Separation of church and state

Separation of church and state is the American constitutional principle that Mary Antin first encounters as a lived doctrine during her schoolyard declaration of freethought, when her teacher Miss Bland privately instructs her that religious arguments must be kept off school territory. The principle stands in stark contrast to the Russian system she left behind, where the Czar commanded Jews to remain within the Pale of Settlement and military service forced Jewish soldiers to violate their own religious laws. For Mary, the separation doctrine becomes the cornerstone of her American identity, distinguishing the freedom of the New World from the religious and political tyranny of the Old. It is the rule that transforms her from a prisoner of the Pale into a Fellow Citizen who may hold any God she chooses, and it is the standard by which she measures the conduct of her American-born classmates when they challenge her right to believe as she pleases.

The Russian Counterpoint: Religious and Political Tyranny

The separation of church and state had no counterpart in the Russia of Mary's childhood. Within the Pale of Settlement, which grouped Polotzk with Vitebsk and Vilna and other places, the Czar commanded her to stay with her father and mother and friends and all other people like them, and they must not be found outside the Pale because they were Jews. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and this knowledge trickled into her consciousness drop by drop, so that by the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The state's power over religious life was exercised through military conscription, which forced Jewish men of twenty-one, most of them already married and with children, to serve four years in the army. A soldier often had to eat trefah and work on Sabbath, shave his beard and do reverence to Christian things, and he could not attend daily services at the synagogue. When he returned home at the end of his term, he could not rid himself of the stigma of those enforced sins, for four years he had led the life of a Gentile. The state also extracted its dues through a bewildering array of taxes on houses, rents, business, and profits, with the town, the county, and the central government all collecting, and the chief of police always present. A railroad bridge across the Dvina, while open to the military, could be used by the people only by individual permission, a small emblem of how the state controlled even movement and infrastructure in the service of its own interests.

The Schoolyard Declaration and the Teacher's Lesson

The separation doctrine first became real to Mary in the schoolyard, where she was surprised into a dispute about God. Rachel and Kitty and Maggie, Sadie and Annie and Beckie, made a circle around her, pressed her with questions, mocked her, and threatened her with hell flames and utter extinction. She held her ground against them all, glibly repeating phrases she had heard her father use, though she had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. As the number of her opponents grew and she saw how unanimously they condemned her, her indifference turned into a heat of indignation. The actual point at issue was as little as ever to her, but she perceived that a crowd of Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have any kind of God she chose. She knew, from her father's teaching, that this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and she held her ground as befitted the defender of a cause. George Washington would not have treated her as Rachel Goldstein and Kitty Maloney were doing, she thought, and in the middle of the argument she reminded them, "This is a free country." The excitement in the yard amounted to a toy riot, and when the school bell rang, she stood out there as long as any of her enemies remained, although it was her habit to go to her room very promptly. The teacher who kept the line in the corridor was obliged to scold and pull the noisy ones into order, and Sadie Cohen told her, in tones of awe, what the commotion was about.

Miss Bland waited till the children had filed in before she asked Mary, in a tone encouraging confidence, to give her version of the story. Mary did so, huskily but fearlessly, and the teacher, who was a woman of tact, did not smile or commit herself in any way. She was sorry that the children had been rude to her, but she thought they would not trouble her any more if she let the subject drop. She made Mary understand, somewhat as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of her whispering during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory. Mary felt honored by this private initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State, and she went to her seat with a good deal of dignity, her alarm about the safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness. The lesson was not that her freethought was wrong, but that the schoolhouse was not the place for it, and this distinction, between the right to believe and the proper arena for debate, was the essence of the American rule she had defended without quite understanding.

The Father's Americanization and the Mother's Selective Emancipation

The separation doctrine was not merely a schoolroom abstraction for Mary; it was the animating principle of her father's American project. Father himself conducted the children to school on that first day, and he would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States. Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before, had been his application for naturalization, and he had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, becoming a citizen of the United States at the earliest moment allowed by the law. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only thirty-two when he landed, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings, hungry for his untasted manhood. His ambition to make Americans of his family was rather headlong and strenuous in his methods. To his mother, on the eve of departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in America did not spend their days in praying, and he urged her to leave her wig in Polotzk as a first step of progress. The process of her emancipation was not obvious to Mary at the time, but what she observed of her mother's outward conduct has been interpreted by her subsequent experience. To-day she understands how it happens that all the year round her mother keeps the same day of rest as her Gentile neighbors, but when the ram's horn blows on the Day of Atonement, calling upon Israel to cleanse its heart from sin and draw nearer to the God of its fathers, her soul is stirred as of old, and she needs must join in the ancient service. It means that she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism, but years were required for this process of instinctive selection. The separation of church and state, in the father's hands, became a separation of the family from the outward symbols of orthodoxy, while the inner faith, for the mother at least, survived the purge.

The Test at Miss Dillingham's Tea Table

The doctrine was put to a more personal test at Miss Dillingham's tea, where Mary, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch a slice of ham. It was her first entrance into a genuine American household, her first meal at a Gentile, yes, a Christian, board, and she came in much trepidation, all eyes and ears, that nothing should escape her which might serve to guide her. She had been accustomed to consider her table manners irreproachable, but America was not Polotzk, as her father was ever saying, so she proceeded very cautiously with her spoons and forks, cunning enough to try to conceal her uncertainty by being just a little bit slow, so that she did not get to any given spoon until the others at table had shown her which it was. All went well until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to her. Some mischievous instinct told her that it was ham, forbidden food, and she, who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought, was afraid to touch it. She had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt, but she helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless, and hung her head over her plate to hide her confusion. She was furious with herself for her weakness, and she began to reduce her ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. Alas, she learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. She ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of herself. The separation of church and state, which protected her right to believe as she chose, could not protect her from the visceral revolt of a body trained in the dietary laws of her ancestors. The doctrine governed the public sphere, the schoolyard and the schoolroom, but the tea table revealed that the inner man had its own allegiance, one that no constitution could override.

The Principle in Practice: A Community of Tolerance

The separation doctrine also shaped the economic and social world that received the Antin family in America. The grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplied their table conducted his business on the same perilous credit system which had driven Mary's father out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street, supplying them with tea and sugar and strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and bananas done to a turn, for the consideration of part payment, with the faintest prospect of a future settlement in full. Mr. Rosenblum had an intimate knowledge of the financial situation of every family that traded with him, from the gossip of his customers around his herring barrel. He knew without asking that Mary's father had no regular employment, and that, consequently, it was risky to give them credit. Nevertheless he gave them credit by the week, by the month, accepted partial payment with thanks, and let the balance stand by the year. He knew, as well as the landlady, that Mary's father kept a daughter at school who was of age to be put to work, but so far was he from reproaching him for it that he detained the father by the half-hour, inquiring about Mary's progress and discussing her future. When Mary came in to have her kerosene can filled, he did not fall upon her with harsh words of blame; instead, he wanted to hear about her latest triumph at school, and about the great people who wrote her letters and even came to see her, and he called his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who could not sign her name, came out in her faded calico wrapper, and stood with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before the embryo scholar, nodding her head sideways in approval, drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of Mary's tale. This was the American community the separation doctrine made possible, a community where a Jewish girl's education was a source of pride rather than a violation of religious law, where a grocer's credit was extended not despite the family's difference but because of the promise it represented. The principle that kept religion out of the schoolhouse also kept the schoolhouse open to the daughter of an unemployed Jewish immigrant, and it was this conjunction, of constitutional freedom and everyday generosity, that made America, in Mary's telling, not Polotzk.