this was, before the Nazi Holocaust, a continuing decline
of Judaism both as a religion and as a homogeneous ethnic
group amongst German Jews. This process of assimilation
and acculturation produced the phenomenon that Isaac
Deutscher called “the non-Jewish Jew”. Such Jews counted
among their number such great and innovative thinkers as
Marx himself (as well as Freud and Einstein, to name but a
few) all of whom played a decisive role in creating modes
of thinking subversive of both capitalism and traditional
religious monotheisms.
If Hindus and Hinduism is not to suffer the same fate
as Jews and Judaism, and if instead there is to be a renewal
of Hinduism as a religious world view – one that has always
run counter both to Abrahamic monotheisms and to ‘the
monotheism of money’ – then this renewal will most likely
only spring from ‘non-Hindu’ (non-traditional and/or non-
ethnic) Hindus. Otherwise Hinduism and Hindus will end
up sharing the same fate as Jews – divided between a
generation of ‘traditional’ ethnic and religious Hindus on
the one hand and a generation of assimilated, secularised
and de-politicised Hindus on the other – both vulnerable to
marginalisation or to conversion by other faiths and world
views.