Is there a term for 'abandoning your Jewish identity'?

Factual Questions
21

I must gently disagree with your assertion that “conversion” is neutral as a substitute for “apostasy”. If the latter is indeed negative for what it refers to (the unambiguous rejection of a particular religious faith), then the former is indeed more positive for those of a pro-religion bent, because it’s about exchanging one religion for another. For that matter, an apostate isn’t necessarily agnostic or atheist. I’m a Presbyterian apostate because I rejected P’ianism, the church I was raised in (as opposed to being born into). If I become a Buddhist tomorrow, I’d still be a P’ian apostate, although I should think in most contexts my new embrace of another faith would take classificatory preeminence.

To be frank, I and other ex-whatevers can attempt consciousness-raising and call ourselves apostates until we’re blue in the face, but the term will still bear negative connotations for most people, due mostly to the RCC’s historic imperative of persecuting and executing people for, among other things, apostasy – as do certain Wahhabist Islamic nations today, to citizens who’ve renounced Islam, whether they’ve taken up another religion or not. Perhaps a term like “renunciate” (someone who has renounced) could better serve as a value-neutral and largely ahistoric substitute for “apostate,” but my dictionary doesn’t list the term.

I have another problem with the traditional (racialist) definition of Jewish in the context of the OP, which asked how we should refer to a Jew’s abandonment of his religious identity. It seems to me the OP takes it as a given that the hypothetical ex-Jew is no longer Jewish, at least in all ways that he is able to determine for himself (i.e., in every way but the genetic or racial sense). Therefore the argument that Isaac Cohen (by any other name) will always be a Jew whether he likes it or not, unless he actively converts to another faith (and even then it’s debatable), is begging the question somewhat.

But the OP should be clearer on Isaac Cohen’s relationship to his [former?] faith – is he merely lapsed (but still a believer), or does he disbelieve the religious creeds of Judaism? Is he simply not religious anymore (in which case he probably doesn’t qualify as an apostate), or does he consider himself an agnostic or atheist (or something else)?

22

Unknown. I’m writing about a real historical figure (Isaac Cohen=pseudonym). What I know is that he anglicized his name as a young man, and never (apparently) practiced any religion or participated in any other Jewish organizations. Probably agnostic.

He seems to have been somewhat ashamed(?) of his religion/race and wanted to leave it behind. Perhaps assimilation is indeed the correct term.

Maybe somebody like Irving Berlin or Frank Gehry would be analogous (?)

23

Hmm, there’s a lot of food for thought here!

Key Lime Guy, I think you’ve got yourself a sticky problem here in trying to label your subject, in the absence of sufficient evidence, as it were. The dual nature of Jewish religious identity [racial as well as creedal] is one source of the difficulty, of course, as well as the unprivileged status of Jewish immigrants and their children (and even grandchildren, well into the mid-20th C.).

Your guy may well have suffered from what has been perhaps trendily termed “Jewish self-loathing,” but without firm evidence of same it’d probably be overreaching to call it that. When I think of self-loathing Jews, I think of someone like the deranged Viennese Wunderkind author Otto Weininger, who embraced the cultural antisemitism and homophobia of his fin-de-siecle milieu and was doubly-self-loathing [as a homosexual as well as a Jew] and who killed himself at a very young age. But Weininger probably represents the gold standard of this phenomenon.

As for his being ashamed of his roots, lots of immigrant children experience[d] this for reasons having little or nothing to do with religion. Every first-generation teenager who chafes at a parent’s accent, Old World ways, customs or dress, or overprotectiveness or domineering intrusiveness (as in, “I expect you to marry within from within our own community”) can relate to “Isaac Cohen” to a degree. I wouldn’t assume his unusual degree of assimilation/passing/self-loathing necessarily stems from his rejecting his Jewishness, as opposed to his identification with or ties to the immigrant generation.

A family anecdote: my Dad experienced some of this [Japanese-American]immigrant culture clash when he was a young man and his mother told him to find a nice Japanese girl to marry. And this from largely assimilated parents in a largely assimilated and pro-assimilation subculture! He was shocked; he couldn’t believe it! My Dad grew up wanting to be a professional baseball player – well, that was his juvenile fantasy, anyway. And his parents were apparently cool with that… He didn’t start catching this “thou shalt” BS until he came of age and those major family issues raised their ugly head.

So what happened? I don’t know the details exactly, as to whether he told his parents to stuff it or adopted a more tactful and perhaps passive-aggressive tack, but he went on to live his life as he saw fit. Maybe he simply pointed out that the places where he grew up (and where he attended undergrad and post-grad universities) were virtually devoid of Japanese girls of any description, and thus finding one to marry would be akin to winning the lottery.

So when he married a woman of mixed Western European background, was this an act of ethnic or cultural self-loathing? Absolutely not. Was it even primarily an assertion of his independence from his parents and a repudiation of their expectation or hope that he’d marry one of their own? I very, very much doubt it. I think it was primarily and perhaps entirely motivated by his falling for a nice white girl in the tiny hick town where he lived (and where he was virtually the only Asian person, Japanese or otherwise, male or female). But a historian assessing the cold facts of his life might mistakenly conclude otherwise and misattribute the trajectory of his life to a determined repudiation of his heritage, background, or immigrant/Issei parents…

24

It’s also called “passing.” My wife gets accused of it by (some of) her Jewish and black relatives; it’s incredibly silly in both instances.

25

Agreed. & Thanks for the good discussion.

26

Heh, I can’t seem to leave this one alone.

Without knowing anything about his family or early adult years, he could’ve been driven to simply get away from home for lots of prosaic reasons having nothing to do with religion. If this wasn’t a Jewish guy, we might be asking if he had had an abusive childhood or if his parents were driving him nuts, if he’d gotten a girl knocked up, if his first stab at a business had failed, incurring unpayable I.O.U.'s… all problems easily evaded back in the day (before computer databases, paternity tests, and with forensics and fingerprinting in its relative infancy). I wonder if we aren’t overlooking the obvious out of a fixation on the religious angle.