The approach of my essay is liberal in two senses. The usual meaning of the word will be explained in my discussion of the value of freedom in education and how it comes into conflict with teachers' attempts to indoctrinate students in school.

But the liberalism I advocate has another meaning, which is evident in internal Jewish debates at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth regarding the definition of Judaism or Jewishness. In contrast to the German Jewish philosophers (Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Hermann Cohen) who viewed Judaism as a distinct spiritual school of thought that could be defined as “a philosophy,” a Weltanschauung or at least as “an ethics,” the Eastern European Jewish writers and thinkers (Peretz Smolenskin, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Aḥad Ha-Am, Simon Dubnow, David Frischmann, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Yosef Ḧayyim Brenner) conceived of a different model.

According to this model, Judaism is first and foremost a historical fact. The Jewish people is a collective whose continuous historical existence derives from shared memories (especially memories of a common fate); shared languages (Hebrew and many different jargons); shared destiny (determined to a great extent by anti-Semites in the present); and, sometimes, shared expectations of the future. The bonds among the generations are based on the feeling of their being part of one family.