist serves the same function within the progressive coalition. The working-class Protestant belief that elite institutions are captured by cosmopolitan elites serves the same function within that population. Each set of beliefs is the hatred adaptation’s contribution to coalition coordination. None is best understood as objective analysis. All are best understood as the cognitive products of adaptations designed to maintain coalition cohesion against shared targets.
The essay’s most charged passages receive under Sell’s framework the readings the framework’s logic forces. The Bridenbaugh address that the essay treats as antisemitic outburst was the WASP custodianship’s hatred adaptation operating in public after the institutional defeat had become irreversible. Bridenbaugh was naming the toxic targets whose existence had imposed costs on the WASP coalition’s institutional position. The naming served the hatred adaptation’s information warfare function even when the warfare was being lost. The Pierson worry about social class was the same adaptation operating in the institutional position the chairman occupied. The Hocking remark about the Jewish mind being unfit to teach Western philosophy was the same adaptation deploying its most metaphysically elevated information warfare. Each behavior was the predictable output of the adaptation given the trigger structure the WASP custodianship was experiencing.
The essay’s mourning of what was lost in the shift from WASP custodianship to Jewish-led custodianship receives a different reading too. The losses are real. The mourning is a phenotypic output the essay produces. The output serves a function within the coalition the essay’s writer represents. The function is information warfare against the current institutional arrangement that displaced the practices the essay values. The mourning identifies the toxic targets whose institutional displacement of the previous arrangement is responsible for the costs the essay’s coalition perceives. The current academic arrangement has produced costs to the coalition the essay represents. The hatred adaptation activates. The information warfare deploys. The essay is the output. The output is functional given the trigger structure the writer’s coalition is experiencing. Whether the output is true is a separate question from whether it is functional. Sell’s framework will not let the writer claim transcendence of his own coalition’s hatred adaptation while documenting the adaptation’s operation in others.
This is the same uncomfortable implication the previous frameworks produced, but Sell’s framework gives it a specifically evolutionary basis the previous frameworks did not provide. The essay is not the analytical achievement the writer treats it as. It is the phenotypic output of the writer’s coalition’s hatred adaptation directed at the academic arrangement the coalition perceives as having imposed costs. The adaptation operates through the writer’s body and produces analytical content of unusual sophistication, but the content’s sophistication does not change its function. The function is hatred-driven information warfare against the coalition’s targets. The targets include the academy, the protective norms shielding Jewish scholarly production from sociological analysis, the consensus historians who suppressed Jewish particularity, and the contemporary academic arrangement that has produced the practices the essay documents as losses. The writer experiences the writing as analytical work. The adaptation’s design requires this experience. The hater perceives his own targeting as legitimate analytical engagement rather than as hatred adaptation operating through him.
The hardest implication is what this means for the essay’s project. The essay treats itself as exposing what the academy has refused to expose. Sell’s framework would say the essay is one coalition’s hatred adaptation expressing itself analytically against another coalition’s institutional arrangement. The exposure is real in the sense that the protective norms exist and the practices the essay documents have changed. The exposure is not analytical truth reached from outside the hatred dynamics. It is the writer’s coalition’s information warfare operating through the writer’s analytical capacities. The same observations could be made by writers in other coalitions whose hatred adaptations are not currently activated against the same targets, and those writers would not make the observations because their adaptations are not selecting for the analytical work that produces them. The protective norms persist not because individual scholars lack analytical courage but because the coalitions whose adaptations are currently institutionally dominant do not have triggers activated against the targets the protective norms protect. Change the institutional situation enough that those coalitions experience costs from the protective norms, and the norms will dissolve as the coalitions’ adaptations activate against the targets the norms protect. The dissolution will not require any change in individual analytical courage. It will require situational changes that activate the adaptations.
The essay’s implicit theory of change therefore requires revision under Sell’s framework. The theory holds that brave individuals making observations that less brave individuals refuse to make can dissolve protective norms through the analytical force of their observations. Sell would deny this. The brave individuals are not brave. They are operating coalitions whose adaptations are activated against the protected targets. Less brave individuals are operating in coalitions whose adaptations are not activated. The bravery is not the operative variable. The coalition position is. Change the coalition positions, and the bravery distribution changes accordingly. The essay’s call for analytical honesty about what the academy has refused to name is, on Sell’s framework, a call for the activation of more coalition adaptations against the targets the essay identifies. The call may succeed if institutional conditions support coalition realignment in the directions the essay favors. The call may fail if conditions do not support such realignment. The success or failure has nothing to do with whether the essay’s analytical observations are correct. They may be entirely correct and still fail to produce the changes the essay wants, because the changes depend on coalition dynamics rather than on analytical truth.
The custodianship question itself receives under Sell’s framework an answer the essay’s framework cannot supply. The question of who guards a tradition is the question of which coalition’s hatred adaptations are currently directed at which targets within the relevant institutional arrangement. The American academy of 2026 is the institutional output of the coalition arrangement that prevailed across the postwar period, with the Jewish, progressive, Catholic, and Black coalitions having converged on the displacement of WASP custodianship while excluding the working-class Protestant population from institutional participation. The arrangement is now under pressure from coalition realignments that the essay’s writer’s coalition is participating in. The realignments may produce a new institutional arrangement in which different coalitions hold different positions and direct their hatred adaptations against different targets. The new arrangement will not be the restoration of WASP custodianship that the essay’s mourning sometimes implies it would prefer. The new arrangement will be whatever configuration the new coalition dynamics produce, with that configuration’s hatred adaptations directed at the new targets the configuration’s situation generates.
This is the deepest application of Sell’s framework to the essay because it places the entire analytical project within an evolutionary framework the project does not invoke and cannot accept without losing the moral architecture that makes the project rhetorically effective. The essay needs to distinguish between justified and unjustified hatred, between bigotry and accurate perception, between coalition warfare and analytical truth. Sell’s framework collapses these distinctions. All hatred is the operation of the adaptation against perceived toxic targets. All bigotry is accurate perception from the perspective of the haters whose adaptations are activated. All coalition warfare is conducted with analytical apparatus that the participants experience as truth. The essay’s framework cannot survive this collapse. The essay’s framework requires that some hatreds be unjustified and others be appropriate analytical responses to actual problems. Sell would say the framework is itself the analytical apparatus through which the writer’s coalition’s hatred adaptation expresses its information warfare. The framework’s distinctions are not analytical truths but coalition products, just as the framework would predict.
What survives of the essay under Sell’s framework is the documentary record. The quota systems existed. The reference letter formulas existed. The Populist reevaluation happened. The protective norms operate. The losses in academic practice are real. The coalition dynamics produced these outcomes. What does not survive is the moral architecture that organizes the documentary record into a story about who was right and who was wrong. Each side was operating its hatred adaptation in response to the situational triggers the historical conditions provided. Each side perceived itself as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. Each side produced phenotypic outputs that the framework would predict given the triggers. The outputs included scholarly analysis that the participants experienced as truth. The truth-experience is part of the adaptation’s design. The hater believes he is seeing accurately. The hater is seeing accurately, in the limited sense that his target is in fact imposing costs on him as the adaptation has identified. The accuracy does not extend to the moral evaluation the hater applies to the target. The moral evaluation is the cognitive product of the adaptation, not a separate analytical achievement the hater performs in addition to the targeting.
The essay’s most powerful single observation is that Hofstadter’s exaggeration of Populist antisemitism, his stress on the movement’s dark side, was justified in his own mind by the corrective function of countering previous historians’ excessive sympathy for the Populists. The observation reveals exactly what Sell’s framework predicts. The hatred adaptation produces analytical exaggeration that the hater experiences as corrective rather than as exaggeration. The essay’s framework can identify Hofstadter’s exaggeration retrospectively because the writer’s coalition’s adaptation is activated against Hofstadter’s coalition’s adaptation. The future will identify the essay’s exaggerations the same way, when whatever coalition succeeds the writer’s coalition has its adaptation activated against the writer’s coalition’s outputs. The retrospective identification of one coalition’s exaggerations by another coalition’s analytical apparatus is the standard operation of the framework. Every coalition’s analytical work appears to itself as corrective and to its successor as exaggeration. The essay performs this operation against Hofstadter and Hofstadter’s coalition. The essay’s successors will perform it against the essay. Sell’s framework predicts the entire pattern as the standard output of the adaptation operating across coalitions whose successive institutional positions activate it against successive targets.
The honest accounting Sell’s framework forces on the essay is that the writer’s coalition’s adaptation is activated against the current academic arrangement, the analytical work the essay performs is the adaptation’s information warfare deployment, the exaggerations the essay performs are the adaptation’s standard outputs, and the moral judgments the essay makes are the cognitive products of the adaptation that the writer experiences as analytical truth. None of this means the essay is wrong about the documentary record. The record is what it is. The framework that organizes the record is the question. The essay’s framework treats the record as evidence of moral wrong by specific coalitions that the writer’s coalition has identified accurately. Sell’s framework treats the record as evidence of multiple coalitions’ adaptations operating on each other across institutional time, with the writer’s coalition’s analytical apparatus being the latest expression of the adaptation against the latest target rather than a final analytical achievement that transcends the dynamics it documents.
The custodianship question, finally, has under Sell’s framework the answer the framework’s logic supplies. There is no custodianship question in the form the essay poses it. There are coalition dynamics across institutional time, with each coalition’s hatred adaptation directing its information warfare and other neutralization strategies against the targets the situation activates. The American academy across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the site of multiple coalition conflicts whose institutional outputs reflect the convergent operation of multiple hatred adaptations on multiple targets. The current arrangement is the institutional output of the postwar coalition convergence. The arrangement is under pressure from new coalition dynamics. The new arrangement will be whatever configuration the new dynamics produce. None of these configurations represents correct custodianship. Each represents the coalition equilibrium of its moment, with the equilibrium’s stability dependent on the trigger structure the institutional situation produces and the adaptations’ continued activation against the targets the situation supplies. The framework permits no view from outside this dynamic. The essay’s framework requires such a view. The view is the framework’s coalition product, not a discovery the writer has made through analytical effort. Sell’s framework is harder than the previous frameworks because it places the entire analytical enterprise within an evolutionary explanation the enterprise cannot accept without losing its rhetorical force, and the loss is real because the enterprise’s value depends on the moral architecture the framework’s logic dissolves.
* Of four identifiably Jewish historians before World War I, two never sought regular academic appointments. Cyrus Adler held a position at the Smithsonian.
The highly esteemed colonialist George Louis Beer was a wealthy German Jew who for several years after receiving his M.A. combined lecturing at Columbia with a business career, but he never enjoyed teaching, and after his retirement from business, pursued the life of a “gentleman scholar.” Charles Gross, who held a Ph.D. from Gottingen, made a strong impression on Herbert Baxter Adams, who feared that “it will be very difficult for him to get a start as a regular instructor in an American College, on account of his Jewish connections. A University position must be created for him in some way, for he is really too brilliant and too well-trained for any subordinate kind of work.” (Adams to Andrew D. White, 24 November 1883, in Holt, “Historical Scholarship,” 69-70.) Adams’s fears were, happily, unfounded, and Gross became a professor at Harvard, and twice chairman of its History Department. Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard at first found Frank Golder “a rather unusually insignificant looking little Jew whom we threw down hard the first time he tried his general examinations,” but came to be “quite attached to him for he is a very good, kindly fellow.” Golder held a variety of positions at minor universities before the war, and later wound up at Stanford. (Coolidge to Arthur Lyon Cross, 29 October 1924, Van Tyne Papers, Box 2.) Unlike the situation later on, there were so few Jews within the profession in this period that anti-Semitism was hardly an issue.* By the time that Beard was promoting German historiographical writings, the triumph of Hitler, and the relative warmth with which Nazism was greeted by most German historians, made Germany a somewhat less
attractive place for Americans to go for guidance. The trickle of emigre German historians (almost all Jewish, part Jewish, or married to Jews) were much too busy scrambling to find positions to serve as expositors of the “Crisis of Historicism” to their new compatriots. With the sole exception of Beard the German crisis had no discernable influence on American historians.* Concern with checking the declining social status of the historian almost certainly contributed to the widespread anti-Semitism within the profession in the interwar years. Academic anti-Semitism in interwar America was much stronger in geisteswissenschaftlich disciplines like history (particularly American history) and English than it was in the sciences, or in the newer social sciences. Selig Perlman, a professor of economics at Wisconsin, is said to have regularly summoned Jewish graduate students in history to his office and warned them, in a deep Yiddish accent, that “History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. You belong in Economics or Sociology.” The academic patrons of Jewish graduate students often despaired of finding them jobs. Writing on behalf of J. H. Hexter, Crane Brinton said, “I’m afraid he is unemployable, but I’d like to make one last effort in his behalf.”
It is impossible to disentangle, from fragmentary evidence, the components of academic anti-Semitism. Concern with lowering the status of the profession merged into concern with who should be entrusted with the guardianship of the Geist, and with reservations about the allegedly aggressive intellectual and personal style of Jews: a concern that discourse and social life within the profession would become less genteel if it became less gentile. Letters of recommendation repeatedly tried to reassure prospective employers on this point: Oscar Handlin “has none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race,” and Bert J. Loewenberg “by temperament and spirit . . . measures up to the whitest Gentile I know” (Arthur Schlesinger); Daniel J. Boorstin “is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception” and Richard Leopold was “of course a Jew, but since he is a Princeton graduate, you may be reasonably certain that he is not of the offensive type” (Roger B. Merriman); Solomon Katz was “quite un-Jewish, if one considers the undesirable side of the race” (Merrill Jensen); variations on the formula were endlessly repeated.
The number of Jews within the profession who were discriminated against in this period was probably smaller than the number of those who, knowing what they were in for, stayed out of it.
* It is noteworthy that the best-known Jewish historians in the interwar years were Europeanists: Leo Gershoy, Louis Gottschalk, J. Salwyn Schapiro, Lawrence Steefel.
* The exquisite ambiguity of the phrase which Schlesinger applied to Handlin—simultaneously embracing and distancing oneself from the stereotype—commended itself to Harvard historians, who repeatedly used it. Variations on the theme were widespread. Raymond Turner of Johns Hopkins said of a candidate that he would not recommend him “were it not that in my opinion he is, for those who may object to Jews, the least objectionable Jew engaged in teaching that I have ever seen” (15 February 1928 letter to C. H. Van Tyne, Van Tyne Papers, Box 2); Bernadotte Schmitt of the University of Chicago wrote to the same effect about Leo Gershoy (9 October 1926 letter to William E. Dodd, Dodd Papers, Box 25). Bruce Kuklick found similar locutions in letters of recommendation written by Harvard philosophers at around the same time. Kuklick’s view is that those who employed such phrases, even if not themselves anti-Semitic, “participated in, and therefore in some measure reinforced, a vicious system of prejudice.” (The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 [New Haven, 1977], 456-57.) This seems to me a bit overjudgmental. If those seeking to find jobs for Jewish students in an anti-Semitic environment took a high moral ground, it probably would have been at the expense of the students. But the whole question is shrouded in ambiguity. Before Schlesinger (who was himself half Jewish by ancestry) moved to Harvard, and learned its ritual phrases, he said of a candidate for an instructorship that he was “a little afraid of employing a Jew unless I know him personally.” (Letter to Harry Elmer Barnes, 13 May 1921, Barnes Papers, Box 9.) Some gentile job applicants—for example, Wallace Notestein and Frederick L. Nussbaum—ran into difficulty because of their names, and prospective employers had to be prevented from leaping to the wrong conclusion. Charles W. Hull of Cornell reassured C. M. Andrews of Yale, where Notestein was under consideration, that “his family are all
Presbyterians, very much so, except Wallace himself, who is a somewhat straying sheep.”* Universalism” was equally absent in the relation of Catholics to the historical profession, though the circumstances were quite different than in the case of Jews. American Catholic historians—at least those born into that faith—inhabited a separate scholarly world. The handful of American-born Roman Catholics who had any prominence in the interwar historical profession were all converts: Carlton J. H. Hayes, Raymond J. Sontag, Parker T. Moon, Robert H. Lord, Gaillard Hunt. (There were a few European Catholic emigres, like Oscar Halecki, who also entered the mainstream of the profession.) Bookish Catholic
youngsters, as had been true of Protestants a few generations earlier, frequently wound up as clerics. The very substantial number of historian-priests (and nuns) who earned their Ph.D.’s at Catholic universities spent their academic careers in religious institutions, with usually only the most tenuous relationship with the rest of the profession. There was considerable antipathy to Catholics among many Protestant historians, who often believed, as one put it, that “a Catholic cannot teach history and be a true Catholic.” (W. H. Mace to Harry Elmer Barnes, 5 March 1922, Barnes Papers, Box 10.) Catholics, understandably, were hypersensitive to possible signs of prejudice—which could produce amusing results. When a book by the Catholic scholar Peter Guilday received an unfavorable (anonymous) review in the AHR, the Jesuit historian John J. Wynne wrote a letter of protest concerning the “dishonest” review. He observed that, as Jameson might recall, “This is not the first time . . . that I have deemed it necessary to point out to you symptoms of bias in some of your contributors and reviewers.” His postscript noted that he had enclosed a carbon of the letter for the reviewer, “which I trust you will send to him, not, however, with my compliments, as one who can write in such fashion deserves no respect.” Jameson replied that he was “duly appreciative of the lofty tone of your concluding paragraph, and do not need to be reminded that this is not the first time that you have thus addressed me de haut en has. As to sending to the reviewer the carbon of your letter, I would not think of it for a moment. Gentlemen do not like to be told that they are dishonest, and no gentleman will willingly accept the office of transmitting such accusations.” Jameson did not tell Wynne that the reviewer was Austin Dowling, the
Roman Catholic Archbishop of St. Paul, who had chosen anonymity to spare Guilday’s feelings.* If academic anti-Semitism was a relatively minor breach of the scholarly norm of universalism [during the interwar years], continued regionalism within the profession, and in American historical writing, was more serious, representing a defeat for the aspirations of the founding fathers of the profession to create a community which was truly national, and manifestly contradicting the notion, central to the conception of objectivity, that “truth is one.”
* Frank L. Owsley, who became president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940, was one of the “Vanderbilt Agrarians” who composed the 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in defense of traditional southern values and culture. In his contribution to the volume he wrote of “half-savage blacks . . . some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.” Both before and after the Civil War tranquil race relations in the South had been disturbed by northern troublemakers, who had bamboozled the “childish and naive” blacks into believing that the white man was his oppressor. He proposed to Robert Penn Warren that a secret organization be formed to bolster southern morale in combating the interlopers: members would be required to read Vll Take My Stand, Avery Craven’s biography of Edmund Ruffin, and Allen Tate’s life of Jefferson Davis, and to visit Confederate cemeteries. If that didn’t work, if “smart lawyers” (read “Jewish
lawyers”) continued to come to the South to stir up blacks, he threatened a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.* Anthropologists took a close look at the moral implications of cultural relativism and found it wanting. Elgin Williams, reviewing a 1946 reprint of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, observed that “the Gold Star Mother . . . is going to be reluctant about granting significance to Hitler’s culture . . . and the remaining Jews of Europe . . . are going to be poor customers for gospels which hold that there are two sides to every question.” But Benedict had already altered her perspective. In an unpublished manuscript dating from shortly after Pearl Harbor, she wrote that it was vital to “discover the ways and means of social cohesion… This problem is beyond relativity.” The task of anthropology, she said, was to discover “what it is that makes for well-being and a sense of freedom in tribes like the Blackfoot and for the conviction of doom in tribes like the Chukchee. We are fighting today a war which is to preserve freedom, and we need to know its proved strategy.”
* J. H. Hexter saw an intimate connection between [Carl] Becker’s relativism and Nazi historical practice: “Many German professional historians were shortly to perform the service that Becker had prescribed. . . . The history they wrote was intended to do work in the world, to be living history that influences the course of history, to enlarge and enrich the specious present of the Nazi Everyman, to encourage him to embrace the thousand-year Reich. . . . How did such exponents of living history . . . suit Carl Becker? What did Becker make of the generous services that, following his prescription without being aware of it, so many professional historians in Germany rendered to Mr. Everyman, when he appeared in the guise of Herr Sturmer? He does not tell us directly; and he did not directly pass judgment on the historians in Nazi Germany, who along with the idea of blood and race gladly accepted from the Nazis the jobs of Jews and liberals who were displaced from university positions.”
The association of either Becker or [Charles] Beard with totalitarianism was so outrageous that it is distasteful to say the charge had “greater justification” in one case than the other. Still, it is noteworthy that in the logic of those who connected totalitarianism with moral and cognitive relativism, Becker seems a more plausible target. He was much more of a moral skeptic than Beard. It was Becker, not Beard, who saw the historian as the relatively passive and acquiescent servant of society’s demands. Yet in practice, attacks on Becker were infrequent and mild compared to those directed at Beard. For in Beard’s case there was an aggravating circumstance: his opposition to Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy, which, unlike most other pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists, he continued to express in historical works written during and after the war.
* In the 1960s Hofstadter noted that Frederick Jackson Turner spoke of democracy in terms of “sentiments and attitudes,” and identified it with egalitarianism. “Most of us today are disposed to define
democracy as a system of parliamentary government in which there is a universal or nearly universal base of suffrage, in which officeholding is not restricted to a limited class, in which criticism of the policies of the government is tolerated and takes an institutional form in an opposition party or parties, and in which there are adequate formal legal sanctions to protect such criticism.”* Armin Rappaport’s appointment at Berkeley in 1949 was held up until John D. Hicks, who was worried that Rappaport “might have some of the ultra left wing tendencies so common to the New York Jewish intelligentsia,” could receive a guarantee that he was not an opponent of American foreign policy.
* Wisconsin…throughout the 1950s had been something of a “Progressive” holdout against more conservative historiographical currents. Its faculty contained a number of historians who in various ways served as models to graduate students, a significant portion of whom were New York Jews of leftist background, for whom Wisconsin served an “Americanizing” function. George Rawick, a student at Wisconsin in the mid-1950s, recalled in a letter to Merle Curti that Curti had served as an inspiration to him in becoming an American radical, “not just someone in the ‘internal emigration’ which has been the home of so many New York radicals.” Paul Breines, a graduate student at Madison a few years later, thought that “leftist Jews who identified with [William Appleman] Williams were trying to submerge their Jewishness in his very American socialism or even his socialist Americanism.”
* No interpretive tendency of the 1950s was more typical of the general movement of intellectual opinion, or reverberated more widely throughout the culture, than the sharp downward turn in the historical reputation of the Populists. As postwar academics and intellectuals put greater and greater distance between themselves and traditions of dissidence and insurgency, the favorable view of the Populists associated with Progressive historical scholarship was an obvious candidate for historiographical revision. Rather than a democratic movement against exploitation, whose program prefigured subsequent reforms, the Populists came to be portrayed as a backward-looking band of nativist book burners obsessed with imaginary grievances.
Whereas the rise of counterprogressive tendencies in the historiography of the late eighteenth century remained a purely professional matter, of which most nonhistorians were hardly aware, the assault on Populism spread throughout the social sciences and the intellectual world at large. Richard Hofstadter was the principal historian involved in the attack on the Populists, but he was by no means alone and was joined by leading figures from other disciplines. The immediate context of the reevaluation of the Populists was the early 1950s phenomenon of McCarthyism, which a number of analysts quickly connected with agrarian radicalism, La Follette Progressivism, and, in particular, Populism. In this view McCarthy’s crusade, like that of the Populists, was a democratic and antiintellectual revolt of dispossessed groups against educated elites. Historians increasingly identified with elites, and disdained “vulgar levellers.” Lawrence W. Levine recounts that as a graduate student working with Hofstadter at Columbia he found William Jennings Bryan’s “militant egalitarianism” to be among those of Bryan’s characteristics which would “make even the most sympathetic historian shudder.” Cushing Strout perceived “a populist current in both fascism and Communism.” The approach which Hofstadter took to the Populists was the first important example of what became a common feature of cold war historical scholarship, the social-psychologizing of dissidence and insurgency.
Taking up themes which received wide currency in The Authoritarian Personality, and the literature which grew up around that much discussed work, Europeanists discussed the irrational drives and longings which led people to embrace Nazism or Communism, while Americanists explored the unconscious forces which produced Populists, Progressives, and abolitionists. If those who wrote in this vein never went quite to the point of identifying protest per se with pathology, and acceptance of the status quo with mental health, they often came close to it. The most controversial of Hofstadter’s assertions about the Populists, certainly the one which attracted the greatest amount of attention, was the charge that anti-Semitism was central to their world view; indeed, that the Populists had “activated most of what we have of modern popular anti-Semitism in the United States.” Privately, Hofstadter acknowledged that he had exaggerated Populist anti-Semitism, and that his treatment would “mislead anyone who had never heard of Populism from any other source,” but he thought his overstatement justified in order to redress the balance, since previous historians had omitted any mention of Populist anti-Semitism.
Hofstadter’s strategy was consistent with his long-held view that “if a new or heterodox idea is worth anything at all it is worth a forceful overstatement,” a position he contrasted with that of historians who “approach their work as though they were engaged in the final death grapple with error.” But tacking toward a balanced view is a strategy which can easily go astray if one misjudges the direction of the wind. In the climate of the 1950s Hofstadter’s exaggerations concerning Populist anti-Semitism, and in general his stress on the movement’s “dark side,” were not countering the conventional wisdom. Rather, his exaggerations were further exaggerated by other members of his generation with a less well-developed sense of nuance, or whose move in a conservative direction was less ambiguous than Hofstadter’s. The reevaluation of Populism became a central symbol of the jaundiced view which postwar historians took of radicalism in its various embodiments.
Hofstadter’s interpretation of Populism, or variants of it, appeared in the work of Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Oscar Handlin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Talcott Parsons, David Riesman, and Edward Shils, among others. Although their views remained dominant for a time, they did not go unchallenged. John D. Hicks and C. Vann Woodward defended their earlier, positive evaluation of the movement, and they were joined in criticizing the Hofstadter school by Howard K. Beale, William B. Hesseltine, John Higham, Walter T. K. Nugent, Norman Pollack, Theodore Saloutos, David Shannon, and William A. Williams. With minor exceptions (Parsons in the one camp, Pollack in the other), those critical of the Populists were Jews and from the Northeast; those defending them were gentiles, and from the South or Midwest. This feature of the controversy was well known to the participants and many contemporary observers, but was usually mentioned only obliquely, if at all. It tacitly raised issues of perspectivism and universalism which, for the moment, the profession preferred not to discuss openly.
In the early 1960s Carl Bridenbaugh outraged a good many historians with his AHA presidential address. In what was universally taken to be a reference to Jews, who were for the first time becoming a significant presence in the profession, Bridenbaugh deplored the fact that whereas once American historians had shared a common culture, and rural upbringing, the background of the present generation would “make it impossible for them to communicate to and reconstruct the past for future generations.” They suffered from an “environmental deficiency”: being “urban-bred” they lacked the “understanding . . . vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town.” They were “products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true.”
Most of those who commented on Bridenbaugh’s address had no hesitancy in terming it anti-Semitic. They inferred, probably correctly, that he was distressed and resentful at the entry of Jews into the profession. No such inference seems justified in the case of those defenders of the Populists who, directly or indirectly, publicly or privately, commented on the background and ethnicity of the Populists’ critics, sometimes employing language which superficially resembled Bridenbaugh’s. They were simply seeking to account for what they considered to be an astigmatic perception.
Woodward, in an article critical of the “Hofstadter school,” listed the viewpoints found among the anti-Populists. They included, he said, “the New Conservative, the New Liberal, the liberal-progressive, the Jewish, the Anglophile, and the urban, with some overlapping,” and he noted the northeastern origin of the assault. Hicks believed that Hofstadter understood urban America well enough, but thought “his background . . . quite inadequate for any reasonable understanding of Populism.” Beale wrote a colleague that Hofstadter had a “sophisticated New Yorker’s lack of understanding of the rest of the country.” Hesseltine pronounced The Age of Reform “not, technically speaking, a work of history . . . [but] an asphalt-oriented piece of professorial punditry.” Besides noting what they regarded as the critics’ inadequate understanding of the rural context of Populism, the Populists’ defenders charged Hofstadter and his associates with “cavalierly disregarding] the past and writfing] solely from the present” (Norman Pollack), and with “a transformation of History into Ideology” (William A. Williams).
Many expressed irritation at Hofstadter’s implicit denial that insurgents had real grievances, and at what they regarded as his intoxication with social psychological propositions about “status anxiety.” “This is not science,” David Shannon wrote to Merle Curti. It was “what an intelligent person can do sitting in an arm chair.” None, so far as I can tell, ever advanced what seems to me the most compelling reason why a group of the background of Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, and their friends should have taken such a uniformly and exaggeratedly bleak view of the Populists: they were all only one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl, where insurgent gentile peasants spelled pogrom.
* The approach which Hofstadter took to the Populists was the first important example of what became a common feature of cold war historical scholarship, the social-psychologizing of dissidence and insurgency. Taking up themes which received wide currency in The Authoritarian Personality, and the literature which grew up around that much discussed work, Europeanists discussed the irrational drives and longings which led people to embrace Nazism or Communism, while Americanists explored the unconscious forces which produced Populists, Progressives, and abolitionists. If those who wrote in this vein never went quite to the point of identifying protest per se with pathology, and acceptance of the status quo with mental health, they often came close to it.
* Daniel Bell recalled for an interviewer discussions about anti-Semitism he had with Richard Hofstadter in the early 1940s. “What arose in our conversations has, I think, shaped a lot of subsequent work. I mean a fear of mass action, a fear of passions let loose. A lot of this goes back in many ways to a particularly Jewish fear. In traditional Jewish life, going back particularly to the Assyrian and Babylonian episodes, the first creativity, there’s a fear of what happens when man is let loose. When man doesn’t have halacha, the law, he becomes chia, an animal.”
* Hofstadter, the son of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant father and a Lutheran mother, was thus only half Jewish by inheritance—and as a child served as an Episcopalian altar boy. But, as he told an interviewer, he “spent a lot of years acquiring a Jewish identity, which is more cultural than religious . . . anyone who is part Jewish can only be a Jew.” (Richard Kostelanetz, Master Minds [New York, 1969], 168.) The second half of Hofstadter’s observation, as the case of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. suggests, is extremely doubtful.
* [Oscar] Handlin himself was a symbol of the most significant universalization of hiring criteria: the entry, for the first time, of a substantial number of Jews into the profession.
* After World War II anti-Semitism in the historical profession, as in society at large, was an embarrassing legacy to be exorcised. The selection of Louis Gottschalk as president of the American Historical Association at the extraordinarily young age, for an AHA president, of fifty-two was in part an expiation of past sins. In these years, relatively few Jews undertook graduate work in history, compared with other disciplines. Of a large sample of the B. A. class of 1961, only 7 percent of those planning graduate work in history were Jews, fewer than in any other disciplines save geology, biology, botany, and zoology. By the end of that decade Jews constituted 9 percent of academic historians, but 22 percent of the membership of history departments at highly rated universities. Of works in American history deemed outstanding in polls of historians, none published before 1950 was by a Jewish historian; of those published in the 1950s three out of ten were by Jews; in the 1960s, four out of ten. Jews also figured prominently in modern European, especially German, history in these years, with a particularly noteworthy role being played by those who had emigrated in the 1930s as children.
Anti-Semitism by no means completely disappeared, and indeed for some the entry of Jews into positions of prominence was an added provocation. J. Fred Rippy of the University of Chicago History Department complained in the early 1950s that “Alfred Knopf does all he can to promote the Jews. . . . The Harris Foundation here is now largely Hebrew controlled. The Guggenheim Foundation favors the Jews in its awards. Saturday Review of Literature is now in the hands of Jews.. . . Jewish influence has been responsible for the choice of Louis Gottschalk as a member of UNESCO’s committee to write a world history. . . . Enrollments have declined . . . the main cause . . . probably is the distaste for such an overwhelming number of Jewish refugees on the faculties.”
* When David Donald recommended six young Americanists to the University of Wisconsin in 1957, five of the six were Jews. By that point, the price of anti-Semitism was mediocrity.
* There was discrimination against Catholics, but its extent is very difficult to measure. Whereas Jews were substantially overrepresented at elite institutions (22 percent versus 9 percent in the profession at large), the situation with respect to Catholics was reversed (10 percent versus 21 percent in the profession at large). (Steinberg, 121.) But these figures can be misleading because a very high proportion of Catholic historians were part of a separate labor market: graduates of Catholic universities who spent their entire careers at Catholic institutions. One young Catholic historian in the 1950s wrote his (Protestant) graduate school mentor asking him to recommend a Protestant denomination for him to adopt so that he could evade discrimination: “In these past few years I have learned what
‘Catholic’ on an application blank can mean—teachers’ agencies have made it plain enough. . . . Now my problem is what ‘church affiliation’ can I select which will be respectable in the majority of college employment circles? I don’t give a bang if it’s Mohammedan—it won’t affect my beliefs—and certainly won’t offend the God and Christ I believe in. . . . I am really shopping around for a Church. The way I figure it my God deserves the best—that includes a decent living too.” The Doktorvater in question provided the requisite information, and in his next letter of recommendation, remarked casually, in passing—”I think he is an Episcopalian.”* Until 1949 women constituted about 20 percent of the profession; this declined steadily to 12 percent by 1965, where it remained for several years. As in the case of Jews earlier on, it is hard to say how much of the underrepresentation of women was due to actual discrimination, how much to anticipated discrimination, and how much to internalized notions of appropriate occupational roles. Daniel J. Boorstin of the University of Chicago was undoubtedly voicing a widespread attitude when he told the AHA Committee on Graduate Education in 1959 that he had not “had a single really keen woman student” and in consequence was “not in favor of encouraging women students any more than they have been encouraged in the past.” Since it is a sociological truism that nothing contributes more to the status of a vocation than the extent to which it is seen as a male calling, the change in the gender composition of the profession probably contributed to the enhanced occupational prestige of historians which Higham noted.
Another dimension of universalism was the gradual decline of regional loyalties, a greater “nationalization” of historical consciousness.
* …a minor cult surrounding Marc Bloch, the eminent French medievalist executed by the Germans for his Resistance activity. His life and death, combining serene scholarly detachment in a field far removed from current struggles with heroic moral commitment in the great issues of the day, was a dramatic and reassuring example which suggested that detachment and commitment could coexist without either threatening the other… The reconciling function the canonization of Bloch performed was furthered by some other considerations. He was, of course, a superb historian, and one of the founders of the Annales school, destined to be a major force in Western historiography in the postwar decades. His principal (posthumously published) excursion into historical theory, The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953), while containing much good sense, never addressed issues of objectivity and relativism. His politics were neither offensively chauvinist nor embarrassingly leftist. He was a Jew who had risen higher professionally than had any Jew in the United States before World War II. For the growing number of Jews in the historical profession he was thus an inspiration, while for gentiles the cult of Bloch was something of a talisman against the profession’s reputation for anti-Semitism.
* As the election of Louis Gottschalk to the presidency of the AHA at a relatively young age had been a deliberate symbol of the acceptance of Jews within the profession, so the selection in 1978 of Eugene Genovese, at an even younger age, as president of the Organization of American Historians signaled the legitimacy of the left.
* With a few noteworthy exceptions the Jews who rose to prominence within the profession did not venture into Jewish history; they certainly never attempted to define a “Jewish perspective”; it is probably not coincidental that the leading figures in developing the “consensus” interpretation of American history were all of Jewish background.
* The entry of large numbers of Jews into the upper reaches of the profession in the 1950s and early 1960s was widely seen as the fulfillment of universalist norms. It was otherwise with the arrival of blacks and women from the late sixties onward. For their rise to prominence within the profession coincided with a new, assertive, particularist consciousness which challenged universalist norms. They defined themselves not as “historians who happened to be Negroes,” with a consensually acceptable integrationist standpoint, but as black historians, committed to one or another form of cultural nationalism; not “historians who happened to be women,” seeking proportional representation in textbooks for members of their sex, hut feminist historians with an overriding loyalty to their sisters, and agendas which called for a thoroughgoing transformation of historical consciousness. Jews, upon entering the profession, had insisted that they were “just like everyone else, except more so,” committed to a sensibility which was not just integrationist but usually assimilationist as well.
* The chairman of Yale’s History Department, for one, found the social origins of postwar graduate students distressingly low, as compared with those in the English Department at that institution. “Apparently the subject of English still draws to a degree from the cultivated, professional, and well-to-do classes, hence more young men and women from able backgrounds. By contrast, the subject of history seems to appeal on the whole to a lower social stratum. . . . Far too few of our history candidates are sons of professional men; far too many list their parent’s occupation as janitor, watchman, salesman, grocer, pocketbook cutter, bookkeeper, railroad clerk, pharmacist, clothing cutter, cable tester, mechanic, general clerk, butter-and-egg jobber, and the like. One may be glad to see the sons of the lower occupations working upward. .. . It may be flattering to be regarded as an elevator. But even the strongest elevator will break down if asked to lift too much weight.”
* America, “born liberal,” lacked a conservative tradition in the European sense: organicist, legitimist, antiliberal. The few representatives of this tradition in the American historical profession never had much influence before the 1960s, and had no more thereafter. While right-of-center academic journals proliferated in other disciplines, the only explicitly conservative historical venture was Continuity, which began publication in 1980.
* Michael Walzer in 1979: “For liberalism is above all a doctrine of liberation. It sets individuals loose from religious and ethnic communities, from guilds, parishes, neighborhoods. It abolishes all sorts of controls and agencies of control: ecclesiastical courts, cultural censorship, sumptuary laws, restraints on mobility, group pressure, family bonds. It creates free men and women, tied together only by their contracts—and ruled, when contracts fail, by a distant and powerful state. It generates a radical individualism and then a radical competition among self-seeking individuals. What made liberalism endurable for all these years was the fact that the individualism it generated was always imperfect, tempered by older restraints and loyalties, by stable patterns of local, ethnic, religious, or class relationships. An untempered liberalism would be unendurable. That is the crisis the neo-conservatives evoke: the triumph of liberalism over its historical restraints.”
* American historians, as compared with historians of other nationalities, had always been especially attached to universalist norms, and were proud that these norms had strengthened as the profession developed—a particularly urgent task in a country with strong regional loyalties, and a multiethnic population. The process of professionalization had seen the gradual victory of national over particularist interpretations, and increasingly universalistic patterns of recruitment to the profession.
* The entry of large numbers of Jews into the upper reaches of the profession in the 1950s and early 1960s was widely seen as the fulfillment of universalist norms. It was otherwise with the arrival of blacks and women from the late sixties onward. For their rise to prominence within the profession coincided with a new, assertive, particularist consciousness which both directly and indirectly challenged universalist norms. They defined themselves not as “historians who happened to be Negroes,” with a consensually acceptable integrationist standpoint, but as black historians, committed to one or another form of cultural nationalism; not “historians who happened to be women,” seeking proportional representation in textbooks for members of their sex, but feminist historians with an overriding loyalty to their sisters, and agendas which called for a thoroughgoing transformation of historical consciousness. Jews, upon entering the profession, had insisted that they were “just like everyone else, except more so,” committed to a sensibility which was not just integrationist but usually assimilationist as well. In a different cultural climate the new black and female entrants stressed the distinctiveness of their vision, and often were highly critical of central values of the profession. Assertive particularism had implications not just for academic universalism in the abstract, but for values as basic to academic life as a commitment to “telling the whole truth.”
* Lawrence Levine, who was beginning to study black folklore, experienced a sense of deja vu. What was being put forward was a “new historical obscurantism” which exactly paralleled what he took to be Carl Bridenbaugh’s suggestion, some years earlier, that it was incongruous for Levine, as a Jew of recent immigrant background, to study William Jennings Bryan. “This was a period,” Eugene Genovese later recalled, “in which any white working in black history had to take a lot of crap.”
* “Those who can, gloat; those who can’t, brood.” Englishmen are born gloaters; Irishmen born brooders. .. . A reformed gloater—an English liberal say, or a Swede—…identifies himself… with the master race. The brooder, making the opposite identification, feels no sense of guilt, only a sense of outrage.”
* Those who have written the most influential studies of white attitudes and behavior toward blacks were almost all gentiles—David Brion Davis, George Frederickson, Winthrop Jordan, Morgan Kousser, James McPherson; those who wrote of blacks as subjects, were overwhelmingly Jewish—Ira Berlin, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, Leon Litwack, George Rawick. Whatever the reason for the disproportionate number of Jews who wrote about blacks from the black point of view, what is important for our purposes is the profound identification of all members of this latter group of historians, Jewish and gentile, with blacks. Though white, they prided themselves on “thinking black”; of being the reverse of “oreos”—vanilla wafers with chocolate filling.
* The generalization about the difference in focus between gentiles and Jews applies with greatest force to those who came of scholarly age in the sixties and seventies, though one could observe it in the previous generation: Woodward and Stampp writing the history of racism and oppression from the white side, Herbert Aptheker and Philip Foner emphasizing black agency. By the 1980s the injunction to “think black” had become so powerful that the distinction began to break down. The examples of Aptheker and Foner suggest a partial explanation for the difference: Jews were considerably more likely to have a background in left politics—to be presocialized into identification with the oppressed.
* If capitalism was as inhuman and destructive as socialists maintained, its victims must have been psychologically maimed and brutalized. On the other hand, if workers were as noble and stalwart as they were in socialist depictions, could the system within which they had developed really be all that oppressive?
* In a way which had many parallels to Jewish historians’ discussions of the behavior of Jews during World War II, resistance came to be equated with endurance and survival. Responding to criticism that in The Slave Community he had slighted resistance, John Blassingame made the analogy explicit: “The most apt characterization of the slave’s behavior is that Lucy Dawidowicz used . . . [in] The War Against the Jews: ‘They learned not only to invent, but to circumvent; not only to obey, but to evade; not only to submit, but to outwit. Their tradition of defiance was devious rather than direct, employing nerve instead of force.'”
* Nathan Glazer…assert[ed] that the black American “has no values and culture to guard and protect.”
* Most members of the generation of young white historians who wrote the history of blacks in the seventies had left-wing backgrounds or involvement in the civil rights movement. Insofar as they were disproportionately Jews, they were products of the years when Jews were, in O’Brien’s terms, brooders rather than gloaters.
* While only a minority of feminist historians were or became lesbians, a much larger number were inclined to agree that heterosexuality was to some substantial extent a male-imposed construct. A common response was a kind of political or cultural lesbianism. Lesbians were honored as serious feminists, much as Jews accorded special respect to those who demonstrated the depth of their Zionism by emigrating to Israel. Even if women did not physically separate themselves from men—and many, in various ways, did—a kind of moral separatism was fairly widespread. All of this was a good deal more threatening to academic life, and the domestic life of male academics, than black separatism had been.
* America, “born liberal,” lacked a conservative tradition in the European sense: organicist, legitimist, antiliberal. The few representatives of this tradition in the American historical profession never had much influence before the 1960s, and had no more thereafter. While right-of-center academic journals proliferated in other disciplines, the only explicitly conservative historical venture was Continuity, which began publication in 1980.
* Most members of the generation of young white historians who wrote the history of blacks in the seventies had left-wing backgrounds or involvement in the civil rights movement. Insofar as they were disproportionately Jews, they were products of the years when Jews were, in O’Brien’s terms, brooders rather than gloaters.