Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times 9781782380030

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Against the Grain

Against the Grain Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times

 Edited by

Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014 Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Against the grain : Jewish intellectuals in hard times / edited by Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen. — First edition.      pages cm    Summary: “This volume analyzes the political roads taken by German Jewish thinkers; the impact of the Holocaust on the Central and East European Jewish intelligentsia; and the conundrum of modern Jewish identity”—Publisher’s summary.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-1-78238-002-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-003-0 (institutional ebook)   1.  Jews—Germany—Intellectual life.   2.  Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. 3.  Intellectuals—Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century   4.  Germany— Intellectual life—20th century.   5.  Political culture—Germany—History—20th century. 6.  Aschheim, Steven E., 1942—-Political and social views.   7.  Strauss, Leo—Political and social views.   8.  Jews, East European—Germany.   9.  Germany—Ethnic relations.   I.  Mendelsohn, Ezra, editor.   II.  Hoffman, Stefani, editor.   III.  Cohen, Richard I., editor.    DS134.26.A35 2013    305.5'52089924043—dc23 2013005581 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-002-3 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-003-0 institutional ebook

To Steven Aschheim, Eminent Scholar, Dedicated Teacher From his colleagues, students, and friends

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Editors’ Note

xiii

Introduction Reading Steven Aschheim Ezra Mendelsohn

1

Part I. Strauss, Scholem, Arendt, Benjamin Chapter 1 A Zionist Critique of Jewish Politics: The Early Thought of Leo Strauss Jerry Z. Muller Chapter 2 Leo Strauss Reading Karl Marx during the Cold War Adi Armon Chapter 3 Gershom Scholem, Einst und Jetzt: Zionist Politics and Kabbalistic Historiography David Biale Chapter 4 Death or Birth: Scholem and Secularization Zohar Maor

Chapter 5 Fragments from a Correspondence (Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem): A Poem Zvi Jagendorf

17

32

51

64

86

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Part II. Political Positioning in Hard Times Chapter 6 In Heidegger’s Shadow: Ernst Cassirer, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Question of the Political Jeffrey Andrew Barash Chapter 7 Walther Rathenau’s Dilemma: Modernity and the Human Soul Shulamit Volkov

Chapter 8 “Nothing But a Disillusioned Love”?: Hans Kohn’s Break with the Zionist Movement Adi Gordon Chapter 9 Historicism and the Event Martin Jay

93

104

117

143

Part III. Brothers and Strangers: The Issue of Identity Chapter 10 Asiatic Brothers, European Strangers: Eugen Hoeflich and Pan-Asian Zionism in Vienna Hanan Harif Chapter 11 “Brothers and Strangers”: The American Example Pierre Birnbaum Chapter 12 “Man kann verjuden”: Paradoxes of Exemplarity Vivian Liska

171

186

198

Part IV. In the Shadow of the Holocaust Chapter 13 A “Usable Past” and the Crisis of European Jews: Popular Jewish Historiography in Germany, France, and Hungary in the 1930s Guy Miron Chapter 14 Three Jewish Émigrés at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin Michael R. Marrus

213

240

Contents | ix

Chapter 15 The Frankfurt School and the “Jewish Question,” 1940–1970 Anson Rabinbach

255

Chapter 16 Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities Christopher R. Browning

277

Notes on Contributors

285

Selected Bibliography

289

Index 295

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank Arie Dubnov, Adi Gordon, and Udi Greenberg for their important contribution to the making of this book. They are also indebted to Keren Sagi; to the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center; the Mosse Program in History; and the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and to the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Technical support was provided by the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: our thanks to Dalia Sagi and Noam Ivry for their help. We are also grateful for the support of Marion Berghahn and Ann Przyzycki DeVita of Berghahn Books, our publisher. We thank Tracy Bartley of the R. B. Kitaj Estate for granting permission to use the painting displayed on the cover, The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin), and Jacqueline Mabey of Marlborough Gallery, New York City, for supplying us with the image. The final text editing of this book was done by Stefani Hoffman of the Hebrew University and the bibliography and index, by Shmuel Barnai of the same institution.

Editors’ Note

This volume, which honors Steven Aschheim upon his retirement from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is organized around the major themes of his work. The chapters do not represent an analysis of Aschheim’s oeuvre, but nearly all of them reflect its impressive, far-reaching influence and concentrate on major themes that he has made his own. Indeed, the inner consistency linking Aschheim’s various subjects of inquiry provides a unifying framework to the topics in this volume. Aschheim, himself deeply influenced by the work of his Doktorvater, the distinguished German-Jewish historian George Mosse, has written at length on the lives and work of the giants of modern German-Jewish thought and scholarship, playing a significant role in bringing these figures to the attention of Jewish scholarship and to a wider audience as well. (In his contribution to this book, the chapter “Reading Steven Aschheim,” Ezra Mendelsohn discusses this and other aspects of Aschheim’s work in greater detail.) The first section of this book is thus devoted to discussions of such seminal figures as Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss. In addition, a poem by Zvi Jagendorf imagines a poignant conversation sometime in the 1930s, between Scholem and his doomed friend Walter Benjamin. Aschheim’s research is also distinguished by its attention to the political dimension in the thought and activities of German-speaking Jewish intellectuals. This facet finds its reflection in our second section, devoted to political aspects of modernity, including analyses of such figures as Ernst Cassirer, Walter Rathenau, and Hans Kohn. The chapter by Martin Jay—one of the few chapters in the book that does not emphasize the “Jewish Question”—does, however, take up the issue of intellectuals and power, which has certainly informed Aschheim’s work over the years. Moreover, it is most definitely a piece on the role of intellectuals “in hard times,” in times of crisis. A natural corollary to Aschheim’s study of German-Jewish intellectuals is his work on the Holocaust—not so much the dreadful events themselves, but the debate as to how to interpret them and to determine their rightful place in the contemporary scholarly and public discourse. It is fitting, therefore, that we devote a separate section to Holocaust scholarship, ranging from questions relating to the reliability of survivor testimony to the way Jewish historians and publicists

xiv | Editors’ Note

reacted to what might be termed the “pre-Holocaust”—the rising tide of extreme anti-Semitism in Europe, in the 1930s. The third section of our book addresses another theme that has preoccupied Aschheim, along with virtually all other modern Jewish historians—that of Jewish identity, and, in particular, the efforts of certain Jews to articulate a satisfying identity by means of interaction with other Jewish or non-Jewish communities. Aschheim’s first book, based on his dissertation, dealt with the fraught relationship between “Western” (German) and “Eastern” (Eastern European) Jews in the German Reich before World War I. Appropriately, our book contains a chapter by Pierre Birnbaum that rehearses this drama in its American setting. Another chapter in this section deals with an Austrian-born intellectual’s rather eccentric notion of proposing an alliance between Zionism and the nations of Asia, in particular with Japan, based on a common “Oriental” identity. Research into the fascinating and fateful history of German-speaking Jewry has flourished in recent years, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is surely one of the leading centers in this field. Steven Aschheim has been an important contributor to the ongoing debates concerning the nature of German Jewry and its reaction to the “hard times” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is designed to be both a tribute to him and a showcase for new work—some accomplished by his students—in areas that undoubtedly will remain for many years at the core of the study of modern Jewry.

Introduction Reading Steven Aschheim

 Ezra Mendelsohn

Marginal Men Steven Aschheim, the scholar and teacher whose work this book honors, is a cultural and intellectual historian with a special interest in German-speaking Europe. He is a member of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which, unlike universities outside of Israel, maintains two separate history departments—one for general (that is, Gentile) history, the other for Jewish history. Ironically enough, many members of the General History Department also work on Jewish subjects, and Aschheim is one of them. In fact, he has conducted most of his research in the Jewish field, more specifically modern Jewish cultural and intellectual history in German-speaking Jewish communities, ranging from Berlin and Vienna to L’viv (Lemberg, Lwów), from Prague and Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) to Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and Riga. This is a tricky specialization. The historian in this field must not only persuade his readers of the worth of the intellectuals he studies—by emphasizing their intrinsic value, their insights into contemporary social, economic, and cultural problems, and their impact on subsequent generations—but he also faces the added subtle problem of defining what makes an intellectual or cultural figure “Jewish,” an issue explored in several chapters in this book. Here the demon of essentialism raises its ugly head, reflected in the practice, much deplored by some scholars but highly attractive to others, of “outing” various cultural figures as “Jewish” thinkers or artists and then endowing them with certain inherently Jewish characteristics, even if they themselves did or do not wish to be so designated.1 Was Kafka a Jewish writer and intellectual, or was he a Prague-born novelist

2 | Ezra Mendelsohn

writing in German whose parents happened to be Jews? The same question can be asked of other Austrian and German geniuses of Jewish origin, such as Max Liebermann, Gustav Mahler, and Felix Mendelssohn. Was Karl Marx a Jewish thinker or Franz Boas a Jewish anthropologist? Is Philip Roth a Jewish writer? Whole forests have been felled to produce the paper on which such questions have been endlessly debated, and the debate goes on.2 Aschheim makes his life even more difficult—but arguably more interesting and challenging—by studying those thinkers, cultural figures, and sometimes (but rarely) political movements that are located not in the mainstream of Jewish history, but at its margins. Several of his book titles, such as Beyond the Border or At the Edges of Liberalism, give him away and signify his interest in men and women who possessed multiple identities and flexible, oft-changing political, cultural, and religious allegiances that can be read and interpreted in manifold, often contradictory, ways.3 Indeed, their Rezeptionsgeschichte is sometimes the subject of Aschheim’s attention. Only occasionally does he write about mainstream German-Jewish figures such as notable rabbis or communal leaders; he concentrates on Jews who are estranged, to one degree or another, from the organized, official Jewish community, people who rebel against the establishment and see themselves just as they are seen by others, as men and women of the opposition.4 Those individuals tended to be either secular or, as in the case of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, bearers of a highly idiosyncratic religiosity born partly of their profound exposure to the non-Jewish world. Nevertheless, most of Aschheim’s subjects do identify strongly as Jews, at least sometimes—men and women such as Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Hugo Bergmann do not have to be “outed”—but they lived at the margins of both Jewish and German society and culture; their Jewishness, however construed, often conspired to marginalize them in the German Gentile world, while their exposure to and involvement and identification with German culture and their powerful German (or Austrian) identities had the effect of alienating them to some degree from Jewish religious, political, and social life. An extreme example of this marginality is Viktor Klemperer, a truly assimilated Jew who had gone so far as to convert to Christianity but was compelled by the Nazis to endure the consequences of his almost nonexistent Jewishness. In another case, Hannah Arendt, one of Aschheim’s favorite subjects, managed in the course of her life to outrage almost everyone in the Jewish world, in particular the Zionists, with whom she had once been identified and whom she later severely criticized. The philosopher Leo Strauss, in exile in America, was received as a prophet of the anti-communist right in a land where most Jews were, and still are, liberals, and where many in the 1920s and 1930s were on the left.5 Walter Benjamin, a leading Weimar cultural figure, opted for universalist Marxism rather than Jewish nationalism, as Zvi Jagendorf recalls in the poem that graces this volume.6 In his first full-length study, Brothers and Strangers, Aschheim demonstrated that for mainstream German Jewry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Eastern European Jewish immigrants in that country were perceived as a marginal and even frightening presence, because their speech, religiosity, clothing, manners, and

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 3

politics did not fit the German-Jewish model of acculturation: integration, the reduction of Jewishness to the realm of a modernized version of Judaism, and German patriotism. Aschheim’s focus on the margins applies also to his only book that deals with “general” cultural history, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, a remarkable study of the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Friedrich Nietzsche. It emphasizes how this brilliant philosopher resists classification and how his powerful writings were so wide ranging and inconsistent that he was able to influence and inspire a vast array of political and cultural movements, ranging from left-wing Zionism (the youth movement Hashomer hatsair [meaning, “the young guard”]) to Fascism and, of course, Nazism. In this sense, Nietzsche, too, might be understood as a man “at the edge,” fitting in nowhere, estranged and alienated, and in rebellion against the received ideas of his time. Finally, let us note that one of the few political movements that Aschheim subjects to historical research, Brit Shalom (The covenant of peace), founded in the 1920s and supported mainly by German Jews in Palestine, was the most marginal of all Zionist movements, so marginal in its insistence on cooperation with the Arabs of Palestine that many mainstream Zionists regarded its activities as bordering on treason.7 The choice of marginal men and women, and even of political movements, is the hallmark of Aschheim’s work, but it is worth recalling that the intellectuals and cultural figures he studies were born into Jewish communities that far from being “at the edges,” in fact played a central, even dominant, role in the drama of modern Jewish history. German Jewry, after all, had created a synthesis of Jewishness and openness to the world that appeared to be eminently successful and was regarded with admiration and even envy by many non-German Jews in Europe and in the New World. Germany in particular (and the German lands in general) was a great laboratory of modern Jewish history, the arena in which the struggles for emancipation, Jewish integration, acculturation, and even assimilation were played out, the lands where modern Judaism was created and in which emancipation, attained after a long and bitter campaign, was ultimately dramatically and horribly reversed. It should be pointed out that the cultural history of German-speaking Jews, especially those who lived at the fringes and not at the center of German-Jewish life, is no marginal subject in the academy; on the contrary, it has attracted and continues to attract a multitude of researchers. Evidently, the writings and lives of these figures still resonate today in the United States8 and particularly in Israel, where German-Jewish history bears special importance as the classic cautionary tale of modern Jewish history: indeed, Germany represented the arena in which the profound German-Jewish belief in the values of European progress and enlightenment—in a word, Bildung—was so clearly and tragically exposed as a dead end. Moreover, in a world that once again must deal with nationalism, with the problems of integration versus group loyalty and right-wing movements that reject toleration of “the other,” the dilemmas of the Jewish intellectuals born and bred in the land of profound Jewish integration and extreme anti-Semitism—in the country of Jewish emancipation and of the Shoah, of Goethe and of Goebbels—are of

4 | Ezra Mendelsohn

intense interest, at least to contemporary intellectuals and academics. This book is yet a further example of how widespread this interest is among current scholars of German and Jewish history.

The Outsider as Insider While attracted to intellectuals at the margins, Aschheim is at pains to emphasize that these figures, who maintained a precarious relationship with the establishment and authority, combined their critique of the established order—both Jewish and German—with a keen knowledge of its workings. They may have fashioned themselves into outsiders, but they were armed with the necessary tools to understand the societies from which they were so alienated. Moreover, Aschheim believes that these rebels often preserved, consciously or not, something of the values of the society that they had left behind. Like lapsed Catholics who are stamped for life by their childhood experiences in the church, they continued to represent, in one way or another, the core beliefs of German Jewry along with a profound understanding of the German world.9 If this smacks a bit of the notion of essentialism as mentioned above, of the idea that one’s Jewishness, however marginal, is often a significant biographical detail, so be it. The paradoxical situation of being both outsider and insider is an important theme in Aschheim’s book of essays on three brilliant German Jewish intellectuals: Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Viktor Klemperer. That he finds them “fascinating”10 comes as no surprise; more intriguing is his claim that their work yields profound insights into the societies and cultures they emerged from and then rejected. Aschheim is a historian of paradox and irony, of the cunning of history—thus his insistence that one cannot understand the triumphs and tragedies of German Jewry in the modern age as a whole without referring to these “marginal men,” who not only rebelled against the bourgeois Jewish and German worlds and against their version of Judaism, but who also proposed radical solutions to the “Jewish Question.” Notably, a high percentage of Aschheim’s intellectuals were attracted, permanently or temporarily, to Zionism, surely an unusual choice for a German Jew in the years before 1933 and clearly a sign of their rejection of the Jewish establishment. Just as Proust’s novels reveal the secrets of upper-class French society and Joyce’s fierce critique of Irish life is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn about modern Ireland, so too do Aschheim’s atypical, idiosyncratic intellectuals unpack the complexities of the German-Jewish conundrum. Insisting that a close examination of these three intellectuals will add “to our knowledge of the world of modern German Jewry,” Aschheim makes an even weightier claim—that their letters and diaries illuminate “the thickness and drama of the twentieth-century European and Jewish experience.”11 “Taken collectively,” he states, they “yield a mosaic, a kind of composite portrait of the turbulent history of German Jews in the twentieth century.”12

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 5

Perhaps the most paradoxical figure of all is Gershom Scholem, a man deeply imbued with German culture and passionately interested in German-Jewish life, who nonetheless despised the foundations of modern bourgeois German-Jewish life, such as Reform Judaism and a profound identification with the German state. Such foundations, the young Scholem tells us in his early writings, were constructed on clay, and the Jewish community’s belief in the triumphal procession of progress was nothing more than an illusion.13 Aschheim tells us that Scholem’s relationship with Arendt, another intellectual who found bourgeois German Jewry unpalatable, was “illustrative of the most basic questions at issue among German Jews.”14 Arendt’s work—in particular her biography of that early exemplar of deep acculturation, Rahel Varnhagen—demonstrates her “seminal, sometimes dazzling, insights into the tortured duplicities and psychology of assimilation.”15 In general, Aschheim informs us that Arendt’s work and life “were passionately linked to core predicaments of the Jewish experience.”16 As for Klemperer, surely one of the most marginal Jews whom we encounter in Aschheim’s writings, his alienation from German Jewry helped him survive the war (with the aid of his courageous non-Jewish wife), while his deeply rooted Germanness enabled him to become a pioneer in the dissection of the language used by the Nazis. Moreover, this same Germanness, which the Nazi regime had stripped from him, along with his suffering during the war years, rendered him a profound interpreter of German attitudes toward Jews. He, like other intellectuals who have come before Aschheim’s probing eyes, was both an insider and outsider, a man of “multiple identities.” As Aschheim explains, “It is . . . in their complexities and ambivalences, not their black-and-white character that the fascination resides.”17 In short, these three highly unusual figures are viewed as uniquely situated to unlock the secrets of German-Jewish society and the relationship between Germans and Jews; they may have been marginal Jews (and Germans), but they are also “emblematic” of German Jewry as a whole.18 Another example of the insider-outsider paradox is the above-mentioned Zionist Palestinian organization Brit Shalom.19 It consisted of a small but dazzling array of mostly German-speaking Jewish intellectuals. Surely this group was not representative of German Jewry or even of German Zionism, itself very much a minority movement in Weimar times. It was, as we have noted, not only “beyond the fringe,” but nearly beyond the pale of Jewish politics and culture in the 1920s, which was characterized by the split among Zionist nationalists (most of whom hoped for the eventual creation of a Jewish state in Palestine), anti-Zionist socialists, and integrationists who flourished within the Jewries of the West. Nevertheless, Aschheim suggests that it was, in some subtle, paradoxical way, a typical German-Jewish construction. Otherwise, how to explain the fact that this organization bore an overwhelmingly “German” nature at a time when the Zionist “new yishuv” in Palestine was dominated by Eastern European Jews? Aschheim writes that Brit Shalom’s humanistic, tolerant, and, above all, nonstatist version of Zionism reflects the Bildung-oriented nature of German Jewry as a whole. If the members of Brit Shalom were nationalists, they believed in nationalism with a

6 | Ezra Mendelsohn

human face, explicable only in terms of the special qualities of German Jewry, or at least of articulate German Jewry. It can be no accident, Aschheim tells us, that Jews hailing from the German Kulturbereich (including, significantly, a number of important figures from Prague) came up with this highly unusual variety of “spiritual, enlightened nationalism,” which was described by Hugo Bergmann, one of its leaders, as “a humanist nationalist flame.”20 If Germany as a whole fell prey to the horrendous nationalism of the Nazi variety, some elements within German Jewry embraced a totally different model of nationalism that Aschheim calls “admirable,” even if unrealistic; not a bad way, one might think, to describe German Jewry’s path to modernity in general.21 According to Aschheim, German Jewry’s most eminent historians of the twentieth century—individuals who were far removed from mainstream German Jewry, had no religious affiliation, and worked almost entirely on general historical problems—similarly tended to reflect a certain German-Jewish point of view in their writings. For example, unlike (non-Jewish) German social historians dealing with the Nazi era, who emphasize the social causes behind Hitler’s shameful, almost inexplicable victory, many historians of Jewish origin (Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Walter Laqueur, and others) emphasize cultural factors—racism, the centrality of national myths, anti-Semitism, the irrational—in short, everything about which German Jewry as a whole felt uneasy.22 Once again, we are led to understand that the Jewishness of the figures whom he studies, even if it was only of a vestigial nature, played a role in the crystallization of their worldview and in the formation of their historical Weltanschauung.23 Aschheim has written extensively on Hannah Arendt, who interests him not only as a brilliant thinker but also as a woman of multiple and frequently changing views and identities. In this sense, Aschheim views her not as a “traitor to Zionism” or an enemy of the State of Israel (as she was accused of being after the publication of her celebrated book on the Eichmann trial), but rather as a representative German Jew whose life embodies the trials and tribulations of post-emancipation German Jewry and whose writings reflect the agonizing dilemmas of twentiethcentury German Jewry. Surely there is irony in portraying some of the greatest critics of German Jewry and some of its most errant offspring—Arendt and Scholem, the Budapest-born Zionist and cultural critic Max Nordau, Klemperer, Franz Rosenzweig (the leader of the Jewish religious revival in Weimar Germany and a critic of Reform Judaism), and those who not only embraced the Zionist option but actually went to Palestine, such as Arthur Ruppin, Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, and other supporters of Brit Shalom—as emblematic of the very community they disliked, even despised.24 They, too, however, were the children of Gabriel Riesser, the renowned fighter for the cause of Jewish emancipation and one of the creators of the nineteenth-century German Jewish synthesis of pride in one’s Jewishness linked to a commitment to Enlightenment values. Riesser also comes under Aschheim’s purview, and the historian celebrates Riesser’s courage in demanding equal rights for Jews and his commitment to a “civilized, integrated, and liberal society.”25 Riesser’s

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 7

vision ultimately failed, but his influence on later German Jews, who rejected as utopian his lifelong struggle for Jewish equality, should not be underrated.

The Complexity of History A key aspect of Aschheim’s historical approach is thus his embrace of history’s complexity, its unexpectedness and its “cunning,” and his impatience with those who write it in order to advance a particular political agenda. For example, he is critical of those who write Jewish history from the present backward, thereby condemning all proposed “solutions” to the “Jewish Question” that did not take into account the rise of integral nationalism, Fascism, and ultimately Nazism. He will not condemn Riesser because his vision was destroyed by Hitler’s rise—who knows, one hundred years from now, Riesser’s emphasis on liberalism, Enlightenment thought, and (as it is called today) tolerant multiculturalism may be regarded as prophetic.26 Few will dare predict today the contours of the world one hundred years from now or how History (with a capital h) will judge today’s politicians and intellectuals, let alone those of the nineteenth century. Aschheim rejects all simplistic, monocausal explanations of historical developments in favor of privileging a multiplicity of readings and emphasizing the impossibility of finding the absolute truth. History unfolds not smoothly, but with unpredictable zigzags and inexplicable turns. Hence Aschheim’s fascination with Nietzsche, and, more than with Nietzsche’s work itself, the fact that it was read in such diverse, even contradictory ways. Denying the possibility of a single authoritative interpretation of this genius’ work, Aschheim firmly rejects both Lukács’s efforts to make Nietzsche the ideological father of Nazism and Walter Kaufmann’s attempt to make him into a decent liberal. Nietzsche’s stance, or stances, on the “Jewish Question” is characteristic, says Aschheim: he both blames Jews for the Old Testament, which led the way to a “slave morality” in religion, and he abhors the anti-Semitism of his time while praising contemporary Jews for their remarkable achievements.27 Though far from a Zionist, Nietzsche was of importance to Buber and, as we have already noted, to the Zionist youth movement Hashomer hatsair. As for his appropriation by the radical right in Germany, and in particular by the Third Reich, Aschheim delights in this paradoxical development. The Nazis selected what suited them in Nietzsche’s work: his anti-universalism, for example, and his emphasis on rejuvenation and masculinity as opposed to Judeo-Christian femininity. Aschheim cites Karl Jaspers’s observation that one can make of Nietzsche either an opponent of Nazism or a Nazi, a remarkable example of the bewildering complexity of this revered and derided philosopher.28 Aschheim’s only full-length book on Jewish history “proper,” Brothers and Strangers, is a study of German Jews’ attitudes toward their Eastern European brethren and also emphasizes the complexity of reception. German Jewry’s leaders and intellectuals, as I have pointed out, found much to detest in the Ostjude. But things are not so simple, as we discover in this exemplary study. Ostjuden may have been

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loathed and feared, but they were also Jews, and as such, worthy recipients of charity, help, and well-intentioned efforts at reform.29 Moreover, and here we confront yet another paradox, some Westjuden perceived Eastern European Jewry as a positive model rather than a negative phenomenon—as in the well-known case of Martin Buber, for example, and his cult of Hasidism, an Eastern European Jewish phenomenon much mocked and detested by most Western Jews. In a way, for some German Jews, the Ostjuden were the true insiders, the truly authentic Jews, and not marginal people beyond the pale of Western civilization, hailing from a vast area called by Karl Emil Franzos “Halb-Asien” (Half-Asia). The small German Zionist minority considered that there was much to emulate in the Ostjuden, because they had spurned the cowardly and false path of assimilation, choosing instead to remain loyal to the values and practices of the Jewish folk. Aschheim highlights the case of Nathan Birnbaum, a Viennese Jew who became a celebrated champion of Yiddish, the much-disparaged vernacular of Russian and Polish Jews.30 Kafka was another admirer of this (relatively) young and vigorous language. As in the case of Nietzsche, so too with regard to Ostjuden in the eyes of Westjuden—complexity is everything; one-dimensional studies are useless. Things are seldom as they seem, and this multifaceted reality must be faced and explicated by the historian, as Aschheim does in such an impressive way. Aschheim’s rejection of monocausality is most clearly revealed in his interventions on the subject of the historiography of the Holocaust. Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, historians have been quarreling about how to explain the rise of Nazism in the capital of European high culture, in the land of “poets and thinkers.” One of the most divisive issues relates to the degree of complicity on the part of the entire German nation for the crimes of the Nazi state and, in particular, for that state’s eliminationist policy with regard to the Jews. These are quarrels with much at stake, in particular in postwar Germany and in Israel, given Germany’s desire to integrate into the European world of nations and the decisive role of the Holocaust in Israel’s civil religion. Scholars of the Shoah, Aschheim insists, should not treat this event as having taken place outside of history—it must be contextualized like all other modern historical events, with one of its contexts being the rather numerous cases of brutal ethnic cleansing and even genocide in modern times.31 The Holocaust resists all simple efforts at understanding and interpretation. Aschheim thus severely takes to task the Princeton historian Arno Meyer for claiming that the fate of the German war in the East—the failure to smash Soviet Russia—was the primary reason for unleashing the mass murder of the Jews. Better, he suggests, to approach the Shoah as a catastrophe made possible (but not inevitable) by the extreme racial ideology of the Third Reich, an ideology it applied not only to Jews, but toward supposed “degenerates,” gypsies, homosexuals, and the “inferior” Slavic nations, who they claimed were destined to be resettled and reduced to the status of slave laborers.32 By the same token, Aschheim castigates the German historian Ernst Nolte for offering a simple (and convenient) reason for the triumph of Nazism in Germany by connecting it to the grave Soviet threat to Europe and European culture.33

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 9

Let us quote Aschheim: “The final solution was a secular, human event that occurred at a particular, identifiable time and place and . . . it should be equally amenable to the rules and methods that govern the (still defensible) practice of historiography in general.”34 Given this attitude, Aschheim’s reaction to Daniel Goldhagen’s famous book on the Holocaust and the furor it provoked is not surprising. Goldhagen’s claim that the Germans had long “harbored a great hatred for the Jews” and that this attitude explains the ferocious anti-Semitism of 1933 to 1945 is rejected as a species of “essentialism.”35 For Aschheim, the idea that German anti-Semitism was uniquely eliminationist for hundreds of years does not hold water. He rejects the assumption that Hitler and Eichmann emerged seamlessly from a long German tradition of Jew hatred as an unconvincing reworking of the idea of a German Sonderweg (unique historical path), which he also views with considerable suspicion. If German anti-Semitism was so extreme in modern times, then how can one explain, for example, the high rates of intermarriage between German Jews and German non-Jews before 1933? In the “historians’ debate” in the wake of Goldhagen’s book, Aschheim, like Arendt before him, was leery of generalizations about “German national character” and came down on the side of Christopher Browning, who has shown that under certain extreme circumstances, ordinary people can become murderers.36

History and Biography Steven Aschheim was born and raised in South Africa, the son of German Jews to whom that country had granted asylum. Educated in South Africa, Great Britain, and the United States, his most important and much revered teacher was the Wisconsin-based German-Jewish historian George Mosse. A member of a mildly leftwing South African Zionist youth movement, he eventually settled in Israel and, for the last thirty years or so, has been teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. E. H. Carr has famously proclaimed that in order to understand a historical work one must know something about its author—his or her politics, cultural heritage, social position, and the like.37 Let us consider the impact of Steven Aschheim’s interesting biography on his research, without falling into the trap of claiming that everything he writes is in some way predetermined by his background. Aschheim has written a brief but revealing autobiographical essay, which is referred to in Pierre Birnbaum’s contribution to this volume.38 In this essay Aschheim describes growing up as the son of immigrants of German background; in fact, he was a member of a minority group three times over—a “German Jew” within a mostly Eastern European Jewish community; a Jew within a strongly Christian, Protestant white community; and, of course, a privileged white person in a sea of disenfranchised blacks and other “inferior” races. As was common among South African Jews of his generation, the policies of the apartheid state made him sensitive to racial injustice and caused him to become an opponent of racist nationalism of the Boer variety. Not wishing to identify with this pariah

10 | Ezra Mendelsohn

state, his road to Zionism was fairly predictable, but it was a commitment to Jewish nationalism combined with an adherence to liberalism, even socialism, and to the German-Jewish notion of Bildung, which his teacher George Mosse believed was the chief characteristic of middle-class German Jewry. Aschheim informs us that what first attracted him in the German-Jewish heritage was the universalism of its leading figures, such as Marx, Freud, and Einstein, whom he describes as “universal men.”39 You don’t have to be a post–World War II South African Jew with German antecedents to admire the universalist tendencies of distinguished German Jews, but one can see the connection. Universalism versus particularism—an ancient and still-profound divide among the Jews. But how does one remain faithful to universalism, liberalism, tolerance, and democratic multiculturalism—the very opposite of pre-Mandela South Africa—while maintaining a commitment to contemporary Zionism? Although the movement founded by the liberal Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl was, in the 1940s and 1950s, closely linked to socialism, secularism, and a cosmopolitan openness to the world’s diversity, recently it has been in the process of recasting itself as a movement and an ideology committed to a narrow, integral Jewish nationalism closely allied to Israeli Orthodox Judaism. This is a dilemma faced by Steven Aschheim and many of his left-leaning colleagues at today’s Hebrew University whose Zionist sympathies are constantly being tested by the turn to the right in Israeli politics and culture, on the one hand, and on the other hand by “post-Zionist” Israeli scholars and thinkers who, having lost their faith in Zionism in general, now hold up the banner of “one state for all its citizens,” meaning, in effect, a dismantling of the Zionist project. It is rewarding to examine the effect of this dilemma on Aschheim’s work. It is clear from reading him and from conversing with him that his worldview delineates him as a member of a fairly small minority in Israel, although it is a minority well represented in the academy and among intellectuals, artists, and so forth. In his own words, in Israel he is, as he was in South Africa, at the margin—yet another paradox, given the Zionist promise to solve the marginality of Jews via the “ingathering of the exiles.” He finds himself between the rock of an intrinsic belief that Zionism was and is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and that a Jewish state is necessary and desirable, and the hard place of an Israel that appears to be ever more intransigent, nationalistic, even chauvinistic, an Israel in which the settlers beyond the Green Line are seen as heroic pioneers and Orthodox, unreconstructed rabbis have a growing moral impact upon society and enjoy a monopoly on the Israeli rabbinate. He is an internationalist in a world of nationalism, a universalist in a world of particularism, a bearer of the German-Jewish allegiance to enlightened optimism in a country whose master narrative of modern Jewish history states that anti-Semitism will never disappear, that the Jews will always be hated, and that the Holocaust is definitive proof of the accuracy of the Zionist interpretation of history. He is a liberal and a pluralist in a country that emphasizes that there is only one way to view Jewish history (although it tolerates those who do not agree). And yet, as he has told me many times, despite all this, he loves

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 11

living in Jerusalem—his life, his family, his students and friends are there—and nowhere else. I would argue that Aschheim’s commitment to pluralism and the values of the Enlightenment, along with his adherence to what might be called liberal Zionism, results in a historiography characterized by a liberal sensibility and a reluctance to judge the intellectuals whom he describes so eloquently. Let us consider, again, his reading of Hannah Arendt, a woman who, as we have mentioned, has been excoriated by the Israeli mainstream. Presenting her views with an impartial eye, he does not engage in moral judgments on her “lack of love for the Jewish people” (“ahavat yisrael”), as Gershom Scholem put it after her book on the Eichmann trial appeared. Aschheim does not necessarily accept Arendt’s denial of any link between German history and the Holocaust, a view which he terms extreme, nor does he by any means endorse her ferocious critique of Zionism and the Israeli state, but neither does he regard her as a “traitor” to the Jewish people. The Arendt he presents is complex, replete with internal contradictions, as was the case with so many German-Jewish intellectuals during times of trouble. He certainly does not hide her faults, as, for example, the blatant racism in her descriptions of Israeli Jewish society,40 but he writes in her spirit when he critiques what he regards as the misuses of the Holocaust in the Israeli context. Arendt thus appears as neither saint nor villain, but rather as an acute observer and critic both of Jewish history and of the “Jewish state,” a thinker whose relevance today is as great as ever. Nothing in Aschheim’s work suggests a triumphalist Zionist narrative. As we have seen, he presents a warm, compassionate picture of Gabriel Riesser, for whom no streets are named in Israel’s cities. Indeed, Aschheim manifests considerable understanding for Riesser’s efforts to promote a synthesis between loyalty to Judaism and to enlightened Germanness, all the more so as Riesser’s version of Judaism bore a clearly universalist character.41 Both Riesser and Arendt, along with Scholem and Klemperer, Franz Rosenzweig and Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin, all belong in Aschheim’s pantheon, as does the “anti-nationalist nationalist” movement Brit Shalom, whose adherents were sympathetic not only to the idea of rejuvenating the Jewish people in Palestine, but also to Arab national aspirations in the same country. In Aschheim’s view of German-Jewish history, one senses—despite his stance of impartiality—his empathy for this remarkable community. He writes neither to condemn nor praise the German-Jewish intelligentsia but to understand them in their own special contexts. His attitude toward Germany itself is necessarily ambiguous—this nation of “poets and thinkers” supported Hitler to the bitter end, but it also produced men like Lessing, Mendelssohn’s friend and the embodiment of the generous nature of the Enlightenment.42 I have suggested that Aschheim’s South African and German-Jewish roots help to explain his work, although I do not claim that his specific background was bound to determine his historiographical position. As I come to my conclusion, it is useful to consider Aschheim’s own position in his adopted homeland. In Jerusalem, as in Johannesburg, Aschheim remains something of a marginal figure: a so-called

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“Anglo-Saxon” (what a delicious irony) among the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—a person who writes almost exclusively in English (and a beautiful, rich, jargon-free English it is). He is better known abroad, among Germanists and historians of German Jewry, than he is in his own country. There are, to be sure, enough such people in Jerusalem to make for a sort of mini-society composed of native English speakers, readers of the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and the International Herald Tribune, mostly relocated Americans, but also British, Australian, and Canadian Jews (and South Africans, of course) for whom English remains their language and the basis of their culture. Many such people are employed in the academic world of Israel, and most of them, including the most brilliant, retain a kind of “otherness,” as does Aschheim. In this sense, Aschheim himself occupies a position not so dissimilar to that of his German-Jewish subjects. In Jerusalem he is on the margin—a liberal, secular, English-writing Jew in a sea of religious and nationalist Israelis; a Jew committed to what he regards as the positive values of the German-Jewish heritage among the Jews from Moslem lands and Eastern European Jews who are highly critical, to say the least, of the path taken by German Jewry; a man for whom the Judeocentric views of the majority are a source of mirth and anger; a universalist among the particularists, and a skeptic and ironist among believers in the chosenness of Israel. Indeed, to sum up, Aschheim’s work reflects what is finest in the German-Jewish tradition. As a reviewer of one of his books has suggested, he is not only a chronicler and interpreter of German Jewry, but a man who, in the context not of Germany or of the German-Jewish diaspora in America but in the Zionist state, is a worthy heir to the men and women he writes about with so much understanding.43 Steven Aschheim may be one of the last prominent yekkes of this type,44 albeit a yekke whose native language is English. The chapters that follow, written by people close to him from Israel, America, and Europe, reflect his considerable influence both as a scholar and a teacher. It is my great pleasure to call myself his friend and to admit to valuing immensely his company, whether we are discussing Mozart or Moses Mendelssohn. May he enjoy this book, our tribute to him, and may it give its readers a sense of his remarkable scholarly and pedagogic achievements.

Notes 1. For Aschheim’s views on this issue, see his review of a recent book by Pierre Birnbaum, “Bold Ones,” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 5511, 14 November 2008. 2. On this issue, see Murray Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford, 2007) and my article “Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill? Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 22–39.

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztIntroduction | 13

3. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton and Oxford, 2007) deals with German Jews outside of Germany, while his new collection of essays is called At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History (New York, 2012). 4. Aschheim’s book Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982) is something of an exception, because in that case the German-Jewish establishment and its organizations are analyzed. Another exception is his essay on Gabriel Riesser, the champion of the struggle for equal rights for German Jewry. See Steven Aschheim, “Between Rights, Respectability, and Resistance: Reframing the German-Jewish Experience” (first presented in lecture form in 2007), in At the Edges of Liberalism, 185–94. 5. See chapter 2 of this book, “Leo Strauss Reading Karl Marx during the Cold War,” by Adi Armon. 6. See chapter 5 of this book, Zvi Jagendorf ’s, “Scholem and Benjamin: Fragments of a Correspondence—A Poem.” 7. See chapter 8 of this book, “Nothing But a Disillusioned Love”? Hans Kohn’s Break with the Zionist Movement,” by Adi Gordon, and Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 6–44. 8. Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 81–118. 9. See Aschheim’s essay on insiders and outsiders in Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, ed. Richard Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman, (Oxford and Portland, OR, 2010), 1–14. 10. Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington, 2001), 3. 11. Ibid., 3, 7. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. On Scholem’s commitment to the values of Bildung, see chapter 3 of this book, “Gershom Scholem, Einst und Jetzt: Zionist Politics and Kabbalistic Historiography,” by David Biale. 14. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 44. 15. Ibid., 59. 16. Ibid., 65. 17. Ibid., 83. 18. Ibid., 98. 19. For an analysis of one of its leaders, see chapter 8 of this book, “Nothing But a Disillusioned Love”? Hans Kohn’s Break with the Zionist Movement,” by Adi Gordon. 20. Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 6. 21. Ibid., 43. 22. Ibid., 45–80. 23. Ibid., 93. 24. On Rosenzweig, see his essay “German Jews Beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic,” in Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises, ed. Steven Aschheim (New York, 1996), 31–44. 25. Aschheim, “Between Rights, Respectability, and Resistance,” 186. 26. Ibid. 27. Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1992), 96ff. 28. Ibid., 237, 254ff. 29. For the American version of this clash, see chapter 11 of this book, “‘Brothers and Strangers’: The American Example,” by Pierre Birnbaum. 30. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 114–16 (on Birnbaum). 31. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 114. 32. Ibid., 124. 33. Ibid., 15. 34. Ibid., 15. 35. Steven Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison, 2001), 92.

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36. Ibid., 140. See also chapter 16 of this book, “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities,” by Christopher Browning. 37. Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1964), 24. 38. “Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa,” in Aschheim, Times of Crisis, 59–63; Birnbaum, “‘Brothers and Strangers.’” 39. “Excursus,” 62. 40. Steven Aschheim, “Introduction,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim, 7. 41. See note 4 concerning his article on Riesser. 42. He is again referring to the work of Arendt; see Steven Aschheim, “Hannah Arendt: Jewishness at the Edges,” in At the Edges of Liberalism. Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History (New York, 2012), 62. 43. See Michael Meyer’s review of Aschheim’s Beyond the Border in The Protestant-Jewish Conundrum, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 24 (2010): 253–55. 44. A word used in Palestine to describe the German Jews, who first came in large numbers to that country after 1933. It can be used as a term of affection but can also be used in a negative sense, denoting the German Jews’ lack of Yidishkeyt or their adherence to absurd formality, a dress code unsuitable to the Middle East, and an inability to learn proper Hebrew.

Part I



Strauss, Scholem, Arendt, Benjamin

Chapter 1

A Zionist Critique of Jewish Politics The Early Thought of Leo Strauss

Jerry Z. Muller

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In Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, Steven Aschheim notes: “The Zionist engagement of so many German-Jewish intellectuals who were later to achieve international fame, the creative energies it inspired, is rather astonishing and a tale that awaits its historian . . .”1 This chapter, which examines the role of Zionist engagement in the early thought of Leo Strauss, is a contribution to that astonishing tale. Strauss famously suggested that in reading the work of a thinker of the past, we should do so without preconceived notions. This chapter is based on the assumption that the younger Strauss might have had things to say different from the older—purportedly “mature”—Strauss and that his early work, too, might be intrinsically worth reading. It was Strauss’s commitment to a secular, political Zionism that led him into his investigation of the nature of political life. That is not to say that Strauss’s political thought is “Zionist” or “Jewish”: on the contrary, as we shall see, Strauss believed that the proper task of Zionism was to acquire a realistic conception of politics that took into account the ineluctability of particularistic identities and interests and the role of power in human affairs. The deficiencies of the Jewish tradition necessitated learning this knowledge from the Gentiles, from Nietzsche back to Plato. He evaluated such thinkers not on the basis of their attitude toward the Jews, but on the value of their insights and perspectives for himself and other Jews, who under the influence of the Jewish tradition and the dominant assumptions of German Jewry were dangerously unprepared to navigate the perilous shoals of the twentieth century. Leon Pinsker also played a key, though rarely understood, role in Strauss’s intellectual development. In his pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, which laid out the rationale

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for modern Jewish nationalism, Pinsker wrote, “Im wogenden Ozean der Weltgeschichte segelten wir ohne Kompaß, und einen solchen gilt es zu schaffen.” (We [Jews] have sailed the surging ocean of world history without a compass, and our task is to create one.)2 It was the search for such a compass that led Leo Strauss to political inquiry and political philosophy. Despite the fact that Strauss repeatedly referred to Pinsker’s significance,3 one can read through virtually all of the secondary literature on Strauss without coming across a mention of Pinsker’s name or a discussion of the importance of his work for Strauss.4 One reason for this omission lies in the peculiarities of contemporary academic disciplines. Those who write about Strauss’s Jewish thought tend to come from either departments of religion or philosophy, which deem the abstract work of thinkers such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, or Martin Heidegger as legitimate objects of reflection. In contrast, the more concrete, political thought of Pinsker or Theodor Herzl is assumed to be too parochial for a philosophical mind like Leo Strauss. The secondary literature on Strauss, thus, abounds in references to Cohen and Rosenzweig and even to Martin Buber, although in each case the main point is that Strauss fundamentally rejected the central elements of their thought. Strauss rejected Cohen’s reduction of Judaism to ethical monotheism, and Strauss’s political Zionism was the polar opposite of Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Judaism as removed from the vagaries of secular, Gentile history. Buber served Strauss primarily as a foil. The thinkers who currently form the canon of German-Jewish thought were far less influential on Strauss than the work of Leon Pinsker—a figure well known to historians of Zionism yet beyond the horizon of contemporary religion and philosophy departments. Strauss derived his emphasis on “Nüchternheit” (political sobriety) from Pinsker’s diagnosis of the modern fate of the Jews.5 In addition, since at least the 1960s, the narrative of German-Jewish cultural history has tended to neglect the historical exigencies and political concerns that motivated Strauss’s early work. Written in societies where security and even affluence were taken for granted, such scholarship often took as its unacknowledged point of departure the search for models of personal meaning or spirituality, or it assumed a Jewish identity conceived as part of a mission to moralize the world or pass critical judgment upon its imperfections. Peter Gay presented Weimar culture as the creation of “outsiders.” Others praised the role of “critical theory,” of the stranger, of prophetic politics, or “the Other.” None of these, however, provides a useful key to understanding the Herzlian Zionism of the young Leo Strauss.

Strauss’s Commitment to Zionism Zionism was not only Strauss’s earliest political commitment, but also one that he maintained to the end of his days. Strauss tells us that he became a Zionist at age seventeen, which was in 1916. He grew up in a rural region of Hesse, where he completed his gymnasium education in 1917. He then spent a year and a half in

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztA Zionist Critique of Jewish Politics | 19

the German army as a translator, in Belgium. After the war, he studied at the Universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg. We know that Strauss was active in the Zionist fraternity Kartell jüdischer Verbindungen (KjV) in Frankfurt, in the fall of 1922.6 From 1923 to 1928 he published some thirteen articles in three Jewish periodicals: the Jüdische Rundschau, the newspaper of the German Zionists; Der Jüdische Student, the magazine of the KjV; and the magazine Der Jude, edited by Martin Buber. During those years, those were the only periodicals in which he published.7 In addition, Strauss was active in the leadership of the KjV for a time.8 He learned and taught Hebrew (a key element of Zionism)9 and addressed gatherings of Zionist students in 1924 and 1930.10 Strauss’s Zionist interests did not end with his emigration from Germany in 1932. He was active in Zionist circles in England in 1934, where he lectured on Jewish history and the possibility of a Jewish state.11 That same year, at the urging of his friend Gershom Scholem, Strauss applied for a lectureship in medieval Jewish thought at the Hebrew University. Having published little in the field, Strauss, at Scholem’s urging, assembled his unpublished essays on Maimonides into a book, Philosophie und Gesetz, which was published in 1935.12 In the end, the position went to a more senior figure, Julius Guttmann. Neither Scholem nor Strauss, however, gave up on the idea of bringing Strauss to Jerusalem. In 1949, not long after Strauss had moved to the University of Chicago, Scholem visited him there to discuss the possibility of Strauss assuming the chair in social thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which Martin Buber was about to retire. Strauss considered the idea seriously before deciding against it for personal reasons.13 He did, however, come to the Hebrew University as a visiting professor for the academic year of 1954–55, during which he delivered his lecture series “What Is Political Philosophy?” (published in 1959).14 A few years later, Strauss wrote his only published letter to an editor, defending the State of Israel against repeated attacks in the conservative magazine National Review.15 Later, in his 1965 preface to the English-language publication of his early book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Strauss explored some of the intrinsic tensions of Zionism while asserting that the successful establishment of the State of Israel “procured a blessing for all Jews everywhere regardless of whether they admit it or not.”16 Unlike Buber and his erstwhile disciples, Strauss never regarded Zionism as a form of personal therapy or as a forum for individual transformation. It was not supposed to realize either religious goals or some secularized form of messianic aspirations. Rather it was meant to alleviate the real threat to Jewish pride and to Jewish lives in the age of ethnonationalism, which Strauss thought was by no means over in the 1920s. He stressed that Zionism offered a solution to this Judennot but did not resolve the intellectual challenge that the Enlightenment critique of religion—with its origins in Hobbes and Spinoza—posed to Jewish belief. Strauss frequently made the point that in trying to attain human Selbstständigkeit and Selbstverantwortlichkeit (autonomy and self-responsibility), political Zionism was fundamentally at odds with the Jewish religious tradition. Consequently,

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as he noted from his earliest writing on the issue, those with spiritual inclinations (“geistige Menschen”) ultimately would not be satisfied by political Zionism’s naturalism or its emphasis on a sense of national honor.17 In short, and contrary to many assertions in the secondary literature, Strauss never thought that Zionism could solve the theological dilemmas that the Enlightenment critique of religion posed to Jewish belief; nor did he ever stop believing in the importance of political Zionism’s achievements. Certain elements of Strauss’s experience as a German Jew help account for his attraction to Zionism; his Zionist commitments, in turn, shaped his relationship to Germany and to German culture. Growing up as the son of a merchant in a small, traditional Jewish community in rural Hesse, Strauss was exposed early on to the pervasive anti-Semitism of the local peasantry.18 The memory of an encounter with Russian Jews fleeing westward from the pogroms of 1905 seems to have left an indelible impression on him, as well as a foreboding sense that German Jews might one day experience a similar fate.19 Strauss was surely aware of the wave of pogroms in Eastern Europe at the end of World War I and during the Russian Civil War (especially in Ukraine) and of subsequent threats to Jews closer to home. The Zionist newspaper for which he wrote reported with alarm about governmental measures against Ostjuden in Berlin, in 1920, and the murderous attacks on Ostjuden in Munich, Berlin, and elsewhere, in 1923.20 In an article entitled “The Fateful Hour of German Jewry,” the Jüdische Rundschau asked rhetorically, “Do the Jews of Germany understand the process now unfolding? The fateful hour of German Jewry has arrived. The Jews can no longer feel secure about their physical safety in Germany; legal equality, always praised as fundamental to Jewish existence, has been shaken to its core; the possibility of a special legal status for them [Ausnahmegesetzgebung]—which would have seemed unthinkable and unimaginable only a few years ago—appears to be on the horizon. . . . German Jewry is faced with the fact that the politics it has pursued for the last century is today bankrupt.”21 For Strauss, as for Pinsker and Herzl, anti-Semitism was an inevitable part of the galut. The political Zionism that Strauss embraced was a response not to “the problem of Judaism,” but to “the problem of the Jews,” that is to say, to the problem of anti-Semitism both in its violent form and anti-Semitism in its milder form—the rejection by wide swaths of non-Jewish society of the notion that Jews were indeed an intrinsic part of their nation.22 Like other members of his generation of German Zionists, Strauss was a “post-assimilationist” who began both with a critique of traditional Jewish religion and an awareness of the limits of the assimilationist project.23 Unlike those on the communist left, Strauss did not consider particular, national identity as pernicious—and his acceptance of the legitimacy of particularism applied to German national identity as well. He simply regarded himself primarily as a Jew rather than as a German. As Strauss noted in a letter to Gershom Scholem written in 1965, he never shared the romance with all things German (“Liebe zum deutschen Wesen”) so characteristic of many German Jews.24

Gershom Scholem, Einst und JetztA Zionist Critique of Jewish Politics | 21

What Strauss Learned from Political Zionism Friedrich Nietzsche made an impression on many Jewish thinkers, both Zionist and non-Zionist. But as Steven Aschheim demonstrated in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, each thinker’s concerns and sensibilities largely determined what he or she took from Nietzsche.25 Strauss’s letters and biographical reflections indicate that he began to read Nietzsche while he was a gymnasium student and, as he wrote to his friend Karl Löwith, that “Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my twenty-second and thirtieth years that I literally believed everything that I understood of him.”26 Strauss’s reading of Nietzsche in the 1920s was informed in good part by his Zionist concerns.27 No doubt those concerns arose out of Strauss’s own experience, but they were shaped by his reading of Pinsker. In later autobiographical reflections Strauss referred to himself repeatedly as having been a “straightforward political Zionist.”28 It is worth recalling the key assertions of the three Zionist thinkers who most influenced Strauss: Pinsker, Herzl, and (to a more limited degree) Ahad Ha’am—claims that formed the premises of Strauss’s Zionism. (He notes that during the 1920s he met Jabotinsky but never seems to have identified himself as a Revisionist.) The most important of these thinkers was Leon Pinsker, whose book AutoEmancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, written and published anonymously in German in 1882, was republished in Berlin in 1917.29 The book began with a (truncated) quotation from the sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?” In Eastern Europe, Pinsker noted, Jews were still in search of legal equality. In Western Europe, they had attained legal emancipation but remained subject to social discrimination. Indeed, Europe was characterized by ethnonational competition in which the Jews were regarded as aliens at best and often as hated rivals. In the face of this reality, Jewish appeals to “humanity” and “justice” were futile.30 So, too, was hope for the coming of the Messiah.31 “The time has come for a sober and dispassionate realization of our true position,” Pinsker asserted. There was a deep, anthropological basis to prejudice against the Jews, one that would not be eliminated in the foreseeable future.32 Jews might lament the natural basis of this antagonism, but sober responsibility demanded that they act upon it; otherwise, they would remain the “anvil of the nations.”33 In his 1896 book, The Jewish State, Herzl asserted that anti-Semitism was on the rise and would continue to grow, above all because the Jews in the Diaspora had become a Mittelstandsvolk (middle class people) and, when emancipated, found themselves as competitors with the non-Jewish majority. Although the Jews might have regarded themselves as an integral part of the larger nations in which they lived, the Gentile majority defined them as an alien minority. The majority, indeed, decided who was to be regarded as “alien” by virtue of its superior power. “It is a question of power,” Herzl wrote, “as in all relations between peoples.” Although Strauss was skeptical about “cultural Zionism,” of which Ahad Ha’am was an early theorist, he was sufficiently impressed by his reading of one

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of Ahad Ha’am’s most famous essays, “Slavery in Freedom” (first published in 1891), to recall it decades later. There, Ahad Ha’am offered a biting critique of the redefinition of Judaism as ethical missionism, in which the Jews were to be the self-appointed ethical mentors of the nations. Missionism, he asserted, was a form of spiritual slavery in which the Jews were forced by others to find a universalistic explanation and legitimation for their felt sense of belonging.34 These assumptions and analyses were to become central to Strauss’s work of the 1920s.

Strauss’s Critique of Cultural Zionism, Jewish Liberalism, and Orthodoxy Strauss’s thought is particularly striking when compared with that of other German-speaking Zionists such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, or Robert Weltsch, whose work has been explored in Steven Aschheim’s book Beyond the Borders, in the chapter “Bildung in Palestine.”35 The strand of Zionism associated with the above-mentioned German-speaking Jews sought to combine elements of Jewish spirituality, liberalism, and anarchism, going so far as to abjure the need for, or desirability of, a Jewish state. It was most closely identified with Martin Buber and was popular among young German Zionist intellectuals. Strauss sought to warn against this brand of “cultural Zionism” and the intellectual trends that had gone into its formation. To him it represented Zionism as neoromanticism, an attempt to substitute the current fashion for subjective emotionality and mysticism for the (irrecoverable) propositional content of traditional belief. He regarded it as a hopeless compromise that not only failed to capture the inner meaning of Judaism as a revealed religion, but also led away from the realistic, worldly, political Zionism with which Strauss identified—away from Nüchternheit. These criticisms were at the center of Strauss’s first Zionist interventions in 1923 and 1924.36 He first took the field in a piece entitled “Antwort auf das ‘Prinzipielle Wort’ der Frankfurter” (A response to the “principled word” of the Frankfurters).37 The “Frankfurter” in this case were five members of the Frankfurt branch of the Zionist student organization KjV, four of whom went on to become significant intellectuals: Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal, who were later associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and with “critical theory”; Ernst Simon, who would become an important figure in the German branch of the religious Zionist organization Mizrachi and later became a professor of the philosophy of education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Fritz Goithein, better known as Shlomo Dov Goitein, who would become one of the great historians of his generation, first in Jerusalem and then in the United States. Whereas his opponents were skeptical of Wissenschaft and of “sovereign politics,” Strauss affirmed both. In opposition to what he termed the Frankfurters’ neoromanticism—their tone of sentimentality, pathetic declaration, subjectivist

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emotionality, and their Buberian litany of Erlebnis, Bekenntnis, and Glaube—Strauss called for Nüchternheit, which was to become his watchword. Picking up on a theme from Pinsker—that the condition of galut was one of “Entwirklichkeit” in which the Jews lived a spectral existence as a spectral nation (“Volksgespenst”)—Strauss affirmed the necessity of what he called “Einwirklichung.”38 By that he meant that the Jews needed to become part of mundane, sober, secular history, with its characteristic attributes of land, power, and a normal social structure (“Grund und Boden, Macht und Heer, Bauerntum und Adel”).39 Zionism, he maintained, was ultimately not about a “Rückkehr zum Volke,” but rather a “Rückkehr zur Wirklichkeit, zu normalem historischen Dasein,” not a return to a romanticized “Volk,” but to normal historical existence. This secularization of vision, Strauss noted, was common both to Jewish liberalism and to Zionism. An element of Strauss’s Redlichkeit (his intellectual probity), which he raised in this initial article and then frequently restated, was that traditional belief in God was simply impossible in light of modern science. He was skeptical of attempts to recapture the Jewish religion by stressing the subjective elements of religious experience and by focusing on human needs, while bracketing out the question of God’s actual existence. In his subsequent writings of the 1920s, Strauss emphasized that for Zionism to succeed as a political movement, it needed to develop a sober, realistic view of politics. That meant avoiding multiple snares: belief in Orthodox Judaism, which he considered irrational, an unwarranted faith in liberal humanitarianism, and the unholy combination of the two that he saw as characteristic of “cultural Zionism.” It meant eschewing the propensity of so many Jews to substitute moralistic judgment for realistic analysis of human motivation and behavior. Political Zionism, Strauss wrote, with its origins in the thought of Pinsker and Herzl, was a reaction to the concrete Judennot, to the recognition that Jews were becoming an excluded minority (“ausgestossene Minderheit”), and an attempt to find an honorable form of existence in light of that fact.40 It signaled a departure from the ideology of assimilationism, which Strauss, like Pinsker and Herzl, regarded as founded upon an illusionary trust in the progressive humanity of civilization. Jews owed their political emancipation to the doctrines of the French Revolution. Many of them had assumed that the advance of civilization would put an end to discrimination against them. But as Pinsker and Herzl recognized, the advance of civilization (roughly, of capitalist development and democratic political participation) actually led to an exacerbation of national feeling and ethnic conflict. Assimilationism, in this analysis, was based upon a failure to recognize that the host nations’ rejection of the Jews who lived among them was not a mere holdover from the past but actually something that intensified with the development of modern civilization.41 Indeed (as Daniel Tanguay has rightly noted), it was the Zionist critique of progressive assumptions that led Strauss to a broader critique of liberalism.42 The attempt to find an honorable solution to this state of affairs led to political Zionism, the belief that the solution to the problem of the Jews lay in a sovereign state capable of deploying power.43

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Zionism, Strauss emphasized, was a dialectical reaction to liberalism and its limits. That is, it represented a continuation and even an intensification of the detraditionalizing thrust of liberal assimilation. Like all authentically modern thought, Strauss contended, Zionism rejects religious premises based upon revelation and a traditional Jewish view of history and of the Jews’ place within it, according to which exile (galut) is part of a divine plan. For Strauss, the Zionist view of history ought to be uncompromisingly naturalistic, replacing a religious, teleological view of history with worldly, causal analysis. From this point of view, the replacement of traditional, revealed religion by the ideology of missionism— the notion that it was the task of the Jews to embody some perfect form of morality—was as unworldly, and as dangerous, as traditional Orthodoxy.44 Zionism, then, was grounded in the “naturalization of European thought”: it forced the Jews to view their situation in natural categories, including the struggle among groups, rather than through categories stemming either from revealed religion or moral sentimentalism.45 It forced the Jews to become political. And politics was about power.46 In an extended analysis of the Zionism of Max Nordau, occasioned by Nordau’s death in 1923 and the publication of his Zionistische Schriften, Strauss distinguished what he saw as the hard kernel of realistic causal analysis in Nordau’s Zionism from the elements of moralistic illusion in his work. In Nordau, Strauss wrote, one finds a combination dominant in contemporary Zionism of “a naïve, enlightened faith in the ideals of 1789, together with a more realistic skepticism regarding the actual relevance of these ideals for the Judenfrage.”47 Strauss contrasted what he saw as the residual sentimentality of Nordau’s writing with Herzl’s more realistic practice. Playing a weak political hand, Herzl made use of secret diplomacy and strategic deception. While Nordau valued and sentimentalized Jewish powerlessness, Strauss wrote, Herzl’s politics displayed “a thoroughly conservative, state-preserving propensity” (eine durchaus “staaterhaltende,” konservative Tendenz).48 Strauss’s critique of the Jewish propensity to moralize rather than analyze was similarly evident in his evaluation of Simon Dubnov’s history of the Jews, which had been recently published. Although Dubnov claimed to be writing “sociological” history, bringing economic, political, and cultural factors to bear, Strauss deemed it insufficiently scientific. In Dubnov’s work anti-Semitism is moralistically condemned, rather than explained by reference to the rational, economic motivations arising from economic competition. Were Dubnov to seriously consider the motive of economic competition, Strauss writes, he would see why the spread of democracy and of civilization (capitalist development) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland did not lead to a diminution of anti-Jewish animus. Dubnov’s problem, according to Strauss, was that he could not imagine any motive for anti-Semitism other than hate based on the lowest and most irrational instincts. In this sense, Pinsker’s analysis of anti-Semitism is far superior, Strauss maintained.49 Dubnov’s moralism is heightened by the remnants of traditional Jewish theological self-understandings that mar his work. He offers forced interpretations

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according to which Gentile actions that are good for the Jews are characterized as “justice” whereas actions against the Jews are characterized as “force.” For Jews, Strauss explains, “suffering”—that is, being the objects of violence— has been an essential mode of being (Lebensform). This involves not just the passive experience of being the victims of violence but also an inner acceptance, an almost willing attitude toward suffering. In this traditional worldview the “nations of the world” are seen as nothing but correlates of this suffering, that is, as cruel torturers of the Jews, an approach that makes sense when suffering is conceived as part of divine providence. From a realistic, scientific point of view, however, it is absurd.50 Zionism, according to Strauss, seeks to dissociate from this self-understanding.

Rethinking the Jewish Tradition with Nietzsche and Wellhausen Precisely because it broke so radically with traditional Jewish modes of self-understanding, Strauss asserted, Zionism demanded a great deal of reflection; for it was “the product of a Jewish spirit that has become problematic to itself” (das Produkt des sich selbst problematisierenden jüdischen Geistes). “If Justice is the ability under some circumstances to see oneself as others see us, so it is an act of national justice for Zionists to concern themselves with the ways in which the Jewish essence is perceived in Gentile minds. . . .”51 To acquire a certain reflective distance, Strauss suggested that it was useful for Jews to examine how they were seen by others, including even the more intelligent anti-Semites, such as Paul de Lagarde, to whom Strauss devoted an early essay. Most of that essay discusses Lagarde’s views on Christianity and on German identity. The most relevant observations, however, regarded an issue on which Lagarde concurred with several contemporaries whom Strauss cites, namely, Theodor Mommsen, the distinguished historian of ancient Rome; Julius Wellhausen, the critical scholar of the Bible; and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Strauss quotes directly. These thinkers all considered postexilic Judaism (from the time of Ezra) as stamped by a nonpolitical and even anti-political propensity. A worldview formulated by priests and rabbis portrayed politics as the disdained realm of the Gentiles. Leaving the state’s characteristic functions of protection and defense to others, Jews came to treat the states on which their actual existence depended as if they were unnecessary.52 In this context, Strauss quotes from Nietzsche’s analysis in The Will to Power, according to which antipathy toward the Jews had not existed in the time of the Israelite kingdom, when the Jews possessed a functioning political entity, but rather was a function of postexilic Judaism’s disdain for the worldly virtues by which states are maintained: “The ‘fanatical aversion’ toward the Jews was due to the artificial nature of their existence, its homunculus-like nature. The peoples of the world were bound to perceive it as outrageous that the ‘impudent people,’ who were relieved of all real tasks by the alien state, ‘nevertheless acted as if they had no need of

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it’ (Nietzsche).”53 The fuller quotation from The Will to Power, paragraph 120, is apposite here. It reads (using Nietzsche’s punctuation): The Jewish instinct of “chosenness”: they claim all the virtues for themselves without further ado, and count the rest of the world their opposites; a profound sign of vulgarity of soul; the complete lack of real aims, of real tasks, for which one needs virtues other than moralistic condemnation [Muckerei]—the state took this work from their shoulders, but this shameless people acted as if they had no need of the state.54

Strauss accepts these thinkers’ notion that traditional postexilic Judaism is based upon an element of Entwirklichkeit, of removal from the worldly realities of politics and even disdain toward them. Hence, far from rejecting modern, critical biblical scholarship, Strauss repeatedly points to its utility for understanding Jewish history,55 above all in his essay of 1925 on biblical history and biblical scholarship.56 In an important recent essay, Daniel Weidner has demonstrated the overlooked influence of Julius Wellhausen on German-Jewish thinkers seeking a Jewish “counterhistory.”57 That is much in evidence in the case of Leo Strauss. In the final paragraph of his essay on biblical scholarship, Strauss puts forth a view, essentially derived from Wellhausen, that much of the Bible represents a retrojection onto earlier periods of biblical history of an “unpolitical” worldview that originated in later periods, when the Jews were no longer politically sovereign.58 That nonpolitical perception reflects a theocratic conception of politics developed by the priestly class and projected back to Sinai. This unworldly view of politics colors the description of the political events recounted in the Bible itself, in which the political fate of the Jews was attributed to their righteousness or iniquity. Thus the creation of a kingship, which flowed from basic political needs and not from a hysterical, intoxicated desire to be “like all the nations,” was portrayed in the Bible as a “decline.” Strauss, like Wellhausen, saw this as evidence of an unworldly, “prophetic” conception of history maintained by a people no longer accustomed to political responsibility.59 Strauss reached practical conclusions from Wellhausen’s outlook on biblical history: it called into question the veracity of the prophetic, apolitical characterizations of events recounted in the Bible and hence the utility of the biblical tradition as a guide to political action. Strauss’s understanding of the Bible was informed not only by Wellhausen but also by Nietzsche, both of whom he read through the lens of his political Zionism.60 “The tradition has been shaken to its very roots by Nietzsche,” Strauss told a gathering of Zionist students in 1930. “And so has the Bible. We no longer take it as a given that the prophets were right: we ask ourselves in all seriousness whether, perhaps, it was the kings who were right.”61

Strauss’s Critique of Orthodoxy One of the recurrent themes of Strauss’s lectures and essays of the 1920s—the danger posed by religious Orthodoxy to a sober, political Zionism—derives

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from this understanding. Strauss recognized that some Zionists were tempted to embrace Orthodoxy, not because they found its theological premises plausible, but because they valued its purported effects. From this perspective he writes, “They swallow dogmas whole and unchewed, like pills.”62 (The quotation comes from Hobbes’s Leviathan, to which Strauss would devote himself for much of the next decade.63) But, Strauss warned, one should not be drawn to religious belief out of nationalist conviction. “No one can believe in God for the sake of his nation, and no one can obey halakhah from nationalist motives.”64 For Strauss, this temptation was a siren’s song. In a series of essays published in 1924 and 1925, and in a speech he gave to an assembly of Zionist students, Strauss provided an account of the tensions between Zionism and Orthodoxy that was startling in its boldness.65 Proclaiming, “Today, the enemy is on the right!” he suggested that the coalition among German Jews between Zionism and Orthodoxy ought to be replaced by a coalition of Zionists and liberals, as both liberalism and Zionism were based on discontinuity from the religious tradition and an embrace of naturalistic understandings.66 In a biting critique of neo-Orthodoxy entitled “The Church Militant” (“Ecclesia militans”), Strauss stressed that Zionism must be based on the fact that the fundamental premises of Orthodoxy had been rendered dubious by the European critique of religion. Though it might have been fashionable to dismiss the Aufklärung (the Enlightenment), Strauss insisted on the validity of the critique of revelation developed in the modern critique of religion (Religionskritik).67 Strauss reiterated all of these points in a review of Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, published in 1928 in the Zionist journal Der jüdische Student.68 It is no coincidence that Strauss devoted the bulk of his more scholarly work in the years from 1924 to 1938 to the two pioneers of modern biblical criticism and of the critique of religion, Spinoza and Hobbes. For it was his curiosity about the origins of modern political thought—which Strauss rightly saw as inextricably connected to the critique of revealed religion and a more skeptical approach to the Bible—that dictated Strauss’s philosophical explorations from the early 1920s through the mid-1930s. After the rise of National Socialism, his emigration from Germany, and eventual establishment in America, Strauss’s quest for sobriety would take new turns, leading him to a more encompassing critique of modern political thought, a recovery of the medieval appreciation of the political uses of religion (in Philosophie und Gesetz),69 and back to Plato (or at least to his Plato). His views on the political utility of religion might have been plausible in postwar America, where religion could be seen as buttressing political and social institutions, but they had little purchase in the Israeli context, in which (a variety of ) Orthodox interpretations of the meaning of the new state competed with (a variety of ) secular Zionist understandings. Perhaps the “young” rather than the “mature” Strauss’s teachings might be most apposite in the present. The need to recover the virtues of sobriety has not diminished. In the contemporary Israeli context the warnings of the young Strauss about the pitfalls of reliance upon Orthodoxy, international institutions,

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or moral missionizing might be of ongoing relevance. So, too, in the Diaspora, where for many Jews, moralistic critique remains the essence of residual Jewish identity.70 If so, the rediscovery of the “young Strauss” could be of more than mere historical value.

Notes For comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Malachi Hacohen, John McCormick, Thomas Meyer, Samuel Moyn, Sharon Muller, Thomas Rid, and Susan Meld Shell. Some of the ideas in this chapter appear also in my article “Leo Strauss: The Political Philosopher as a Young Zionist,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 17, no. 1 (Fall, 2010): 88–115. 1. Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 93. Works frequently cited below are Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Heinrich and Wiebke Meier (Stuttgart), of which three volumes have been published to date, some in several editions. I cite them as follows: GS 1—Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften 1: Die Religionskritik Spinozas und zugehörige Schriften, 3rd, expanded edition (2008); GS 2—Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften 2: Philosophie und Gesetz— Frühe Schriften (1997); GS 3—Leo Strauss Gesammelte Schriften 3: Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften—Briefe (2001).





Also cited frequently is the valuable collection of Strauss’s writings edited by Kenneth Hart Green, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, Leo Strauss (Albany, 1997), cited as JPCM. I have also profited from Leo Strauss: The Early Writings (1921–1932), translated and edited by Michael Zank (Albany, 2002), although as will be clear, I have not always agreed with Zank’s interpretation. Translations from Strauss’s writings in the text are my own. 2. Leon Pinsker, “Autoemancipation!” Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Jude. Mit einer Vorbermerkung von Achad Haam (Berlin, 1917), 28–29. This was probably the edition that the young Strauss encountered. 3. See, for example, his “Preface to the English Translation,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E.M. Sinclair (1965; reprint, Chicago, 1997); and “Why We Remain Jews” in JPCM, 141, 142, 340. 4. An important exception is Kenneth Hart Green’s “Introduction” to JPCM, 28–36. 5. “Wir müssen uns zu der Einsicht bekehren, daß, ehe die große Humanitätsidee alle Völker der Erde vereinigen wird, noch eine Reihe von Jahrtausenden vergehen kann, und daß bis dahin ein Volk, welches überall und nirgends zu Hause ist, auch überall als fremder Körper von den Volksorganismen empfunden werden wird. Es ist die Zeit gekommen für eine nüchterne und leidenschaftslose Erkenntnis unserer wahren Lage” (Leon Pinsker, “Autoemancipation!”, 23). 6. Jörg Hackenschmidt, Von Kurt Blumenfeld zu Norbert Elias: Die Erfindung einer jüdischen Nation (Hamburg, 1997), 222, 319, n.19. 7. Thanks to the Memory Project, all three journals, along with many other periodicals of German Jewry, are now available online at http://www.compactmemory.de. 8. In early 1924 Strauss was active in the newly constituted presidium of the Kartell jüdischer Verbindungen, and in July 1925 he was given responsibility for writing a new brochure for the KjV (now lost). See Heinrich Meier, “Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage,” in GS 1: xvi.

A Zionist Critique of Jewish Politics  |  29

9. According to a letter from Strauss to Nahum Glatzer, dated Purim eve 1925 and written in Hebrew, Strauss had been teaching Hebrew in Kassel and reading Rashi and Abravanel, cited in Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Stephen B. Smith (Cambridge, 2009), 15. 10. “Das Camp in Forchtenberg (29 Juli bis 1 August 1924)” in Der Jüdische Student. Zeitschrift des Kartells Jüdischer Verbindungen, vol. 21, Heft 8–9 (October–November 1924): 196–200; “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (previously unpublished lecture, delivered on 21 December 1930, at the Bundeslager der Kadimah in Brieselang bei Berlin), GS 2: 377–91. 11. See Klein to Strauss, 19/20 June 1934, and Strauss to Klein, 23 June 1934 in GS 3: 511–18. 12. Scholem to Strauss, 19 Oct. 1933, GS 3: 703; Scholem to Strauss, 19 June 1934, GS 3: 712. For additional information on this episode, see Thomas Meyer, Zwischen Philosophie und Gesetz: Jüdische Philosophie und Theologie von 1933 bis 1938 (Leiden, 2009), 57–60. 13. Scholem to Strauss, 20 Jan. 1950, GS 3: 718; Strauss to Scholem, 24 Feb. 1950, GS 3: 719. 14. Smith, “Leo Strauss,” 34–35. 15. “Letter to the Editor: The State of Israel,” reprinted in JCPM, 413–14. 16. Strauss, “Preface to the English Translation,” Spinoza’s Critique of Reason,” 5; reprinted in JCPM, 142. 17. “Das Camp in Forchtenberg,” 196–200. 18. Strauss to Scholem, 7 August 1965, in GS 3: 753. 19. “Why We Remain Jews,” in JPCM, 312–13. 20. Jehuda Reinharz, “The Zionist Response to Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, NH, 1985), 268. 21. “Das Schicksalsstunde des deutschen Judentums,” Jüdische Rundschau 28, no. 96 (9 November 1923): 557; reprinted in Jehuda Reinharz, Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus 1882– 1933 (Tübingen, 1981), 340–41. My translation. 22. See Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, second edition (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 32. 23. See Hackenschmidt, Von Kurt Blumenfeld zu Norbert Elias, 266. 24. Strauss to Scholem, 7 August 1965, in GS 3: 753. 25. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 102–12; on Jewish Nietzscheanism, see also Werner Stegmaier and Daniel Krochmalnik eds., Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus (Berlin, 1997). 26. Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts,” in JPCM, 460. Strauss to Karl Löwith, 23 June 1935, in GS 3: 648. 27. For an exploration of some of Strauss’s debts to Nietzsche, but one that ignores the political Zionist concerns that informed Strauss’s early appropriation of Nietzsche, see Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago, 1996). 28. “Preface to the English Translation,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion; “Why We Remain Jews”; “A Giving of Accounts,” all in JPCM; letter to Klein, 23 June 1934, in GS 3: 515–18. 29. “Autoemancipation!” (see note 4 above). 30. Leon Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation,” in Leon Pinsker, Roads to Freedom: Writings and Addresses, ed. B. Netanyahu (New York, 1944; rep. Westport, Conn., 1975), 82–84. 31. Ibid., 89. 32. Ibid., 91. 33. Ibid., 91 (translation altered). 34. “Slavery in Freedom,” in Leon Simon, ed., Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am (Philadelphia, 1912; reprinted New York, 1962), 184–86; 193–94. 35. Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 6–44. See also Hagit Lavsky, Before the Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism (Detroit and Jerusalem, 1996). 36. “Antwort auf das ‘Prinzipelle Wort’ der Frankfurter,” Jüdische Rundschau (1923) and GS 2: 299– 306; and “Das Camp in Forchtenberg,” 196–200. The latter is a report on a speech given by Strauss, the contents of which closely comport with Strauss’s publication, “Zionismus und Orthodoxie,” Jüdische Rundschau 29, no. 50 (24 June 1924): 362 (reprinted in GS 1: 451–8).

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37. “Antwort auf das ‘Prinzipelle Wort’ der Frankfurter,” GS 2: 299–306. 38. “Der Zionismus bei Nordau,” Der Jude 7, no. 10–11 (October–November 1923): 567–60, in GS 2: 315–21; cited on 319. 39. “Die Zukunft einer Illusion,” Der Jüdische Student 25, no. 4 (August 1928): 16–22, in GS 1: 431–39. 40. “Quellen des Zionismus,” Jüdische Rundschau 29, no. 77–78 (26 September 1924): 558 and no. 79 (3 October 1924): 566; reprinted in GS 1: 458–65, citation on 462. The “Quellen des Zionismus” is a slight reworking of “Der Zionismus bei Nordau” but more explicit in its political judgments. 41. “Der Zionismus bei Nordau,” 318–19. 42. Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2007; French original 2003), 15. 43. “Quellen des Zionismus,” 458–65. 44. “Der Zionismus bei Nordau,” 319–21. 45. “Quellen des Zionismus,” 465. 46. “Ecclesia militans,” Jüdische Rundschau 30, no. 36 (8 May 1925): 334, reprinted in GS 2: 351–6, citation on 355. 47. “Der Zionismus bei Nordau,” 319. 48. Ibid., 316. 49. “Soziologische Geschichtsschreibung?” in GS 2: 334–37. 50. Ibid., 336–37. 51. “Paul de Lagarde,” Der Jude 8, no. 1 (January 1924): 8–15, in GS 2: 323–31. 52. “Paul de Lagarde,” in GS 2: 327. 53. “Paul de Lagarde,” in GS 2: 327. “Die ‘fanatische Abneigung’ gegen das Judentum gilt dessen Künstlichkeit, der Homunkulität seines Daseins. Als empörend mußten es die Völker der Welt empfinden, wenn ‘das unverschämte Volk’, dem der fremde Staat alle wirklichen Aufgaben abnahm, ‘trotzdem tat, als ob sie ihn nicht nötig hätten’ (Nietzsche).” 54. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Wille zur Macht, Nietzsche’s Werke. Zweite Abtheilung. Band 15 (Leipzig, 1901): 122. The original reads: “der jüdische ‘Auserwählten’-Instinkt: sie nehmen alle Tugenden ohne Weiteres für sich in Anspruch und rechnen den Rest der Welt als ihren Gegensatz; tiefes Zeichen der Gemeinheit der Seele; der vollkommene Mangel an wirklichen Zielen, an wirklichen Aufgaben, zu denen man andere Tugenden als die der Muckerei braucht, der Staat nahm ihnen diese Arbeit ab: das unverschämte Volk that trotzdem, als ob sie ihn nicht nöthig hätten.” 55. See, too, Strauss, “Das Heilige,” Der Jude 7, no. 4 (April, 1923): 240–42; reprinted in GS 2: 307–10, cited on 308, where Strauss affirms the value for Jews of Protestant scholarship on the Old Testament: “die uns den realen Zusammenhang, dem die Prophetie entstammt, aufgehellt hat.” 56. “Biblische Geschichte und Wissenschaft” (1925), Jüdische Rundschau 30, no. 88 (10 November 1925): 644–45, reprinted in GS 2: 357–61. 57. Daniel Weidner, “‘Geschichte gegen den Strich bürsten.’ Julius Wellhausen und die jüdische ‘Gegengeschichte,’” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 54, no. 1 (2002): 32–61. For the centrality of Wellhausen to some of Strauss’s Zionist contemporaries, see Stefan Cohn-Vossen, “Führeransprache,” in Blau-Weis Blätter, Neue Folge, heft 8 (April, 1924): 97. 58. On Wellhausen and his context, see Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), 178–86. 59. “Biblische Geschichte und Wissenschaft,” 361. 60. See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, “Der Anti-Christ,” in Nietzsche, Werke, First part, vol 8 (Leipzig, 1895), section 26. 61. Strauss, “Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart” (unpublished Referat, halten am 21 December 1930 im Bundeslager der Kadimah in Brieselang bei Berlin), GS 2: 377–391, citation on 389. 62. “Biblische Geschichte und Wissenschaft,” 361. 63. In his 1964 foreword to Hobbes politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, Strauss noted that his interest in Hobbes went back to 1922 and increased with his reading of Carl Schmitt’s 1927 essay “Der

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Begriff des Politischen” (GS 3: 7). Hobbes figures in the first chapter of Strauss’s Spinoza book, then in his books of the 1930s on Hobbes’s critique of religion, and in another on Hobbes’s political science. 64. “Die Zukunft einer Illusion,” in GS 1: 431–39. The original German reads: “Niemand kann um seines Volkes willen an Gott glauben; niemand kann aus nationalen Gründen das Gesetz erfüllen” (433). 65. “Zionismus und Orthodoxie,” Jüdische Rundschau 29, no. 50 (24 June, 1924): 362, 363; GS 1: 451–58. 66. “Bemerkung zu den Weinbergschen Kritik,” Der Jüdische Student 22 (1925): 15–18; in GS 1: 427–30. 67. “Ecclesia militans” Jüdische Rundschau 30, no. 36 (8 May 1925): 334, reprinted in GS 2: 351–6; citation on 356. 68. “Die Zukunft einer Illusion,” in GS 1: 431–39. 69. Philosophie und Gesetz, GS 2: 109–13. 70. For a recent example, see the much-heralded essay by Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, 10 June 2010.

Chapter 2

Leo Strauss Reading Karl Marx during the Cold War Adi Armon

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I happen to be opposed to Communism in every way but precisely for this reason I cannot take the view that a businessman can take: “If it comes after my lifetime, I don’t care.” I care very much whether it comes after my lifetime and therefore the real issue is whether it is altogether feasible with—I mean, that they may win militarily I regard as absolutely feasible but whether it can be at the same time the true liberation of man; that alone is, of course, the question. —Leo Strauss, “The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx”

Introduction In 1962, Leo Strauss gave his characterization of both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, defining the latter as “the step-grandfather of fascism” and the former as “the father of communism”: Karl Marx, the father of communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the step-grandfather of fascism, were liberally educated on a level to which we cannot even hope to aspire. But perhaps one can say that their grandiose failures make it easier for us who have experienced those failures to understand again the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism. Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.1

One should not underestimate these observations, which in many ways summarize Strauss’s views about the United States. With regard to Nietzsche, Strauss was very careful. Unlike György Lukács, who defined Nietzsche as “the father

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of fascism,” 2 Strauss exonerated Nietzsche by virtue of reasonable doubt. In his scheme, not only is Nietzsche the grandfather, not the father, of fascism, but he is also a step-grandfather, lacking any blood relationship. It is quite a different story, however, with regard to Marx, whom Strauss links directly and naturally to communism: For him, Marx was the “biological” father of communism—the sole enemy of the United States after World War II. “The father of communism,” however, was never granted the “privilege” of being an essential part of Strauss’s written oeuvre concerning the crisis of the West. In his philosophical critique, Strauss describes three waves of modernity, the first of which is associated with the thought of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke and which made possible the waves of modernity that followed.3 Rousseau initiated the first break (i.e., the second wave) in the modern history of ideas and Nietzsche and Heidegger the next (and last) one. Yet these thinkers, Strauss claimed, failed to provide an alternative to the founding principles of modernity. Each tried to avert the afflictions of modernity and return to his version of classical Greek principles. But instead of improving the human condition, their responses only gave further prominence to the illnesses of modernity and led to the continued degeneration of philosophy. Strauss thought that these negative trends were manifested in the century’s ills: instrumental positivism, radical historicism, violent nihilism, and boundless relativism. Accordingly, communism and Nazism were political ideologies created as a result of the distortions of modernity. Marx’s natural place, both chronologically and conceptually, ought to be in the second wave of modernity, following a philosophical line that began with Rousseau and continued with German idealists such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel. In his famous lecture “What Is Political Philosophy” (1954), Strauss states: “The delusions of communism are already the delusions of Hegel and even Kant. The difficulties to which German idealism was exposed gave rise to the third wave of modernity—the wave that bears us today. This last epoch was inaugurated by Nietzsche.”4 In other words, Strauss proceeded from the second to the third wave without mentioning the name of the “father of communism”: he had supposedly completed the second wave of modernity, but, peculiarly, Marx is absent. This lacuna is even more surprising in light of the historical context of teaching political thought in the United States during the Cold War.5 In the second half of the twentieth century, after the triumph over Fascism in World War II, communism (a direct product of Marxist thought) was perceived as the major enemy of Western liberal democracy and freedom.6 In Strauss’s case, however, the situation was more complicated. In contrast to many intellectuals of his age, Strauss tried to avoid commenting on day-to-day politics and current events, thus creating the impression that Marx and the Cold War played a minor role in his critique of modernity.7 The purpose of this chapter is to show that this is a false impression. Marx’s work, including his political philosophy, played an important role in Straussian thought, and the Cold War was a central aspect of Strauss’s political teaching in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States. In order to demonstrate this, I shall rely primarily on unpublished

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seminar transcripts, including one on “The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx,” which was delivered by Strauss and his disciple, Joseph Cropsey, at the University of Chicago in 1960.8 The seminar reveals Strauss’s interest in Marx and demonstrates the way he read and understood him. Viewing him as a central figure in the crisis of modernity, Strauss situated Marx on the final crest of the second wave of modernity, as one of the most important figures in the attempt to destroy philosophy. The seminar provides a rare peek not only into “Strauss’s Marx” but also into Strauss the teacher. Furthermore, by affording unmediated access to the Straussian teaching, it partially lifts the veil on the secretive element that characterized his teaching and the myth that was constructed around him—whether in the form of harsh criticism or boundless admiration. It penetrates a fog of esoteric writing and secrecy, biased ideological interpretations of Strauss’s thought, and confusion regarding Strauss’s thought and intentions, all of which flourished after his death.9

Just Before America Strauss’s convictions about Marx and Marxism were formed before he emigrated from Europe to the United States at the end of the 1930s. As far back as the Weimar Republic, Strauss considered Marxism and socialism a disaster, but the perspective and the historical context were different. At that time, Strauss was strongly influenced by ideas that were identified with the European right. Attracted to the writing of critics of liberalism, his mentors were Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.10 Strauss admired Nietzsche, admitting that from the age of twenty-two through to his thirties he believed every word written by the German thinker.11 Marx represented the antithesis of Nietzsche; Marxism and liberalism on one side opposed existentialism on the other. Strauss located liberal democracy and Marxism on the left and himself on the right, as he wrote to his friend Karl Löwith in 1933: “Ich glaube allerdings nicht, dass die Kampffronten in [der] Gegenwart so verworren sind, wie Jaspers—und auch Sie?—annehmen. Ich sehe vor mir den Kampfes auf beiden Seiten: die progressivistische und die marxistische links, und die Nietzsche, Kierkegaards, Dostojewskis rechts” (I don’t believe the front lines are as blurry as Jaspers assumes—and as perhaps you do, too. I see it as a battle between two camps: the Left of the progressives and Marxists and the Right of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky.)12 The sharp political distinction between right and left enables us clearly to understand his early writings in the Weimar Republic, especially his comments on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932). Strauss identified with the Schmittian attempt to refine the political and fight against the liberal aspiration toward neutrality and depoliticization. Schmitt turned to the thought of Thomas Hobbes in his attempt to resolve political dilemmas. Strauss, however, saw in Hobbes “the most anti-political thinker,” whose ideas eventually led to the development of the ideals of universality, equality, depoliticization, and breaking with the philosophical tradition.13

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According to Strauss, Hobbes developed humanistic philosophy out of the fear of violent death. It focused on the individual and on achieving peace by conquering nature. Hobbes, a nonliberal thinker, became the father of liberalism, the bourgeoisie, and the socialist movement. Strauss stressed that Hobbes established and expounded the modern ideal of civilization—both the bourgeois-capitalist and the socialist models—with an unrivaled depth, clarity, and sincerity.14 Not satisfied with merely pointing to the connection between Hobbes and liberalism, Strauss claimed that the ramifications of Hobbesian thought were identical to the Marxist ideal itself. According to Strauss, the humanistic Hobbesian ideal already contained hidden Marxist aspirations and desires, elevating man at the expense of nature. In fact, according to Strauss, part of the liberal discourse is nothing but concealed Marxist discourse: “Es handelt sich nicht darum, was dem Hobbesschen Ideal Geschichtliche Wirksamkeit verliehen hat; sondern was dieses Ideal beinhaltet und ob es das wahre Ideal ist: Ausserdem (gegen Marxismus): das Hobbessche Ideal ist das Ideal des Marxismus. . . .” (It is not a matter of what gave historical effectiveness to the Hobbesian ideal but of what this ideal consists of and whether it is the true ideal. Moreover (as opposed to Marxism): the Hobbesian ideal is the ideal of Marxism. . . . )15

Marx’s Place in Strauss’s Critique of Modernity Only in the United States, years after his departure from Germany, did Strauss begin teaching young students about Karl Marx’s political philosophy. In the particular seminar discussed in this chapter, Strauss started with an introduction to the foundations of modern philosophy and then turned to explicating Marx’s writings, beginning with The Communist Manifesto (1848) and ending with Das Kapital (1867). Strauss focused, however, on Marx’s early writings, especially German Ideology (1846). During the Cold War, Strauss undertook more profound readings of those works, and, as to be expected, his reading of Marx was mostly political16 and attempted to show that the Marxist assumptions about man and his intentions precede any economic discussion. According to Strauss, Marx’s political philosophy was completely modern and was a pure product of thinkers of the second wave of modernity: It embraces equality, rejects natural rights, and considers man as the highest entity. Nature is no more than an instrument in the hands of human creators. Strauss’s Marx is depicted as the antithesis to Straussian thought. As he did in his published works, in the introduction to modern thought in his seminar presentation, Strauss describes the first wave of modernity, focusing on Hobbes and Locke, and then proceeds to discuss thinkers of the second wave, such as Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. In this case, however, his goal was to show that Marx was a natural continuation of his predecessors and that the Marxist ideal was essentially modern, detached from classical philosophy—the last phase of the second wave of modernity: “And the great trumpeter of this moral indignation about the first wave was Rousseau. And out of Rousseau grew, then, German

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Idealism, culminating in Hegel, and, last but not least, Marx. From this point of view, I think Marx belongs absolutely to that second wave.”17 Strauss described Rousseau as the first philosopher who rejected man’s inborn essence. In contrast to Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau strictly opposed the existence of inequality in the transition from a natural, presocial human condition of equality to civil society. According to Rousseau, inequality was caused by historical and social circumstances, and it was therefore not natural or just. Inequality was a product of corruption created by man and civilization. But Rousseau also stressed that man has the power to change things for the better. Hobbes’s civil society is characterized by fundamental inequality between the ruler and the ruled. In contrast, Rousseau advocated an egalitarian society in which there is an identity between the sovereign and the citizen. According to Strauss, Rousseau paved the way to the Marxist understanding of the problem of inequality, and he “takes the great step toward the famous liberation from teleology that is characteristic of modern times.”18 In Strauss’s view, Rousseau was the first thinker who criticized the apostles of modernity, but the political philosophers who followed him were mainly German. Marx’s views, for example, cannot be separated from the rest of German thought; nevertheless, Marx belonged to a branch that criticized and tried to change this thought. German idealism, led by Hegel, believed that the state would bring an end to man’s miseries. Marx, however, focused on society, not the state.19 Kant served as a mediator in the transition from Rousseau to Hegel and Marx. According to Strauss, Kant was the first thinker who envisioned the possibility of man’s complete liberation from his dependency on nature. Strauss cites Kant’s comment in his Critique of Judgment that “the understanding prescribes to nature its laws,”20 emphasizing that Kant is a philosopher of radical freedom.21 In contrast to Strauss’s concepts, Kantian ethics exist only within the limits of reason, totally liberated from the chains of nature or God. Strauss argued that whereas Rousseau desired that a few individuals return to the state of nature in order to overcome society’s injustice, Kant believed in a necessary transition from an unjust society to a just society. Kant’s philosophy of history promoted justice through contradictions: harmony created out of disharmony and necessity created by free choice.22 Following this line of thought, society is advanced not by aspirations for moral perfection but rather via competition, selfishness, and pride. Similarly, it is not the caring for the common good but the narrow calculations of costs and benefits that lead to the internalization of the importance of preventing war and achieving peace.23 The just society progresses not by means of moral virtues, but through law and through political and economic institutions whose role is to promote competition and prevent violence. Strauss describes the “mechanical necessity” of Kant’s “eternal peace” as “a victory of the spirit of commerce and selfish gain uniting the nations over the spirit of positive religion which is divisive.”24 Yet the way to Marx must still pass through Hegel. Strauss ends the discussion in the seminar on the second wave of modernity and his long introduction

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to Marx’s political philosophy with remarks on Hegel,25 who completely rejected Kant’s aspirations for eternal peace. According to Strauss, Hegel showed common sense in objecting to Kant’s vision and a sober perspective in contending that a world without the state would lead to anarchy. Hegel believed that a world that aspires to eternal peace will find itself immersed in bloody wars in the name of those pure aspirations.26 According to Strauss, Hegel was not a fascist, because he believed in constitutionalism and judicial independence, which were designed to protect human rights.27 Strauss defines the relationship between Kant and Hegel according to the following formula: whereas Kant tried to refute the possibility of metaphysics, Hegel saw in this very effort proof of the existence of metaphysics.28 Kant distinguished between the phenomenon and the thing in itself. Human reason has access only to the phenomena, to the objects of experience, and not to the things in themselves. Thus there is a gap between the truth and the world as perceived by man. In contrast, Hegel saw the human spirit as an inseparable part of truth, distinguished from phenomena. Man has access to the “thing-in-itself ” by correctly relating to and analyzing human history. History becomes the key to understanding the whole, the human spirit.29 The Hegelian philosophy of history is a process of progress and the evolution of reason. The lack of harmony that led to making the right choice in Kant’s historiosophy is a necessary phase in the development of the Absolute Spirit in the Hegelian dialectic. Truth exists de jure from the beginning, but it takes shape in the historical process. History has an expiration date, which arrives with the establishment of a rational and just society. According to Strauss, Marx followed his predecessors and borrowed various elements from their thought. Like Rousseau, he rejected teleology in nature and opposed any inequality in society, while, like Kant, he rejected any external authority to man and praised human creativity. In Strauss’s view, Marx radicalized the modern position that celebrates freedom and applied it to economics and human productivity. Economics in Marx’s world not only enables the conditions for self-legislation but also consolidates virtue and productivity, “or if we want to have a still more beautiful word—creativity.”30 Freedom and economics are bound together in human creativity. Concepts such as nature, politics, and classical moral philosophy are abandoned. Like Hegel, Marx relied on history as the arena in which the human condition can change and as the only real factor making it possible to establish a perfect society.

The Marxist Ideal as the Manifestation of “the Last Man” In Strauss’s explication, Marx and his colleagues in the second wave of modernity criticized their predecessors for lowering philosophical standards by overestimating self-preservation and utilitarianism and neglecting the common good. Assessing that the first wave of modernity led to moral corruption, they tried, therefore,

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to uphold elevated moral dictates—“to be more moral than the Platonic-Aristotelian structure”—while preserving comfort and affluence.31 The second wave of modernity attempted to restore elements of classical philosophy and bring the question of “what ought to be” back into the main philosophical discourse. This attempt failed, contended Strauss, because it had already been corrupted by modern ideas that attributed greater importance to self-preservation over natural right and to history over nature. Whereas the classical world emphasized contemplation and virtues, the modern world that influenced Marx revered action, material production, and freedom. Economics became the essence of everything, and Marx’s political philosophy is nothing but “economics that becomes metaphysics.”32 By elevating economics while trying to preserve both affluence and morality, Marx tried to “have his cake and eat it too”—to extract the highest human potential out of the search for self-preservation, to derive moral perfection from comfort, and to attain the highest levels of consciousness from the material world, the realm that satisfies man’s physical needs.33 According to Strauss, Marx aspired to create an oxymoronic “universal aristocracy.”34 The thinker who most influenced Strauss regarding his understanding of Hegel and Marx was undoubtedly his friend Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Strauss advised his students to read the “Half Marxist–Half Hegelian” work Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), written by his Russian-French friend, and introduced it as “the most valuable book on Hegel of which I know.”35 In addition, Strauss used to send his students (among them Allan Bloom) to France, so that they could participate in Kojève’s seminars. Strauss read Hegel and Marx through Kojève’s eyes and adopted vast parts of his interpretations. Kojève’s influence on Strauss is particularly significant not only because it illuminates the unique connection and friendship between the supposed conservative Strauss and the supposed Stalinist Kojève but also because the influence occurred relatively late in Strauss’s life, after his exile from Germany and not during his “crystallizing years” in the Weimar Republic.36 The most important concept that Strauss borrowed from Kojève was the idea of “the end of history,” which in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel becomes a key concept, if not the most significant notion in Hegelian philosophy.37 Kojève labeled the capacity for self-awareness as man’s central characteristic. Human history started with man’s attempt to overcome basic natural instincts such as that for self-preservation and his willingness to sacrifice his life for honor and recognition.38 This willingness, created by the desire for recognition, led to the evolution of history as a dialectical struggle between master and slave. A master is one who is willing to risk his life in order to rule and glorify his name, while a slave prefers reluctantly to accept the authority of his master over risking his own life.39 The master, however, will never be satisfied, asserts Kojève, because the recognition he has won is dependent on the slave, who is not perceived as a valuable human being.40 Paradoxically, the master is sentenced to a “tragic” life, whereas the slave is the agent who can achieve self-satisfaction and change his position. The end of history is a concept belonging to the slave, not the master. The master condemns

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the slave to a life of hard work, but work enables the slave to grow stronger and conquer nature through technology. Labor distances the slave from subordination to nature and directs him toward freedom. Absolute freedom can exist, however, only when the slave can choose his work and be a free citizen. According to Kojève, Hegel believed that man can attain absolute truth and freedom by establishing political institutions and that history reaches its end only after the master-slave dialectic ends and the two agencies merge into a citizen of the perfect and rational state.41 Only such a citizen can achieve truth and complete self-awareness. In Strauss’s reading, Hegel posited that society or a nation can still be corrupted at the end of history, but in contrast to Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic view, he maintained that man’s knowledge enables him to overcome inevitable decline and return through reason to the ideal social and civic state. In Hegelian thought, this state of affairs is represented by monarchy, which enables free trade, recognizes human rights, and understands the existence of political inequality.42 Strauss contended that the threat of corruption and degeneration at the end of history is a crucial problem in Hegel’s thought: It is one of the greatest difficulties of Hegel that one does not really know whether Hegel was fully aware of what he clearly implied: that with the fulfillment, with the completion of world history, there is now the beginning of a final decay, a final corruption of mankind. This is a problem that we shall later raise in the form of the “last man,” where people no longer have any tasks, and where all great challenges have been solved, and where we have the perfect society. After all truly important intellectual tasks have been solved, and when the truth is known in the final system, what will happen then? Triviality? There can be no genuine heroism anymore; and whether and to what extent Hegel saw that is, as far as I can see, impossible to decide.43

The idea of the “end of history” harbors the danger of man’s becoming degenerate and shallow, without a higher purpose in life. Strauss uses the Nietzschean concept of the “last man” as the manifestation of man in the state of the “end of history.” Nietzsche regarded the last man as the complete opposite of the Übermensch, who represented the will to power according to Zarathustra.44 In Strauss’s view, Nietzsche’s nightmare—in the form of the last man—is Hegel’s and Marx’s ideal man at the end of history. Strauss links Marx to the “last man” idea in his correspondence with Kojève in 1957, which also illustrates the differences between the two: “The root of the question is, I suppose, the same as it always has been, that you are convinced of the truth of Hegel (Marx) and I am not. You have never given me an answer to my questions: (a) was Nietzsche not right in describing the Hegelian-Marxist end as “the last man”? And (b) what would you put in the place of Hegel’s philosophy of nature? I am under the impression that you read Plato from your Hegelian point of view without sufficiently waiting for what would reveal itself as Plato’s view by simply listening to Plato and strictly adhering to his suggestions.”45

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In his questions to Kojève, Strauss summarized both his deep aversion to the ideal of the last man and his admiration of Nietzsche. According to him, whereas Hegelian thought accepted a nonegalitarian state at the end of history, governed by bureaucracy and a constitutional monarchy, Marxist thought radicalized the concept of the end of history, objected to any compulsion, and praised an egalitarian society without classes. This society did not need a state or a political system.46 Marx’s ideal of freedom, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,”47 is supposed to be established with the proletarian revolution. This ideal does not refer to positive or negative liberty but to universal freedom, in which cultivating one’s skills never comes at the expense of the other. Such freedom derives from prosperity and freedom without scarcity or any social and historical barriers. This concept of freedom accepts equality as a given and rejects Aristotelian natural inequality. It is a concept of freedom that leads to redemption, which is a product of man’s creation and a universal and just society. According to Strauss, Marx’s conception subjugates nature in man’s favor. Man becomes the ultimate conqueror of nature. Strauss, who, of course, rejects this position, defines the domination of nature through Marx’s creative man as an action aimed at ruling the whole and making all nature an instrument for man’s use. In other words, to become God: “Man as the conqueror of nature is a god; he takes the place of God. . . . But in what capacity, may I ask, does man conquer nature? Not as a spectator. There he leaves nature alone. But as worker, as industrialist, as engineer, as an ‘economic being,’ so it is the economic activity of man, the material production of man that establishes the unity of man and non-man, and the humanly superior thought is the highest thought, and the highest thought is material production; economics is metaphysics.”48 Marx rejects Plato’s ideal doctrine or any other attempt to transcend the limits of human reason or creation. He therefore rejects the tension between “Jerusalem” and “Athens,” the two cornerstones of the West according to Strauss. Strauss’s Marx tries to change man completely and to solve all of his problems through societal means, abolishing private property, conquering nature through technology. In his lecture “Why We Remain Jews” (1962), Strauss claimed that the Jews are the proof of the impossibility of redemption.49 He saw the Marxist vision as a dangerous fantasy of a universal, global, and free society that radicalizes modernity and aspires for salvation. Marx’s ideal man is nothing more than the “last man”: the manifestation of human decay, the abolition of the noble and of politics, and the abstraction of man. Marx’s last man represents a denial of the political and goes completely counter to Strauss’s political thought.50

The City and Man: The Straussian Teaching during the Cold War According to Strauss, the Marxist program for redemption formed the basis for “the delusions of communism.” Strauss regarded communism as a dangerous enemy, in which an envisioned radical freedom and equality rapidly turned into

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tyranny. Strauss saw America, despite its many flaws, as the only political entity that could offer an alternative to the father of communism’s vision. In order to survive, however, it had to be strong and self-confident and manifest its power not only by military force in a nuclear arms race but also through a strong philosophical structure. Strauss’s teaching in the United States, therefore, tried to prevent the closing of the American mind. In Strauss’s view, Marx and Engels believed that an egalitarian universal society would arise out of the necessary destruction of Western civilization: I don’t remember the passage in Marx, but in Engels there is a remark in the AntiDühring that the communist world society will be achieved at the risk of the destruction of civilization. Now, this, of course, is very grave. There may be people who say: let civilization perish rather than get this abomination. Then the whole case is wide open. That is where the difficulty arises. Now, the tacit premise of Marx, and I think also of Lenin and of Khrushchev today, is that people are not so foolish as to endanger themselves when destruction is obvious. In the case of Hitler, ruin was not obvious. There was a fair chance from his point of view, and it was touch and go. But now in the age of thermonuclear war, it is impossible to play with that kind of thing. You know, a minimum of common sense suffices to rule that out. It still might happen by accident [Strauss, Cropsey, “Marx,” 72–73].

One should compare this excerpt to Strauss’s earlier lecture, “German Nihilism” (1941), in which he tried to understand the nihilists’ motives for working in favor of the destruction of civilization. He states:51 The prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise, was positively horrifying to quite a few very intelligent and very decent, if very young, Germans. They did not object to that prospect because they were worrying about their own economic and social position; for certainly in that respect they no longer had anything to lose. Nor did they object to it for religious reasons; for, as one of their spokesmen (E[rnst] Jünger) said, they knew that they were the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of godless men. What they hated, was the very prospect of a world in which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would have his little pleasure by day and little pleasure by night, a world in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe, a world without real, unmetaphoric sacrifice, i.e., a world without blood, sweat, and tears. What to the communists appeared to be the fulfillment of the dream of mankind, appeared to those young Germans as the greatest debasement of humanity, as the coming of the last man. They did not really know, and thus they were unable to express in a tolerably clear language, what they desired to put in place of the present world and its allegedly necessary future or sequel: the only thing of which they were absolutely certain was that the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed in order to prevent the otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order; literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the wild west, the Hobbesian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better than

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the communist-anarchist-pacifist future. Their “yes” was inarticulate—they were unable to say more than: No! This “no” proved, however, sufficient as the preface to action, to the action of destruction. This is the phenomenon which occurs to me first whenever I hear the expression German nihilism.

In other words, Fascism (and nihilism) sees the destruction of civilization as a preferred alternative to the Marxist utopia. It proved that the communist ideal always had an alternative, even if it meant committing suicide. Hitler and Fascism represented a position that refused to accept Marxist conditions and preferred war and even suicide over surrender. The Cold War was characterized by the possibility that the world’s nuclear capability could lead to its own self-destruction, to the annihilation of all humanity, a universal holocaust. Strauss refused to accept the possibility of surrender. In his seminar on Marx, he was cautious in his criticism, but his hostility toward communism was later revealed in an unpublished letter that he wrote to his friend Robert Goldwin, who later became a dean at St. John’s University and an advisor to U.S. president Gerald Ford. In his letter, Strauss wrote that communism had to be overcome by all means: A status quo was not possible as communism wanted to destroy the West. If the two options were victory or surrender, Strauss rejected surrender: The major premise of American foreign policy must be: no strengthening of the USSR at the expense of the USA. . . . The opponent continues to argue as follows: if [there is] no genuine peace, then [we face] the danger of thermonuclear war, which confronts us with the alternative of annihilation or surrender. We must face this alternative. There is a profound cleavage of opinion in this country as to which of the two alternatives is preferable. The issue will be settled not in journals by the people who call themselves and are called by others “the intellectuals” but, as is meet in a democracy, ultimately by the majority vote of the people at large. If this issue is brought before the American people, I believe, the large majority will be opposed to surrender. . . . Above all, there is the alternative of a modus vivendi. This is the best alternative for which one can hope in the circumstances. Yet: the possibility of a modus vivendi does not exist now—how can you peacefully live together with, or be a good neighbor of, someone who is determined to bury you? There cannot be a modus vivendi until Russia abandons communism, i.e., ceases to support the premises of communism; for it is utterly uninteresting to noncommunists whether they pay lip-service to communism, providing they have become convinced that the free West is here to stay and they act on this conviction. To bring about this change of mind, the West must be as tough, and if need be, as brutal as the communists are to the West. The West must demonstrate to the communists ad oculus that they must postpone the establishment of the communist world society ad calendas Graecas.52

According to Strauss, the United States was an integral part of modern Western civilization but had a firm classical foundation as well. After defeating Fascism, which was morally bankrupt because of the Nazi’s racism, the United States, the new leader of the West, became the only hope in the ideological battle against the Soviet Union and communism.

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In 1964, Strauss published The City and Man. At first glance, it does not deal with modern political thought. Its main protagonists are classical Greek thinkers— Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides. Marx is mentioned only twice. The seminar on Marx, however, enables us to approach The City and Man from a new perspective, in which the book is first and foremost a political essay. In a reality overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war and the communist enemy, Strauss tried to explain to his readers how classical texts could be helpful in everyday life, even during the 1960s. In the introduction to The City and Man, Strauss referred to the West’s contemporary crisis as the motive for understanding the past. He did not seek to escape reality. His writing was not merely contemplative but an attempt to offer an alternative to current conventions. His introduction to a discussion of the tension between philosophy and politics in ancient Greece was deeply permeated with the present—with the Cold War. Strauss even used examples from the 1950s and 1960s: the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the superpowers’ rivalry for control in Africa in the age of decolonization. According to Strauss, the present proved that the liberal and Marxist attempt to cancel authority and create the perfect society had failed completely and had brought about violence: “It became clearer than it had been for some time that no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and, hence, there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint. For the same reason, it could no longer be denied that communism will remain, as long as it lasts, in fact and not merely in name, the iron rule of a tyrant, which is mitigated or aggravated by his fear of palace revolutions. The only restraint in which the West can put some confidence is the tyrant’s fear of the West’s immense military power.”53 The liberal, Marxist failure created a crisis in the West. According to Strauss, up until Stalin, many liberals saw communism as an ally. However the communists’ methods demonstrated that it was neither a branch of the West nor a continuation of the attempt to realize the Western liberal ideal, but rather a violent tyranny and, therefore, an enemy: The experience of Communism has provided the Western movement with a twofold lesson: a political lesson, a lesson regarding what to expect and what to do in the foreseeable future, and a lesson regarding the principles of politics. For the foreseeable future, there cannot be a universal state, unitary or federative. Apart from the fact that there does not exist now a universal federation of nations but only of those nations which are called peace-loving, the federation that exists masks the fundamental cleavage. If that federation is taken too seriously, as a milestone on man’s onward march toward the perfect and hence universal society, one is bound to take great risks supported by nothing but an inherited and perhaps antiquated hope, and thus to endanger the very progress one endeavors to bring about.54

In order to protect the United States, Strauss urged American democracy to change its direction: to fight communism and simultaneously limit its liberal tendencies. Strauss, as is well known, defined himself as a friend of democracy who

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tried to “construct a ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally conceived.”55 According to him, in the face of the communist threat, the West had to examine its philosophical foundations, renounce accepted liberal thought and ideals, and return to “premodern” Western values, i.e., classic Greek values. Strauss utilized Plato’s notion of justice, the Aristotelian concept of the political, and Thucydides’s descriptions of war as philosophical instruments for instructing the West on how to cope with present dangers. In contrast to mainstream interpretations of the Platonic dialogue such as Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Strauss claimed that Plato’s Republic was an ironic text that aspired to show that a perfect society was impossible. In his view, Plato described a vision of absolute communism that aspired to create a just society. This vision, however, was unrealizable, and any attempt to achieve it destroyed man’s Eros and disconnected him from nature and from natural right. Strauss’s Plato believed that the just city was unattainable: “The just city is then impossible. It is impossible because it is against nature. It is against nature that there should ever be a ‘cessation of evils,’ ‘for it is necessary that there should always be something opposed to the good, and evil necessarily wanders about the mortal nature and the region here’; the just city is against nature because the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against nature.”56 There is a tension between justice and Eros, politics and philosophy. A society that imposes absolute equality has no passion or wonder.57 It is an attempt to build an abstract world devoid of nobility.58 Plato, while depicting absolute communism in the Republic, suggested a situation in which Eros was sacrificed for equality.59 Eros is not just a sexual passion. It is also the passion for knowledge, i.e., the essence of philosophy. According to Strauss, the attempt to build an egalitarian society could endanger philosophy and corrupt the mind; such an attempt, he believed, goes against nature and the necessary tension between the city and man: The republic cannot bring to light the nature of the soul because it abstracts from the body and from Eros; by abstracting from the body and Eros, the republic in fact abstracts from nature; this abstraction is necessary if justice as full dedication to the common good of a particular city is to be praised as a choice worthy for its own sake. . . . The teaching of the republic regarding justice can be true although it is not complete, insofar as the nature of justice depends decisively on the nature of the city. . . . The republic then indeed makes clear what justice is. As Cicero has observed, the republic does not bring to light the best nature of the city. Socrates makes clear in the Republic what character the city would have to possess in order to satisfy the highest need of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature of the city.60

Plato introduced a perfect city, which was governed by absolute communism. This egalitarian society aspired to create a unity between the city and man and

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achieve justice. However the city and man are in constant tension and absolute communism is a delusion.61 According to Strauss, Plato teaches that utopias are bound to fail, and Marx’s vision is not an exception. In conclusion, Strauss’s anti-Marxist attitude began to evolve in the Weimar Republic and took shape upon his immigration to the United States, where a different historical context prevailed. Fear of the Marxist ideal, the communist enemy, nuclear war, and the crisis of the West motivated Strauss’s teaching. Strauss saw communism as the ultimate Western enemy. He saw the conflict as a war of good against evil, of the children of light against the children of darkness, and he regarded communism as absolute darkness. He believed that the Western light still gleamed, but its brilliance had grown extremely dim. His teaching aspired to reinforce that light.

Notes 1. Leo Strauss, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York and London, 1968), 24. 2. On the discussion of Nietzsche’s relationship to the National Socialism movement, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany. Aschheim describes the reception of Nietzsche’s views on German politics and culture, and mentions two opposite positions with regard to Nietzsche: Walter Kauffman’s, who saw Nietzsche as a humanist thinker and criticized “the Nietzsche legend,” the twisted interpretation of the philosopher; and György Lukács’s, who saw Nietzsche as the “father of fascism” and as “the irrational spokesman of the post-1870 reactionary bourgeoisie and inherently proto-fascist thinker, father to a Nazism which, given the logic and dictates of historical developments, was inexorably bound to faithfully reflect his ideas” (4). See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1982). György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981). 3. Strauss summed up his discussion of the three waves of modernity in a lecture delivered in Jerusalem in 1954, “What is Political Philosophy?” See Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (New York, 1959), 9–56. In the lecture, Marx is mentioned only once and is described as “Machiavellian” (41). 4. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 54. 5. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Political Thought, (Cambridge, UK, 2003); Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1996). See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2006) and James Cronin, The World the Cold War Made: Order, Chaos, and the Return of History (New York, 1996). 6. Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now,” in The Cambridge Companion to Marx, ed. Terrell Craver (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 29. 7. The few attempts to contextualize Strauss in the United States focused mainly on the Straussian reaction to the rise of positivism and behaviorism in American scholarship; see John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of American Vocation (Chicago, 1993). Other studies that were written from a Straussian perspective mention the Cold War and depict the antiCommunist mood of Strauss and some of his pupils but do not elaborate on the subject;

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see Kenneth Deutsch and Walter Sofer, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany, 1987); Kenneth Deutsch and John Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the Study of the American Regime (Lanham, MD, 1999). Strauss’s followers argue that Strauss, a critic of liberalism and modernity, supported democracy in its battle against communism. Strauss’s interest was not so much in protecting freedom, whether positive or negative liberty, as much as it was in saving philosophy and the foundations of classical natural right, which could exist in the American republic. See Thomas West, “Leo Strauss and the American Founding,” Review of Politics 53, no.1 (1991): 157–72. However none of the researchers try to incorporate Strauss’s attitude toward Marx and Marxism as part of his anti-communist views. 8. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, “The Political Philosophy of Karl Marx” (transcript of a seminar) (henceforth referred to as “Marx”), Leo Strauss Papers, University of Chicago (1960). In addition to using Strauss’s seminar on Marx, this chapter utilizes other unpublished texts such as a seminar on Hegel, which Strauss taught in 1958; see Leo Strauss, “Hegel,” Leo Strauss Papers, University of Chicago (1958). 9. Although Strauss’s thought was already subject to criticism during his lifetime and just after his death, the controversy around him arose in 1985 with the publication of a critical review by Myles F. Burnyeat in The New York Review of Books (30 May 30, 1985) of Strauss’s last book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1983). The critique was expanded in Shadia Drury’s book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York, 1988), which argued that Strauss brought to America not conservatism, but the ideas of the extreme European right. After 9/11 and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticism of the Straussians and of the kinship between Strauss and neoconservatism in the United States spread in universities, journals, and the media. In 2004, a BBC documentary film The Power of Nightmares polemically appropriated the connection drawn by Strauss’s critics between Strauss and the neoconservative movement. In the last few years, many articles and books have been published in order to explain the “truth” about Leo Strauss. See Ann Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, 2005); Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (Chicago, 2006); Catherine Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss (Chicago, 2006); and Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore, 2006). For earlier reviews of Strauss’s thought, see John H. Schaar and Sheldon S. Wolin, “Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique,” The American Political Science Review 57, no. 1 (March 1963): 125–50; Harvey C. Mansfield, “Reply to Pocock,” Political Theory 3, no. 4 (1975): 402–5; J. G. A. Pocock, “Prophet and Inquisitor: Or, a Church Built Upon Bayonets Cannot Stand: A Comment on Mansfield’s ‘Strauss’s Machiavelli,’” Political Theory 3, no. 4 (1975): 385–401. 10. See David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003); Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago, 1996); Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, 2008); and Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago, 1995). 11. See Strauss, “Korrespondenz: Leo Strauss-Karl Löwith,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart, 1996–2001), 648. One can find Strauss’s attitude toward Heidegger in Leo Strauss, “Existentialism,” Interpretation 22 (1995): 304. For a similar version of the article, see Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago, 1989), 3–27. See also Samuel Fleischacker, ed., Heidegger’s Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh, 2008). 12. Leo Strauss, 2 February 1933, “Korrespondenz: Leo Strauss-Karl Löwith,” 620. 13. Leo Strauss, “Comments on Der Begriff des Politischen,” in idem, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York, 1965), 339. 14. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago, 1963), 1. 15. Leo Strauss, “Disposition: Die politische Wissenschaft des Hobbes,” Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, 196; see also Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 125.

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16. The Straussian interpretation based on Marx’s early writings was part of an exegetic wave that characterized many of the political scientists of that time. Shlomo Avineri’s The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, UK, 1968) was one of the leading essays of that wave, according to which the political precedes the economic in Marx’s worldview. Strauss never regarded himself as an expert on Marxist thought and confessed his ignorance in economics; his seminar, however, preceded the work of many of the researchers of his time. 17. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 62. 18. Ibid., 5–6. 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 1, 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (New York, 2007), 174. 22. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 18, 19. According to Strauss, “Only through Kant, through Kant’s revolution, do the rights of man, which played such a great role already prior to Kant, become sacred because they are derivative from a non-utilitarian morality” (19). 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Ibid. Strauss emphasizes Kant’s objection to revolution because it entails lying and concealment (19). Hannah Arendt, in her seminar on Kant’s political philosophy, addresses an important element in Kant’s philosophy that exemplifies the total contrast between Kant and Strauss. According to her, Kant is the philosopher of publicity (40–46). Therefore, he is opposed to a state of revolution. Strauss, on the other hand, is a philosopher of secrecy and concealment. Conspiracy and noble lies can exist in Straussian thought. They are not legitimate in Kant’s and Arendt’s philosophy. In addition, in the seminar on Hegel (lecture no. 1, 13), Strauss uses two contemporary examples—the Cold War and the question of segregation in the United States—in order to elaborate Kant’s notion of eternal peace: “(1) These same motives of shrewd, mean calculation will induce, for example, Mr. Khrushchev, at a certain point, to be in favor of perpetual peace. . . . Morality doesn’t enter here at all. . . . Khrushchev doesn’t become a bit more decent if he sees that nuclear war doesn’t pay. He is the same crook but he acts a bit more rationally, externally. (2) People argue that whatever southern people may think about segregation or desegregation, the international standing of the United States forces the United States to give equal rights to the colored people, and, therefore, it has nothing to do with morality; it is simply a calculation of how to keep the United States as strong as possible.” 25. In Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), Strauss writes: “The connection between the developed form of ‘the philosophy of freedom,’ i.e., German idealism, and Rousseau, and hence Hobbes, was realized by no one more clearly than by Hegel. Hegel noted the kinship between Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism and ‘the anti-socialist systems of natural right,’ i.e., those natural right doctrines that deny man’s natural sociality and ‘posit the being of the individual as the first and highest thing’”(279). 26. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 25. 27. Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 10, 1. Hegel, in his work of 1820 The Philosophy of Right wrote that “the higher significance of war is that, through its agency (as I have put it on another occasion), the ethical health of nations [Voelker] is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite determinacies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that stagnation which a lasting calm would produce—a stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace would also produce among nations. . . . In peace, the bounds of civil life are extended, all its spheres become firmly established, and in the long run, people become increasingly rigid and ossified. But the unity of the body is essential to the health, and if its parts grow internally hard, the result is death. Perpetual peace is often demanded as an ideal to which mankind should approximate. Thus, Kant proposed a league of sovereigns to settle disputes between states, and the holy Alliance was meant to be an institution more or less of this kind. But the state is an individual, and negation is an essential component of individuality. Thus, even if a number of states join together as a family, this league, in its individuality, must generate opposition and create an enemy” (361–62). For a balanced discussion of Hegel’s concept of war,

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see Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, UK, 1972); see also Steven B. Smith, “Hegel’s View on War, the State, and International Relations,” American Political Science Review 77, no. 3 (1983): 624–32. Strauss’s position is completely different from Karl Popper’s; the latter viewed Hegel as one of the fathers of nationalism and totalitarianism. In his work, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (Princeton, 1962 [1945]), Popper writes: “Hegel not only developed the historical and totalitarian theory of nationalism, he also clearly foresaw the psychological possibilities of nationalism” (64). 28. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 26. For a different approach to Kant’s philosophy of history and metaphysics, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, 1980). 29. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 27. 30. Ibid., 63. 31. Ibid., 62. 32. Ibid., 62, 89, 129, 139. 33. Ibid., 62–63. 34. Ibid., 63. 35. Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 4, 17. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York, 1969 [1947]). The correspondence between Strauss and Kojève, as well as the debate regarding Xenophon’s Hiero were published in the expanded edition of Strauss’s On Tyranny ; see Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago, 1991 [1948]), 133–315. 36. Strauss and Kojève met in the beginning of the 1930s and planned to “undertake a detailed investigation of the connection between Hegel and Hobbes”; see Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 58. The research was not carried out, but the two maintained an ongoing dialogue that lasted more than thirty years. Strauss claimed that Hegel’s (and Kojève’s) view with regard to the relations between master and slave was directly influenced by Hobbes: “Kojève knows as well as anyone living that Hegel’s fundamental teaching regarding Master and Slave is based on Hobbes’s doctrine of the state of nature. If Hobbes’s doctrine of the state of nature is abandoned en pleine connaissance de cause (as indeed it should be abandoned), Hegel’s fundamental teaching will lose the evidence which it apparently still possesses for Kojève. Hegel’s teaching is much more sophisticated than Hobbes’s but it is as much a construction as the latter. Both doctrines construct human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition.” See Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago, 1959), 111. 37. The idea of “the End of History” also appears in Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pages 148, 158, 159–62, 192–93, 220, 258; see also Michael Roth, “A Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojève and the End of History,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 293–306; Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism (Toronto, 1984); Patrick Riley, “Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojève,” Political Theory 9, no. 1 (1981): 5–48. A central criticism against Kojève (for example in Riley’s article) is that many concepts such as the end of history do not exist in Hegel’s philosophy but are only existential and Marxist late additions that influenced Kojève’s interpretation. In contrast to this critique, Strauss understood Hegel and Marx almost exclusively through Kojève’s interpretation. Because Strauss identified Marx as the “father of Communism,” one can argue that an essential part of his understanding of Marx, Marxism, and communism is connected directly to his understanding of his friend Kojève. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was Francis Fukuyama who made the most significant attempt to translate Kojève’s ideas into politics. Fukuyama claimed that with capitalism and liberalism’s victory over communism, history drew closer to its end. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). 38. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 6–7. 39. Ibid., 16.

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40. Ibid., 19. 41. Ibid., 44. Eventually, Kojève admitted that at the end of history, the master is murdered (225): “In truth, only the slave ‘overcomes’ his ‘nature’ and finally becomes a Citizen. The master does not change: he dies rather than cease being a master. The final fight, which transforms the slave into Citizen, overcomes mastery in a non-dialectical fashion: the master is simply killed, and he dies as master.” 42. Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 4, 20; lecture no. 11, 20. 43. Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 11, 20. 44. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford, 2005), 15–16: “So I will speak to them of what is most despicable: and that is the last human. And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: ‘The time has now come when the human will no longer shoot the arrow of his yearning over beyond the human, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir! ‘I say to you: one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos within you. ‘Alas! The time will come when the human will give birth to no more stars. Alas! There will come the time of the most despicable human, who is no longer able to despise himself. ‘Behold! I show you the last human.’” 45. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 291. 46. Strauss claims that Marx and Kojève differ with regard to the attitude toward the state. According to him, while Marx aspired to abolish the state, Kojève didn’t oppose it and tried to find the balance between the United States and the Soviet Union: “More socialism in America and more liberty in Soviet Russia”; see Strauss, “Hegel,” lecture no. 4, 18. 47. Karl Marx, “Critique of Gotha Program,” Selected Writings (Indianapolis, 1994), 315. 48. Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 91. 49. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany, 1997), 327. 50. Nevertheless, Strauss defended Marx’s concept of alienation: “My view of Marx does not mean, of course, that I have not learned very much from Marx and, I hope, I will still learn much from him. For me the most important point in Marx, the positive point in Marx, is this—his notion of alienation, meaning his attempt to understand modernity in particular as the period of man’s alienation” (Strauss and Cropsey, “Marx,” 140). One can even argue that Strauss’s critique of modernity embraces the notion of alienation, i.e., the idea that in the past people were not alienated. Strauss believed that premodern thought and the classical natural right were pure and authentic, whereas modern thought was trapped in a second cave, blinded by positivism and historicism. For Marx, history is the process of alienation, which would end only at the end of history. 51. The lecture was later published in Interpretation 26 (1999): 353–78, citation, 360. 52. The letter is undated, and it might be only an unedited draft of Strauss’s thoughts (Leo Strauss Papers, University of Chicago; box 5, folder 10). However, even if it were the case, one cannot ignore the insights which are expressed by Strauss and can be helpful in understanding his political thought. This chapter is not interested in pursuing the popular controversy that surrounded Strauss and his relationship to the Straussians and neoconservatism. However, one can say that this letter is the “smoking gun” that links them. 53. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), 5. 54. Ibid. 55. Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago, 1995), 10. See also Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (Chicago, 2006); Robb A. McDaniel, “The Nature of Inequality: Uncovering the Modern in Leo Strauss’s Idealist Ethics,” Political Theory 26, no. 3 (1998): 317–45; Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

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56. Leo Strauss, The City and Man, 127. 57. Ibid., 111. 58. Ibid., 112, 128. 59. Ibid., 118. 60. Ibid., 139. 61. Ibid., 117.

Chapter 3

Gershom Scholem, Einst und Jetzt Zionist Politics and Kabbalistic Historiography

David Biale



In a birthday greeting to his son Gerhard, written on 12 March 1921, Arthur Scholem says of the younger Scholem’s work on Kabbalah, the first fruits of which had just appeared in Martin Buber’s Der Jude: “It’s a pity that all this scholarship should have been used so idly, and a double pity that such productive powers and intellectual labor should have been expended so uselessly.  .  .  . Three cheers for Hebraica and Jewish studies—but not as a career. Take my word for it: if you don’t change course you will experience a bitter shipwreck. . . .”1 Scholem père had reason to worry: his son was still in the middle of writing his doctoral dissertation, with no reasonable hope for employment on the horizon. Although he must have later taken heart when Gerhard’s professors judged his dissertation a success and offered him the opportunity to write a Habilitation, the irascible young Scholem soon dashed his father’s hopes by decamping for Palestine and a very uncertain future, one which the father made clear he would not support financially. Arthur Scholem may have found it hard to fathom his son’s choice of profession, not to speak of his Zionism. He certainly couldn’t understand the nexus between the two. But it is precisely the relationship between Kabbalah and Zionism—the subject of this chapter—that is the key to decoding the hermetic Scholem. As I shall try to make clear, the relationship between the two was not as linear or as direct as one might naively assume. On the contrary, the relationship for Scholem was dialectical and fraught with ambivalence. The title for this chapter derives from Scholem’s attack on his nineteenthcentury historiographical predecessors, the scholars associated with Wissenschaft des Judentums.2 He viewed their refusal to countenance the central role of myth and mysticism in Jewish history as a product of their bourgeois assimilationism. The

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study of Kabbalah meant the rejection of the bourgeois component, just as Zionism meant the rejection of assimilation. Yet Scholem’s own position turned out to be more complex, because there is a seeming contradiction between his foregrounding of mystical apocalypticism as the motor force of Jewish history and his struggle against such forces in contemporary politics. With the perspectives of recent scholarship, as well as the publication of Scholem’s diaries and letters, we can now view Scholem from a new vantage point, one less beholden to his own self-presentation, which tended to elide the inherent tension between his Kabbalistic historiography and his Zionist politics. Scholem’s argument against the Wissenschaft des Judentums school must be read together with his critique of the idea of a German-Jewish symbiosis, an idea that the nineteenth-century scholars promoted as fundamental to their historiographical project.3 His denials of such a symbiosis and description of it instead as “unrequited love” were, as we shall see, post-Holocaust expressions of a position he had already taken as an uncompromising Zionist during World War I. Scholem’s lifelong attack on the very idea of the German Jew seemingly effaced his own identity as a product of this specific German milieu. The “Jewish Scholem” outraged his contemporaries in the early Weimar period with his radical pronouncements, thus creating a self-image—reinforced in his later memoirs—as an alien marooned in Germany who succeeded in truly becoming himself only when he settled for good in Palestine. Since his death in 1981, however, a number of studies have sought to recover the German Scholem. George Mosse argued that Scholem was a classic case of the German-Jewish appropriation of Bildung, the Enlightenment virtues of reason and education.4 In his Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, Steven Aschheim objected to turning Scholem into a late child of the Enlightenment, pointing out, based on the recently published Scholem diaries and letters, that the Nietzschean fulminations of the young Gerhard were aimed explicitly against the bourgeois rationalism of the German Jews, the very heirs of Bildung.5 It was the German Jews of the age of crisis and catastrophe, to use the title of another of Aschheim’s books, rather than those of the age of German liberalism, who provide the context for situating Scholem. Finally, Benjamin Lazier has shown how the Weimar fascination with antinomianism explains the young Scholem.6 Despite their differences in emphasis, all of these historians of German Jewry sought to show that one cannot understand “Gershom” without knowing what passed through the mind of “Gerhard.”7 Understanding the ideas incubated in Germany that Scholem brought in his baggage to Palestine turns out to be crucial to explaining both his historiography and his Zionism. Scholem’s position on the role of messianism in Jewish history is well known but bears repeating, to highlight the conundrum of this chapter. One of the most famous statements of this position can be found in his synthetic essay, “On the Messianic Idea in Judaism”: “From the point of view of the Halakhah, to be sure, Judaism appears as a well-ordered house, and it is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing. Something of messianic apocalypticism

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penetrates into this house; perhaps I can best describe it as a kind of anarchic breeze. A window is open through which the winds blow in, and it is not quite certain just what they bring in with them.”8 Perhaps Scholem had in mind his father’s own “well-ordered house,” which he, who would come to describe himself as a religious anarchist, sought to shake up. As he wrote in an essay, “On the Possibility of Mysticism in Our Time”: “All of us today may to a great extent be considered anarchists regarding religious matters . . . the fundamental fact that a religious understanding of Jewish continuity today goes beyond the principle of Torah from heaven.”9 One might therefore initially describe a parallelism between the halakhah and bourgeois German Judaism, on the one hand, and messianic apocalypticism and Zionism, on the other. Scholem’s greatest work was his study of Shabbatai Zvi, the seventeenthcentury self-proclaimed Messiah. As is well known, Scholem held that Sabbateanism was the watershed that led to the modern age by shattering rabbinic authority from within. In the last pages of his famous essay “Redemption through Sin,” he argues that the doctrine of “the holiness of sin” paved the way to modern secularism: The hopes and beliefs of these last Sabbateans caused them to be particularly susceptible to the “millennial” winds of the times. Even while still “believers”—in fact, precisely because they were “believers”—they had been drawing closer to the spirit of the Haskalah all along, so that when the flame of their faith finally flickered out they soon reappeared as leaders of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals or simply complete and indifferent skeptics. . . . Those who had survived the ruin were now open to any alternative or wind of change; and so, their “mad visions” behind them, they turned their energies and hidden desires for a more positive life to assimilation and the Haskalah, two forces that accomplished without paradoxes, indeed without religion at all, what they, the members of “the accursed sect,” had earnestly striven for in a stormy contention with truth, carried on in the half-light of a faith pregnant with paradoxes.10

The spirit of the modern age—rational, skeptical, secular—was incubated in the womb of the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the mythic. Sabbateanism, that most extreme and irrational of all premodern Jewish doctrines, dialectically produced its opposite. Scholem repeatedly refers to the Kabbalistic messianism of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century Sabbateans—and particularly the movement around Jacob Frank—as nihilistic. In “Redemption through Sin,” he calls Frank “one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole of Jewish history,” labeling him a “nihilist,” albeit a nihilist whose “nihilism possessed a rare authenticity.”11 Frank and his followers expressed this nihilism in the doctrine of the “holiness of sin,” an antinomianism grounded dialectically in the Jewish mystical tradition. As Robert Alter has pointed out, words like “rupture,” “chaos,” and “nihilism” appear frequently in Scholem’s vocabulary, a patently modern lexicon that he applied to apocalyptic and antinomian impulses in Jewish mysticism.12 But did his fascination with these anarchic energies mean that he identified with Sabbateanism,

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as Baruch Kurzweil famously argued?13 One might think so, given Scholem’s application of such language to his favorite modern author, Franz Kafka. In a by now well-known birthday letter from 1937 that Scholem sent to the German-Jewish publisher and philanthropist Zalman Schocken, he described the surprising correspondences he found between the Kabbalah and the work of Franz Kafka: “Years of highly stimulating thought had brought me to a rationalistic skepticism concerning the object of my study, coupled with an intuitive affirmation of those mystical theses that lie on the narrow boundary between religion and nihilism. I found the fullest and unsurpassed expression of this boundary in the writings of Kafka, which are themselves a secularized description for a contemporary person of the feeling of a Kabbalistic world. Indeed, at a later stage this led me to look on them as possessing an almost canonical halo.”14 Twenty-one years later, in a series of ten “unhistorical” aphorisms on Kabbalah, he returned to this theme in almost identical language, this time comparing Kafka with Jonas Wehle, one of the last Prague Frankists, whose heretical Kabbalah Scholem describes as “nihilistic messianism.”15 Wehle had tried to put his worldview in the language of the Enlightenment, thus demonstrating the dialectical connection between recondite mysticism and modern secularism. Kafka, says Scholem, must have had a “sympathy of souls” with Wehle because he gave expression to the same “border between religion and nihilism,” seemingly stemming from a heretical Kabbalah. Given Scholem’s profound affinity with Kafka, one has good reason to suspect that he, too, walked the fine line between religion and nihilism. For Scholem, the antinomianism of modern Jewish secularism was a dialectical product of the religious tradition, insofar as Sabbateanism, the source of Jewish modernity, was itself produced by the tradition. For this reason, Kafka—a secular writer whom Scholem believed to have a deep Jewish sensibility—could give expression to something rooted in Jewish mysticism, even if he was ignorant of mystical sources. Yet, despite this seemingly incontrovertible evidence, Scholem did not identify with the forces of messianic nihilism as they appeared in modernity and, indeed, rejected them vehemently. This stance becomes explicit in his essay “On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time” (1963).16 The hesitation he expresses repeatedly in this essay stems from the tension he evidently felt between the desire to find some mysticism in the modern age and his own secularist inability to identify with it. He declares explicitly that he does not believe in the Torah of revelation and can therefore not partake in the Kabbalist’s conviction that the Torah has an infinity of divine meanings (in other essays, such as “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” however, he seems to identify with this position). But he also states that Jewish mysticism as a public endeavor, that is, as an enterprise that produces a public literature, has virtually ceased to exist in modern times. Even those genuinely spiritual or religious figures, the Rav Kook and Rabbi Arele Roth, were not Kabbalists proper, but rather expressed their individual spirituality in terms remote from the Kabbalah. If the Kabbalah had been the vital

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force in premodern Judaism, it became thoroughly marginalized and uncreative in the modern period.17 In the same context, Scholem dismisses the Hasidic leaders of the twentieth century as merely perpetuating their dynasties; the creative age of Hasidism was limited at best to the eighteenth century, when the movement emerged. And even then, Hasidism was not particularly innovative kabbalistically but rather translated the earlier Lurianic Kabbalah into a popular, psychological movement.18 This dismissal of any originality in post–eighteenth century Hasidism was surely one of Scholem’s blind spots as a scholar, but it accords with his secularist definition of modernity. The same skepticism about various types of religious spirituality can be found already in the 1920s, particularly in Scholem’s vehement attacks on Oskar Goldberg (1887–1952).19 Goldberg, who came from an Orthodox background, developed a bizarre theology focused on the five books of Moses interpreted in terms of numerological magic. Following the Kabbalah, Goldberg held that the Pentateuch is based on the letters of the tetragrammaton. According to this theory, because all of the laws and rituals of the Torah are, in effect, the name of God, the Hebrews activated the metaphysical reality at their “center” by means of observing these rituals. Through this magical procedure the Hebrews became a metaphysical people and, indeed, the most metaphysical of all peoples. All subsequent biblical and Jewish history represented a fall from this “reality of the Hebrews” (the title of Goldberg’s 1925 magnum opus). As opposed to polytheistic religions, whose gods were rooted in material reality, only the God of the Hebrews enjoyed a pure metaphysical reality. Goldberg’s goal was to recapture this magical reality in the modern world, which had become mired in polytheistic materialism. Interestingly, Thomas Mann based the metaphysical ideas in the first part of his Joseph and His Brothers on Goldberg, but he later satirized Goldberg as “Dr. Chaim Breisacher,” the purveyor of a Nazi-like magical racial theory in his Dr. Faustus.20 In the 1920s, the Goldberg circle tried to entice Scholem to join their ranks because they were fascinated by Kabbalah but had little access to its texts. Scholem rebuffed these advances, in part in reaction to Goldberg’s hostility to Zionism but also because he rejected Goldberg’s ahistorical metaphysics that sought to recreate the primordial “reality” of the Hebrews. This kind of reenchantment was utterly foreign to his sensibility. When Goldberg’s Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer appeared in 1925, Scholem attacked it as “Jewish Satanism.”21 The impact that Goldberg’s definition of the role of magic and mysticism had on Scholem’s version of modernity cannot be overestimated. Scholem’s resistance to Goldberg seems to have arisen from his rejection of the possibility of a true mysticism “in our time.” Goldberg’s odd synthesis of magical metaphysics with a biological (even racial) definition of the Jews was almost the complete diametric opposite of what can be seen as Scholem’s far less mythic understanding of the Jewish people in the modern era. Moreover, Scholem considered Goldberg’s transplantation of the Kabbalah into modernity to have something in common with the nihilistic vestiges of Sabbateanism.

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In Scholem’s view, therefore, even those who adhere to some form of traditional religion have lost touch with the creative forces that he—in opposition to the Wissenschaft des Judentums—identified with mysticism. Little wonder that he contemplated the “possibility of Jewish mysticism in our time” with evident lack of conviction. If, as he argued in the first lecture of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, mysticism is the third stage in the history of a religion (the first being the direct experience of God and the second the institutionalization of religion), then the capacity of mysticism to recover the immediacy of the first stage had run its course by modern times. Or, put differently, he defined the modern age as that which follows the age of mysticism. What had happened to the demonic energies of Sabbateanism? In his analysis of Hasidism, Scholem introduced the idea of “neutralization.”22 Rather than suppressing Sabbateanism altogether, he claimed, eighteenth-century Hasidism neutralized its messianic energies by redirecting and channeling them to this world. Although he was less explicit about more secular movements, he apparently believed that the Haskalah, Reform Judaism, and Zionism all engaged in forms of neutralization of the messianic. He addressed the latter at the end of his essay “The Messianic Idea in Judaism”: Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. . . . Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up—that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.23

Zionism is not messianism, but it harnesses messianic energies in the process of entering the realm of history, the “concrete” realm. Or, as Scholem put it in a letter to Hannah Arendt that criticized her essay “Zionism Reconsidered”: “The Zionist movement shared this dialectical experience of the Real (and all its catastrophic possibilities) with all other movements that have taken it upon themselves to change something in the real world.”24 Since messianism demands a world outside of history (“meta-history”), the harnessing of messianism for a nonmessianic political task is a highly dangerous enterprise. It requires neither suppression nor succumbing, but rather neutralization. Arendt’s critique of Zionism struck him as utopian in the worst sense of the word because she had failed to understand that Zionism had no choice but to risk entry into the pragmatic realm of history. In a now-famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem expressed this view in terms of language. As a youth, he had embraced the Hebrew language, which he taught himself. Upon his immigration to Palestine in 1923, he switched to writing in Hebrew and returned to German only after World War II (with the important exception of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, the manuscript of which

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was written in German). But he was acutely aware that the rebirth of Hebrew as a vernacular could never be fully secular and therefore the dangers of messianism were concealed within it: “They [the speakers of modern Hebrew] think that they have turned Hebrew into a secular language and that they have removed its apocalyptic sting, but it is not so. The secularization of the language is merely empty words. . . . We live with this language as on the edge of an abyss. . . . . A language is composed of names. The power of the language is hidden within the name; its abyss is sealed therein. After invoking the ancient names day after day, we shall no longer be able to hold off their power.”25The revival of the Hebrew language could therefore subvert the Zionist experiment by leading it into the same nihilistic abyss that was the fate of Sabbateanism, he claimed. In what way did the religious echo of the Hebrew language threaten its modern, secular manifestation? For an answer, we must turn to Scholem’s politics from the period of World War I through the 1920s. His Zionism, it must be noted, is difficult to define. It was idiosyncratic in the extreme, which explains why virtually everyone in Germany—Zionist or not—failed to conform to his ideal. It might be called “cultural,” yet despite his affinity for Ahad Ha’am,26 it was a far less coherent program than that of the cultural Zionists. Zionism, he wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1933, had the “greatest insights in diagnosing the Jewish condition, but the most tragic weakness in prescribing therapy.”27 For the young Scholem, the return to Judaism was impossible in the galut; it could only be accomplished in Palestine. As he wrote to Siegfried Lehmann in 1916, Zionism is the necessary precondition for understanding Judaism, because “the Zionist can hear the words of God only from Jerusalem . . . the living word of God cannot be comprehended in the German language. Only from the innermost soul of Hebrew can the inner form of Judaism be understood.”28 Although this particular letter seems to suggest a return to religion, Scholem’s conception was, once again, idiosyncratic. It was the “tradition” that constituted God’s actions, but for Scholem this was self-evidently not the Orthodox tradition of mitzvot. Rather, he had in mind the very texts of the tradition as themselves the bearers of Judaism. Whether one could speak of God or not was immaterial to this bibliophile, as long as one had the books that purported to hear God’s word. This quasi-religious language would, however, increasingly vanish from his statements on Zionism, although his belief remained that only Zionism allowed for an unbiased understanding of the traditional texts. Zionism offered the only possibility for the secular Jewish historian determined to understand his/her tradition. A cultural—or, perhaps, anarchistic—nationalist, Scholem rejected more conventional political nationalism. No understanding of Scholem’s position on nationalism is possible without factoring in the crucible of World War I, the first catastrophe that modern nationalism visited on Europe. As he has described it in his memoirs, he was one of the few to oppose the war uncompromisingly from its very outset.29 His opposition was initially mediated through his brother Werner, who belonged to the radical wing of the Social Democrats. But the more important influence was Gustav Landauer, the German-Jewish anarchist whose thought

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is critical for an understanding of Scholem’s own nonsocialist politics, politics one might call “anarchistic Zionism.”30 As he wrote to Arendt in 1946, “My own political credo is, if anything, anarchistic.”31 Although Scholem attended a few meetings of the miniscule anti-war movement in 1914 and 1915, his anti-war activity took place primarily within the Zionist movement, to which he already belonged. Zionism, for Scholem, signified the conscious rejection of both European politics and the bourgeois culture of the German Jews. Only by leaving Europe could the Zionists escape what he called the “dogmatism” of modern nationalism. Escape to Zion represented an attempt to create an anarchistic community in which the patriotic pieties of the European setting would have no place. His later hostility to the political Zionists’ desire to create a “nation like all the nations” was rooted in this experience of nationhood in the second decade of the twentieth century. As he wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1931: “I do not believe that there is such a thing as a ‘solution to the Jewish Question,’ in the sense of a normalization of the Jews.”32 Scholem was most active politically in the period from his immigration to Palestine until roughly the Nazis’ accession to power. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he was involved in Brit Shalom, the group of intellectuals centered around the Hebrew University that represented the singular, if largely ineffectual, contribution of a Central European sensibility to the political culture of the Zionist yishuv.33 Brit Shalom advocated limitations on Jewish immigration and a binational parliament as ways of coming to a political compromise with the Arabs. After the rise of the Nazis in 1933 and the mass flight of German Jews to Palestine, Scholem, like many others, could no longer complacently accept voluntary restrictions on immigration. With the Arab riots and general strike of 1936, he abandoned any hope of a political settlement leading to binationalism and, many years later, claimed that from this point onward, the course of history leading to the 1948 War of Independence and the establishment of a Jewish state was largely determined.34 Indeed, his political statements and letters from those years reveal a recurring pessimism and despair about Zionism’s prospects of realizing his hoped-for program, as nebulous as that program may have been. As early as 1925 he wrote to Ernst Simon that he had come to Palestine without many illusions, but after two years in the country, he had even fewer: “No one should foster the illusion that what happens here and will occur in the future (after the open retreat from everything to do with human tikkun) has the slightest thing in common, in substantia et essentia, with Zionism, in whose name your faithful servant is here.”35 In 1930, in the wake of the riots and massacres of 1929, he wrote to Martin Buber: “The countenance of the Zionist cause has darkened in catastrophic fashion for us [i.e., for the followers of Brit Shalom]. . . . Someday . . . the face of Zionism, even that which is only turned inward, [may] prove to be that of Medusa.”36 On the eve of World War II (and conscious that war was on the way), he wrote to Walter Benjamin that “since there is nothing that can assume the function of

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Palestine within Judaism, . . . how can I come to terms with all that has happened during these years? Confronted with this darkness, I can only keep silent.”37 His withdrawal from politics was, therefore, not only a result of his counterpolitical path to Zionism but also an acknowledgement that the anarchistic community he sought had no hope of coming into existence. While he rejected Arendt’s critique of political Zionism as based on irresponsible utopianism, his own Zionism may be said to have rested on something equally impossible. A final testimony from much later in his life: in 1965, he responded to Georges Friedmann, whose book The End of the Jewish People? argued that Israelis had banished Jewishness for a new Israeli identity, whereas the Jews in the Diaspora were assimilating. Based on his belief in the dialectics of historical memory, he utterly rejected Friedmann’s thesis but then proceeded in equally pessimistic tones: “The Israeli nation, which has separated itself from the Jewish people, is marching toward its ruin. . . .”38 The “metamorphosis of tradition” ushered in by Zionism was not, however, an intrinsic disaster because of the lack of an alternative. Once again, he emphasized the perils of creating a Jewish nation on its ancient soil but regarded it as the only possible course for Jews in the modern world. What was the source of Scholem’s pessimism beyond a theoretical ambivalence about the wisdom of the Jews’ efforts to reenter history? His position was prompted not only by Arab resistance to Zionism but also, and even more, by the rise of the right-wing Revisionists in the 1920s and 1930s. He regarded Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s Revisionism as a Jewish version of the nationalism he had rejected in Europe. In 1926, in his first political declaration in Palestine, he joined with five other members of the new Brit Shalom in denouncing Jabotinsky’s call for a Jewish legion and rejecting Jewish militarism and concepts of heroism and national honor. He condemned what he called the imperialism of the Revisionists, arguing in pessimistic terms that seem prophetic today: “If the dream of Zionism is numbers and borders and if we can’t exist without them, then Zionism will fail, or, more precisely, has already failed. . . . The Zionist movement still has not freed itself from the reactionary and imperialistic image that not only the Revisionists have given it but also all those who refuse to take into account the reality of our movement in the awakening East.”39 The colonial power, he asserted, created the conditions that would inevitably lead the indigenous Arab population to demand self-determination.40 The Zionists must anticipate this development and come to terms with Arab nationalism rather than assuming the Revisionists’ version of nationalism, which was, in reality, no better than other forms of European colonialism. Once again, reflecting his view that mysticism and modernity did not mix, Scholem viewed modern mysticism as just as dangerous to Zionism as the Revisionists’s secular nationalism. In 1934, he attacked the anti-Zionist Orthodox writer Isaac Breuer, who had constructed a mystical alternative to Zionism. Scholem argued, “Just as [Zionism] will not find its salvation, its tikkun, in the wild apocalypticism of the Revisionists, it must not give way to a politics of mysticism

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that uses the most profound symbols of our inner life to usurp a power that others have fought for and have sacrificed themselves to firmly establish—which uses these symbols to subjugate a way of life. . . . The adherents of that politics have followed with nothing but excommunications, maledictions, and hate.”41 The secular nationalists of the Revisionist movement and the Orthodox anti-Zionists were unwitting allies in their attempts to wrest power from the moderate secular Zionists. By appropriating kabbalistic symbols, Breuer was turning what Scholem considered the source of Jewish vitality into a weapon of oppressive Orthodoxy. In his attack on Breuer, Scholem labels the politics of the Revisionists as “wild apocalypticism,” bringing us back to the Sabbateans. According to Scholem, these nationalists may have been secular, but they shared with Sabbateanism a politics that could never achieve anything in this world. For that reason, he rejected the association of Zionism with messianism, writing in 1929: “I absolutely deny that Zionism is a messianic movement and that it has the right to employ religious terminology for political goals. The redemption of the Jewish people, which as a Zionist I desire, is in no way identical with the religious redemption I hope for in the future. . . . The Zionist ideal is one thing and the messianic ideal another, and the two do not meet except in the pompous phraseology of mass rallies that often infuse our youth with a spirit of new Sabbateanism, which must inevitably fail. The Zionist movement has nothing in common with Sabbateanism.”42 In this invocation of Sabbateanism, Scholem explicitly connects his historical work with his politics. This particular statement came just a year after he completed his first study of Sabbateanism, an essay on Abraham Cardozo, in which his conclusion reads in almost identical language: Thus it was that before the powers of world history uprooted Judaism in the nineteenth century, its reality was threatened from within. Already at that time [i.e., the time of Sabbateanism] the “reality of the Hebrews,” the sphere of Judaism, threatened to become an illusion. . . . The messianic phraseology of Zionism . . . is not the least of those Sabbatean temptations that could bring to disaster the renewal of Judaism. . . . As transient in time as all the theological constructions, including those of Cardozo and Jacob Frank, may be, the deepest and most destructive impulse of Sabbateanism, the hubris of the Jews, remains.43

The messianic impulse consists of the desire to realize the final redemption within an unredeemed world, a kind of hubris that can only result in catastrophe. And Scholem ironically invokes the title of Oskar Goldberg’s book, which had appeared three years earlier, a hint that Goldberg’s own form of nonmessianic magic was as dangerous to the Jews as apocalyptic messianism: both tended toward nihilism. In a fragment found in his Nachlass entitled “Why Did We Become Zionists,” he writes paradoxically that “the more Zionism turned apocalyptic,” the more it perpetuated the exile.44 Those who had searched for redemption in Zionism, by which Scholem means the renewal of the Jewish people, now found themselves

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trapped in what they had tried to escape. The “tikkun” of Zionism (the term itself, as used in the Lurianic Kabbalah, is messianic) lies, paradoxically, in abandoning such messianically freighted language. Or, in the terms we encountered earlier, Zionism must neutralize the messianic by channeling its revolutionary energies into a this-worldly project. For Scholem, politics and religion must be kept separate because religion injects a demand for the absolute into politics, which must be based in the realm of moderation. This view remained consistent throughout his life. In an interview shortly before his death, he referred to the “fatal attraction” that the Jews have always had to messianism, and he argued that the contemporary Gush Emunim were like the Sabbateans, although perhaps even more dangerous because the group’s messianism had not only spiritual but also political, consequences. 45 He evidently saw these Orthodox messianists as combining the worst of the Revisionists’ politics with the worst of Breuer’s mysticism. Thus we may say that in his politics Scholem charted a course between nihilism, on the one hand, and bourgeois stasis, on the other. That third course may be called anarchistic: rejecting a nationalist politics that turned the nation-state into a messianic goal, he instead embraced a Zionism of cultural and communal renaissance. Only in such a community, free now of the apologetic demands of the Diaspora, could historiography itself flourish. For Scholem this version of Zionism guaranteed a genuine investigation of the Jewish past that could encompass all of the facets of Jewish history, from the rational to the irrational, the conservative to the apocalyptic. Only in such a setting might one reconstruct the vital forces of such movements as Sabbateanism without succumbing to their allure. And now, thirty years after Scholem’s death, the great problem he posed in his historical work for contemporary politics has not vanished. If anything, as the strident drums of nationalism drown out the voices of reason and moderation, the forces that Scholem had warned of as long ago as the 1920s have become even more threatening. Zionism has indeed awakened the slumbering demon of nihilistic apocalypticism. The return of the Jews to history paradoxically aroused the very metahistorical forces that could lead to the destruction of their creator. A year or so after my book on Scholem was published, my wife and I paid the Scholems a social visit. As we conversed about the problems posed by the Orthodox in Jerusalem, I realized that the great rebel had become what he most repudiated: a liberal, dare I say even “bourgeois,” German Jew, who felt profoundly alienated by Israel’s direction and deeply concerned about its future. He epitomized those beset by “unease in Zion,” marooned in the Middle East, where the dreams of their youth had evaporated in the blazing sun. In his deepest political sentiments, Gershom had never left Gerhard quite behind. Indeed, the political path that Scholem took in Palestine, especially in his first decade there, was one dictated by the peculiar context of his youth in Berlin, shaped by the inescapable Erlebnis of war and revolution. His rebellion against his father took him very far, yet in another sense, he never quite left home.

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Notes 1. Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 119. 2. See Gershom Scholem, “Wissenschaft vom Judentum einst und jetzt,” in his Judaica and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (Frankfurt, 1968), 147–66. The English is to be found in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 304–13. A much more aggressive attack on the nineteenth-century school was his 1944 Hebrew essay, “Reflections on Modern Jewish Studies,” translated into English in Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism In Our Time, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia, 1997), 51–71. 3. Gershom Scholem, “Wieder den Mythos vom deutsch-jüdischen ‘Gespräch’” in Judaica 2 (Frankfurt, 1970): 7–11; “Noch einmal: das deutsch—jüdische Gespräch,” in ibid., 12–10; and “Juden und Deutsche,” in ibid., 20–46. 4. George Mosse, “Gershom Scholem as a German Jew,” in George Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, NH, 1993). 5. Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 16. Scholem utterly rejected any sympathy for Nietzsche in his memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem, but as Aschheim shows, his diaries are shot through with Nietzscheanisms. See also Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem: Politisches, Esoterisches und Historiographisches Schreiben (Munich, 2003). 6. Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the Wars, part 3 (Princeton, 2008). See also Christoph Schmidt, Der Häretische Imperativ: Überlegungen zur Theologische Dialektik der Kulturwissenschaft in Deutschland (Tübingen, 2000). 7. The phrase is a paraphrase of Harry Wolfson’s remarks about Spinoza in The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge, MA, 1934 and 1962), 1: vii.: “We cannot know what passed through the mind of Benedictus without knowing what passed through the mind of Baruch.” 8. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 21. 9. Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 16. 10. Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 141. 11. Ibid., 126–27. 12. Robert Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” Poetics Today 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 429–42. 13. Baruch Kurzweil, Bema’avak al erkay hayahadut (The struggle for Jewish values) (Tel Aviv, 1969), 99–243. 14. Translation from “A Candid Letter About My True Intentions on Studying Kabbalah,” in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 3–4. I was the first to publish this letter in German in my book Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 215–16 (for my English translation see 74–76). On Scholem and Kafka, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Cambridge, MA, 1991) and Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia, 2010), 118–20. 15. See the tenth aphorism of Scholem’s “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” in Gershom Scholem, Judaica (Frankfurt, 1973) 3: 271. See also my article “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5, no. 1 (February 1985): 67–93. For Scholem’s definition of religious nihilism, see “Der Nihilismus als Religiose Phänomen,” Eranos Jahrbuch 43 (1974): 1–4. 16. Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 6–19. 17. For a discussion of Scholem’s refusal to study contemporary Kabbalah, see Boas Huss, “Ask No Questions: Gershom Scholem and the Study of Contemporary Jewish Mysticism,” Modern Judaism 25, no. 2 (2005): 141–58. 18. See, in particular, Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1941), lecture 8. 19. On Goldberg, see Manfred Voigts, “Einführung” [introduction] in Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (Wiesbaden, 2005) and Voigts, Oskar Goldberg: der mythische Experimentalwis-

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senschaftler (Berlin, 1992). See also Gershom Scholem, “Oscar Goldberg,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), 7: 705. 20. See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The History of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia, 1981), 98. 21. See Scholem’s letter to Ernst Simon, 22 December 1925, in Scholem, A Life in Letters, 148. 22. See in particular, Gershom Scholem, “The Neutralization of the Messianic Element in Early Hasidism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 176–202. 23. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 25–26. 24. Scholem, 28 January 1946, A Life in Letters, 332. 25. Scholem, “Thoughts About Our Language,” in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 27– 28. For a recent analysis of this letter, see Galili Shahar, “The Sacred and the Unfamiliar: Gershom Scholem and the Anxieties of the New Hebrew,” Germanic Review 83 (2008): 299–320. 26. See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter History, (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 65. 27. Scholem, A Life in Letters, 238. 28. Ibid., 37. 29. Gershom Scholem, Vom Berlin nach Jerusalem (Frankfurt, 1977), 70–71. See further my Gershom Scholem, 60–65. 30. Scholem, A Life in Letters, 120–21, where he states that he does not believe that “the task of Zionism has any essential relation to social problems.” 31. Ibid., 331. 32. Letter to Walter Benjamin of 1 August 1931, translated into English in Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia, 1981), 169–74. 33. See Dimitry Shumsky, Beyn prag liyerushalayim: tsionut prag vera’ayon hamedinah haduleumit beerets yisrael (Between Prague and Jerusalem: Prague Zionism and the idea of a binational state in Erets Yisrael) (Jerusalem, 2009). I thank Richard Cohen for drawing my attention to this important new work. 34. See Scholem, A Life in Letters, 280, where in his 1937 reaction to the Peel Commission report he states that he was still opposed to partition in principle but recognized that an Arab-Jewish federation—”the ideal solution”—may no longer be possible. His later view of the course of history can be found in David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem,” New York Review of Books (14 August 1980), 22. 35. Scholem, A Life in Letters, 145. 36. Ibid., 185. 37. Ibid., 302. 38. Ibid., 412. 39. Scholem, “The Final Goal” (Hebrew), Sheifotaynu 2 (August 1931): 156. 40. “Zur Frage des Parlaments,” Jüdische Rundschau 34 (1929): 65. See also Gershom Scholem, Od davar (Explications and Implications: Writings on the Jewish Heritage and Renaissance), ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv, 1989), 65. 41. Gershom Scholem, “The Politics of Mysticism: Isaac Breuer’s Neue Kuzari,” in The Messianic Idea, 334. 42. Gershom Scholem, “Three Sins of Brit Shalom” (Hebrew), Davar (12 December 1929): 2. 43. Scholem, Judaica (Frankfurt, 1968), 1:146. 44. Scholem, Od davar, 92. The same idea that Zionism had failed as a result of its own success can be found in his letter to Walter Benjamin of 1 August 1931. 45. Biale, “The Threat of Messianism.”

Chapter 4

Death or Birth Scholem and Secularization

Zohar Maor

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Scholem and Secularization: An Ambiguous Encounter My secularism is not secular. —Gershom Scholem, 1974

Gershom Scholem’s account of the process of secularization and his personal confrontation with it—arguably, almost two sides of the same coin—are both ambiguous and hard to follow. Scholem celebrates the destruction of the religious past but in the same breath mourns the shallowness of the secular present; he accepts secularization as a final stage according to a deterministic Hegelian dialectic but yearns for a dramatic, unanticipated religious renaissance. An interview from 1974 reveals much of this almost amusing ambiguity, as biographic experience mingles with theoretical analysis. For example, this is how Scholem describes the Jewish awakening of his youth: “I didn’t want to be Orthodox. Judaism interested me very much, but not the practice of observances. . . . The Orthodox thought I would be a great baal teshuva . . . and they received me nicely. But kashrut, for example, held little attraction for me. . . . My father had said to me, ‘If you want Yidishkeyt so much, then become a rabbi and you’ll be able to keep busy with Yidishkeyt all your life.’ I told him, ‘I don’t want to be a rabbi.’ Papa didn’t understand what I wanted. Yidishkeyt without anything? I called it Zionism.”1 Scholem was anything but naïve, and he knew very well that Zionism was not simply “Yidishkeyt without anything”; in the same interview he admits: “Like all destruction, secularism is both liberation and risk. But Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of Exile.”2 This “reality”

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is the traditional Yidishkeyt that the young Scholem had rejected; he was well aware that Zionism undermined its existence. Was this risky destruction justified in hindsight? From the perspective of the Israeli crisis in the aftermath of the traumatic Yom Kippur War of 1973, Scholem was not sure: “When you look at the secularization process, at the barbarization of the so-called new culture . . . it is difficult to discern any seed of the future, any fructifying seed. But who knows? Maybe it’s impossible to undergo crisis differently. Degeneration for the purpose of regeneration—yerida letsorekh aliya.”3 As a fervent adherent of the dialectics of history,4 Scholem believed that there was no way back to the old world of Jewish tradition; it had been destroyed irrevocably. But secular culture was not the final, elevated destiny of progress; it was only an interim phase. The old religious era needed to pass away in order to clear the way for a new one. Scholem thus hoped that the crisis of destruction would not lead to “death” and “oblivion” but that it could be a “crisis of birth,” the birth of a new Jewish spiritual existence: “We saw secularism as raw material, as a state out of which something new and endurable would be created.” As a proud anarchist he celebrates the liquidation of halakhic Judaism but still yearns for the emergence of a new form of mystical—and, again, religious—Judaism in its place.5 This interview (like other late texts of Scholem) raises some troubling questions: If Scholem craves a new religious era, why has he fought so fervently for the secularization of politics (as he demands, in the same interview, separating political Zionism from messianism6) and of the study of Kabbalah (as he stressed the need for a detached, historicized study of it)?7 And in what sense does he portray himself as a “nonsecular Jew”? Perhaps Scholem’s radical definition of secularization is responsible for the confusion. Whereas he presents secularization as the destruction of the religious past, many sociologists define it in a much more innocent way: as the process in the course of which religion becomes irrelevant, boring, and meaningless (just as kashrut practices were to the young Scholem), or the one in which religion is marginalized as modernity separates religion from science, economics, and politics (just as Scholem denies the religious layers of Jewish politics and scholarship). Indeed, using these more accepted definitions of secularization, we could relocate Scholem, against his will, into a secular context. Many contemporary sociologists of religion could say that Scholem’s antinomian, mystical version of future Judaism is a typical artifact of secularization.8 Scholem would not have agreed. First, he had far too dramatic a personality to accept this banality of secularization; second, it seems that he had some good reasons to exclude himself from secularity. Those reasons are not intellectual, however. They reflect Scholem’s turbulent personal experience, or in other words, his traumas. Scholem’s disdain of secularization is not the result, I argue, of the destructive aspect of secularization. Paradoxically, it is the constructive aspect that bothers him. Indeed, secularization is not only the rejection of religion but also its transformation: the metamorphosis by which religious symbols and energies appear

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in modern, secular garb. Scholem was receptive to destructive secularization because he believed it could pave the way for new religious forms; the messianic expectations of his youth helped him to believe that the nihilistic void of the transition period would not last for long. But the transformation processes, in which secular essences like nations were hallowed and charged with explosive religious energies, horrified him. As I shall try to demonstrate, despite this profound reservation, Scholem did not avoid transformative secularization altogether. He marshaled his brilliant creativity for the staggering endeavor of creating an idiosyncratic transformation that would yield a “neutralized” worldliness. This fiery struggle with the messianic and catastrophic faces of secularization, I aver, affected some of Scholem’s titanic ventures: transforming the scholarly approach to the Kabbalah, understanding the essence of mysticism, and fighting for Zionism’s proper course. A more accurate account of Scholem’s concept of secularization, however, must be correlated with his early biography because this concept went through several stages in which it was changed dramatically. Those frequent changes might be responsible for some confusing contradictions in Scholem’s personal and theoretical writing on secularization. I maintain that one cannot overlook the chronology of Scholem’s various (and incoherent) assessments of secularization. This chapter examines the noteworthy stages of Scholem’s development, from a youthful religious rebellion to a Zionist immanent secularization, and further on, to an idiosyncratic type of “negative” secularization. I shall demonstrate how Scholem’s break with his father and his encounter with Buber and World War I shaped his developing concept of secularization and how this, in turn, affected his early Zionism and his vocation as a Judaic scholar.

Looking for the Lost Tradition On [my grandfather’s] gravestone . . . the Hebrew inscription still refers to him as Scholem Scholem. . . . The gravestone of my father (1925) bore no Hebrew inscription. What fascinated me in those days, the power of a tradition thousands of years old, was strong enough to shape my life. —Gershom Scholem, 1977

The young Scholem’s rich cultural world was marked by the total rejection of his parents’ values and habitus. He grew up in a typical Jewish bourgeois family of Wilheminian Germany, where diligence, respectability, practicality, rationalism, and German patriotism were devotedly cherished; Jewish rituals and traditions, conversely, were derided.9 Shulamit Volkov has taught us that such families had a solid Jewish identity based on their persistent loyalty to bourgeois values (even when they were questioned by their Gentile peers) and based also on their intimate and almost exclusive

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social network with other bourgeois Jews.10 But Scholem found this identity dull and deceitful; he looked for a sound Jewish identity based on distinct Jewish content—this was the essence of his evolving Zionism. He enthusiastically adopted Herzl’s dictum that Zionism is first and foremost a return to Judaism.11 Scholem lamented the loss of Jewish tradition in his family and among German Jewry. Even if the Hebrew words and rites were preserved, their inner meaning had been lost: “The Kiddush, the Hebrew blessing for the Sabbath, was still chanted but only half understood. That did not keep people from using the Sabbath candles to light a cigarette or cigar afterwards.” The religious rituals metamorphosed into bourgeois rituals; a lively belief in God became a shallow commitment to monotheistic morality.12 Many Jewish adolescents rebelled against their parents’ bourgeois life and venerated instead anti-bourgeois socialism; many others turned to an irrational, anarchistic, and unrestrained youth culture. Scholem adopted both sides—he was both a socialist and an anarchistic irrationalist.13 But his revolt had yet another very unique facet: an attraction toward the much-despised Orthodoxy. Drawn by his religious sentiment to seek the lost Jewish tradition, Scholem became an Orthodox Jew. One might say that his youthful Zionism was the combined outcome of these three conflicting penchants with just one common denominator: his father’s contempt of these three alternatives. In his first diary entry, from winter 1913, he writes: “My Bar Mitzvah took place on December 2, 1911. Since that day I have been an Orthodox Jew (I hate the [liberal] Lindenstrasse [Synagogue], where my Bar Mitzvah took place).”14 Two years later, he wrote about this period in his turbulent life: “I was totally and utterly Orthodox, offering no justification for small acts of apostasy, such as carrying a bag on the Sabbath.”15 He frequently visited Orthodox synagogues, taught himself Hebrew, bought and enthusiastically read Jewish books, and learned Mishnah and Talmud with a tiny group of Zionists. “It was my first . . . encounter . . . with Jewish substance in tradition,” he writes in his autobiography.16 Little wonder he participated in the meetings of the Agudat Yisrael youth group, where he was even elected to the executive committee. The romance with the lost Jewish tradition, however, lasted barely a year. In May 1914, accused by other Agudat Yisrael committee members of not being truly halakhically observant, Scholem was forced to resign from the leadership. “A month later, I left Orthodoxy. It wasn’t an easy decision,” he wrote in his diary. In his autobiography he admits that the verdict was not unjustified; he was repelled by the stringent details of halakhic practices.17 But it wasn’t just a matter of lethargy, especially for someone who adopted so ardently Aby Warburg’s dictum, “God is in the details.” It seems that Scholem’s attraction to tradition and his desperate search for the lost Jewish past was at odds with his declared anarchism and his antipathy to any kind of organization and dogmas.18 In one of his lectures he admitted in retrospect: “When I began to study the Hebrew language in my youth, against my parents’ wishes and in clear rebellion

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against their authority, an intense attraction toward tradition awakened within me. Although its archaic character was clear to me, I nevertheless sensed something in its heartbeat that indicated its ability to undergo a vital transformation. . . .”19 One can’t just ignore the paradox: Scholem’s break with his parents led him to tradition, but is not tradition based on a son’s deep trust in his father, on the continuity of generations?20 Considering secularization as the awareness of the rupture with the past, Scholem’s blunder demonstrates vividly the intricacy of restoring tradition in a secular age. If we can rely on the authenticity of this late text, we must conclude that the young Scholem, even in his short Orthodox phase, yearned for renewal, not for restoration. No wonder Scholem craved for a fateful encounter of conservation and transformation, of tradition and anarchy; no wonder he couldn’t find it in Orthodoxy. In the same diary entry in which he bids farewell to Orthodoxy, he declares: “I’m now sailing full speed ahead in the direction of Martin Buber.” Buber’s modernized religiosity attracted him. After resisting secularization as a rejection of the sacred, Scholem would now engage in a daring endeavor to secularize the sacred by its transformation.

The Spells of Immanence “Martin Buber . . . was the first one to proclaim a Zionism of tomorrow . . . he has become . . . a prophet of a God who has yet to be born,” wrote Scholem in his diary in 1915.21 Buber offered Scholem and his generation religious sentiment without tradition and halakhah. Like Scholem, he scorned nineteenth-century secularization, namely, the hasty effort to make religion redundant. For Buber, religion was the beating heart of culture, and in the Zionist context it was the only true basis for genuine Jewish regeneration.22 This approach was definitely not an appeal to traditional religion. Buber deliberately broke with tradition; he believed that tradition is a fossilized belief, the halakhah only a refuge designed “to avoid looking into God’s abyss.” The divine word had not frozen into the dead letters of the sacred text but it was alive in “our innermost hearts.”23 In his address “Judaism and the Jews” from 1909, the first of his highly influential “Addresses on Judaism,” Buber said: “Just as the Jews of the old days . . . gave their lives for the sake of the one God, the total unity, so we, living in another kind of duality, must liberate ourselves; not through devotion to God, since we no longer have God anymore, but through devotion to the foundation of our existence, to the unity of our inner essence.”24 The transcendent God was dead; the longed-for unity was not beyond, but within us. In another address, Buber stresses: “God [is] inclining toward the world. . . . His Shekhinah descends to the world in order to abide with it. Sparks of the divine fell into the soul of man. Transcendent unity became immanent—the unity of the world . . . being-God . . . , the God of Baruch Spinoza.”25

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Buber’s Zionism relies on this immanent religious renewal so as to render nature, ethnicity, and territory sacred and unconditional. In one of his late articles on Buber, Scholem acknowledges that it was precisely Buber’s anarchism that attracted him so much: “We were young . . . and we looked for a new way. . . . Formulas from past generations were beyond our scope, or we didn’t know how to find in them our own essence. .  .  . And then came Buber’s appeal.  .  .  . He promised to a frozen Jewish world a revolutionary revival from within, the disclosure of concealed life beneath the formal, frozen structures. . . . Our crude and anarchistic feeling was deeply excited by this appeal, which, despite all the splendor of the rhyming and rich sentences, contained so much anarchism and ‘Deep calleth unto deep’” (Psalms 42:7).26 As Aschheim has shown, the young Scholem was enchanted by Buber and his creed. Only his intimate records betray his (transitory) admiration of Buber; his later denunciation impelled him to conceal any trace of this youthful Buber intoxication.27 Buber’s inspiring, anarchistic, anti-traditionalist religiosity and its implication for a new Zionist doctrine attracted Scholem and satisfied his quest for a renewed Jewish identity. For him, too, God dwells in the abyss, where the safe path of tradition ends abruptly. In his journey to the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1914, Scholem hears God’s “voice” rumbling over the mountains and proclaims: “You are the chaos now, out of you alone shall the Eternal Will bring renewal. God could be found only in danger.”28 Scholem’s desperate search for his authenticity echoes again and again in his diary, phrased in Buber’s words and molded in his cult of renewal. At this point, Scholem bluntly rejects Herzl’s maxim that Zionism is a return to Judaism. For him, Zionism was a total revolution, a renewal; it was a dramatic surge into the unknown, not a return to any given form of Judaism.29 Like Buber, Scholem looks for God on earth, not in heaven: “God lives in the hills . . . the God of experience, of mythos. . . . In the hills lives ecstasy, which is the wedding with that God.”30 Secularization is thus the act of Verweltlichung, a Nietzschean demand for transvaluation: “Mauthner states that our highest objective is to be the pioneers of godlessness. . . . If not exactly godlessness, transferring heaven to earth certainly wouldn’t do us any harm.”31 Transcendence, to Scholem, is the outcome of exile—without earth, the divinity has been projected onto heaven, and Scholem demands: “Give us back the earth, ye gods and men! You’ve taken it away from us long enough!”32 As Nietzsche cried, the old God is dead: “Over the past century, the old heaven has been so completely torn to pieces that it’s now gone forever.” But a new God has appropriated the vacant throne: “My God is but an ideal generated by the dreams of a fulfilled human life.”33 In a touching diary entry, Scholem laments his twofold loss of tradition. Clearly, if the Enlightenment had left any threads of tradition, Buber’s counterEnlightenment finally tore them apart: “We are homeless [heimatlos] because our father’s home is not ours anymore. We are looking for a holy land.” But the mission was much more daring: This land did not exist; it needed to be created and

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sanctified anew. And this brings Scholem to mysticism, as he continues: “We seek not the old, but a mysticism that is young and that was born with us.”34

The Abyss of Immanence From nothingness I went to Orthodoxy, and from there I continued on to Buber; and from Buber—by giving him up—I arrived at Zion. —Gershom Scholem, 1916 From infiniteness /a star has risen to the fore /reaching the heaven’s door; /far beyond time and space, /did you really intend to be deceived? /You have so blissfully surrendered yourself to it / it was the War! . . . It was only a false, ghost-light,/ that through the worlds went/ it was the War! —Gershom Scholem, 1915

The romance with Buber, like the one with Orthodoxy, was short lived. Scholem’s admiration of Buber and his creed soon turned into lifelong reservations and hostility.35 Even though first signs of criticism appear as early as December 1914,36 the break with Buber was hesitant and complicated. In the spring of 1915 Scholem was surprised to find himself deeply into the spirit of Buber. He even planned to write a comprehensive essay or book on Buber and his momentous contribution to Jewish and European culture.37 In one of his most striking diary entries, written in the same period, he identified Buber as the harbinger of the redeemer of the Jewish people, the perfect one, Shalem, as Scholem wrote, using the Hebrew word. Buber had found the soul of the Jew—the innermost religiosity, while his successor, Scholem, would fasten this soul together with the Jewish body while curbing the devastating influence of rationalism.38 Gradually, however, this fanatic devotion gave way to no less fanatic enmity; Scholem’s diaries reveal the cause of the break: World War I. Confronting this unprecedented, dramatic event, the mentor and his devoted follower found themselves at odds. Buber, like many other leading German intellectuals, backed the war (and the German cause in it) and saw it as an opportunity for cultural rebirth.39 Yet Scholem, for his part, believed that the war signified the breakdown of European culture: “Today, in heaven, a mighty Kaddish will be said for Europe. Will it be the ‘Kaddish of renewal’? . . . No, it will be the Kaddish of condemnation against the servants of Moloch.”40 His opposition to the war caused him to challenge his father once again, and he avoided recruitment by claiming insanity.41 In his diary he wrote: “Werner’s friend Jansen was killed in action. . . . The old men should be shipped off to war. They can kill one another if they want, they just shouldn’t rob youth of its blood, which is a vicious act against the future of society. We shouldn’t tolerate it. But the youth think ‘you have to go along.’ . . . What is the stupidity of the gods measured against the slyness of men?”42

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Scholem could not overlook the fact that Buber glorified the war and the German militaristic ethos, applying the same worldly Erlebnis religiosity he had promoted as a basis for Jewish regeneration,43 and he gradually became attentive to the hazards of basing Zionism on Buber’s sanctification of human subjectivity. Buber’s mystical folkism, Scholem contended, had rendered holy the individual revelation of the hidden national ego without providing any moral restrictions on its manifestations. In his diary Scholem comments sarcastically: “Buber wishes to make repairs on a bad racial theory by substituting racial mysticism.”44 In a draft entitled “Zionism and Egoism,” he warns: “Zionism will not overcome the roots of egoism until it overcomes experience [Erlebnis], which is the deepest source of this egoism.” The destiny of the aspired-for “revolutionary Zion” will be doomed if Buber’s cult of experience is not uprooted.45 He repeatedly criticizes Buber’s creed of subjectivism and inner experiences and its sway on Zionist youth while struggling to construct an “objective,” transcendent anchor (which he often calls “Zion”) from which an ultimate, unconditional demand could be uttered.46 In a poignant letter to his once-adored mentor, Scholem writes to Buber: “The highest price should be paid for a movement or it will fall into the abyss that threatens at every moment to swallow it: [The abyss of ] immanence, of being founded on emotional experience alone.”47 The abyss, which had attracted Scholem so greatly only a couple of years earlier, now seemed like a horrifying threat—the unrestrained sanctification of man’s deeds leads eventually to the sanctification of power, violence, and jingoism, he realized. After immigrating to Palestine in 1923, Scholem became more aware of the treacherous implications of the same phenomenon in the Zionist case. This is the context of his oft-cited letter of December 1926 to Franz Rosenzweig, a candid account of the limited feats of the Zionist secularization process. The letter opens with the Arab threat to the Zionist enterprise but quickly turns to what seems to be the real threat in Scholem’s eyes—secularization as transformation: “Is not the holy language, which we have planted among our children, an abyss that must open up? People . . . think that they have turned Hebrew into a secular language and that they have removed its apocalyptic sting, but it is not so. . . . Will not the religious power latent therein one day break out against its speakers? . . . A generation which has inherited the most fruitful of all of the holy traditions, our language, cannot live without tradition.”48 Scholem turned his back on secularization for two reasons: First, he did not believe it could really be implemented; the religious would not surrender its power to the secular without returning someday, like Rumpelstiltskin, to collect its debt. Second, the hidden religious powers that were secularized by the forerunners of Zionism could be lethal if they reappeared in the modern political realm. Some could see here a startling prophecy about Gush Emunim (religious Zionist movement that emphasized Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line) or the meteoric ascendance of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) demographic power, but this is, first and foremost, a desperate warning about the perils of the abyss of immanence. We must read this letter in the light of Scholem’s inspiring eulogy of Franz Rosenzweig,

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where, referring to the alienation of Zionism from theology, he avowed dramatically: “Nobody needs it, and why should we, who in our new discovery of nationhood are making Judaism secular .  .  . have any need of it? However, questions about the eternal life of the Eternal People before the eternal God are not of the sort that can be forgotten. After the Zionist movement has set itself to the work of implementation, the [old] question must arise . . . : Where are we headed? And with it the old answer: toward ‘the star of redemption.’”49 According to Scholem, therefore, Zionism secularizes the religious notion of redemption immanently, transforming it into a total demand for a nation-state and the resolution of the Jewish problem. But the inner, hidden layer of religious redemption will eventually rise with all its catastrophic impulse. The tragic result might be a catastrophe when the apocalyptic battle that results in the destruction of evil might emerge in secularized form as Jewish-Arab bloodshed.50 In a draft from 1917, Scholem stresses that the secularized cult of experience (the essence of Buber’s worldly secularization) draws its spell from the worlds of Tohu (chaos), those divine powers of the primary creation that broke down generating the dark powers of evil.51 Thus the adoption of this type of secularization would inevitably lead to further catastrophes just as it had led to World War I.

Redemption as Secularizing the Transcendent The Torah is not a law, just as Judaism is not religion. Torah is the transmission by tradition of God and divine things; it is the principle of the gradual rediscovery of the truth that is hinted at in writing but whose understanding has been lost. —Gershom Scholem, 191652

Standing in front of the abyss, Scholem did not turn back, as we might expect, to the more convenient pattern of secularization, namely to the separation of nationalism and religion and of Zionism and messianism. Instead, he tried to form a new brand of secularization, one which still transforms heaven into earth but posits another kind of heaven. If Buber and his disciples secularized the immanent God, Scholem attempted to secularize divine transcendence. After a year of devoted admiration, Scholem deserted Buber and developed an alternative creed. As he wrote in a diary entry from December 1915: “I was following Buber, and now I’m following myself.”53 Arguably, 1916 was the most decisive year of his early life;54 at that time Scholem launched his own spiritual doctrine that shaped his highly influential account of mysticism—general and Jewish alike. Scholem now rejects Buber’s key notion of the divine presence and disqualifies it as “Gentile” or “idolatrous”; true Jewish mysticism, he said, resides in the inaccessibility of God, not his omnipresence.55 Scholem stresses that the sense of divine remoteness is the true essence of Judaism. Only man’s horror at the gap between nature and himself, between the creator and its creation, has produced the

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modern inclination toward pantheism: “Oh, you mighty swindle of pantheism. . . . My life is first created through distance, distance is the only source of the law; it is the law itself. Intermingling with the landscape is modernity’s biggest and most horrid magical trick. It is aestheticism—the deep fear and murderous horror of distance, because distance could make demands.”56 The last sentence is crucial to our understanding of Scholem’s new concept of secularization and its integration into his Zionist creed. For Scholem, secularizing transcendence enables Zionism to bypass halakhic demands while preserving uncompromising moral demands, a vital resource for his twofold struggle. First, a struggle against what he called “hatschi-Zionism” (Hatschizionismus), the impotent, Buber-inspired Zionism of the youth movements, restricted to lively experiences, identity games, and empty phraseology.57 Second, a struggle against the aggressive, immoral tendencies that surfaced among many Zionists during World War I. Transforming an inaccessible God brings Scholem surprisingly close to the once-despised liberal thought of Hermann Cohen.58 At this point his letters to Zionist colleagues convey his new, demanding Zionist credo. Responding to his friend Aharon Heller’s declaration that “Our goal is realizing Zionism equals realizing the Torah, [which] equals realizing [the verse] ‘And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.’ . . . Each Zionist must work toward being holy, i.e., a tsadik, a moral man to the tip of his fingers,”59 Scholem concurs and adds: “We must all realize that to build what we want requires a bit of asceticism (in all things!) . . . Obscenity blocks every possible access to the holy. . . . It’s better to obtain greatness and purity in Exile (if this is even thinkable) than to endure pagan abomination in Eretz Israel.”60 To his friend Gerda Goldberg he writes: “More important than belief in God is whether you accept the Torah—which is to say, whether we make a law, or a metaphysically grounded imperative, an integral part of our lives. . . . We should submit our lives to laws—and not those of a ‘law book’ but rather the deep laws of the spiritual worlds which I sense are active in Zionism. . . . It is very difficult to answer the crucial question ‘Where did the evil way of the Jews begin?’ [I answer:] . . . when Jews started to live intensely, when they no longer wanted to be holy.61 The religious significance of Zionism (or in other words—what Zionism ought to secularize) is not Buber’s apotheosis of man and his experiences (i.e., “living intensely”) but presenting and complying with the uttermost demands, acceding to the lofty rules of existence. Scholem’s new notion of secularization reshaped not only his Zionism but also his concept of mysticism; now, for Scholem, true mysticism was not the urge for unification but the humble avowal of the infinite distance between God and the mundane world, or in his own words: “Mysteries inspire reverence [Ehrfurcht], though there is only one thing that deserves reverence, and that is really the only true object of mysticism: the ‘great abyss,’ which only God’s judgment can bridge. . . . Reverence is basically a mystical feeling. It is the intimation that behind everything yawns the ‘great abyss’ and that one must surrender to the power that animates it.”62

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Scholem now finds the atheist mysticism of Fritz Mauthner useful in constructing his new concept of secularization.63 As in his Buberian period, he juxtaposes mystical experience and secularization, but whereas earlier Scholem (following Buber) had portrayed the true mystic as the one that finds God secularized in His total mundane presence, his later mystic was one who finds God secularized in His total absence: “Mysticism is the experience of reverence. . . . The philosopher knows something about what exists or what will be; the mystic has witnessed something that doesn’t exist and also never will. He has quite simply seen the impossible (and only the mystic knows that God doesn’t exist): He has seen reverence. He has seen the holy.”64 These radical illuminations are the origins of Scholem’s esoteric treatises written from 1918 to 1921, his first (and probably last) endeavor to form an idiosyncratic systematic thought, or rather—a modern secret doctrine. In those enigmatic compositions (which he never published), he elaborates his new Jewish theology. In his “Ninety-five Theses on Judaism and Zionism,” dedicated to his close friend Walter Benjamin, he stresses the negativity of his metaphysics: “The Kabbalah calls God ‘the Infinite’ [and] also ‘Nothingness.’”65 The true God could not be reached or grasped, and he quotes the dictum of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism—“‘God’s Torah is perfect’—because no one has ever touched it.”66 That is why “Torah and experience are absolute opposites”;67 he thus replaces Buberian experience with silence, the humble person standing in front of the inaccessible divinity: “Fervor and silence—these are the secrets of Zionists.”68 In two other treatises, “Torah from Zion” and “The Politics of Judaism,” he further elaborates the unique character of his two key concepts: the Torah (Lehre) and Zion. These are the true cornerstones of both Judaism and Zionism; both Torah (the anarchic Jewish content) and Zion (the utopian Jewish territory) are inaccessible, they are anarchic concepts and only by preserving their anarchic makeup can a true Zionism be developed.69 While Buber preached a Zionism based on land and community that enclose— through experience—the divine immanence, his rebellious disciple Scholem yearned for land and community that was bearing—through silence—the divine transcendence. In an enigmatic unsent letter, Scholem hinted at a Zionism based on “the invisible power that is exerted through the tradition throughout nothingness [Tradition durch Nichts], one that does not depend [on our awareness of it]” and to a new anarchistic Gemeinschaft based on “the nothingness, and on the comprehension of this nothingness, as long as it is comprehensible.”70 He hoped that this kind of transformation would not lead eventually to the sanctification of power and violence. I have shown elsewhere that this acrobatic metaphysics is the true source of Scholem’s political moderation, the hidden backdrop of his political activity in Brit Shalom from 1925 until 1933. Scholem’s overt justification for his moderation, namely, the secularization of Zionist politics and its decisive separation from messianism covers up a concealed inverse justification: Zion is indeed holy, but this is what makes it inaccessible for us, thus clearing the way for practical compromise with the Arabs.71

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This new concept of negative secularization, crystalizing in the years preceding Scholem’s immigration to Palestine, is pertinent not only to his endeavors to construct a more favorable route between the sacred and the mundane but also to his lifelong interpretation of the religious import of the historical process of secularization. Scholem unexpectedly states that only the victory of secularization enabled God’s true revelation, the revelation of the divine nothingness: “God, banished from man by psychology and from the world by sociology, . . . has withdrawn to some hidden place and does not disclose Himself. Is he truly disclosed? Perhaps this last withdrawal is His revelation? Perhaps God’s removal to the point of nothingness was a higher need, and He will reveal His kingship only to a world that has been emptied?”72 Modernity is the final break with tradition; we can no longer transform God’s presence, only His divine absence, the heavenly nothingness, the Ayin.73 “Buber is a false mentor,” Scholem states in one of his ninety-five theses on Judaism and Zionism.74 A decade later he found a new mentor—Franz Kafka. As early as the summer of 1916, Scholem inscribes in his diary a song entitled “The National Hymn of the Quietists,” in which he expresses a pessimistic, Kafkaesque sentiment: “God is the eternal crossroad, /in which you stand trembling; /He is the great world-dread,/ that you can never avoid feeling.”75 The demonic universe that Kafka portrayed so ably suited Scholem’s new notion of tragic secularization well. But this is not all: as Robert Alter and Stéphane Moses have already noted, Kafka’s modern negative mysticism, his “new secret doctrine,” appealed to Scholem because it provided such vivid symbols for the break with tradition and the revelation of nothingness.76 Scholem’s poem on The Trial, from 1934, conveys the confluence of his new concept of secularization and the Kafkaesque dread: Are we utterly estranged from you?/ Lord, is no breath of your peace/or hint of your promised light/meant for us in this dark night? Can your word have so expired/among Zion’s empty wastes—/or has it yet to permeate/this spellbound realm of semblance? This is the sole ray of revelation in an age that disavowed you,/ entitled only to experience you,/in the shape of your negation.77

In his stimulating correspondence with his friend Walter Benjamin about Kafka’s work and its meaning, Scholem stresses, “I am . . . firmly convinced that a theological aspect of this world, in which God does not appear,” is the most appropriate interpretation of Kafka’s prose.78 The gate of the Law (a puzzling symbol, which Scholem found surprisingly similar to his own Lehre) is still open and available, if also inaccessible. In another letter to Benjamin he elucidates the essence of this parable: “You ask what I understand by the ‘nothingness of revelation’? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak. This is obviously

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a borderline case in the religious sense, and whether it can really come to pass is a very dubious point.”79 This view is what makes Scholem a religious anarchist and enables him to disavow both secularity (for denying the existence of the open gate of the law and its enormous effects) and religion (for ignoring the unattainability of the law). His secularity is tragic. In one of his late essays, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” he uses the famous kabbalistic symbol of the tsimtsum (contraction) in order to demonstrate the Kafkaean tragedy of secularization. According to the Lurianic lore, the creation of the world required a drastic limitation of the divine infiniteness; hence, the first step of creation was making a vacant void (halal panui), devoid of the divine presence. Into this void penetrated a slender, restricted beam of light from which the heavenly spheres originated.80 But Scholem emphasizes that this second act of revelation “collides irreconcilably and catastrophically” with the modern “horrifying experience of God’s absence in our world.” And he continues: “The radiation of which the mystics speak and which is to attest to the Revelation of God in Creation—that radiation is no longer perceivable by despair. The emptying of the world to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or direction is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void—in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.”81 The subject of this chapter is not really theology but its secularization. Scholem stresses that the dominant scientific worldview has rendered the notion of creation irrelevant and even ridiculous; it has banished God from the human horizon and thus robbed the world of its meaning. He mocks the attempts to reestablish meaning and unqualified values within a restricted natural perspective; as he asserted more than a decade earlier, unconditional demands and transcendent meaning (that is, holiness), can be bestowed only by a religious impulse, but this impulse cannot emerge in our secularized world. The ray of revelation cannot enlighten our lives because tradition has been broken. We are all trapped in the empty void.82

The Abyss of Scholarship Perhaps it was not so much the key that was missing as the courage—the courage to risk the descent into the abyss that might one day swallow us up. —Gershom Scholem, 1937

This new version of secularization molded Scholem’s idiosyncratic concept of modern research on Judaism.83 David Biale dealt with this issue long ago,84 but I believe that Scholem’s papers, available only in the last decade, enable us to reexamine, recontextualize, and even partly revise his important research.

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Another famous poem of Scholem’s illustrates his view of his vocation as a scholar. The poem was dedicated to his “Gnostic colleague” Hans Jonas, upon sending him a copy of his magnum opus, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: The glimmer of Truth is ancient,/ Yet disaster is unforeseen:/ Generations are weakly linked,/ And knowledge is not clean. “I have brought back the blurred face/ Of the fullness of time./ I was ready to leap into the abyss,/ But was I really primed? The ancestral symbols are here explained . . . / But what transformed time proposes/ Remains foreign, beyond our scope.”85

For Scholem, not only God is remote (“beyond our scope”), but so is the sacred text. Since tradition has been destroyed, we have lost our direct approach to the text. Later, Scholem expresses this tragedy in a somewhat clearer way: “The Kabbalist affirms that there is a tradition of truth that is bequeathable [tradierbar]. An ironic statement because the truth in question here is anything but bequeathable. It can be known, but not handed down, and precisely the element of it that can be handed down does not contain it any longer. Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the fallen tradition [verfallende Tradition] falls upon [verfällt] an object. Only in falling does its greatness become visible.”86 But this catastrophe still has a positive effect: This is what enables us to approach the texts with all the apparatus of modern philology, and Scholem posits himself, with all his explicit and implicit criticism, within this practice. As Scholem stresses in his heated attack on Wissenschaft des Judentums, secularization—that is, the collapse of tradition—is indeed crucial to our estrangement from the text, enabling us to understand it scientifically and turning us into philologists.87 In the same breath, however, he warns that if we celebrate this estrangement, as the demons of Hochmat Israel have done, the abyss will swallow us; we should not disclaim the “radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway” of the text (to paraphrase Kafka). My allusion to Kafka’s parables is not accidental; those parables (and their decoding in Scholem’s letter to Benjamin) are present in one of Scholem’s rare explicit utterances about the “true intentions” of his scholarship, his letter to Zalman Schocken from 1937. It is no wonder that he opens his letter praising Kafka as the herald of new sentiment, “a secularized description for a contemporary person of the feeling of a kabbalistic world.” Scholem stresses that from a scientific perspective (like that of Wissenschaft des Judentums), the “key to [the] understanding” of the symbols of the Kabbalah “seems to have been lost,” but “the mountain itself—the things themselves—does not need a key at all; it is only the misty wall of history that surrounds it that must be penetrated.”88 We must carefully examine Scholem’s parable: The clouds of history conceal the essence of Kabbalah, but he still presents them as crucial for its understanding, arguably because they hinder the blazing rays of the Kabbalah from burning us. The historical contextualization enables us to leave God’s word untouched; this is the only way left to preserve its holiness in a secularized world and to protect that world from the hazards of God’s omnipresence.89

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Indeed, after his emigration to Palestine, Scholem almost completely deserts the direct treatment of his youthful kabbalistic metaphysics, as he now believes that, like God, the elevated, hidden Torah is concealed. Leaving behind his modern mysticism, he reinvents himself as a pedantic scholar. An infinite abyss separates us from the text; we must commemorate its opaqueness by scientific remoteness. Once again, secularization is the only way to maintain God’s revelation. This, however, is not all. The letter elaborates the crucial role of the return to history for Scholem. In many of his essays (especially after the foundation of the State of Israel), he stresses that the essence of Zionism is the Jewish people’s return to history,90 but this return is precisely the way in which Scholem constructs his religious anarchism: “With the return of the Jewish people to its own history and to its own land, Judaism has for the majority of us become an open, living, and undefined organism. It is a phenomenon that changes and is transformed in the course of its own history. The scholarly work of our generation has discovered new dimensions of depth and of living movements that we call Judaism or Jewishness.”91 By historicizing the religious tradition, Scholem highlights its relativity; the living nation becomes the embodiment of revelation. No wonder that Scholem ends his “Reflections on Jewish Theology” paraphrasing two Talmudic sayings “which probably constitute the most sublime synopsis of religious Judaism in the past, and possibly in the future as well”—”‘The freedom of the Tablets’ of the Law and the ‘broken tablets’ that still lie together with the holy tablets in the ark of the covenant.”92 The canonization is lost; the tablets are broken to pieces—and this turns the engraving of the tablets, of the holy text, into freedom. No doubt that Scholem was fully aware of his notable contribution in his titanic scholarly enterprise to the modern fragmentation of the tablets. To sum up—Scholem’s historicization of the Kabbalah is intertwined with his mature concept of secularization; it preserves both the holiness—i.e., the remoteness—of the text and its anarchic character. Scholem’s struggles with secularization molded not only his hermeneutical approach to Kabbalah, but its image itself. His prolific and influential portrayals of the Kabbalah and mysticism in general (still dominant in spite of the profound reservations of Moshe Idel and others) could not have been born, I argue, without his notion of secularization as a metaphysical gap. In the opening chapter to his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism he writes: “There is no room for mysticism as long as the abyss between Man and God has not become a fact of inner consciousness.”93 In fact, this notion evolved in the formative period of 1916: “There is but one mystery, which can never be comprehended or hinted at in words or through words. . . . No wonder that the Kabbalah describes God as the Ayn-Sof. Existing beyond all borders, Ayn-Sof is that which cannot be named. . . . The only true object of mysticism [is] the ‘great abyss.’”94 Indeed, this decisive statement is reflected in Scholem’s controversial denial (or marginalization) of Jewish unio mystica. Scholem emphasizes that even when swept away by a fiery ecstatic experience, the Jewish mystic “retains a sense of the distance between the Creator and his creature.”95 It seems that Scholem’s own experience

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echoes in his description of the mission of the Jewish mystic: “Only when the soul . . . has descended into the depths of Nothing does it encounter the divine”; thus, Kabbalah is the sacred nihilism. That is why Kabbalah speaks in symbols, according to Scholem: “In Kabbalah, one is speaking of a reality that cannot be revealed or expressed at all save through the symbolic allusion. . . . Anything that becomes a symbol can take us into the great abyss that lies beneath, to the great inexpressible, to the aspect of the Nothing.”96 Indeed, when, at the end of the first chapter of his book, Scholem explicates the relevance of the symbolism of the Kabbalah to our days, he stresses that these symbols “make visible that abyss in which the symbolic nature of all that exists reveals itself.”97 This representation of Kabbalah and mysticism, born from Scholem’s tragic notion of the inaccessibility of the divine (and its secularizations) was easily absorbed into European culture; after all, post-Auschwitz Europe could easily identify with Scholem’s traumas, as well as with his deep sense of the seclusion of Homo modernicus.

Conclusion In his innovative essay “Reflections on the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time,” Scholem questions whether a new impulse of Jewish mysticism is feasible today: can new, modern symbols emerge? And could these symbols ever be canonized in a fragmented society?98 One could say that Scholem himself managed to express his modern drama of secularization (which has much to do with his attempts to generate modern mysticism, as I have showed elsewhere99) with the help of the good old symbols of Jewish mysticism—especially the Lurianic symbol of the tsimtsum. Deity and world exclude each other; the deepest act of God’s revelation is, in effect, His departure; and the emptying of the divine presence from the world is only an interim stage before a subsequent, curtailed revelation—all these are for Scholem both the various facets of the myth of tsimtsum but, at the same time, the essence of secularization. Secularization is thus paradoxically not a secular development; it is part and parcel of God’s Heilsgeschichte. No wonder that Scholem stressed consistently that the real significance of secularization is the painstaking examination and selection of the assorted religious phenomena—the religious content that survives secularization could form the religion of the future.100 Ultimately, every secular move is, essentially, a religious one. For Scholem, however, secularization possesses not only a theological dimension but also an existential one: It is awe in the face of the divine—especially when wearing a secular mask; the deep sense of homelessness; and the desperate, hopeless venture of leaping over the infinite abyss. In his penetrating essay on Scholem, Steven Aschheim wrote of “Scholem’s penchant for the demonic, his early and enduring intuition of what he called the ‘abyss’ . . .”101 Scholem insisted on daringly confronting the abyss but more important—on discerning the tenuous radiance that streams out of it.

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Notes 1. Gershom Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. W. J. Dannhauser (New York, 1976), 10. 2. Ibid., 34. 3. Ibid., 22. I changed the translation according to the Hebrew original. See also Gershom Scholem, “Secularism and Its Dialectical Transformation,” On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. A. Shapira (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1977), 101. 4. See Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 36; see also Amos Funkenstein, “Gerschom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos and the Messianic Dialectic,” History and Memory 4, no. 1 (1992): 123–40. 5. Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 19, quote from 42; see also 33–37 and Ehud Ben Ezer, “Zionism—Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion: Interview with Gershom Scholem” (1970), Unease in Zion (New York and Jerusalem, 1974), 273–78. 6. See Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 43–45; idem, “Zionism—Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion,” 269–70; idem, “On the Three Crimes of ‘Brith Shalom’” (1929), Od davar: Pirkay morashah utehiyah (Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance), ed. A Shapira (Tel Aviv, 1989), 88–89 (Hebrew); idem, “Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos,” Der Jude, Sonderheft zum 50. Geburtstag Martin Bubers (Frankfurt, 1928), 139. Scholem is ambivalent about this issue, too. Elsewhere in the interview he stresses: “Since I don’t believe in ‘like all nations,’ I do not see ultimate secularism as possible for us and it will not come to pass. . . . There is no reason for the Jews to live like the Serbs. The Serbs have reason to exist without theology, without an ahistorical dimension. If the Jews will try to explain themselves only in a historical dimension . . . the Jewish people will find itself without any impulse to continue existing” (Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 34). 7. See Scholem, “The Science of Judaism—Here and Now,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), 304–13; idem, “What Others Rejected: Kabbalah and Historical Criticism,” in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 75–79. 8. See Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford and New York, 1996). 9. See Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 1–6; idem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 10–12, 37–38. 10. Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, UK and New York, 2006), 170–223. 11. See Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem,” 1–6; idem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 25–31; idem, “Wenn man erzählen könnte, wie wir Zionisten wurden” (1919), Tagebücher: nebst Aufsätze und Entwürfen, Halbband: 1917–1923, ed. K. Gründer et al. (Frankfurt, 2000), 2: 552. 12. See Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 10–12, 21–32, 37–39; the quote is from 10. See also 11: “My parents had learned Hebrew in their childhood. My mother, who had already forgotten her Hebrew, surprised me one day when . . . she recited from memory . . . the complete text of the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. . . . To be sure, she had no idea what the prayer meant.” 13. See Steven E. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington, 2001), 9–36. 14. Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem 1913–1919, ed. A. D. Skinner (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007), 22. 15. Diary entry from 20 December 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 88. 16. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 47. See also undated entry, Tagebücher: nebst Aufsätze und Entwürfen, Halbband: 1913–1917, ed. K. Gründer et al (Frankfurt, 1995), 1: 21–22. 17. Gershom Scholem, Miberlin liyerushalayim (Hebrew edition of From Berlin to Jerusalem) (Tel Aviv, 1982), 53–54; Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 88; see also his resignation letter to Agudat Israel from 10 May 1914, in which he gives a Zionist, ideological explanation for his withdrawal: Gershom Scholem: Briefe, ed. I. Shedletzky, 3 vols. (Munich, 1994), 1: 3. 18. See the correspondence with his brother Werner from 1914 concerning socialism: Scholem, Briefe, 1: 3–15.

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19. Scholem, “My Way to Kabbalah,” On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time, 21. The article was originally written in 1974. 20. See Paul Heelas, “Introduction: Detraditionalization and Its Rivals,” in Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, ed. P. Heelas, S. Lash, and P. Morris (Oxford, 1996), 3–7. 21. Diary entry from 27 January 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 49–50. 22. On Buber’s treatment of religion in his early Zionist writing, see his “Jüdischer Renaissance” (1900), Die Jüdische Bewegung: gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1920), 1: 7–16, and other essays in this collection; see also Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work: vol. 1. The Early Years, 1878–1923 (New York, 1981): 24–26. 23. Martin Buber, “The Holy Way” (1918), On Judaism, ed. N. Glatzer, (New York, 1967), 136– 37. See also: Hans Kohn, Martin Buber, sein Werk und seine Zeit (Hellerau, 1931), 23–24, 48–55; Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1992) 105–7; Ron Margolin, “The Implicit Secularism of Martin Buber’s Thought,” Israel Studies 13 (2008) 64–88. 24. Quoted according to Scholem’s private copy of Martin Buber, Drei Reden über das Judentum (Frankfurt, 1911), 30–31 (Scholem Library, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem). This text has an interesting history: In the 1931 edition of the speeches, Buber omitted completely the entire quoted paragraph; even in the earlier 1911 edition of the speeches, the original atheistic expressions were softened, but Scholem preserved for us the original phrase according to the testimony of his friend Robert Weltsch, who attended Buber’s address in Prague. 25. Buber, “Renewal of Judaism” (1910), On Judaism, 43. 26. Scholem, “On Martin Buber” (Hebrew) (1953), Dvarim bego: Pirkay morashah utehiyah (Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance), ed. A. Shapira (Tel Aviv, 1976), 456–57 (my translation). 27. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 30. 28. Diary entry from 17 August 1914, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 30. 29. Diary entry from 23 January 1915, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:82–83. 30. Diary entry from 17 August 1914, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1:35. 31. Diary entry from 27 November 1914, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 65. 32. Diary entry from 19 November 1914, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 38. 33. Diary entry from 20 January 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 47. 34. Diary entry from 27 November 1914, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 65, translated partly in Lamentations of Youth, 42–43. 35. See his harsh criticism in his diary entry from 21 October 1917, Lamentations of Youth, 190, and his account in From Berlin to Jerusalem, 71–73, 76–80. On Scholem’s defiance of Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism, see his “Martin Buber’s Interpretation of Hasidism,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 227–50, and Moshe Idel, “Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism: A Critical Appraisal,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapaport-Albert (London, 1996), 389–403; Jerome J. Gellman, “Buber’s Blunder: Buber’s Replies to Scholem and Schatz-Uffenheimer,” Modern Judaism 20 (2000): 20–40. As we shall see later, the root of Scholem’s argument with Buber is the former’s denial of a Hasidic endeavor to “transform heaven into earth.” 36. See diary entries from 7 December 1914 and 4 January 1915, Tagebücher, 1: 73, 1: 77–78. 37. Diary entries from 8 and 15 May 1915, Lamentations of Youth, 52–53. Scholem explicitly links Buber’s enthusiasm for the war to “his glorification of the self.” 38. Diary entry from 22 May 1915, Lamentations of Youth, 54–58. See also Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 17–18. 39. See Martin Buber, “Bewegung: Aus einem Brief an einen Holländer,” Der neue Merkur 1 (1915): 489–92; Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “The ‘Kriegserlebnis’ and Jewish Consciousness,” Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik, ed. W. Benz, A. Paucker, and P. G. J. Pulzer (Tübingen, 1998), 225–29. On the more general context of Buber’s stance see Wolfgang J. Momsen, Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellectuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1996). 40. Diary entry from 1 August 1916, Lamentations of Youth, 123; see also the complete entry in Tagebücher, 1: 343–44.

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41. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 60–63. On his extreme anti-militarism, see his diary entries from 29 June 1915 and 21 October 1915, Lamentations of Youth, 63, 70–71; “Laeinpredigt,” Der Blau-Weiße Brille 2 (Autumn 1915): 2–3; see also David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA and London, 1979), 60–65. 42. Diary entry from 21 November 1914, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 39. 43. Diary entry from 26 June 1916, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 324–25; 14 August 1916, 361–62; 21 December 1916, 451. 44. Diary entry from 24 January 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 89. 45. “Zionismus und Egoismus,” Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 453–54. 46. Diary entry from 28 July 1916, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 121–22; idem, “Jewish Youth Movement” (1917), On Jews, 49–53, and the various drafts of this essay in his diary: Tagebücher, 1:309–11, 314–16, 316–19; “Farewell: An Open Letter to Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld” (1918), On Jews, 54–60. 47. Scholem to Buber, 28 January 1917, in Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrhzehnten, ed. G. Schaeder et al., 3 vols. (Heidelberg, 1972), 1: 467. The translation in The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, ed. N. N. Glatzer and P. Mendes-Flohr (New York, 1991), 205, is inaccurate. Scholem criticizes not only Buber’s sacralization of the mundane but also the prominence he gave to experience in his concept of Zionism. Scholem demands a Zionism based on ideology and knowledge. See diary entries from 14 December 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 84; 24 December 1915, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 213–14. 48. Scholem, “Thoughts About Our Language,” 26 December 1926, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 27–28. 49. Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book The Star of Redemption” (1930), On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 205. 50. See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Golem of Scholem: Messianism and Zionism in the Writings of Rabbi Avraham Isaac HaKohen Kook and Gershom Scholem,” Politik und Religion im Judentum, ed. C. Meithing (Tübingen, 1999), 223–38. 51. Scholem, untitled draft, Tagebücher, 1: 507–8. On the worlds of Tohu, see Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1941), 265–68. 52. Diary entry from 24 November 1916, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 153; translation slightly corrected. 53. Diary entry from 20 December 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 88. It is important to note that Scholem’s dissociation from Zionist-renewed religiosity in Buber’s fashion is not cut and dried. See for instance his diary entry from 29 July 1916, Lamentations of Youth, 122, and his indecision expressed in the entry from 14 August 1916, Tagebücher, 1: 364–65. 54. “Behind me were three years, 1916–1918, which were to be decisive for the course my entire life was to take” (Scholem, “A Candid Letter about My True Intentions in Studying Kabbalah” [a letter to Zalman Schocken, 29 September 1937], On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 3.) 55. See diary entries from 26 June 1916, Scholem, Tagebücher, 1: 324–25; 23 August 1916, 387–88; 10 September 1916, 396–99. 56. Diary entry from 23 June 1918, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 251. 57. See note 49 above. 58. The forty-sixth thesis in his “95 Theses über Judentum und Zionismus” (15 June 1918, Tagebücher, 2: 303) says: “Hermann Cohens Dasein ist Thora.” See also the diary entry from 25 July 1918, Tagebücher, 2: 276; Scholem, “Farewell,” 59–60. 59. Heller to Scholem, 9 July 1917, Scholem, Briefe, 1: 71–72, my translation. 60. Scholem to Heller, 17 July 1917, Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. A. D. Skinner (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 48. 61. Scholem to Goldberg, 6 August 1917, Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 54–55. The diaries betray his growing estrangement from halakhic practices; see, for instance, the entry from 25 September 1917, Lamentations of Youth, 182.

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62. Diary entry from 15 August 1916, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 131 (translation altered in one place). See also earlier entries, 17 September 1915, 67; 8 March 1916, Tagebücher, 1: 281. 63. On Mauthner and his idiosyncratic combination of atheism and mysticism see Mauthner’s magnum opus, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, 4 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1920– 1923) (Scholem had this series in his library); Gershon Weiler, Mauthner´s Critique of Language (Cambridge, UK, 1970). On Scholem’s interest in Mauthner see especially diary entries from 29 June 1915, Tagebücher, 1: 136–39; 13 June 1919, Tagebücher, 2: 482–84. 64. Diary entry from 31 December 1915, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 91–92. 65. Thesis no. 76, Tagebücher, 2: 305. On this composition see Daniel Weidner, “Reading Gershom Scholem,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 208–15. 66. Thesis no. 89, Tagebücher, 2: 305. Scholem refers to a collection of the Baal Shem Tov’s thoughts that were edited by his grandson, Baal Shem Tov on the Torah (Jerusalem, 1992 [Hebrew]); the specific allusion is to a verse from the Psalms. 67. Thesis no. 50, Tagebücher, 2: 303. See also thesis no. 63, 2: 304 and no. 75, 2: 304–5, where he intentionally mocks Buber’s Erlebnis cult. 68. Thesis no. 74, Tagebücher, 2: 304. 69. “Torah from Zion” (1919/1920), Tagebücher, 2: 621–23; “Politik des Zionismus” (April 1920), 2: 624–26; see my “Two New Secret Doctrines,” Daat 68–69 (2010): 101–129 (Hebrew). After a dispute with Warner Kraft concerning Germanness and Jewishness, Scholem concludes: “The Torah is silent in symbols and speaks through being.” See diary entry from 15 October 1917, Lamentations of Youth, 185. See also the letter to Goldberg, 6 August 1917, Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 54–55, and Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York, 2003), 56–63. 70. A manuscript of a letter to Grete [Brauer], 10 June 1920, Tagebücher, 2: 634–35; see also diary entries from 24 October 1917, Lamentations of Youth, 191; 5 and 24 March 1918, 212, 217. 71. This goes hand in hand with Scholem’s political anarchism; see diary entry from 25 December 1918, Scholem, Lamentations of Youth, 288. On his political moderation see Maor, “The Inaccessible Land: The Central European Roots of Brit Shalom” (Hebrew) in Brit shalom vehatsiyonut haduleumit: “hasheelah haaravit” kesheelah yehudit (Brit Shalom and binational Zionism: the “Arab question” as a Jewish question), ed. A. Gordon (Jerusalem, 2009), 93–110; Maor, “Between Anti-colonialism and Postcolonialism: The Critique of Nationalism and Secularism in Brit Shalom” (Hebrew), Theory and Criticism 30 (2007): 13–38. 72. Scholem, “Franz Rosenzweig and His Book,” 203. 73. In a diary entry from 6 November 1917 Scholem interprets secularization (“everyone has become a skeptic, or even worse”) as the replacement of the true, religious silence with the shallow silence of ignorance and indifference (Lamentations of Youth, 196). 74. Scholem, “95 Theses über Judentum und Zionismus,” Tagebücher, 2: 303 (my translation). 75. Diary entry from 15 August 1916, Tagebücher, 1: 374. 76. Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Stéphane Moses, “Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah,” New German Critique 77 (Spring–Summer 1999): 149–67. 77. Scholem, “With a Copy of Kafka’s Trial,” The Fullness of Time: Poems, ed. S. M. Wasserstrom (Jerusalem, 2003), 101. 78. Scholem to Benjamin, 9 June 1934, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. G. Scholem (New York, 1989), 122. 79. Scholem to Benjamin, 20 September 1934, ibid., 142. For the full controversy between Scholem and Benjamin regarding the (a-)theological meaning of Kafka’s prose, see 127–44. On Benjamin’s views, see John J. McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, 1993), esp. 19–21. 80. See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 260–64. 81. Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” On Jews, 283. 82. Ibid., 289–94.

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83. See Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton, 2008). In his penetrating book, Lazier offers an alternative historical contextualization of Scholem’s scholarship to the one offered here; he focuses on the desperate European effort during the interwar years to relegitimate worldliness in a traumatized world and on the rising involvement in antinomian heresies. Lazier sees Scholem’s scholarly undertaking as based on conflicting notions: on the one hand, “Judaism could abide neither the Gnostic divorce of God from the world nor their pantheist conflation” (147); on the other hand, Scholem consistently flirted with both Gnosticism and pantheism (in the form of myth). Lazier, indeed, adds to the secularization equations a vital variant, namely the secularization of heresies, but he quite ignores Scholem’s struggle with both Orthodoxy and Buber—and, arguably, Scholem’s ambivalence toward tradition and pantheism cannot be understood without taking this struggle into account. See also Shaul Magid, “Gershom Scholem’s Ambivalence Towards Mystical Experience and His Critique of Martin Buber in Light of Hans Jonas and Martin Heidegger,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994–1995): 245–69. 84. Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 94–112. Biale associates Scholem’s demand for the historical contextualization of Kabbalah with his concept of tradition as the true essence of Kabbalah and stresses Benjamin’s influence on him in this issue. This account overlooks Scholem’s deep sense of interrupted tradition and the crucial role of the historical context in safeguarding the inaccessibility of the sacred text, as I shall currently demonstrate. 85. Scholem, “Vae Victis—or, Death in the Professoriate” (1943), The Fullness of Time, 109 (see also the editor’s note on 152). The title of the poem hints at Scholem’s earlier letter to Schocken, which I discuss below. 86. Scholem, “Zehn unhistorische Sätze,” in Scholem, Judaica 3 (Frankfurt, 1970), 271; translated in Weidner, “Reading Gershom Scholem,” 224. On the theses, see David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Gershom Scholem: Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom (New York, 1987), 99–124. 87. See Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “Introductory Essay: The Spiritual Quest of the Philologist,” in Gershom Scholem, the Man and His Work, ed. idem (New York, 1994), 1–28; Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism (New Jersey and Jerusalem, 1999), 4: 225–58; and Peter Schäfer, “Die Philologie der Kabbala ist nur eine Projektion auf eine Fläche: Gershom Scholem über die wahren Absichten seines Kabbalastudiums,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 5 (1999): 1–25. Schäfer cites and interprets earlier texts of Scholem on this issue. 88. Scholem, “A Candid Letter,” 4. On Scholem and his myth of the lost key, see also his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1969), 12–13. 89. In two essays in Buber’s Der Jude, Scholem bluntly criticizes two contemporary works on the Kabbalah, written in Buber’s spirit; among other arguments, Scholem demands a historical, distanced approach to the kabbalistic texts. See Scholem, “Über die jüngste Sohar-Anthologie,” Der Jude 5 (1922): 363–69; idem, “Lyrik der Kabbala?” Der Jude 6 (1921–1922): 55–69; Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 73–74. 90. See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Geschichte, Nationalismus, Eingedenken,” Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute, ed. M. Brenner and D. N. Myers (Munich, 2002), 190–94. 91. Scholem, “Who Is a Jew” (1970), On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 93, see also idem, “What Is Judaism,” 114–17; “With Gershom Scholem,” 34. 92. Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 297. The original sayings are: “Read not harut, [engraved], but herut [freedom]; for there is none so free as one who occupies himself with the study of Torah” (Mishnah Avot, 6: 2); “The Tablets and the fragments of the Tablets were placed in the ark” (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b). 93. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 7. 94. Diary entry from 15 August 1916, Lamentations of Youth, 131 (translation altered in one place). 95. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 120. 96. Scholem, “The Historical Development of Jewish Mysticism” (1944), On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 140 (translation altered in one place). See also Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,

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27; Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia, 2010), 83–108; Nathan Rotenstreich, “Symbolism and Transcendence: On Some Philosophical Aspects of Gershom Scholem’s Opus,” Review of Metaphysics 31 (1978): 604–14; Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington, 1991), 62–167. 97. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 37. 98. Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 6–19; Scholem confronts secularization and its challenges again and again in this essay, too. 99. Maor, “Two New Secret Doctrines,” 113–18. 100. Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” 291–97. 101. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer, 16.

Chapter 5

Fragments from a Correspondence (Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem) A Poem

Zvi Jagendorf

 1

Walter, on my kitchen floor Luria’s shattered vessels lie Scattering sparks where ants drown Quietly in pools of milk. Chase the liquid light and pocket it Says the Rabbi Take aim, thread black letters against white space, Wait for sounds to fall. He didn’t have that bus to forget As it groans towards Zion stuffed Inside a sleeve of dust. Luria could float in the cool air Of an empty cistern Intuiting water. Here this dripping tap marks time While ice melting secretly in its box Illustrates the doctrine Of TSIMTSUM. Come, my Walter, to Palästina Winter rains will make it greener Clamber free of Europe’s trap Rest your head in Zion’s lap.

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2 Gerhard, mon frère, I’ve moved Once more and don’t know For certain where I’ll be Next Ibiza was hospitable up to a point The point of insolvency My paragraphs on language Hastily sent Before I considered the metaphysics of naming Put them aside along with my ideas For a study of nineteenth-century caricature And the history of postcards. How distant the face of my son now The smoker on the Paris bus Blows rings around his memory Could Stefan go to school in Palästina Would that be a place for the boy? As for me I can’t accept Black clouds of poison will infect The air of Goethe, Proust and Brahms La Coupole still has its charms.

3 Walter, Homo Kabbalisticus Is a puppet articulated by the Hidden Mover, Every sinew and joint answers the spirit’s pull. I will elucidate him Pin down his syntax like a butterfly Framed on the wall he will guide My pen as I perfect A lexicon of ecstasies. Daily, doctors, lawyers, engineers Waltz heavily on Palästina’s sand Guten tag Herr Doktor is their song As they tip straw hats across the beach. Their libraries will soon Embarrass the market I eye them like a breeder appraising

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The weight of beef. Your Stefan would be lonely here Among the Hebrew children who run in packs Eat fire and despise smooth knees. Portugal’s a half-way station Refugees of our persuasion Board ships there at great expense Walter, mine, it makes good sense.

4 Gerhard, Hebrew’s out That alphabet of hooks and nails And domino dots is one Frontier I cannot cross Now my head is full of Marx A red muse Takes Amazonian charge of me Class is my project and its pressure Atmospheric Holding our world to its laws Encouraging the new Exposing effete traditions, polishing Mechanisms of brilliant expression To delight the confident masses Brecht, exiled under his tree looks on amused As I devour red prophecy His cunning eyes, storing obstinacy, declare Patient war on our common enemy He pretends to think like a potato Lumpishly TSIMTSUM and EINSOF He would put naked into the chorus Of a louche cabaret About speculators. Gerhard, Zion’s city won’t be free If workers lack hegemony Stalin’s fortress stores up light As Europe’s jackals wait for night.

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5 A postcard hastily scribbled on the day he was to cross into Spain. Gerhard friend and brother in my dream was MALAKHAMOWETH he with the stone eye and razor beak can I trust him to guide me over? expect no letters for a while

Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem and Walter Benjamin, the best of friends, conducted a correspondence between Palestine and the various places of Benjamin’s exile, from 1932 until 1940. One of its recurring topics was the possibility of Benjamin’s coming to Jerusalem. Benjamin took his life after failing to get across the French border into Spain, in 1940.

Part II



Political Positioning in Hard Times

Chapter 6

In Heidegger’s Shadow Ernst Cassirer, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Question of the Political

Jeffrey Andrew Barash

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In an interview accorded late in his life, Emmanuel Levinas recalled his reaction as a youthful spectator at the famous debate in Davos, Switzerland, in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Although in subsequent publications Levinas rarely evoked the name of Cassirer, in this interview in 1986 he reminisced about the orientation that Cassirer had elaborated and defended in Davos against Heidegger’s trenchant critique. Cassirer, Levinas remarked, was the representative of a “refined humanism.” He was, according to Levinas’s not-entirely-favorable comments, a “neo-Kantian, a glorious disciple of Hermann Cohen, the modern interpreter of Kant on the basis of the intelligibility of the sciences . . . in a line of continuity with the rationalism, the aesthetics and the political ideas of the nineteenth century.”1 Levinas went on to note his remorse in later years—in view of Heidegger’s later political allegiance to the Nazi regime a little over three years after this debate— for having preferred Heidegger’s philosophy to that of Cassirer, in 1929. In the following chapter I shall examine an important but rarely noticed motif in Levinas’s political philosophy that, despite his apparent lack of interest in Cassirer’s writings, takes on new significance when it is considered in relation to Cassirer’s philosophy. I shall not dwell upon Levinas’s rather cursory qualification of Cassirer as a “neo-Kantian disciple of Hermann Cohen”—a judgment that hardly does justice to the originality of Cassirer’s thought. Closer scrutiny of Cassirer’s philosophy would certainly demonstrate that its significance cannot be limited to the continuation of a constellation of typically nineteenth-century ideas. Indeed, in 1929, the elder Cassirer manifested a good deal more political discernment than

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the young Levinas, for the Davos debate illustrated the depth of Cassirer’s reservations concerning the ethical-political implications of Heidegger’s philosophy. In later years Levinas came to share similar doubts concerning the implications of Heidegger’s ideas, causing him, as noted earlier, to regret his original preference for Heidegger but not inspiring him to develop an explicit analysis of the political scope of Cassirer’s philosophy. Notwithstanding important differences in the respective positions of Cassirer and Levinas, it is worthwhile to identify briefly a principal aspect of Cassirer’s political thought that places in relief a still deeper and surprising affinity between their fundamental political orientations. Through an identification of this affinity, I hope to elaborate certain implications of Levinas’s own political thought that are not readily evident and to shed light on them. In order to establish a common basis of analysis for two authors of different nationalities and generations and of completely different philosophical temperaments, I shall focus on each philosopher’s use of a famous Platonic phrase that has been a source of reflection in a long tradition of commentary reaching back to antiquity: Plato’s assertion that “the good” is “beyond essence” or being. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen analyzed this Platonic phrase in his seminal work Ethics of Pure Will (1904), which constituted the second volume of his three-volume philosophical work System der Philosophie. Cassirer subsequently evoked it in the second volume of his work The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Mythical Thought (1925), before reexamining it in more detail in the Philosophy of Enlightenment (1932). As is well known, Levinas chose this phrase as the title of his work Autrement qu’être; Au-delà de l’essence (1974). Of fundamental importance in the respective works of Cassirer and of Levinas is that each of them interpreted this Platonic phrase, “the good beyond essence,” in both an ethical and a political sense. Although Levinas never referred to earlier twentieth-century interpretations of this phrase, a consideration of its significance for Plato and also for later twentieth-century interpreters, particularly Cassirer, will highlight the implications of Levinas’s thought.

Ethics and Politics: The Platonic Background Plato employed the suggestive phrase “the good beyond essence” in the sixth book of The Republic. In this passage, recording a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon on the relation between the good and intelligible beings, Socrates replies to Glaucon in the following way: “Admit that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived from it, though the good itself is not essence but transcends essence [epekeina tês ousias] in dignity and power.”2 That the good should be “otherwise than being” and beyond essence places it at the summit of transcendence of all other intelligible forms to which it imparts its superior dignity. In the context of the Platonic dialogue itself, let us recall Glaucon’s reaction to Socrates’s strange assertion that the good far exceeds essence in dignity and in power; he responded in a “ludicrous” manner according to Plato:

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“That the heavens should save us! The exaggeration [hyperbole] could not go farther!” Upon hearing Glaucon’s suggestion that he may have exaggerated the matter, Socrates attenuated the radicalism of his remark with the quip: “The fault is yours for compelling me to utter my thoughts about it.”3 Given Socrates’s own ambiguity toward this hyperbole, it is, perhaps, not surprising that interpretations of it have varied greatly, particularly in the twentieth century. Indeed, it is this hyperbolic quality of Socrates’s remark that drew Hermann Cohen’s attention in his commentary on this passage in the work Ethics of Pure Will. Cohen, indeed, reacted much like Glaucon to this passage, considering it an exaggeration that contradicts its logical sense. For Cohen, such assertions represented nothing more than the outpourings of moral emotion in defense of religious custom. In his words: “‘epekeina tês ousias.’ Ethics is not supported by a preference for such valuations. When an overemphasis of moral feeling leads to an underestimation of logic in relation to ethics, it may be that religious customs triumph; ethics and ethical truth are, however, not supported in this way.”4 All the more noteworthy in this light is the original interpretation that Cassirer presented of the Platonic good “beyond essence” (epekeina tês ousias), due precisely to the affirmative ethical-political connotation he attributes to this notion, thus asserting his independence from his former mentor, Hermann Cohen. Let us recall the context in which this reflection was presented. Cassirer initially evoked the Platonic notion of the “good beyond essence” in his book Das Mythische Denken (Mythical Thought), published in 1925, which constituted the second volume of the work Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms). As a central motif of Plato’s philosophy, according to Cassirer, this notion signified an intrinsic goodness that, far from limited to the ephemeral perspective of mortal individuals in the immanent realm, is the source of an ultimate good transcending this realm in which ephemeral perspectives participate.5 Although Cassirer did not evoke the Platonic phrase itself during the Davos debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, in a preliminary lecture at Davos prior to the direct encounter, he touched upon the Platonic theme of an absolute ethical and theoretical truth that transcends the finite realm while lending it order and significance. In that lecture, which has since become known as the “Heidegger-Vorlesung,” Cassirer contrasted what he termed the “Platonic-Stoic tradition” in Western thought with Heidegger’s philosophy of existence.6 Cassirer traced Heidegger’s emphasis in Being and Time on the fundamental role of finite existence in its singularity to what he saw as an analogous position in the thought of Pascal and, above all, in the theology of Martin Luther. In stressing the ultimate inscrutability of the divine will, Luther, according to Cassirer, questioned the “objective form of religion” and, in light of human fallibility and mortality, the fundamental place that the Platonic-Stoic tradition had accorded to an ideal order of the universe arising through its participation in the “certitude of the Eternal that both illuminates and perdures beyond all existence in its necessary finitude.”7 In the novel perspective of his twentieth-century thought, Heidegger presented a similar challenge to Platonic-Stoic assumptions concerning the fundamental status

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of an objective and autonomous cosmic order beyond the finitude of mortal perspectives. These assumptions, as Cassirer emphasized, had been a source of inspiration for a long tradition of Western thought extending to Kant’s transcendental idealism. In the debate with Heidegger at Davos, Cassirer centered his critique on Heidegger’s aim to deconstruct Kant’s quest for absolute ethical and theoretical truth beyond the fluctuating perspectives of mortal beings. In this context Cassirer emphasized that Heidegger’s insistence that all truth is relative to finite human being represented a danger to the idea of an intrinsic validity of truth.8 In his direct confrontation with Heidegger at Davos, Cassirer did not elaborate on what he had described in his preliminary lecture as the affinity between Heidegger’s critique of the Platonic-Stoic heritage and the theological orientation inaugurated by Luther’s “religious individualism.”9 Nonetheless, in the period following the Davos debate, the interpretation of the historical sources of the theological challenge directed against the Platonic-Stoic tradition was a focal point of Cassirer’s ethical-political reflection. In his examination of the threat to the Platonic-Stoic heritage in the early modern period, Cassirer placed the Platonic notion of the “good beyond essence” in a new light. Cassirer’s most detailed analysis devoted to an interpretation of the Platonic “good beyond essence” is found in the book Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment), first published in 1932. Appearing three years after the 1929 Davos debate with Heidegger, this work was written in a particularly tense political atmosphere—1931 and especially 1932 were years in which the Nazis began to score important victories in national elections. Indeed, this was the last book that Cassirer wrote in Germany; Hitler came to power several months after its publication, and Cassirer quickly emigrated from Germany to Sweden. In view of the dire political situation in Germany in the early thirties, the author of The Philosophy of the Enlightenment intended to present much more than a simple history of eighteenth-century thought. The book’s theme and content constitute a plea in favor of the aspect of the German intellectual heritage that most glaringly contrasted with the contemporary situation. And it is in this context that Cassirer linked the political heritage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to deeper sources revealed by the Platonic notion of a “good beyond essence.” Cassirer’s analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political ideas focused on the theories of absolute state power embraced by modern thinkers. Starting with Machiavelli and Bodin and culminating in the thought of Hobbes, conceptions of political sovereignty, according to Cassirer, began to assume an ever more radical form. This trend was reinforced over the course of the seventeenth century in response to the political claims of the radical religious reformers, who in the wake of Calvin’s reform sought to establish a theocratic basis for absolute state power, founded not on what they took to be the fallibility and finitude of natural reason, but on the word of God interpreted by His representatives. As a reaction against religious fanaticism and the religious wars engendered by sects that each laid claim to a divinely inspired truth, Hobbes posited the absolute authority of the sovereign as the only means of maintaining peace. In view of the ongoing danger

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of civil war, an appeal either to natural law and natural right or to divine law and divine right was senseless and subversive, because peace could not be maintained by appeals to natural reason or to divine authority, but only by the sovereign will. As the avoidance of civil war is the ultimate good, the interpretation of what is just and lawful depends on the sovereign will alone, and nothing is sanctioned that is not in conformity with this will. In the extreme postulation of Hobbes, as Cassirer reminds us, the sovereign, by virtue of his absolute power, is conceived to be a “mortal God.” Natural law and divine law are valid only where they have been legitimized by the absolute sovereign authority, which it is unjust to resist collectively. Curiously, as Cassirer reminds us, Hobbes’s emphasis on the absolute legitimacy of the sovereign will as opposed to an autonomous order of truth, to a “good beyond essence” advanced by the Platonic-Stoic tradition, revealed a deep affinity between his political absolutism and the radical theological positions he placed in question. In rejecting the rationalism of the Platonic-Stoic tradition, both Hobbes and the theocrats, for opposite reasons, glorified brute sovereign force as the only answer to the radical problem raised by the quest for political order.10 The challenge to this tradition thus derived from both the radical religious reformers and the absolutist political philosophers who, as a means of subduing their religious adversaries, endowed the sovereign with absolute power analogous to divine omnipotence. In his analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theories, Cassirer was surprisingly discrete when it came to drawing parallels to his contemporary world. Any politically minded reader, however, would clearly discern the evident parallels to the contemporary situation in the last years of the Weimar Republic. That period, after all, witnessed the rise of both absolutist social movements, with their creed of unconditional obedience to the leader, and political theories advocating that creed. In the decade preceding the fall of the Weimar Republic, its opponents widely revitalized and radicalized the absolutist theories of Bodin and Hobbes as a means of justifying the unconditional character of sovereign power beyond any claims of natural law or other rationally grounded general norms. In a climate marked by a return of “political theology,” the argument concerning the unconditional power of the sovereign sought legitimation in analogies drawn between that power and the absolute will of God.11 In attacking the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century absolutist theories, and, implicitly, those who were then extrapolating from and radicalizing Hobbes as well, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment returned to the political theories of Hobbes’s predecessor and primary target—Hugo Grotius. As Cassirer emphasized, Grotius contributed to the initial development of a major current of Enlightenment thought that culminated in the ethical-political theories of Leibniz and of Kant who, like Grotius, shared the presupposition that justice cannot depend on an arbitrary sovereign will. According to Grotius there are, indeed, ethical principles that are so fundamental and so irrevocable that their validity must be considered to be independent not only of the earthly sovereign, but even of the divine will. Ethicalpolitical validity depends not on sheer will, be it even the will of God, but on what is intrinsically just and good. Even God cannot transform what is intrinsically wrong

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and unjust into something fair and good. In his analysis of Grotius, Cassirer situated this idea within a longstanding medieval and Stoic tradition extending back to the philosophy of Plato and the famous Platonic notion of a “good beyond essence.” According to Cassirer’s analysis: “What is lawful is valid neither because there is a God nor because it is supported by any kind of existence, whether empirical or absolute. It flows from the pure Idea of the Good—from the Idea which, for Plato, exceeds all else in power and dignity . . . the idea of a lawfulness that transcends in placing the just and the good above all being [epekeina tês ousias].”12

Cassirer and Levinas: The Problematic Relationship of Theology and Politics In his book Autrement qu’être; Au-delà de l’essence, Levinas presented an interpretation that was at once different from that of Cassirer and curiously in harmony with his fundamental ethical-political persuasion. Cassirer, as we have seen, did not share the critical attitude of Hermann Cohen, who, following Glaucon, manifested skepticism with regard to the hyperbole suggested by the idea of a “good exceeding essence in power and in dignity”; on the contrary, Cassirer affirmed this principle as a starting point for ethical-political reflection. Levinas, for his part, went beyond Cassirer, for he reinforced the exaggeration by radicalizing the distinction between the good and the essence, or being, that it transcends. For Plato, the idea of the good, if beyond essence, is nonetheless available to reminiscence. Reminiscence recalls the eternal being of the good in which the intelligible forms and, in an ephemeral way, the fleeting existence of terrestrial things participate. It recalls what is innately present, in at least implicit form, as fundamental a priori truth. For in the Stoic and neoStoic tradition that inspired Grotius and which Cassirer evoked, the good found its a priori basis in natural law. Levinas’s radicalization of the Platonic phrase dissociated the good beyond essence from anything that might be represented or recalled in terms of a foundation in the Platonic or Stoic sense. Levinas, therefore, qualified the good, beyond being, as immemorial, as a transcendence that no reminiscence or memory might evoke. “The Good that reigns in its goodness,” as Levinas wrote, “cannot enter into the presence of consciousness, even were it to be remembered.”13 What, however, is the result of this radicalization of the Platonic dichotomy between the good and the immanent world of essence? Let us recall that in Autrement qu’être the immemorial and unrepresentable transcendence of essence by the good led to the evocation of God and of the sacred. Even if Levinas referred to God here with his characteristic discretion, such evocations come to the fore in the rare passages in this work that concern justice and the political, most notably where he describes the bringing together of different subjectivities as citizens, through what he terms “synchronization.” He wrote in this regard: “Synchronization is the act of consciousness which by representation and the spoken word [le Dit] institutes ‘with the help of God,’ the original place of justice, the common ground for me and for others, where I am counted among them; that is, where subjectivity is citizen with

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all measured and measurable duties and rights pertaining to the Me, which is equilibrated or equilibrates itself with the aid of duties and the concurrence of rights.”14 And here we come to the crux of the matter. With the radicalization of the Platonic idea of transcendence of the good accompanied by this evocation of God, Levinas might seem to succumb precisely to the outpourings of moral feeling or religious fervor that Hermann Cohen identified as the danger inherent in the Platonic notion of the “good beyond essence” and that to his mind could only obscure genuine ethical purpose. Even Cassirer, who sought to rehabilitate the ethical meaning of the Platonic phrase, did so by carefully distinguishing it from any religious motive. As we saw, he related it to Grotius’s claim that there are rules of justice and of goodness that are valid independently of any consideration of the divine will. As Grotius and later Cassirer interpreted the matter, this separation of theological questions from the realm of politics was the only means of finding common ground among the different religious persuasions, thereby avoiding either the politics of religious fanaticism at one extreme, or the subordination of all theological matters to absolute political authority at the other. In short, both Grotius and Cassirer sought to distinguish politics from religion, as clearly as possible, in order to avoid the dangers latent in political theology. In view of the discrete and careful way in which Levinas evoked God in his references to the political, there are no grounds for accusing him of promoting a form of political theology. Nonetheless, we may question whether in initiating what Dominique Janicaud has aptly termed the “theological turn of French phenomenology,”15 Levinas introduced a religious element into his philosophy, which long experience counsels us to keep separate from politics. Do we not encounter here a deeper source of the incompatibility between his reflections and the thought of predecessors such as Ernst Cassirer? In order to understand what is at stake here, it is necessary to move beyond the framework of Autrement qu’être in order to focus more directly on Levinas’s approach to the immanent domain of politics. In his view, theological arguments may represent a danger in the political sphere because of the conflict that is engendered by attempts to ground political authority in particular interpretations of the sacred; it is therefore all the more important to search for a universal political criterion that, beyond the particular claims of a religious dogma, may accommodate a diversity of religious expressions and harmonize their claims. Levinas examined the role of universal criteria in the ethical-political domain primarily in the thirteenth chapter of his book Les imprévues de l’histoire, entitled “La laïcité et la pensée d’Israël” (Secularism and the thought of Israel), in which he explored the possibility of moving beyond the particularism of Jewish religious practices to identify a universal message implicit in them that might also encompass other nations and other faiths in the modern social context. In a curious way, Levinas’s reflections here brought him close to the fundamental inspiration of Cassirer’s political philosophy. In this essay Levinas introduced the Talmudic concept of the Noachian laws, which was reinterpreted and revitalized in the medieval philosophy of Maimonides. According to the Jewish religion, the Noachian laws comprise

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seven commandments considered by rabbinic tradition to constitute the essential moral duties required of all humans, regardless of nationality or culture.16 According to Maimonides, the hasid (righteous person among the Gentiles) who obeys these laws—the righteous “foreigner”—has a share in the world to come, even if he or she never converts to Judaism. Even among “idol worshippers,” as Levinas reminded his readers, “there are just people . . . who participate in the world to come.” And he concluded, “Jewish monotheism imbues God himself with the aspiration toward a universal society.”17 What is particularly important for our present analysis is that Judaism’s affirmation of the universal ideal became, as Levinas reminds us, not merely a utopian aspiration but the principal ancient source of modern theories of natural law: “The non-Jewish theorists of natural right, precursors of modern society, recognized, indeed, the way in which the idea of the foreigner developed into the idea of the Noachide and of the ‘righteous among the gentiles.’ They recognized the importance of this movement of thought for constituting the idea of natural right. John Selden (1584–1654), the great seventeenth-century English scholar, and one of the theoreticians of natural law, founded it on Hebrew law, notably in his work De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum [The Law of Nature and of Peoples after the Discipline of the Hebrews]. Hugo Grotius, founder of theory of the law of peoples, explicitly praised the Noachian institution.”18 In thus alluding to Grotius and to Jewish sources of modern theories of natural law, Levinas returned to the same territory that Cassirer delineated in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. By invoking a universal law valid for all religions, irrespective of the particular ways in which God reveals himself to them, Levinas provided an argument that was at once complementary to Cassirer’s interpretation, while at the same time transforming its implication. Cassirer had recalled Grotius’s famous argument to refute the claim that the sovereign’s absolute will, analogous to God’s, is the ultimate determinant concerning the criteria of goodness and justice; certain laws are so fundamental that their validity is independent of any particular divine fiat. Levinas subtly recast Grotius’s argument, because, according to his perspective, even those theories that posit the validity of natural law irrespective of God are ultimately obliged to draw on religious sources. In its universal scope, the ultimate source of natural law cannot be drawn from the reminiscence of an idea in the Platonic sense; its trace is refracted from an inscrutable transcendence. Even where we would like to secularize the political sphere and carefully separate theology from politics, we cannot escape from the insight that our political existence draws on profound sacred sources; in this sense it is impossible to “escape from God,” as Levinas declared in Autrement qu’être.19 If my analysis is correct, however, then Levinas enjoins us to reformulate the theological-political problem. If it is impossible to escape from God, even where we attempt to exclude theology from the political domain, then we are faced with only one alternative: radical transcendence. In denying the possibility of immanent representation or reminiscence, the notion of transcendence that radicalizes the Platonic notion of the “good beyond essence” introduces the possibility of “hearing a God who has not been contaminated by

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being” and who cannot be invoked as “protector of all forms of egoism.”20 From this perspective we have already forsaken the good when we draw the sacred into the sphere of being as a means of legitimating immanent interests in this world. In such cases we substitute an immanent basis, an interest, for what is radically transcendent and without basis, an-archic. In referring the sacred to the good’s radical otherness beyond this world, Levinas aimed at denying a basis—an arche—to all traditional theological claims in the political sphere.

Conclusion I shall conclude by returning to the Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger that Levinas remorsefully recalled. Somewhat more bluntly than Levinas, Jürgen Habermas has also commented on Cassirer’s role in this famous encounter. Although he was too young in 1929 to have attended the debate, Habermas claimed that Heidegger had wrested a “dubious victory” (ein fragwürdiger Sieg) from Cassirer. And if, according to Habermas, Cassirer had lost the debate, it was because he drew his inspiration from a vitiated German and European heritage rooted in the eighteenth century. In the context of Weimar Germany, Jews’ attempts to marshal support from the classical Greek heritage were flawed by “a certain impotence” (etwas Kraftloses). Habermas maintained that power for Jewish thinkers lay essentially in their own tradition, which he equated not with the Torah and the Talmud, but with the more esoteric doctrines of Kabbalah.21 In light of my analysis of Cassirer and of Levinas, Habermas’s attitude toward Cassirer seems questionable. I am not convinced that Cassirer lost the Davos debate nor that speculation derived from the Jewish Kabbalah would have modified the essentially ethical nature of the arguments he presented against Heidegger, whose philosophy is perhaps best characterized by its utter indifference toward ethical concerns. If, indeed, there is strength in Cassirer’s arguments, might it not be that they depended less on a foundation in a particular European or Jewish heritage—in an arche—than on the universality of an ethical reach, which, in Levinas’s perspective, ultimately derived from an anarchic trace “beyond essence” and “otherwise than being”?

Notes 1. “Un néo-kantien, glorieux disciple d’Hermann Cohen, interprète moderne de Kant à partir de l’intelligibilité des sciences, . . . dans la continuité du rationalisme, de l’esthétique et des idées politiques du XIXe siècle” (Emmanuel Levinas, François Poiré, Essai et entretiens [Paris, 1996], 80–81). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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2. Plato, The Republic, 509b (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 107; cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini (Dordrecht, 1988), 76. 3. Plato, The Republic, 509b, 107. 4. “Die Ethik ist durch solche Vorzugswerte nicht gedient. Wenn im Überschwung des sittlichen Gefühls die Logik gegen die Ethik herabgesetzt wird, so mag die religiöse Sittlichkeit darüber triumphieren; die Ethik und die ethische Wahrheit wird dadurch nicht gefordert” (Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens [Berlin, 1921], 90, 421). 5. Ernst Cassirer, Das Mythische Denken, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2 (Darmstadt, 1994), 300. 6. “Heidegger-Vorlesung,” unpublished, Ernst Cassirer Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Gen Mss 98, Box 42, folder 839; this manuscript is currently being prepared by Jörn Bohr for publication as volume 17 of the Cassirer Nachlass edition, Davoser Vorträge. Vorträge über Hermann Cohen (Hamburg). I would like to thank the editor of the Nachlass edition, the late John Michael Krois, and also Gerald Hartung and Christian Möckel, director of the Cassirer Forschungsstelle at the Humboldt University in Berlin, for their kind permission to consult this lecture and to cite from its contents. 7. “ . . . geht ihm die Gewissheit eines Ewigen auf, das alles Dasein, in seiner notwendigen Endlichkeit, überstrahlt u[nd] überdauert” (Cassirer, “Heidegger-Vorlesung,” unpublished ms., 21). 8. Cassirer, Heidegger, “Davoser Vorträge,” Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, 1991), 276–77. 9. Independently from Cassirer’s reflections, Karl Löwith investigated Heidegger’s affiliation with Protestant theology, above all with Luther and Kierkegaard, and the path that led him toward finite choice in the face of nothingness and to the deconstruction of belief in eternal truths that had traditionally inspired the Christian faith. See Karl Löwith, “Der Okkasionale Dezisionismus von Carl Schmitt,” Heidegger—Denker in dürftiger Zeit, Werke (Stuttgart, 1984), 7: 40–70. On the theological background to Heidegger’s philosophy of existence and on the implications of Cassirer’s critique of Heidegger at Davos, see my book Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (New York, 2003). I have also dealt with this theme in some detail in my review article “Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger and the Legacy of Davos,” History and Theory 51, no. 3 (October, 2012), which presents a critical analysis of Peter Eli Gordon’s recent work, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 10. Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1932), 319f; Ernst Cassirer, Die platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig/Berlin, 1932), 53f. 11. One need only recall in this context the decisionist political theories of the late 1920s and 1930s in Germany, notably propounded by Carl Schmitt, which sought to revive and radicalize Hobbes’s absolutist doctrine by seizing upon the traditional analogy between the sovereign and God to reinforce the idea of absolute sovereign power. Well beyond the limits of Hobbes’s own thinking, Schmitt, in his work Political Theology (1922), emphasized that the sovereign’s decisions can in no way be limited by natural right or any other preexisting norms, for the norm depends, according to Schmitt’s phrase, on the absolute sovereign’s decision, born “out of nothingness” (aus einem Nichts geboren) (Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität [Berlin, 1985], 42). Carl Schmitt’s questioning of both the traditional and rational basis of norms and his insistence that decision arises in the face of nothingness anticipates in a striking manner the philosophy of existence of Heidegger. In 1933, both Heidegger and Schmitt, who were in contact with each other at the time, joined the Nazi Party and pledged allegiance to the Hitler regime. Although the argument has been recently advanced that Schmitt’s attitude toward the Weimar regime was ambiguous during the last years of its existence, the doctrine of political decisionism, coupled with his implacable hostility to parliamentary democracy, were hardly compatible with the fundamental principles of the Weimar Republic. 12. Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 319f. The Platonic phrase “the good beyond essence” has been omitted from the English translation of the text. 13. “Le Bien qui règne dans sa bonté . . . ne peut entrer dans le présent de la conscience, fût-il remémoré” (Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être; Au-delà de l’essence. [Dordrecht and Paris, 1996], 88).

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14. “La synchronisation est acte de conscience qui, par la représentation et le Dit, institue, ‘avec l’aide de Dieu’ le lieu originel de la justice, terrain commun à moi et aux autres où je suis compté parmi eux, c’est-à-dire où la subjectivité est citoyen avec tous les devoirs et droits mesurés et mesurables que comporte le Moi équilibré ou s’équilibrant par le concours des devoirs et la concurrence des droits” (Levinas, Autrement qu’être, 250). 15. Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Paris, 1992). 16. See the excellent article on this theme by Isidore Singer and Julius H. Greenstone, “The Noachian Laws” in the Jewish Encyclopedia (New York/London, 1901–1906), 7: 648–58. The references there are to “Sanh.,” 56–60, “Yad,” and “Melakhim,” 8: 10, 10: 12. The seven Noachian Laws are as follows: the prohibition of idolatry, blasphemy, bloodshed, sexual sins, theft, eating from a living animal, and the injunction to establish a legal system. The just person or “hasid” among the non-Jewish populations is entitled to material support by the Jewish people and to the highest earthly honors, and also, according to Maimonides, a right to partake in life after death. 17. “Il y a des justes parmi les idolâtres qui participent au monde futur. . . . Le monothéisme juif met en Dieu même l’aspiration à une société universelle” (Emmanuel Levinas, Les imprévues de l’histoire [Paris, 1999], 186–87). 18. “Les théoriciens non-juifs du droit naturel, précurseurs de la société moderne, connaissaient d’ailleurs la façon dont l’idée d’étranger s’épanouit en idée de noachide et de ‘juste parmi les gentils’ et l’importance de ce mouvement de pensée pour la constitution de l’idée du droit naturel. John Selden (1584–1654), le grand érudit du 17ème siècle anglais, et l’un des théoriciens du droit naturel, le fonde sur la loi hébraïque, notamment dans son De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum. Hugo Grotius, fondateur de la théorie du droit des gens, loue expressément l’institution de noachide” (ibid., 187). 19. Levinas, Autrement qu’être, 165. 20. “ . . . le protecteur de tous les égoïsmes” (ibid., 10, 250–51). 21. “Ein Rückgang auf die Griechen, wo er von Juden versucht wurde, hat so immer etwas Kraftloses behalten—Kraft barg allein die Tiefe der eigenen Tradition, die Kabbala” (Jürgen Habermas, “Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophie,” Philosophisch-politische Profile. Erweiterte Ausgabe [Frankfurt, 1981], 52–54). Habermas’s article was originally written in 1961.

Chapter 7

Walther Rathenau’s Dilemma Modernity and the Human Soul

Shulamit Volkov

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Walther Rathenau is known primarily as Weimar Germany’s foreign minister, a Jew in one of that country’s highest offices, murdered in full daylight on a Saturday morning, 24 June 1922, while riding in his elegant open-roof coupe along the Königsallee in Grunewald, Berlin-West.1 Some also identify him as the son of the famous Generaldirektor of the pioneering electrical concern, the AEG—Emil Rathenau. Walther was an industrial baron and financier in his own right, surely among Germany’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen of his generation. Few still remember that he was also a prolific writer at the time, an intellectual of some standing and influence. To be sure, Rathenau’s writings, especially his early works, were known to very few even during his lifetime; this changed dramatically, however, with the publication of his first full-length book, Zur Kritik der Zeit, in January 1912. The book was energetically promoted by Rathenau’s new publishing house, S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin, reprinted seven times during that year alone, and by 1925 had seen as many as twenty-eight editions.2 A couple of days after publication, the first review already designated it “the book of the season,” and almost overnight Rathenau became a literary celebrity, with good reason, too. The book was brilliant. It was far more ambitious and interesting than anything Rathenau had written before, and although many of the ideas in it had appeared sporadically in his previous essays, the scope and the thrust of this novella-sized volume were incomparably more impressive. Written in a concise and elegant style—sophisticated but eminently readable—it contained an analysis of the origins of modernity, its effects on all spheres of life, especially with regard to Germany, and a bold prognosis for the future. Although it could be seen as a curious mixture of original insights and

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a rehash of ideas that were common currency at the time, it did display Rathenau’s unique take on modernity in all its manifestations, and it spelled out the dilemmas faced surely not only by him, as he attempted to invest these manifestations with meaning and predict their consequences. Discussing modernity and modernization was rampant among intellectuals in imperial Germany, especially from the last decade of the nineteenth century onward. In Rathenau’s immediate milieu, it was the confrontation with large-scale organized capitalism that stood at the center of all deliberations. While Social Democrats, for instance—not part of his circle, of course—were attacking the typical economic system of those years for what they perceived as its inherently unjust method of distribution, conservatives, rather common for his milieu, objected to the system’s mode of production and lamented its inherent consequences. Understandably, as the German economy was in the midst of rapid modernization, intellectuals were debating the pros and cons of this process. But later, too, when the matter had clearly been decided and modernization could no longer be checked or reversed, discussing its economic aspects as well as its political and cultural implications was still deemed profoundly relevant. While there were, to be sure, scholars and intellectuals who basically approved of modernity and were ready, sometimes even eager, to embrace its consequences, many faced this onward march of rapid and radical change with something between nagging unease and intense enmity. Group interests were undoubtedly involved, but anxiety in the face of such a plethora of rapid changes was derived not only from economic or social causes but also from political and cultural ones—one might want to call it ideological. Democratic trends, gradually unfolding in imperial Germany even under its semiauthoritarian regime, aroused deep misapprehensions, and the evolving faceless, homogenous mass society seemed a tangible threat. Solutions to the new ills were, of course, as numerous as the individuals who dealt with these issues. They were being formulated and often rejected as quickly as they were offered. The brand of neoconservatism prevalent in the intellectual circle around Rathenau, for instance, frequently found immediate expression in a longing for a new Caesar, an outstanding leading personality.3 As examples, Bismarck was listed with Friedrich II, the Hohenstaufen with Napoleon, in the sphere of politics; Dante, Beethoven, and Rembrandt were mentioned in the cultural sphere. But setting up outstanding individuals and individualism as standards was clearly not enough in the struggle to contain the multiple threats of modernity. Equally important was a stress on subjectivity as against objectivity, on emotions against rationalism, spirituality against materialism, the human soul against the intellect. With particular conviction this time, metaphysics and neoromanticism were lined up yet again in the struggle against the values of the Enlightenment. This overall cultural bias was clearly apparent on the pages of Die Zukunft, the most widely read and intensively discussed periodical at the time. In literature and theater, the editor-in-chief and main contributor, Maximilian Harden, and his cowriters came out against naturalism and for an elitist, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian subjectivism on all fronts, and by then they already constituted a

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part of a general European trend. The Italian Gabriel d’Annunzio wrote for Harden’s weekly, as did the Belgians Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren and the Parisian Anatole France. In the theater, Ibsen and Strindberg would soon become the cultural heroes of this emerging conservative elite; Nietzsche, Julius Langbehn, and the various prophets of Social Darwinism—its philosophical guides. Finally, chauvinism was joined to racialism in this discourse, reaffirming Germany’s superiority, stressing its unique capacity to withstand the tide of modernity, and praising its culture of “inwardness,” above all its artistic, musical “soul.” This was Rathenau’s intellectual nourishment during the years that he sometimes considered his “Bitterfeld exile” in the 1890s. Trying his hand at the time as an independent entrepreneur in the electrochemical industry—which he found rather uninspiring, even depressing—the young man immersed himself in reading. Soon he was picking up the anti-modern tone of the authors at hand and sought ways to adopt it. From the outset, however, something did not fit. As a budding intellectual, Rathenau easily sympathized with the critique of modernity, but as an industrialist, despite the difficulties and setbacks, he was getting ever more involved in the modern world, learning to appreciate its advantages more deeply, and becoming progressively more entangled in that famous horizontal and vertical networking, most characteristic of the industrial branch he was virtually assigned to—almost by birth, one could say. Biographically, then, he was clearly not the man to come out against modernity. Temperamentally, too, he was a man of compromises and not the type—like Harden, for instance—to seek ways of rocking the boat. Rathenau was in no position to join unreservedly the chorus of cultural critique so often resounding around him. Moreover, his apparent “constitutional unease” stemmed from more than the contradiction between self-interest and ideology. It manifested a fundamental tension within Rathenau’s overall Weltanschauung, a lingering indecision and tension that would accompany him for most of his life. By the summer semester of 1889, the young Walther Rathenau had received his doctoral degree in physics after studying with the renowned physicist August Kundt, first in Strasbourg and then in Berlin. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, he was already capable of laying out a devastating critique of the natural sciences in one of his early essays entitled “Ignorabimus.” At that time, while he was relying heavily on the most modern scientific standards and technical inventions for his business career, he was eager to explain the limitations of the natural sciences as tools—but no more than tools—for profound, true knowledge. Science provides us with means to achieve our end, he argued, but it cannot define this end. It provides the road, even the means of transport, but not the final destination. What we need is not more science, more rationalism, or more calculations, but more metaphysics, he claimed, more subjectivism, and—to use his later idiom—more space for the individual human soul. The tension inherent in this position could not be hidden, even if it still seemed manageable. The ratio still had a significant role to play; not above the soul, to be sure, but in its service.4 Somewhat later, as he was considering matters of aesthetics, he began to adopt a more aggressive tone in criticizing modernity. In a series of three essays written

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between 1903 and 1908, dealing with art in general and painting in particular, Rathenau expressed his distaste of modernism and his longing for a new kind of art—spiritual, even mystical.5 In contrast to Impressionism, for instance, which was typical of the French, this new, peculiarly German art would reach inwardly to the domains that lie beyond or beneath the visible and seek transcendental connotations beyond or above the mere visual. Modern art, wrote Rathenau—Max Liebermann’s nephew, member of the Pan-club in Berlin, patron of such artists as Edvard Munch, and a rather gifted painter in his own rights—tends to dull our sensitivity and stress the outward side of painting at the cost of its deeper meaning. The time was now ripe, he felt, for a revival of what he considered “a true German art,” reasserting itself by giving expression to the unique “German soul” and thus regaining and reestablishing its deserved glory. Here, too, the contrast between modernity, on the one hand, and the human soul, on the other, was clearly formulated and brought into the open in Rathenau’s writings. Indeed, little of this was entirely original. His central piece on modern painting, later revised and reprinted on a number of occasions, was initially part of a contemporary controversy among some of the most well-known art critics, comparing French Impressionism and, at least by association, the Berlin Secession, on the one hand, and the German Symbolists, especially Arnold Böcklin, himself Swiss, on the other hand. In siding with the latter, Rathenau was no more than rehashing some of the art history discourse that had been launched about a decade earlier by Julius Langbehn in his famous, or rather infamous, Rembrandt as Educator.6 Accordingly, modernism was given a critical, negative sign, whereas the soul— the source of all creativity and fantasy—an appreciative, positive sign. Rathenau, always a searching man, often unhappy and permanently unfulfilled despite his various achievements, was seeking deeper layers of meaning in his life, and what he termed the human soul—surely his own most especially—preoccupied him during those years ever more intensely. In May 1906 he took a journey to Greece with some of his friends. In his sketchbook, between short descriptions of the scenery, one finds a brief entry under the title “Breviarium Mysticum.” It included ten principles for comprehending the soul, concisely formulated, probably noted during the trip for future elaboration.7 “The picture which each man has of the world is the measure of his soul” reads the first principle, and “many are born with a soul; all can attain to one” is the second. Further down, one encounters Rathenau’s stress on the fundamental contrast between soul and intellect, his insistence on the superiority of the former over the latter, and his assessment of the soul as a unique life force, the source of all true love and no less than a clear “image of God,” as he put it. Presumably, a man preoccupied by such matters would seek to lead a life that reflected his priorities. On his return from Greece, Rathenau did indeed tell some of his friends that he planned to “buy himself a cottage and practice philosophy.”8 In the end, however, he bought himself what could be better described as “a little Schloss,” a mansion, and at no time in the future did he ever manage to dedicate himself exclusively to philosophy. Neither then nor at any point later in his life

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did he find in himself the strength to favor his spiritual over his down-to-earth, material, professional side. By 1912, at the time of the publication of his Zur Kritik der Zeit, Rathenau must have realized that this duality was a constitutive element of his life and was there to stay. He then turned his indecision into a matter of principle. Abandoning the world of material production was never an option for him as an individual, he now realized, nor was it ever a possibility for Germany or for European civilization as a whole. In practice, he hoped to combine these two sides of his personality. In theory, this posed the need for an entirely new synthesis. The creative potential of modernity, Rathenau felt, had to be joined to the inner, spiritual demands of the soul. If he was going to embrace economic modernity not merely as an inevitability, he ought to be able to suggest ways of overcoming its darker sides. This is what he seemed to have marked as his main intellectual task for the years to come. Zur Kritik der Zeit begins by dating the onset of modernity to the mid-nineteenth century and by characterizing it as the culmination of a universal process, named by Rathenau (though not only by him) “mechanization.”9 Mechanization was a response to the challenge of an enormous population growth, Rathenau claimed, producing, in turn, an unprecedented rise in demand and leading to a gigantic technical and organizational revolution. The initial purpose was to feed the additional men and women around the world but eventually also to meet everyone’s greed for luxury and passion for extravagance. Having carried out its initial role, ran the argument, mechanization induced a growing “hunger” for goods, causing a never-ending cycle of renewed demand and increased production. It was a deterministic process, dialectically carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Others at the time were also using the term “mechanization”—most particularly, perhaps, the Jena philosopher Rudolf Eucken, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the art historian Friedrich Gundolf—signifying an essential aspect of modernity.10 In Rathenau’s writings, however, it did receive a particularly compelling force. One can easily detect that his description of modernity is based on actual experience in the realm of modern industry. The success of the electrical sector, for instance, in creating rather than responding to demand, is clearly reflected in Rathenau’s book. The emphasis he placed here on the interplay of market forces, the bureaucratization of industry, and the inevitable systemic approach to production surely grew out of his own business experiences, too. These endowed his analysis with a measure of coherence and concreteness, rare in writings of this sort. His analysis of the role of the state in the process may have likewise grown out of his daily business affairs. The various municipal, state, and federal authorities, Rathenau explained, took care not only of providing proper education for a population destined to live under modern conditions, but also supplied the necessary means of transport and communication, established a supportive judiciary, and, finally, endowed the system as a whole with a sense of stability, so crucial for ongoing prosperity.11 All this, furthermore, occurred in a society that was becoming increasingly homogenous, a society that required all to excel in the same virtues and knew,

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ideally at least, only one fundamental division—between those who could and those who could not lead under the new circumstances.12 It was a very different society from the traditional, feudal one in which a racially pure aristocracy had ruled over a racially mixed lower order, Rathenau explained. His previous racialist distinction between men of courage and men of fear, or between the brave and the wise, now sounded like empty talk.13 Rathenau was finally convinced that the established Prussian elite, the object of his admiration as a younger man, did not really possess the mental tools required for leadership in the modern world. These “Germanic masters of the West . . . whose fair-haired heads we would so much like to crown with the glory of mankind,”14 as he had once put it, must be replaced by men of another mettle, he now thought: flexible, curious, rational, lacking any sense of the transcendental—like the Jews, to be sure, but not necessarily the Jews themselves; like the Jews, but surely not only the Jews; like the Jews, but not entirely like them. It was the bourgeoisie, and only the bourgeoisie, he explained, that controlled the world of capitalism, and it alone would prove capable of dealing with the challenges of modernity. It alone would eventually also make the economically successful nations into the most powerful ones on earth: England first and foremost, America—second, and then, of course, Germany, too. If Napoleon had argued in his famous conversation with Goethe that in their day and age, “politics was destiny,” Rathenau was convinced that “economics was destiny” in his. However, even at that point, if forced to choose between Napoleon and Goethe, he would surely have chosen the latter. The bourgeoisie could succeed in “feeding the masses” and achieving the necessary level of mechanization. It alone could move the wheels of the huge network of modern production. In the final analysis, however, it could neither define new political goals nor produce true cultural goods by itself. It could neither define nor advance ultimate transcendental values, he felt. Such values, manifested in religion, art, science, or even in politics, were therefore sadly lacking in the modern age, while “individuality” as an independent force was gradually crumpling, and “collective identities” were disastrously blurred. In other words, the single individual was now lost within an impersonal mass society, and in addition, collectivities such as the various singular nations—even the most gifted and outstanding among them—were bound to be pushed aside. Finally, the ideology of nationalism, too, designed to keep the nation united, could not resist the tide of mechanization. It was true that nationalism had grown in reaction to the unequal division of the benefits of mechanization, asserted Rathenau, but, in the end, it could not respond to the real challenge of the capitalist age.15 Capitalism, after all, knew no political boundaries. It was cosmopolitan by definition. The ever-growing tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism was yet another unhealthy outcome of the age of mechanization.16 But Rathenau did not give up hope. As people became aware of the price they were paying to the Moloch of mechanization, they were forced to seek new routes, he believed, in order to reach a proper middle way that would enable them to uphold the benefits of the new age without surrendering to its drawbacks. From the midst of a mechanized world, a new world was bound to emerge, a world

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that would mend the spiritual deprivation brought about by modernity and would finally grow to become a new heavenly, utopian “kingdom of the soul.”17 The preoccupation with the human soul, like mechanization, could be shown to be a major contemporary theme, by no means unique to Rathenau. He, however, made the most intensive and extensive use of it in his next magnum opus, entitled Zur Mechanik des Geistes or Vom Reich der Seele.18 The book was published in the fall of 1913 and expressed Rathenau’s innermost convictions. He always claimed it was his most important work, although in contrast to Zur Kritik der Zeit, it apparently had very little impact. Hastily completed and published shortly after Rathenau’s first book, it was first reprinted only in 1917, in conjunction with the appearance of Rathenau’s third book, Von Kommenden Dingen, and was scantily and not very favorably reviewed. Whereas mechanization was the major concept in Zur Kritik der Zeit, the human “soul” was at the center of Mechanik des Geistes. This, among Rathenau’s earliest tropes, now became a major building block of his thought, central to his efforts to flee rationalism, standing for the more refined, sublime side of man’s mental capacity. In his typically dualistic worldview, in which courage confronted fear and strength was pitched against wisdom, the human mind, too, contained two contrasting elements: the intellect—leading to calculated, goal-oriented behavior, and the soul—the source of everything that was intuitive, unspoken, authentic, and transcendental. Rathenau’s world was thus divided between those who possessed and those who did not possess a true soul; between soulful and soulless nations and societies, soulful and soulless civilizations. He did insist, however, on keeping the line of division fluid. In fact, the apparent dualism was a descriptive rather than a normative state of affairs in Rathenau’s thought, and a world populated by “soulful people” was no mere utopia for him. He repeatedly presented it as a real option, even if only to be achieved in some indefinite, remote future. The past also had a role to play in his system. The crucial difference between the soulful and the soulless, according to Rathenau, was best observed as a collective phenomenon in past periods in the history of various nations. While becoming soulful was a matter of evolution on all levels, it was more apparent in community rather than individual life. On the communal level we first encounter an emerging sense of belonging, he claimed, a readiness to offer even the ultimate sacrifice and the option of attaining love. But the capacity for a communal “life of the soul” is not evenly distributed. It is found most often and most completely among Germans, and then in a qualitatively diminishing order among Indians, the Semites, the Greco-Romans, etc.19 In parallel to racism, Rathenau’s “theory of the soul” helps distinguish among human groups and puts them in a hierarchal order. And everywhere it is the Germanic world that reaches the uppermost heights and German people who are most moved by the longing for the true joy of creation, satisfaction in every kind of labor, and a sense of responsibility in social life, by solidarity and the inner, authentic need to serve mankind.20 Thus, growing in the bosom of mechanization, such qualities would finally overcome its pervasive negative effects.21 “Only an inner revival, a reforming of human

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will,” according to Rathenau, could break “the magic spell of fear and craving.” No institutions, he insisted, or laws or actions of individuals would bring about the new world, only sentiments. Once these were transformed, the rest would follow. At the last stage, he concluded, Christ’s main ideals would be realized. We would then be standing at the gates of the “kingdom of the soul,” as he put it, that kingdom which would, in fact, be nothing less than heaven on earth, “God’s true Kingdom.”22 The most disconcerting aspect of the book comes to a head, indeed, at this final paragraph. Walther Rathenau, so often insisting on his Jewishness, was prophesying an approaching salvation in Christ’s kingdom. He, a man of enormous worldly goods, known for his boundless earthly ambitions, was posing as an evangelist who announces the dawn of a new age in which property and honor would be discarded in favor of life in the service of others. It did require a great leap of faith to take such preaching seriously. And, as could be expected, the book aroused much irritation. Some objected to the rationalistic representation of a heavenly sphere that was supposed to lie beyond analytical thinking—a plethora of logical constructions employed in order to prove the poverty of reason. Others felt it was the work of an amateur and resented Rathenau’s intrusion into spiritual matters, presuming to overcome difficulties in ways that a whole army of better equipped thinkers could not fathom. Finally, even “true believers,” so to speak, people who were well disposed toward Rathenau, were left unconvinced by this longish, annoying book. In a world of open class struggle and deep social gaps, of radical political antagonism and serious cultural rifts, Rathenau’s harmonizing vision struck a strange note. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who—like him—had put their faith in the innermost soul of man, he never saw the problem in reaching and accessing it, in assessing its true identity or in defining its true needs. The vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages, for instance, came to believe in graphology as the window to the individual soul. Sigmund Freud made it his life work to reach beyond appearances toward what indeed might be called “the soul” by studying human dreams, casual mistakes in everyday life, or thoughts expressed through the method of free association. Rathenau skipped that stage. In addition, his efforts at dialectical thinking culminated in concepts of evolution rather than revolution and in finally demanding change that would be both gradual and cautious, rather mysteriously carried out only by spiritual forces. According to him, the capitalist system, thriving on mechanization, was not to be destroyed by the approach of the “kingdom of the soul” but rather kept alive in a reformed version. His was a sort of mediated “third way” that ultimately relied on what could be easily considered no more than empty phrases. The most crushing critique came from the pen of Robert Musil, the Austrian author, who would later capture the Rathenau of these years in his famous novel A Man Without Qualities. To be sure, Musil himself was a sharp critic of rationalism and for him, too, the human soul was at the center of attempts to escape too much logic and calculation. Rathenau’s approach, however, struck him as false and inauthentic. The attack on rationalism in this book, he argued, was not a reflection of a mystical experience, enabling one to go beyond one’s intellect into higher

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spiritual spheres, but an all-too-elaborate construction, philosophically messy, a kind of “pseudo-systematic,” as he put it. “We do not have too much intellect and too little soul,” he sarcastically commented elsewhere, “but too little precision in matters of the soul.”23 Rathenau was painfully offended by the cool reception of what he considered his most important literary-philosophical work. Much later, coming back to Musil’s critique, he still talked about that “deep contempt of my life work” and that crass rejection of his personality, emanating from such criticism.24 As late as May 1917, while insisting that the book did “preoccupy and influence the new literature,” he still found it necessary to comment that it had received the “academic honor of prophylactic disregard.”25 What he probably did not take fully into account was the opposition this and some of his other later works aroused due to their implied conservative connotations. Rathenau’s presumed dialectics, the belief in self-emanating solutions, arising from the bosom of present problems, so to speak, meant only delaying change and postponing it for a distant future. The reliance upon that vague emergence of the soul, spreading solidarity and a binding sense of communal responsibility in the hearts of all competing forces, made hope for such change ephemeral at best and a sheer fantasy at worst. Even within the peculiar intellectual atmosphere of the time, Rathenau’s book remained a curiosity and, despite a few positive reactions, was not taken entirely seriously.26 He did not give up. Following a short episode of bureaucratic engagement during the early months of World War I as head of the Raw Materials Office at the War Ministry, and while he was worriedly predicting Germany’s approaching collapse, Rathenau was repeatedly preoccupied with formulating and publishing plans for a more distant future. His book In Days to Come, begun before the war and slowly completed while it was raging on all fronts, was published in March 1917.27 It offered a view of an alternative future of communal national life while trying to stay clear of what he saw as the “socialist, materialist trap.” Socialism, Rathenau explained, was based on “complaints and accusations” and included no “luminous goals.” Together with capitalism, it, too, needed to be transcended, and that could be done only by “men standing on firm ground,” men whose life was “based upon a genuine participation in the world and genuine responsibility to the world,” but whose eyes were nevertheless “turned toward the sky.” Apparently, it could be done only by men like Rathenau. Once again, as was his habit, his exposition began by reaffirming the closing ideas of the previous book. He opened by explaining the meaning and function of modern “mechanization,” insisting, as he had done before, that there was no way back “to nature and to unmechanized life” and that “our aim” was, nevertheless, to transcend present reality and attain the “kingdom of the soul.” In this more practice-oriented and less pathos-filled book, Rathenau finally discarded his transcendental jargon and called his final goal simply “human freedom.” Having sketched his familiar spiritual roadmap, he was now ready to suggest practical means of moving along it. Rathenau envisioned a collective economic order with strong centralized control, a society that eschewed material values, luxury, and

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the “empty life of amusement,” and sought spiritual integrity through solidarity combined with a deep sense of responsibility. The state hovering above such a society would be taking care of its citizens’ well-being, a true “people’s state,” itself an “organocracy,” as he now called it, stable and dynamic at the same time, incorporating those “absolute and ethical ideals” that were particularly fit for Germany and intent upon “dethroning mechanization” and “elucidating the divine elements in the human spirit.”28 Rather unexpectedly, considering the pressure of war at this particular point in time, the book turned out to be a great commercial success. Its marketing included prepublication of some provocative passages in the daily press, and the Fischer publishing house utilized a new publicity stunt, presenting it alone in the otherwise empty display windows of Berlin’s bookshops. It sold about 65,000 copies until the end of the war and was reviewed by some of the most outstanding intellectual figures of the day such as the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, the aging economist Gustav von Schmoller, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, the philosopher Max Scheler, and the novelists Stefan Zweig and Hermann Hesse. As usual, the author himself was ambivalent toward this apparent public stir and not surprisingly, chose to focus on the few critical and negative reactions. He soon felt attacked from all sides in a “hateful” manner and as was his habit, tried to defend himself whenever and wherever he could in private letters and public appearances. But contrary to this subjective state of mind, most reviewers praised Rathenau as an author of great talent and Bildung, capable of dealing with metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of history, while simultaneously being an astute social critic and state theorist, “addressing the whole German nation and aiming at a radical restructuring of the German social and political situation.”29 Most critics treated Rathenau’s work with a measure of admiration, although each seemed to find some fault in the new book, often in the area of the individual’s expertise, as could be expected. Rathenau’s intentions were noble, argued Schmoller, but as he was insufficiently familiar with the economic resources of the Prussian state, his reform plans were therefore unfit for the task, constituting no more than a utopia. His trust in human nature was admirable, wrote Tönnies, but it was unsupported by scientific observation. His faith in the “kingdom of the soul” was most welcome, stated Hesse, but although it did come from the heart, it was not “written with the heart.” In the end it was an intellectual construct, Hesse contended, pieced together by using the “tools of yesterday.”30 Once again, perhaps even more emphatically, commentators stressed the tension between Rathenau’s actions as a second-generation large-scale industrialist and his critique of hereditary wealth, crude materialism, and luxury consumption. His willingness to compromise with the existing system, declaring himself a monarchist despite all its failings, seemed disingenuous. His plans for parliamentary reform to be implemented only at the “right time” and only in order to achieve limited goals, without losing that much-appreciated “German uniqueness” in the process, made his entire critical construct suspect. His hopeful reliance on a vague spiritual revival rather than some form of practical institutional reform in this

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book too—all this seemed too much for his conservative colleagues and too little for more outspoken liberals, not to mention the socialists. Later on, to be sure, Rathenau did adopt more radical views and in some of his essays demanded more comprehensive change. But in the midst of war, he still felt compelled to limit his criticism and evade too pessimistic an outlook in his public pronouncements. Only when the system finally collapsed and was under the pressure of a violent revolution did he allow himself to become a radical. As a result he was often considered an opportunist by all the competing forces. Everything he wrote could be interpreted, and was interpreted, as a means of bolstering either the position of the AEG or his own sagging political career. But if ambition was the motivation, the outcome did not justify the effort. Whereas Rathenau clearly had political intentions and political plans, his writings were doomed to frustrate them, and although his ambitions were doubtlessly soaring, Rathenau continued to write what he thought. Presumably, he could not help it. “I have never written even one line of thought in my life that I didn’t feel I must write,” he confided to Lili Deutsch in a letter of this period.31 In any case, as a manipulative tool, his writings were simply counterproductive. Still, no censure or criticism could stop him now. His flow of publications continued unabated. During the rest of the war and during the early Weimar Republic, Rathenau repeatedly sought and finally found new platforms from which to expand his ideas about the new economy, the new state, and the new society. Indeed a booklet under this last title appeared in mid- November 1919.32 The New Society is a piece written from the heart. It reads like a rough draft—unorganized, repetitious, inconsistent, a true “stream of consciousness” presentation. It is a much weaker work than some of Rathenau’s earlier writings but biographically very revealing. Rathenau had come a long way. While many notions in this book were old Rathenau stock, others had been completely rejected. As before, spirit and the soul are predominant, but the harsh experiences of war and revolution brought Rathenau closer to the questions of the day. He was now compelled to struggle with the very real challenge of socialism and to suggest concrete economic, social, even institutional reforms. Only toward the very end is one thrown back upon Rathenau’s familiar pathos, and the piece concludes with yet another call for reliance on the will, better still, on good will, and on human solidarity that emanates from one’s soul, expressing one’s true deep spirit. This is also an impatient piece. Having called for a popular insurrection to save Germany’s military establishment as war was drawing to a close, Rathenau was attacked from all sides and may have lost some of his self-control.33 He knew that his loyal publisher would print and even sell it all. In any event, he considered this piece his “last work” and seemed to have lost faith in the effect of his writings altogether. Moreover, he may have simply lost interest at that point in his own philosophical meandering. In any case, modernity was there to stay, as he had always realized, and the human soul—salvaged or doomed in its struggle with modernization—seemed to provide answers that now seemed too abstract, clearly

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too remote from the immediate needs of the day. It was with this realization that Rathenau’s political career finally took off. He had a chance of succeeding only when he could set his grand theories aside. After all, it was neither his analyses of modernity, sound and insightful as they were, nor his metaphysics of the soul— convoluted though surely deeply felt—that were in demand during the early years of the Weimar Republic. It was his business acumen and his extraordinary negotiating skills. These now made him useful in dealing with the main issue at hand, namely reparations, and in handling complex diplomatic exchanges with both East and West. He was called to take office not on account of his vision, but on account of his practical expertise, perhaps also in response to the vacuum in leadership at the time. And he was able to act under extremely difficult circumstances precisely because he finally managed to put his vision aside and place himself—this time completely—in the service of his land. In the end, this cost him his life. “What will be, will be,” Rathenau replied to a worried friend in the summer of 1922. “I have a task to carry out—perhaps not to fulfill. When my hour strikes—and not before—I shall be taken. Then, if I left this country a little nearer to peace . . . I would feel I did not leave too early.”34 Peace, as we know, remained fragile and did not last. His previous, much more far-reaching dreams did not provide even a remote alternative. Ultimately, these remained a memorial of another day and age—yes, food for historians and biographers—but nothing more.

Notes 1. There is a great deal of literature on Rathenau, most of it in German, including numerous biographies. Among the early works, most outstanding and still gripping, is Harry Graf Kessler, Walther Rathenau. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Berlin, 1928). The most recent biography is Lothar Gall, Walther Rathenau. Portrait einer Epoche (Munich, 2009). This chapter utilizes research for my own work: Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven and London, 2012). 2. For much of the information here I am especially indebted to Dieter Heimböckel’s, Walther Rathenau und die Literatur seiner Zeit. Studien zur Werk und Wirkung (Würzburg, 1996); see 182–93. 3. On this milieu, see Hans Dieter Hellige’s presentation in the introduction to the Rathenau-Harden correspondence, Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6 (Munich and Heidelberg, 1983), especially 77–172. Also compare Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK, 1984). 4. This essay first appeared in the Zukunft 1898 and was then reprinted in Walther Rathenau, Impressionen (Leipzig, 1902), 71–99. 5. First published in the Zukunft, these essays were then reworked by the author and reprinted in Walther Rathenau, Reflexionen (Leipzig, 1908). For the essay discussed here, see 58–78. 6. Rembrandt als Erzieher, von einem Deutschen first appeared in Leipzig in 1890 and was subsequently reprinted in as many as eighty editions.

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7. This document was first made available by Harry Graf Kessler in his Rathenau biography (see note 1 above). The translated quotes that follow here are from the English edition of this biography (New York, 1930), 74. 8. See the passage in Alfred Kerr’s memoirs, Erinnerungen eines Freundes (Amsterdam, 1935), quoted in Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 642. 9. The book was first published by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin, January 1912. It then appeared as vol. 1 of Rathenau’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1918). It is now available with a very useful introductory essay by Ernst Schulin in Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 17–103. 10. See Heimböckel, Walther Rathenau, 186–88. 11. Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 55, 57. 12. Ibid., 58–59. 13. For this earlier aspect of Rathenau’s thought, see his essay “Von Schwachheit, Furcht, und Zweck,” first published in the Zukunft (1904), then reprinted in his Reflexionen, and finally in his Gesammelte Schriften (1918), 4: 9–32. 14. Rathenau, Gesammelte Schriften, 4: 26. 15. Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 8. 16. Ibid., 84–86. 17. Ibid., 103. 18. The book later appeared as vol. 2 of Rathenau’s Gesammelte Schriften, in 1918; again, the best edition is now available in Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 105–295. 19. Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 215–16. 20. Ibid., 251. 21. Ibid., 280. 22. Ibid., 295. 23. Robert Musil, “Anmerkung zu einer Metapsychik” in Die Neue Rundschau 25 (1914): 556–60; idem, “Helpless Europe,” Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago, 1995), 131. 24. See Rathenau’s correspondence, 30 July 1914, in Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 5 (2): 1345. 25. Ibid., 1683. 26. See Heimböckel, Walther Rathenau,193–203. 27. Rathenau’s Vom kommenden Dingen was reprinted in vol. 2 of his Gesammelte Schriften, in 1918. The English translation is In Days to Come (New York, 1921). 28. For the quotations in this paragraph, see the In Days to Come (English edition), 57, 16, 27, 60, 155, 203, 247, 286. 29. See Ernst Schulin, “Zur Rathenaus Hauptwerken” in Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2:499–595; on this book especially, 555–95; the citations here are on page 564. 30. Ibid., 565–72. 31. June 13, 1917, Walther Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 5 (2):1707. 32. Walther Rathenau, Die Neue Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1919). Quotations here are from the English translation, The New Society (New York, 1921). 33. For the major episode that discloses Rathenau’s panic at this stage, see primarily Michael Geyer, “Insurrectionary Warfare: The German Debate about a Levée en Masse in October 1918,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 3 (2001): 467. 34. Rathenau-Gesamtausgabe, 2: 853.

Chapter 8

“Nothing But a Disillusioned Love”? Hans Kohn’s Break with the Zionist Movement

Adi Gordon

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Zionism is founded on the link between politics and violence. Our raison d’être was to combine Zionism and ethical demands. A vain [attempt] at this is a contradiction in terms. We must withdraw and as much as we are active, combat Zionism. —Hans Kohn, 22 December 1929 I too am convinced that the Jews will establish a majority here. It is merely a question of nerves. . . . If we will have the money and the army, the Arabs will become powerless. And, ultimately, the world is indifferent to what happens in other countries. The question is how long will the nerves of the Jews hold out. And here is the “dangerous” element in Brit Shalom, for Brit Shalom . . . corrodes, or at least attempts to corrode, the so-called troops’ morale. —Hans Kohn, 21 April 1930

Political Crisis and Academic Creativeness Hans Kohn’s (1891–1971) life’s work marks the beginning of nationalism studies as we know it. From the time of Herder, the major theoretical contributions toward an understanding of nations and nationalism had been written by nationalist thinkers who viewed nationalism as universal and natural. By contrast, Kohn did not write his major works on nationalism as a nationalist, but during and after a slow and painful break with his own national movement—the Zionist movement. “It gave me a better understanding of the pitfalls and self-deception inherent in most national movements,” he would write in his memoirs.1 Although not the only scholar in the early twentieth century to approach nationalism academically,

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critically, and comparatively—Carlton Hayes and E. H. Carr should not be forgotten—for decades he was, undoubtedly, the field’s most influential and prolific scholar. In dozens of celebrated books, Kohn historicized nationalism and exposed it as “first and foremost a state of mind.”2 More important, in several monographs he attempted to explain historically why nationalism developed in such diverse ways, and in the process he charted an extremely influential distinction between two archetypes, or rather families of nationalism: civic nationalism, on the one hand, and ethnic nationalism, on the other. His work profoundly shaped common views of nationalism well into the 1960s. Kohn’s lifelong fascination and grappling with nationalism began as a young Zionist in Hapsburg Prague and matured with the advent of World War I, when nationalism became, in his words, “problematic” (fragwürdig) and needed to struggle for its soul.3 Zionism’s aspiration for a Jewish state also became hopelessly problematic in his eyes at that time because it aspired—overtly or covertly—for a Jewish nation-state in a land with an overwhelming Arab majority. According to Kohn, it was precisely the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that made Zionism’s “Arab Question” the movement’s touchstone. As a Jewish nationalist and a Zionist he claimed the latter movement had to renounce all aspirations for a Jewish nationstate and commit itself instead to the creation of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine.4 Following his migration to British-ruled Palestine in 1925, Kohn cofounded the Brit Shalom Association—the first organization to advocate the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab state in Palestine—and served as its first secretary. Fellow binationalist Zionists were Kohn’s mentor, the philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), and his friends from youth, the philosopher Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975) and journalist Robert Weltsch (1891–1982).5 His eventual break with Zionism, including binational Zionism, marked his emergence as a scholar of nationalism, challenging the premise of its “natural,” “authentic,” and “self-explanatory” character. The binationalist Brit Shalom Association, it should be noted, advocated the most dovish position within the wide ideological spectrum of Zionism. As the experiences of the late 1920s further radicalized Kohn’s worldview, he, the most conciliatory member of that association, effectively found himself beyond the ideological boundaries of Zionism. His break with the Zionist movement is significant because it facilitates the demarcation of the ideological boundaries of Zionism, at least at one end of the spectrum. Beyond Jewish politics, it also offers a compelling case study of the relations between a politically engaged intellectual and an ideological movement in the age of mass politics. Published in the mid-1960s, Kohn’s memoirs described this break and his subsequent emigration from Palestine in an almost technical manner.6 His diaries and countless letters to Zionist and non-Zionist colleagues, however, testify to a great emotional and ideological upheaval. His colleagues recalled that Kohn “left brokenhearted. Suddenly he recognized this path was wrong,”7 and he actually abandoned it “out of despair.”8 Most previous studies concerning Kohn have focused on his published oeuvre and have pointed to a conceptual affinity between

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his writings on Jewish nationalism as an active Zionist and his general theories of nationalism elaborated later as an American professor.9 What is missing from these studies, however, is an examination of the nature and significance of the break that separates these two distinct chapters in Kohn’s intellectual biography. His irreversible rupture with Zionism took place during the six years before he left Palestine in the spring of 1934, and its mark on his scholarly work is the purpose of this chapter. Based on an analysis of his unpublished diaries and correspondence as preserved in multiple archives, it explores the political and intellectual crisis that turned Kohn away from, and ultimately against, the national movement with which he had identified for twenty years and propelled him into what eventually became a brilliant career as a critical and comparative scholar of nationalisms. Not only did his academic work fill the void left when his Zionist activities ended, but his research on nationalism was also inspired by his need to explain his own break with it; he had to write about it.

Dynamics of a Break In the fall of 1929 Hans Kohn resigned from his position in Keren Hayesod (the Foundation Fund of the Zionist Organization) for reasons of conscience. He could not see a way to bridge the gap between his worldview and that of official Zionism and, therefore, could not see himself continuing to represent it. Kohn continued his activity in the Brit Shalom Association for an additional year, but in September 1930, he retired from it, too, claiming that the association simply did not take seriously its own principles. Brit Shalom had compromised where it shouldn’t have, he said, and it had systematically bypassed the key problems of Zionism and of Palestine, instead wrapping itself “in a cloud of innocence.” His primary concern, he continued, was that “from this cloud there is no possibility of influence.”10 Kohn, who lost his livelihood by resigning from Keren Hayesod, was determined to find his place in academia. In the early 1930s he spent much of his time abroad and completed the writing of six books.11 The more radical his critique against Zionism, the greater the gap separating him from his companions became. And the more he distanced himself from this social circle, the more he drifted away from their ideological worldview. After enduring years of frustration and failed attempts to obtain an academic position, in November 1933 Kohn was invited by Smith College in Massachusetts to serve as a professor of modern history. A few months thereafter, in the spring of 1934, he left Palestine with his wife and child, never to set foot on its soil again. Kohn described his ideological progression during those years in a letter to his friend Robert Weltsch: “When I talked about binationalism, . . . the others still did not want to hear anything about it. And today, when I say that one can no longer talk about binationalism in its old sense, but only of a protected minority status, I am once again isolated, and the others say what I had said already in 1925.”12 Kohn, who began advocating binationalism in 1919, abandoned this approach

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some ten years later in favor of a concept of a Jewish minority in Palestine whose rights and existence would be protected by law under the guardianship of Britain and the League of Nations. But this idea interested no one at the time, neither the Arabs nor the British, and certainly not the Zionists. Kohn’s transition from this position to a total break with Zionism was swift and hardly noticeable. After all, within the mainstream Zionist movement and the yishuv (the Zionist Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine), Kohn was perceived as someone who had long ago crossed the line.

“Silence and Parting” The Arab riots that jolted Palestine in 1929 with a storm of violence, and especially the Zionist and British reactions to them, were the immediate historical backdrop to Kohn’s break. A wider reading of his writings, particularly his personal papers, however, demonstrates that his turn away from Zionism had roots prior to the summer of 1929. In the mid-1920s Kohn was fully committed to the mission of Zionism, but like many other members of Brit Shalom, his commitment to binational Zionism derived from grave concerns—the fear that the Zionism that he and his friends espoused was at a point of a moral collapse and on the verge of becoming a movement one should neither participate in nor support. The founding of Brit Shalom, and, above all, the genesis of the binational idea, stemmed in part from the extreme pessimism of individuals who assessed the limits of their Zionism. Thinkers such as Arthur Ruppin and Hugo Bergmann continuously asked themselves how they would act if they were to realize that the implementation of Zionism necessitated objectionable means.13 Kohn was not the only one who repeatedly referred to Ahad Ha’am’s dictum, “If this is the Messiah, I do not want to see his coming.” Hagit Lavsky has already noted that as early as 1921, Kohn dealt theoretically with the question of a break with Zionism, a question that he reiterated throughout the 1920s.14 In 1928 Kohn experienced a series of sobering transformative events. One was an escalating confrontation over the nature of the association’s activities with Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), the pioneer of Jewish sociology, director of the Palestine Land Development Company, and by far the most prominent Zionist in Brit Shalom. Kohn wanted to transform Brit Shalom from an association that represented a principle into an active and enterprising body. Ruppin fiercely rejected this idea, mainly for tactical reasons. In Kohn’s eyes, “Ruppin’s scandalous inactivity”15 placed grave moral responsibility on the association. After the riots of 1929, Kohn’s frustration only escalated. A significantly more traumatic experience was the murder by Jews of two random Arabs passing by Kohn’s home on the night of 8 June 1928. Kohn, who overheard the murder, wrote in his diary of a neighbor who instructed him to say, regardless, that the murderers were Arabs.16 He wrote to Weltsch: “We have degenerated in a horrible way due to our nationalism. . . .

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One can say today, that 95 percent of the yishuv supports such murders. . . . Here innocent people were murdered, passersby. Even the Germans did nothing like this. The French intelligentsia was in turmoil about the Dreyfus affair. Here the murder interests no one. Who can afford to be a part of this? Just like in the world war, each barbarity, like this barbarity, is presented as a necessity. Beyond the moral level, I see also the practical problem in such a position. Where does it lead? [Yitzhak] Ben Zvi [one of the yishuv’s leaders and later Israel’s second president] claimed it will scare the Arabs. I claim the total opposite. . . . An indescribable racial hatred takes place here.”17 After this event, his relations with the yishuv changed. Kohn was in Europe when the riots broke out in Palestine during the summer of 1929, and he followed them with great concern. “News from Palestine on the general uprising of the Arabs,” Kohn wrote in his diary on 26 August 1929. “[T]hat which I have feared, has come into being. It had to come sometime. And we are to blame; for we did not practice any other policy!”18 That same day, in an oft-quoted letter, Kohn urged Buber not to stop at proclamations—”declarations simply do not do the trick”—and to act immediately, for “if we do not act, act ‘unconditionally,’ i.e., without considerations for the self-interest of groups . . . it will soon be too late.”19 Kohn oscillated in those days between utter despair and the hope that out of this crisis a new awareness and a new Zionist policy would arise. He hoped the new policy would show that the Zionist movement understood how to transform itself to assist, rather than oppose, the Arab national movement. Days thereafter, Kohn wrote Judah L. Magnes, chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was also a fellow binationalist: I am afraid the Zionist movement will again go the wrong way, the way all governments and nations would go . . . I am afraid that our friends do not understand the true situation: we are faced by the “national revolution” of an oppressed people. The Arab mob is fighting for a nation, or a nationalistic idea—ideal, just as our people, or the Sinn Féin did. And there are only two ways left now: either to oppress the Arabs and to keep them down by a permanent display of strong military force, a colonial and imperial militarism of the worst sort—or Zionism must ultimately discover its true face, which has nothing to do with state, majority, or political power. . . . We all ought to . . . do all we can to find a way to the Arabs and to change entirely the face of Zionism in light of pacifism, anti-imperialism, democracy—and this means the spirit of true Judaism. Now we have to show all the cleanliness [sic! i.e., purity] of our thinking, to remain objective, impartial, not to become subject to herd instincts. Our great hour has come! I should like to act together. I never was as excited as now. I feel it goes to the root of all my human consciousness. If we waver only a little, I feel true Zionism is lost!20

Kohn’s glimmer of hope for the reform of Zionism was short lived. The following day he wrote in his diary that the policy of the Zionist executive was worse than what he could have ever conceived, and thus he “must not be there or be a part of it. We will secede then slowly! Silence and parting!”21 The day after that, Kohn wrote again that his resolve was only strengthened to “abandon Zionism

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as political Zionism, as an organization. I cannot partake in the responsibility. It means sharing the guilt for a crime. I want to retire from Keren Hayesod in the winter, without drama. We shall need to limit ourselves [economically], but I shall be able to breathe freely!”22 On 18 September matters progressed to the extent that he wrote Weltsch “a farewell letter of sorts to the twenty-one years of my Zionist activity, which was so intertwined with my friendship with him, that the things merged one into the other. . . . As far as Zionism is concerned, he [Weltsch] cannot draw my conclusions. He is also more materially dependent. But I cannot be there any longer; for what grows there runs completely counter to my intentions, and my activity in the group [Brit Shalom] is used only to conceal and support that which should neither be concealed nor supported.”23

Forced Resignation from Keren Hayesod Although Kohn’s decision to resign from Keren Hayesod was the result of much drawn out personal reflection, in a certain sense it was influenced by external pressures as well. Even prior to his return to Palestine in the summer of 1929, Zionist publicists attacked an article by Kohn in the Frankfurter Zeitung in which he criticized the supporters of the “iron fist” policy within the British administration. Such an approach, Kohn claimed, revealed a misunderstanding of “the deep roots of the tragic enmity” between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land, and “surely is not the way for a swift pacification in the land.” Instead, Kohn called for a return to the policy of the first British high commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel (in office 1920–25).24 The Hebrew-language newspaper Davar published a response under the sarcastic title “‘Zionist’ Clarification,” which mocked Kohn’s explanation and questioned his Zionism (hence the quotation marks around “Zionist”). The article attacked Kohn ad hominem for his lack of national party discipline at a particularly difficult time for the movement: If Zionists like Kohn expressed themselves in such a manner in the world press, Davar asked, “how can we hope that this press will change its skeptical and disapproving attitudes toward our enterprise?”25 Weltsch shared German Zionist leader Fritz Naftali’s (1888–1961) feeling that the spirit of the published response to Kohn and especially its title were “identical, more or less, to those of the [German] Volkish newspapers, which, when writing about a certain socialist, place[d] the word ‘German’ in quotation marks.” In the same letter, Weltsch claimed that Davar “casts doubt on Hans Kohn’s ability to manage Keren Hayesod’s propaganda department. This position has no merit. . . . I was notified that on the basis of the Davar article, the [right-wing] revisionists in Palestine have begun collecting signatures demanding that the officials of Keren Hayesod fire Hans Kohn.”26 Kohn was not indifferent to the “inconceivable incitement against” him and wrote in his diary that “if people here were empowered, they also would have tried me and Hugo [Bergmann] for treason.”27 Kohn knew full well that some of his colleagues and superiors in the Keren Hayesod offices were planning behind his

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back to remove him from his position. Shmuel Sambursky, a Brit Shalom member, recalled a meeting when a superior in Keren Hayesod asked to initiate impeachment proceedings against Kohn. “He is waiting only for a letter from the public, and then he would initiate an investigation against Hans Kohn. He requested that Bodenheimer write such a letter.”28 Sambursky viewed the attack upon Kohn as a “traitor” as part of a wider battle in the yishuv against Brit Shalom and what Berl Katznelson, the intellectual leader of labor Zionism, labeled at the time “the rootless intellectuals.”29 At the end of those months, therefore, Kohn did not really decide to resign from Keren Hayesod, but rather was forced to leave. On 22 October 1929, Kohn sent a letter of resignation to his superior, Arthur Hantke, claiming he realized that his “heretic Zionist conceptions” might damage “the smooth functioning of the office.” Toward the end of the restrained letter, Kohn wrote: “Today I am almost forty years old, twenty of which—the very best years—I have devoted purely to Zionist work and thought. In a certain sense, thus, I feel orphaned. I also do not know where to begin, and integrating into a new world will not be easy for me, but it had better happen now rather than in a couple of years when integration would be even harder.”30 A month later, Kohn detailed the motivation for his decision to Berthold Feiwel (Feiwel is a fascinating figure, but in this context all I will mention is that he was director of the Jewish Colonial Trust, and earlier, the first director of Keren Hayesod): Lately, I have become increasingly aware that the official policy of the Zionist Organization and the opinion of the vast majority of Zionists are quite incompatible with my own convictions. I, therefore, feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organization. The Zionism that I have championed since 1909 was at no time political. I and a group of my friends regarded Zionism as a moral-cum-spiritual movement within which we could realize our most fundamental humane convictions: our pacifism, liberalism, and humanism. It has often been argued that we [Jews] could not unreservedly sponsor pacifism or ethical politics among the European peoples because this would result in our being regarded as aliens and traitors. Zion was to be the place where we would be able to realize our humanitarian aspirations. The reality of the Zionist movement and of Jewish settlement in Palestine is far from all this. You know that for years I have been fighting the battle for those ideas which to me represented the very meaning of Zionism. Eventually these ideas acquired focus in the so-called Arab question. For me, this question became the [moral] touchstone of Zionism. This conclusion was, however, not prompted by any particular sympathy for the Arabs or excessive appreciation of their merits. I was concerned not with the Arabs but with the Jews, their Jewishness and the confirmation of their humane [values]. It has, alas, become increasingly clear to me that, in this respect, the Zionist Organization has failed utterly. The decisive experience was the Arab national uprising in August 1929. . . . We pretended to be innocent victims. . . . But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. . . . The Arab national movement is growing and will continue to grow. In a short time it will be much more difficult for us to reach an agreement than it is today. Increasing our numbers by tens of thousands will not

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make it any easier. I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow for a long time. This will be done first with British aid and later with the help of our own bayonets—shamefully called Haganah [i.e., defense]— . . . but by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets. The means will have determined our goal. Jewish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put myself on the line.31

Between One Break and Another: Losing Faith in Brit Shalom After resigning from Keren Hayesod in October 1929, Kohn continued his activities with Brit Shalom for one more year. His gradual detachment from the association during that time had two dimensions: on the operative level, Kohn lost all faith in Brit Shalom’s impact, resolve, and methods; on the ideological level, he gradually distanced himself from the vision of a binational state. In fact, after the 1929 riots Kohn opted for a plan that differed entirely from the one Brit Shalom advocated. While the association strove for the establishment of a binational state, Kohn already spoke merely of securing a protected-minority status for the Jews in Palestine. Whereas Brit Shalom’s primary strategy was advocacy and propaganda within the Zionist movement and yishuv society, Kohn despaired totally of the possibility of convincing those parties or influencing Zionist policy, desiring instead to convince the British directly. He hoped that they, in turn, would dictate the perimeters of the game to the Zionists. In spite of these differences, he still saw great significance in Brit Shalom’s agitation within the Zionist movement.32 As early as September 1929, however, Kohn began to doubt whether Brit Shalom could ever redeem Zionism. Writing about German Zionists who, after the riots, had adopted a “radical Brit Shalom policy,” he wondered: “How could it help? Memoranda, brochures, etc. as long as there is no clear awareness of the fundamentals of what is morally unjustifiable. One has to decide: morality or Zionism. Ruppin saw this confrontation with great precision and chose Zionism. RIP.”33 Kohn grew more and more convinced that Brit Shalom had not and could not fulfill its mission as a significant opposition party within the Zionist movement. Aboard a ship returning from Europe to Palestine, Kohn wrote about the difference between him and the association. Whereas Kohn objected on moral grounds, on principle, to the aspiration to create a Jewish majority in Palestine, Brit Shalom apparently considered it legitimate, even if politically problematic, and therefore recommended that fellow Zionists moderate this aspiration solely on political-diplomatic grounds. But the “concession” (Verzicht) that worried Kohn most was the association’s tendency toward ideological compromise vis-à-vis the Zionist leadership. Each watering down of Brit Shalom’s positions in the hope of solidifying the base of support was a dangerous illusion that “destroys us,” he wrote; the base of support was not expanding, and the association was losing face and its moral backbone.34

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On Rosh Hashanah 1929 Kohn wrote in his diary that so long as he was not entirely convinced of the possibility of implementing Zionism morally, he could not participate in Brit Shalom’s activities. Many there believed they should not abandon Zionism even if it necessitated morally questionable means; therefore, they could justify the use of force. “If obligated to choose between an aggressive, military policy and abandoning Zionism,” Kohn proclaimed, “I shall choose the second.”35 During a Brit Shalom meeting three days later, Jacob Thon attacked Kohn for his Frankfurter Zeitung article, criticizing him for a lack of national loyalty. Kohn fought back.36 The day he resigned from Keren Heyesod, Kohn also resigned from his position as treasurer (and board member) of Brit Shalom.37 He continued working on Brit Shalom’s plans, but his diaries record the feeling that all his efforts were in vain: “It is a shame that all of this has nothing to do with reality. It leads to no conciliation or understanding; these are merely dreams [Traumgebilde]. What’s the point in all that? Either a true peace treaty—which is possible—or the war goes on, a war of the repression of the Arab freedom movement. One shouldn’t participate in that!” Nevertheless, Kohn did participate. He continued attending Brit Shalom’s meetings and worked in its framework on his draft of a constitution through which he again strengthened his beliefs in the association’s mission.38 Distinct from prior programs, Kohn’s draft—which no longer called for the old binational idea but for a protected-minority status for the Jews—was written almost as a matter of principle, with the knowledge that it had no chance of adoption by a broad segment of the yishuv and its leadership. In fact, he did not even plan to make it public to the Jewish community. He intended to offer the idea to British and international authorities in the hope that they would pressure the nations of the land to accept it.39 Until the beginning of summer, Kohn oscillated between the feeling of moral commitment to implementing the founding ideas of Brit Shalom and his growing concern that the association was not fulfilling its mission and even contradicted it in three ways: first, Brit Shalom did not speak in the name of official Zionism and, thus, it misled the Arabs; second, the association had become a propagandistic fig leaf of political Zionism, imparting a dovish appearance to the movement, regardless of its actions;40 third, the association provoked great hostility within the Zionist movement, thus strengthening the hawkish opposing camp.41 Kohn’s impressions from the association’s meetings were gloomy: “Afternoon meeting of Brit Shalom. All the discussions float in a vacuum. . . . Brit Shalom—with well-meaning intentions but lacking courage and panicked about its own impact—conveys a tragicomical impression. Hugo attempts to unify ethics and Zionism and this must fail”;42 “Brit Shalom meeting: a struggle for unrealities”;43 “Afternoon meeting of Brit Shalom. Perplexity and helplessness vis-à-vis the situation. Doom comes. It is not inevitable, but there is no one who will take measures to prevent it.”44 At the Brit Shalom meeting of 4 May, matters reached a boiling point: “In the last meeting of Brit Shalom, there was a confrontation between me and Thon

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on the question of individual freedom of action and freedom of conscience. . . . I have merely pointed out that instead of attacking certain isolated members for their activity [that is, Bergmann and Kohn himself ], it would have been much more fitting to attack Ruppin for his scandalous inactivity and his similarly scandalous behavior against Brit Shalom [after leaving the association].”45 He wrote to Weltsch about Brit Shalom–type initiatives, suggesting that at the current stage “all these are merely lies, after all, which do not even fool the Arabs nowadays. Only a small part of the [Arab] Christians still believe our propaganda.”46 By the summer of 1930, Kohn’s eventual break with Brit Shalom was merely a question of time. In June 1930, Kohn’s criticism of the association was so harsh that he wrote to Weltsch in all seriousness that the hawkish “Jabo[tinsky] is more Brit Shalom than Brit Shalom itself.”47 Kohn’s criticism grew more and more ad hominem. In July he charged Zionist policy with deception and Bergmann with self-deception.48 In a letter to Weltsch, Kohn described the Brit Shalom meeting of 19 July: “The afternoon meeting continued until two o’clock. Nothing was achieved. Those people sense the monstrous injustice that the Zionists perpetrate here . . . but they are helpless. In essence, [they are] idle, obviously morally preferable to [David Werner] Senator and Ruppin, but, logically, they are very weak. Decent people—but very bad politicians.”49 During those weeks, Kohn demanded that the association follow the essentially impossible route of taking a stand against the Balfour Declaration and the Mandatory rule.50 “The worst,” Kohn wrote in his diary, “is the dishonesty of the Brit Shalom people; they want to ‘do something for’ the Arabs, but if the government does something that even looks like complying with this demand, then they scream univocally with all the rest.”51 These harsh statements can be misleading, as Kohn kept most of his critiques to himself. He described his work with Arthur Ruppin and Georg Landauer as “shameful” and as “a dark chapter in my political judgment,” and added “how tainted am I after twenty years there [in the Zionist movement].”52 In another letter to Weltsch he noted that as a matter of fact, only a year ago he had been “blind,” but then he corrected himself immediately: “that is, I wasn’t blind anymore . . . but I did not have the courage to think things through; it was too convenient.”53 Kohn’s breaking point resulted from Brit Shalom’s meeting on the evening of 14 June 1930. Again, he described his gloomy impression to Weltsch: “Yesterday evening there was a Brit Shalom meeting. It was lethal in all aspects. Ruppin’s unadulterated spirit spoke from [Joseph] Lurie, who seemed to have been instructed by him before the meeting, and Ernst Simon, Shmuel Sambursky, Escha, and Boné did not attend. I did not utter a word and Hugo, too, seemed like someone who has accepted his fate. The only one in whom some reason flickered was Rabi Benyamin. Kalvarisky and Schwabe together with Lurie completed the apes’ dance. . . . I decided never to go there again.”54 After many months and even years of doubting that the members of Brit Shalom could act with the seriousness and resolve that should have followed from their views, Kohn finally acknowledged that Brit Shalom did not, and never would, fulfill what he perceived as its mission as an active

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opposition party within Zionism. Two months later he wrote a formal letter of resignation to the association: I would like to ask you to register me henceforth not as a “member” of Brit Shalom, but merely as its “friend.” I would like to explain the reason for this request only briefly: Now—when Zionism is coming ever closer to being Judaism’s most aggressive and reactionary faction—only a unified and resolute group can oppose this development. A group that is just as serious in its belief in peace, human solidarity, and liberal humanism as other groups are regarding their platforms. A group of people who insist on the implementation of their platform and who will stand or fall on its basis. People who do not merely profess their faith in the platform, even though that, too, is honorable. . . . Often members of Brit Shalom are linked to a great degree to the formal Zionist Organization —which they accept willy-nilly—and despite their stance, and maybe also despite their best intentions, their deeds cannot really match their views, and so it [their worldview] loses its impact. All this, of course saps Brit Shalom of all its power and leads it to write piles of pretty peace proposals, welcomed by all, but which are never implemented because they are up in the air, because they simply bypass the fundamental problem—which is not pretty at all—and which is welcomed by none. And so, Brit Shalom errs and misleads others as to the real problem. It wraps itself in a cloud of innocence, but from this cloud, there is no possibility of influence. . . . P.S.: As far as I’m concerned, I do not wish this step to be made public beyond the narrowest circle. As long as Brit Shalom is “persecuted”—even if this is a mistake—I will publicly identify myself with it entirely.55

For twenty years—as a cultural Zionist and later a binational Zionist—the core of Kohn’s Zionist agenda was the same: namely, that Zionism should never be just another small national movement aspiring for political sovereignty and a nationstate. Having lost faith also in the viability of binational Zionism, Kohn gave up the long struggle for Zionism’s soul and for the first time left it to his opponents to define it. In the late 1930s, when he wrote that “Zionism is the Jewish national movement that aims at the reestablishment of Palestine as a Jewish nation-state,” it was the clearest indication that he saw no glimmer of hope for Zionism.56

A Perplexed Guide: Kohn and Buber A central element in Kohn’s break was the development of a critical distance between himself and Martin Buber, who had been his mentor from his initial Zionist stirrings. At the time that he was breaking with Brit Shalom and Zionism, Kohn also concluded writing the first biography of Buber, which he had begun in early 1924.57 One cannot overstate Buber’s influence on the young Kohn and the personal bond the pupil felt with his teacher. Hillel Kieval showed long ago how Buber became a spiritual guide to Kohn and his fellow members of the Prague “Bar Kochba” Zionist student association. Buber gave his first address on Judaism

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to the association in Prague in 1909, and many of its veterans described that evening as an enchanted encounter and as “an indelible experience, [which] located our Zionist views on a truly stable foundation for the construction of our work. A foundation that was entirely new to many of us.”58 Kohn’s first edited volume (which he compiled as the chairman of Bar Kochba) was Von Judentum, which was a project carried out in the spirit of Buber and with his guidance.59 Kohn also dedicated the first book he published to Buber.60 When he began writing Buber’s biography two years later, it was very much from the perspective of a disciple and was even written with Buber’s cooperation. Despite Buber’s considerable influence and Kohn’s commitment to him, as early as World War I and more clearly during his Palestine years, the student’s implicit critique of his teacher began to grow stronger. For example, Kohn criticized the political “romanticism” in Buber’s periodical Der Jude, and prior to the 1929 riots he complained that Buber was not active enough regarding the Arab Question and that his Zionist speeches in those years were overly abstract and ignored the various practical questions.61 Despite his growing criticisms, Kohn composed a sympathetic biography of Buber by using the formula “Buber: His Work and Times.” He attributed almost every negative element in the biography to the spirit of the times, whereas his descriptions of Buber’s personality derived from deep identification and appreciation. The writing of this book, however, was also an act of leave-taking from a teacher. In those years of crisis, it enabled Kohn, and perhaps even forced him, to do some soul-searching and critical thinking about Buber’s path and his own, even if he did not make this criticism explicit in the pages of the book. After concluding the biography, Kohn wrote in his diary, “Some people wonder why, in my book about Buber, I so often quote my own works, my own deeds, etc. After all, the book should at the same time be my intellectual autobiography and my confrontation— simultaneously testifying to the strong feeling that lends unity to all of my books, which, at first sight, seem so disparate in their topics. Simultaneously, it reflects the unity of my essence, the dissonances therein, and its path.”62 In many ways this book can be seen as Kohn’s projection of his own location (i.e., on the margins of Zionism) onto the various chapters of Buber’s life.63 In a letter to Weltsch, Kohn was even blunter: “It is truly more an autobiography than a biography of Buber. For it shows my path and ours, my youth and ours, from which I part ways in this book and which I have analyzed and criticized in the book. . . . I choose the legitimate form of a biography of another man, a great man, to be able to say things I couldn’t have said on my own behalf.”64 In the spring of 1929, Buber attempted but failed to help Kohn acquire a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the wake of the Arab riots, a few months later, Kohn confronted Buber with his far-reaching conclusions, in an attempt to goad his mentor into even more radical and resolute Zionist action. This was a cry for help from a pupil in crisis. Even though the theoretical gap between the two was not so significant, Buber, in contrast to Kohn, perceived primarily the hand of fate and the tragic element of the riots.65 Kohn became

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increasingly critical of Buber’s personality and conduct, and although he saw him as a great thinker, he also viewed him as a rather small man in the hours of historic trial. In his letters to Buber, Kohn made small jabs: he alluded to Buber’s physical distance from Palestine and raised Buber’s initial embrace of World War I in order to draw a parallel to his conduct in the current crisis. Buber, for his part, found in Kohn’s dramatic letters, which repeatedly dealt with the idea of a break with Zionism, a troubling degree of dogmatism.66 In his diary entry for 2 September 1929, Kohn complained that “Buber is ambivalent again just as in 1914.”67 That same day he wrote to Magnes, claiming that the riots were a historic trial of one’s commitment to the cause, in which Buber, “unfortunately . . . again seems like he was in 1914–1915: ambivalent and unclear.”68 On 25 September, Kohn wrote Buber a letter toying with the idea of a break with Zionism, discussing the situation in Palestine while equating it to the moral, political trial raised by the outbreak of World War I. In the letter he referred to Buber’s detachment from the reality on the ground: You are lucky not to see the Palestinian and Zionist reality in its details, but Zionism as it is today, the Zionist goals, are unacceptable. From here, we cannot continue without becoming estranged from our own principles, which now must be put into action in all seriousness. The situation resembles 1914, that is like always and everywhere. It is not about Ishmael, only about Isaac; that is, about our goal, our life, and our deeds. I fear we lend our support to something that we cannot condone. But this is something that will drag us further, out of false solidarity, into the quagmire. Zionism must be carried out peacefully, or be carried out without me. Zionism is not Judaism.69

In a letter to Buber the next day, Kohn again noted Buber’s distance from the Palestinian reality: “Facing that Zionism, I am utterly in despair. This is something I did not wish, even in the years 1910–1914 or 1918. And this is what happened. I see it in thousands of details that you cannot see from afar.”70 A few days later, Kohn wrote in his diaries: “Buber’s conduct in this Zionist crisis is a major disappointment. . . . He doesn’t take either himself or his teachings seriously. He labels that serious conduct as one-dimensional doctrinairism (is there, then, deliberate ambivalence in his teaching?) as he himself makes very dark compromises. This does not discredit his teaching; it only discredits him.”71 Kohn subtly embedded his escalating criticism of Buber in the biography, as he told Weltsch: “I’ve expressed excruciatingly harsh criticism in places where the regular reader could not detect my dispute with Buber.”72 After the publication of the biography, Kohn wrote to Buber: My book about you must be out by now. I clearly feel that it represents a turning point in my development, as it is a book that was not conceived or written as a confession and yet became one. A turning point and an avowal in a dual sense: looking backward, it represents thanks for and an accounting of twenty years of progress and work, a period that began with your speech about the meaning of Judaism and

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that was shaped and guided by your teachings, a period in whose center stands a Zion that is only now revealing itself to me in its true form and has nothing in common with the national war [Völkerkrieg] in Palestine, a bad war that has been raging since 1917 and perhaps even longer but that we were not able to see from Prague around 1910. A turning point and an avowal of the future: it is not an accident, even though it was completely unintended and unpremeditated, that in my third chapter, the one devoted to the World War, I conclude your Zionist development with a Zionist creed that most people will no longer regard as Zionist . . . and now, in 1929, twenty years after 1909, your teachings—perhaps a practical, doctrinaire, consistent, Landauer-like conception of your teachings—have pointed the way to me that I am preparing to pursue. . . . Everything here is riddled with the sin of the (international) state of violence, everything is unfruitfully politicized; but maybe reality—the political turn of events, admittedly after the collapse of [this new] Sabbateanism, and with the loss of all hope for normalization—will bring about a new breakthrough, and our Zion would be resurrected—but maybe all of my material and spiritual springs would be blocked [by then], and I would have to leave.73

Hence, even in this concluding letter, Kohn did not spare Buber his jabs: he emphasized again that the transformation he had undergone stemmed necessarily and coherently from Buber’s teaching, a teaching that guided him “as a practical, doctrinarian, consistent” view. He believed that had Buber taken himself and his teaching seriously, he would have experienced a similar transformation. At the end of 1929, then, Kohn had reached the conclusion that Buber did not take his own humanist, Jewish, and Zionist views seriously and therefore did not act accordingly. This is precisely the same accusation he directed at the Brit Shalom Association a year later and was actually the very accusation he directed against himself. The tension between Kohn and Buber, apparently never reached an open confrontation, and it seems that the two always retained a considerable amount of mutual respect. But from then on, their bond progressively weakened. The scholarly confrontation of the biographer Kohn with his Zionist mentor Buber, which turned into his own Zionist soul-searching, became a key element in his eventual break with the Zionist movement.74

Toward the Scholarly Vocation Another dimension of Kohn’s break with Zionism is, of course, his scholarly work. During those years Kohn’s Zionist career was replaced in many regards by emerging academic ambitions. The beginning of Kohn’s academic career predated his break with Zionism and emigration from Palestine. Admittedly, most of his earlier publications were more philosophical than scholarly.75 Even his early books, however, published before the riots of 1929—History of Nationalism in the East (Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im Orient, 1928) and two additional research volumes that were written in a more “popular” style, his book on Soviet Russia, Meaning and Fate of the Revolution (Sinn und Schicksal der Revolution, 1923) and the 1926 History of the Arab

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National Movement (Toldot hatenuah haleumit haaravit)—display a marked scholarly approach. As of the mid-1920s, Kohn also published regularly in academic periodicals such as Zeitschrift für Politik. These works began to express in scholarly language the evolution of his political views. Already in History of Nationalism in the East (which he started writing prior to his immigration to Palestine), Kohn situated the Zionist project not in the context of Jewish history but within a broader framework of events in the East—modernization, decolonialization, and budding Arab nationalism—and this angle gave it entirely different proportions. As noted earlier, a biting review of this work in Davar (titled “Zionism in Two and a Half Pages”) included some highly personal criticisms and challenged Kohn’s position in Keren Hayesod.76 In the spring of 1929, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was about to establish the world’s first academic chair in “International Peace.” Kohn, viewing himself as most suitable to fill the position, suggested his candidacy to Magnes—a binationalist, a friend, and the chancellor of Hebrew University—with the following words: In my opinion, it should be a chair for political science and political philosophy, held by a man who is a real pacifist and interested in and actively striving for international peace, at the same time especially devoted to the political dilemma of the Middle East. I do not think there are many serious candidates for this chair. This professor could have a very important task: giving our youth a really liberal and pacifist political education and combating the narrow outlook that we encounter so often in our midst. It would be a task that attracts and allures me. I should find here—after long years of thankless toil, but still at the zenith of my creative forces—as teacher and as author, my life task for which I believe myself qualified, by my general faculties, my inclinations and tendencies, my work and my training.77

Before the selection of the chair, Magnes wrote to Buber—who, like him, worked for Kohn’s appointment to the position—that many reservations regarding Kohn’s candidacy “result[ed] from dissatisfaction with Dr. Kohn’s political position.”78 In August 1929, two weeks after the outbreak of the riots, the decision was made, and the university nominated Norman Bentwich, not Kohn, to the chair. Kohn’s diary records great frustration over the fact that his pacifism hindered his candidacy for the chair in “international peace,” a fact that struck him as utterly absurd. His resolve not to let himself be crushed by the loss of what he called up until then his “life task” is remarkable. Soon after, he embraced the outcome and rationalized his loss, asserting that in the current conditions, the position “would have given me more suffering than joy. I would like at one time to be a teacher at a German or American university. There I could give full expression to my teaching abilities and I would have an incentive for scholarly work.”79 The connection between his break with Zionism and his entry into academia was evident in the fact that a few days prior to his resignation from Keren Heyesod, Kohn roughly outlined a book titled Philosophy and Sociology of Nationalism that already pointed in a direction similar to his seminal work, The Idea of Nationalism, published

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in 1944.80 Half a year later, Kohn sketched an outline of works he planned to write before he would turn forty-five (in 1955), which covered eight topics: the philosophy of politics; the social psychology of modern Judaism; the philosophical foundation of politics and religion; the history of the national movement in the East; the “political problem of the Orient (Orient and Occident: on the boundary of two worlds)”; the political problem of Palestine; nationalism and national rights in the Soviet Union; and the philosophy and psychology of nationalism.81 Indeed, the moment he decided to quit Zionist activity, an academic career became his preferred alternative. In the two months between his resignation and his actual departure from the offices of Keren Hayesod, he wrote impatiently of his desire to devote himself completely to scholarship: “As long as I was at Keren Hayesod, I wasn’t able to do it, for I felt complicit in the Zionist deeds.”82 The great turmoil surrounding his resignation hindered him from any academic work during the time. (“In the current situation, I cannot work at all; it consumes me from within. This must stop.”83 “Days pass in constant nervousness, devoid of content and work.”84) When he traveled to the United States in the summer of 1930, he stressed both in his diary and to others that the journey was related to scholarly matters and would have no connection whatsoever to Zionist issues: “I do not wish to lecture before Zionist organizations. . . . I do not wish to come to America as a Zionist, I do not wish to be labeled or proclaimed as such, I do not wish to interfere in real Zionist politics—but rather to come as a scholar, a lecturer in political science and Judaism.”85 Initially, Kohn welcomed the period of forced unemployment.86 He devoted the time to learning and study, just as he had during his years as a POW in World War I. He made good use of the time and published widely. Years went by, however, and no academic position appeared on the horizon. In the fall of 1932, when he also lost his position as the Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent and had already used up most of his savings, Kohn grew increasingly anxious regarding his future. He asked for Magnes’s assistance in finding a teaching position at an American university.87 Magnes thought he should continue seeking a post at Hebrew University, but Kohn considered that an unlikely prospect: “I have established for myself now in Palestine, at great personal expense to me—not only financially, but much more as regards emotional woes, intellectual strain, heart suffering—a position of independence.”88 Kohn refused to endanger this independence by further pursuing a position at Hebrew University. His scholarship on the contemporary history of the Arab world, including the 1931 books Nationalism and Imperialism in the Hither East and Orient and Occident, evidenced the developments in Kohn’s thinking on the future of Palestine, Zionism, and the Arab national movement.89 Even though he attempted as much as possible to avoid a clear expression of his personal political views, he was unambiguous in asserting that the Palestinian Arabs had a national movement for all intents and purposes, and he added that this awakening of national consciousness renders impossible “even in the Orient,” the “swallowing” of one nation by another, the elision of its national identity or its assimilation.90 He also alluded to the 1929

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riots, stating: “History shows that suppressed nations won their freedom only through uprisings and violence, the lack of which was used by the oppressors as proof of the legitimacy of the current situation.”91 Kohn left Palestine in the spring of 1934 after being invited to serve as a professor of modern history by Smith College, in Massachusetts. On his very last day in Palestine, he concluded the final lines of his book Western Civilization in the Near East.92 This was his last book on the East; Kohn now shifted not only his life but also the focus of his research westward.

A Pacifist in the Zionist Movement Kohn’s pacifism was a central element in his break with Zionism. He became a pacifist during World War I, and from 1925 on he served as the Palestinian representative to War Resisters’ International (WRI). During the late 1920s he became one of the organization’s central figures.93 At an international conference of WRI in 1928, Kohn delivered an influential address titled “Active Pacifism,”94 in which he expressed some remarkable points with regard to his Zionist activity. First, he stressed that the hardest tasks for the world’s pacifist struggle were in the new nation-states such as the successor states that had replaced the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those nations, he claimed, previously strongholds of anti-militarism, now saw militarism as the highest expression of national sovereignty.95 If the relevance to the Palestinian context was merely implicit initially, the heart of Kohn’s piece created a most explicit link: In a state of multiple nationalities, the problem of pacifism in the context of domestic policy is presently more urgent and difficult than the problem of pacifism in the context of foreign policy. . . . For the Czechs need an army not for war against external enemies but rather to suppress the Germans at home. At present such a problem exists in each multinational state. . . . The quantitative concept of [a national] majority must cease to be a power-political concept bestowing exclusive rights [Vorrechte]. A similar problem exists in Palestine. I do not regret this. Pacifist convictions are worth something only if upheld when one’s own interests are at stake. For this offers us not only the possibility of espousing theoretical principles, an easy thing, but also the possibility of living out these principles. Like all other pacifists, we have to prove such principles not in battle against another people, not through the education of other peoples, but rather in the education of our own people. . . . We have to conduct this battle, which I see today as the decisive spiritual battle, above all in the midst of our people against our own people. . . . Hence I am happy that we Jews, returning to Palestine, are not coming to an unpopulated land and can uphold—on the basis of this specific material, this specific life task before us—the seriousness and sense of reality of our principles as well as the meaning of Judaism.96

For Kohn, the riots of 1929 were not only a test of Jewish and moral values, but equally of pacifist values. “Now we must put ourselves to the test,” he wrote to Buber, “for otherwise, what is the worth of our pacifism, anti-imperialism, and

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socialism?”97 After the riots of 1929 Kohn attributed greater importance to the conduct of his fellow pacifists within the Zionist movement and focused his gaze primarily on Magnes and Einstein. Occasionally he praised them,98 at other times he expressed doubt as to whether they would withstand the trial,99 and often he expressed despair regarding their conduct. For example, Kohn raged in his diary that Albert Einstein “published in the Manchester Guardian a scandalous article of deceitful Zionist phraseology of the most common kind, and he stabs me in the back in such a manner, for he is a pacifist. It is precisely things like that that drive me crazy.”100 Kohn often expressed his belief that there was no better setting for a modern Jew to fight for his radical views than within Zionism in Palestine. Yet a few days after his resignation from Keren Hayesod, he wrote in his diary, “We cannot act for peace etc. here any better than anywhere else. The claim according to which one can fight for humanity here [more than anywhere else] is false.”101 A major element in Kohn’s break was his growing conviction (which, as established above, predated the riots) that the leaders of Zionism and the majority of the yishuv did not, in fact, want an end to the conflict with the Arabs and may even have needed it. Kohn’s ongoing dilemma was about the modus operandi of a Zionist pacifist in such a position. In early 1930 he wrote that “the Zionists want war; [hence] the mission of the pacifists in the movement must be to deny [it] men and money so long as there is no peace.”102 At the end of the Palestine chapter of his life, after he had already turned his back on Zionism, Kohn wrote that “the pacifists’ struggle must primarily be against nationalism. The goal: absolute cosmopolitanism. Then, only then, will disarmament be possible. Setting of goals: (a) in the short term: the individual must not volunteer to participate in war or in the preparation for war ([with the pretense of ] the defense of his own people); (b) in the long term: ending the era in which the highest duty was the individual’s loyalty to the nation and educating men toward loyalty to humanity, a world-state [Erdstaat] (protect humanity from the nation).”103 Kohn, who is so identified with the distinction between destructive and benign nationalism, seemed to find all nationalism destructive in those months. Pacifism’s chief adversary, he argued, was not militarism, as one would imagine, nor the modern state, but nationalism. Probably more than any other conceptual foundation, pacifism offered Kohn an ideological platform for a radical critique of Zionism. In those years his pacifism could not be divorced from his newly acquired insights on the nature of nationalism, but a few years thereafter, Kohn’s pacifism, too, evaporated.104

Conclusion Preceding and following the 1929 riots, Kohn gradually neared a breaking point in parallel arenas in his life: first, as the head of the propaganda department of Keren Hayesod who became very critical of its goals; second, as a central figure

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in Brit Shalom who lost his faith in the group, its resolve, and its impact; third, as the author of the first biography of Buber, through which he found himself confronting his spiritual mentor and his own path; fourth, as a scholar seeking to devote himself fully to impartial academic endeavors, who wrote his important works on the Middle East and Arab nationalism in those years while conducting research that changed his perception of the developments in the Middle East and the Arab world; and, finally, as a radical pacifist at the height of his activity in international organizations, who saw Palestine as a decisive arena for pacifist struggle but despaired of the possibility of forging a significant pacifist current within Zionism (not even within its most dovish wing—Brit Shalom). Kohn’s Zionist national perspective was gradually replaced with the supranational one of great empires. In his memoirs he stated that in the early twentieth century the Hapsburg monarchy (his fatherland) was about to turn into “a truly multinational state,”105 and it seems that Kohn remained loyal to this unrealized Austrian idea. Accepting Palestinian citizenship (and gladly giving up the Czechoslovakian one), Kohn wrote in his diary that actually, “I was always Austrian. Austria I loved.”106 He loved the promise of higher human ideas surpassing religion and nationality. He identified similar potential in the 1920s in the British Empire,107 the Soviet Union,108 and later in the United States, all of which he saw as radical alternatives to the new nation-states. This aspect was also connected to his break with Zionism, as a letter to Weltsch from the spring of 1930 states: “It is likely that by using aggressive means, it will be possible to establish here a [Jewish] majority. But what will be here then? Nothing. A small Jewish state. What do I have to do with that? What does anyone have to do with it? If I am interested in states [at all], it is [in states such as] the English or the Russian, where there are great possibilities [for the formation] of a future and of a new type of man—something which is completely lacking here. For this small state . . . will always be armed to the teeth against the irredentism from within and the ‘enemies’ all around. Aware of its weakness, it will always remain a hotbed of exaggerated nationalism.”109 In fact, no idea or ideology filled the void created by his withdrawal from the Zionist movement. His pacifism, which played such a crucial role in the break, totally lost its critical edge outside the framework of the national movement: what was the value or legitimacy in demanding that other nations avoid the path of war? Indeed, Kohn himself abandoned pacifism within a few years. Similarly, Kohn stressed at the time that his break with Zionism was the most Jewish thing to do. When he explained the grounds for his withdrawal to Berthold Feiwel, he stressed, “I was not concerned with the Arabs but with the Jews, their Jewishness and the confirmation of their humane [values].  .  .  . In this respect the Zionist Organization has failed utterly.”110 One of his mottos at the time was that “Zionism is not Judaism,” but Kohn was far from coherent regarding this Jewish aspect. After having immigrated to the United States, his activity within Jewish frameworks diminished dramatically.111 The void created by his rejection of Zionism was filled by an alternative perspective—academia. From an activist member of the Zionist

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national movement, Kohn turned into a scholar analyzing the promises and perils of various national movements, in academic writing that aimed at being impartial, critical, and uncompromising. Until the possibility of settling in the United States arose, Kohn seemed trapped in Palestine and complained about the tremendous emotional stress: “I cannot stay in the country. I become too nervous because politics disturbs all the time. Time and again, I wish to end the story—and cannot.”112 After quitting Brit Shalom, Kohn’s evaluation of the Zionist movement grew even harsher, along with his disregard for the merit of Brit Shalom: “Zionism,” he wrote in his diary in the summer of 1932, “is completely and openly an oppressive, antisocial, freedom-suppressing movement. . . . In this regard, the good will of a few [or] the subjective dignity that others may have, Hugo Bergmann for example, does not change a thing.”113 His diaries and private correspondence in the four and a half years between his resignation and his immigration to the United States attest to his deep intellectual confusion and intense emotional turmoil. Bergmann understood well what his friend was going through and wrote to Kohn in the autumn of 1933 the following lines: “In the last year or two we have drifted apart. And as much as I regret this, I cannot change it, and neither can you—even though often it is not because of your views, but because of the manner in which you express them in smaller circles. There is no one who could not understand, on the personal level, your hatred and resentment of Jewish Palestine—you’ve been wronged too much and you [after all] were so deeply bound to the whole thing, and ultimately yours is nothing but a disillusioned love.”114

Notes This chapter is a revised and enlarged version of an article published in Adi Gordon, ed., Brit shalom vehatsiyonut haduleumit: ‘hasheelah haaravit’ kesheelah yehudit (Brit Shalom and binational Zionism: The ‘Arab question’ as a Jewish question) (Jerusalem, 2008). The editors thank Carmel Publishing House for their permission to use this material here. The Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati (Summer Research Fellowship) funded the preparation of the English version. 1. Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York, 1964), 53. 2. Hans Kohn, World Order in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 93; idem, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York, 1944), 10. 3. Hans Kohn, “Nationalismus,” Der Jude 6, no. 11 (1921–1922): 674–86. 4. Hans Kohn, “Zur Araberfrage,” Der Jude 4, no 12 (1919): 567–69. A translation from the German can be found in Wilma Abeles Iggers, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader (Detroit, 1992), 239–42. The political structure he envisioned, it may be noted, was clearly influenced by Austro-Marxist concepts of national autonomy. 5. The literature on Martin Buber is vast, e.g., Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit, 1989); Maurice S. Friedman, Martin

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Buber’s Life and Work (New York, 1981). The best available biographical introduction to Hugo Bergmann is Miriam Sambursky, ed., Samuel Hugo Bergmann: Tagebücher & Briefe, 2 vols. (Königstein/Ts, 1985). For an excellent recent introduction to Robert Weltsch’s biography, see Stefan Vogt, “Robert Weltsch and the Paradoxes of Anti-Nationalist Nationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 3 (spring/summer 2010): 85–115. 6. Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, 143, 145. 7. Transcribed interview of Robert Weltsch by Hagit Lavsky and Israel Kolatt, 9 July 1979, Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Oral History Division (henceforth referred to as ICJOHD), (183)15. All archival texts cited here, with the exception of Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, were composed in German. The translations that appear here are mine. 8. An interview of Nathan Hofshi (Frankel) by Ayala Dan-Kaspi, 1974, ICJOHD, (114) 37. 9. Kenneth H. Wolf, The Idea of Nationalism: The Intellectual Development and Historiographical Contribution of Hans Kohn (Ph.D. diss., Notre Dame, Indiana, 1972); Hagit Lavsky, “Nationalism between Theory and Practice: Hans Kohn and Zionism” (Hebrew), Zion 67, no. 2 (2002): 189–212; Yfaat Weiss, “Central European Ethnonationalism and Zionist Binationalism,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 93–117; Hedva Ben-Israel Kidron, “Hans Kohn: One of the Founders of Nationalism Research,” in Beshem haumah: masot umaamarim al leumiyut vetsiyonut) (In the nation’s name: essays and articles on nationalism and Zionism), ed. Hedva Ben-Israel Kidron (Beer Sheva, 2004), 361–88; André Liebich, “Searching for the Perfect Nation: the Itinerary of Hans Kohn (1891–1971),” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (2006): 579–96; Lutz Fiedler, “Habsburger Verlängerungen: Imperienkonzepte im Werk Hans Kohns,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 477–508. 10. Hans Kohn’s letter to the Brit Shalom Association, 22 September 1930, The Central Zionist Archives (henceforth CZA), A187–1a. 11. Five of these books were published between his resignation and his immigration to the United States. They include: the biography Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit (Hellerau, 1930); L’Humanisme juif: Quinze essais sur le Juif, le monde et Dieu (Paris, 1931); Nationalismus und Imperialismus im vorderen Orient (Frankfurt, 1931); Orient und Okzident (Berlin, 1931); Der Nationalismus in der Sowjetunion (Frankfurt, 1932). Kohn completed the writing of a sixth book—Die Europäisierung des Orients—on his very last day in Palestine, in mid May 1934. This book, which appeared in 1934, was his last on the Middle East. Ironically, Kohn also brought to print his two-volume Hebrew-language history of Zionism: Hans Kohn, Perakim letoldot hara’ayon hatsiyoni (Chapters on the history of the Zionist idea), 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1929–1930). 12. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 17 May 1930, Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch Correspondence (AR6908) (henceforth HKRWC), Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York, reel 1. 13. Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism (Leiden and Boston, 2002), 137–46. Arthur Ruppin’s Diary, CZA, A107/951, entries 18 July 1919, 27; 21 January 1921, 57; 1 May 1921, 56; 30 October 1923, 110–11. I thank Nadine Garling for these references. Robert Weltsch’s letter to Hugo Bergmann, 24 November 1921, Jewish National and University Library (now referred to as the National Library of Israel (henceforth NLI), Manuscript Department, 4º 1502/1334, 2 (reference drawn from: Anja Siegemund, “Kassandrarufer: Robert Weltsch, eine Stimme des Verständigungszionismus,” ed., Anne Birkenhauer, Jüdischer Almanach (Frankfurt, 2001): 110, 124. 14. Quoted in Lavsky, “Nationalism Between Theory and Practice,” 197. 15. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 8 May 1930, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, Robert Weltsch Collection (henceforth RWC), AR7185, box 7, folder 18; Hans Kohn’s diary, entries 15 February, 29 September, and 28 October 1928, Hans Kohn Collection (henceforth HKC) (AR259), 1, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York . This debate is documented also in a formal document of the Brit Shalom Organization: “A [correction of a] Report regarding a Debate between Dr. Arthur Ruppin, Dr. Hugo Bergmann, and Dr. Hans Kohn on Brit Shalom Issues,” 16 November 1928, CZA, A187–40.

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16. Hans Kohn’s diary, 8 June 1928, HKC, box 18, folder 2. 17. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 12 June 1928, RWC, box 7, folder 18. 18. Hans Kohn’s diary, 26 August 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 19. Hans Kohn’s letter to Martin Buber, 26 August 1929, The Letters of Martin Buber, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn (New York, 1991), 370. 20. Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 2 September 1929, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (henceforth CAHJP, Jerusalem), P3/2665. 21. Hans Kohn’s diary, 3 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 22. Hans Kohn’s diary, 4 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 23. Hans Kohn’s diary, 18 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 24. Hans Kohn, “Indien! Die Schwankende Brücke: Englands grosses Problem,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 September 1929, 1–2. 25. B. B. “‘Zionist’ Clarification,” Davar, 22 September 1929, 2. 26. Robert Weltsch’s letter to Fritz Naphtali, 24 October 1929, CZA, A 145/153. 27. Hans Kohn’s diary, 17 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Kohn relates here to a parallel (though lesser) assault against Hugo Bergmann following his article on “The Event in Jerusalem,” on the front cover of the Prager Tagblatt of 28 August 1929. 28. Shmuel Sambursky’s undated letter to Leo Hermann, CZA, A 145 (The Leo Hermann Collection), 153. Kohn himself was well aware of the plot, but since nothing was openly said, he could not do much more than complain about the ugly atmosphere, in a private letter to Leo Hermann. See Kohn’s letter to Hermann, 3 October 1929, HKC, box 8, folder 9. 29. Kohn’s letter to Hermann, 3 October 1929, HKC, box 8, folder 9; Shmuel Sambursky’s letter to Leo Hermann, 29 September 1929, CZA, A 145, 153; Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York, 1992), 191. 30. A copy of Hans Kohn’s letter to Arthur Hantke, 22 October 1929, CAHJP, P3/2399. 31. Hans Kohn’s letter to Berthold Feiwel, 21 November 1929, HKC, box 8, folder 9. English translation based on Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ed., A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (New York, 1983), 97–99. 32. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 21 April 1930, HKRWC, reel 1. 33. Hans Kohn’s diary, 8 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 34. Hans Kohn’s diary, 26 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 35. Hans Kohn’s diary, 5 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 36. Hans Kohn’s diary, 8 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 37. Hans Kohn’s diary, 19 October 1929. The formal letter of resignation was mailed a few days later: Hans Kohn’s letter to Ernst Simon, 21 October 1929, CZA, A187/1a. 38. “Basis of an Arab-Jewish Understanding in Palestine,” Martin Buber Archive, NLI, Arc. Ms. Var. 350, Het, 376/224. For a discussion of this plan, see Hagit Lavsky, “Nationalism between Theory and Practice,” 202–3; Joseph Heller, Mibrit shalom leihud: Yehudah leib magnes vehamaavak limedinah duleumit (From Brit Shalom to Ichud: Judah Leib Magnes and the struggle for a binational state) (Jerusalem, 2003), 70. 39. See Hans Kohn’s diary, 2 November 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Chaim Weizmann was the sole Zionist leader to whom Kohn asked Magnes to mail the draft—and only in a private and personal letter (Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 4 November 1929, CAHJP P3/2665). His cautious optimism regarding the constitution project evaporated when Magnes, “out of a complete lack of psychological understanding” and contrary to Kohn’s explicit request, publicly discussed the constitution draft (Hans Kohn’s diary, 2 November 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4). 40. See 15 November 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 41. Hans Kohn’s diary, 24 April 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 42. Hans Kohn’s diary, 21 November 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 43. Hans Kohn’s diary, 17 January 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4.

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44. Hans Kohn’s diary, 18 February 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. At the same time, Kohn also pointed to positive potential in the association’s activity and, at any rate, continued attending Brit Shalom’s meetings and investing his energies in its cause (Hans Kohn’s diary, 7 March 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4). 45. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 7 May 1930, RWC, box 7, folder 18. See also Hans Kohn’s diary, 4 May 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Kohn, incidentally, was convinced that Ruppin, even after leaving Brit Shalom, continued to exert influence in it through “his” people (Joseph Lurie, Jacob Thon, and others). 46. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 8 May 1930, RWC, box 7, folder 18. 47. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 10 June 1930, RWC. 48. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 17 July 1930, HKRWC, reel 1. 49. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 22 August 1930, HKRWC. 50. Hans Kohn’s diary, 11 June 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 51. Hans Kohn’s diary, 12 June 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 52. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 1 July 1930, HKRWC, reel 1. 53. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 20 July [1930], HKRWC, reel 1. 54. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 15 June 1930, RWC, box 7, folder 18. See also Hans Kohn’s diary, 14 June 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 55. Kohn’s letter of resignation from Brit Shalom, [22] September 1930, CZA, A187–1a. See also Hans Kohn’s diary, 22 September 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Kohn wrote similarly to Magnes about the reasons he quit Brit Shalom: “I do not think the B[rit] Sh[alom] [Association to be] of much worth as long as those members who have any influence do not consider the principals of B. Sh. which they profess—binding for their public life. . . . The Revisionists or the workers’ party exercise some appeal because they stand and fall by their principles. The B. Sh. members do not” (Kohn’s letter to Magnes, 2 October 1930, CAHJP, P3/2665). Even after having quit Brit Shalom, Kohn continued publishing articles in its periodical, Sheifoteinu. See Hans Kohn, “Several Remarks on Constitutional Issues of the Palestine Mandate I,” Sheifoteinu, 2, no. 1 (Adar 5691 [February 1931]): 20–28; idem., “Several Remarks on Constitutional Issues of the Palestine Mandate II,” Sheifoteinu, 2, no. 2 (Nisan 5691 [April 1931]): 47–50; idem., “The Armenian Refugees in Syria,” Sheifoteinu, 2, no. 7 (Tishrei 5692 [September 1931]): 250–254; idem, [no title], Sheifoteinu, 3, no. 4 (Tammuz 5692 [July 1932]): 117–20. 56. Hans Kohn, Revolutions and Dictatorships: Essays in Contemporary History (Cambridge, MA, 1939), 299. 57. Hans Kohn’s letter to Martin Buber, 8 March 1924, Letters of Martin Buber, 310–11. The actual intensive writing of the biography manuscript began only in 1927. Most of the correspondence between Buber and Kohn—beginning in 1911 and continuing into 1964—is kept at the NLI, Jerusalem, Arc. Ms. Var. 350, CHET, 376. 58. Robert Weltsch, quoted in Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870—1918 (New York, 1988), 137. 59. As Gershom Scholem stressed very patently in an interview to Meir Lamed, 15 June 1964, ICJHOD, 38 (29), and as was clearly laid out in Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 147–48. Kieval pointed out that Buber’s sponsorship of the edited volume served to support “the spiritual-intellectual party” in the association, which circled around Weltsch and Kohn. 60. Hans Kohn, Nationalismus: Über die Bedeutung des Nationalismus in Judentum und in der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1922). 61. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 29 January 1929, HKRWC, reel 1. 62. Hans Kohn’s diary, 11 April 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 63. Thus Kohn’s book elaborated on Buber’s 1903 turn from Zionist activities to other fields of Jewish and philosophical activity (Hans Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit (Hellrau, 1930), 45–47. Kohn projected his own liminality onto the lives of many of his friends and colleagues such as Ruppin (who carried the full burden of the contradiction between his

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commitment to Zionist achievement and to human ethics), Hugo Bergmann (who, like him, is marked as treacherous), and Magnes: “He, too, wants to leave Palestine if peace does not appear in the foreseeable future” (Hans Kohn’s diary, 3 November 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4). 64. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 3 May 1930, HKRWC, reel 1. 65. Hans Kohn’s letter to Buber, 2 September 1929, Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten (Heidelberg, 1972) 2: 347–48. 66. In a letter to his wife, Buber compared Weltsch’s “remarkable” conduct to that of Kohn, who, Buber argued, was “more doctrinaire, who tended to proclamations rather than seeking a real breakthrough in the labyrinth of facts.” Martin Buber’s letter to his wife, Paula, 3 October 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 318. 67. Hans Kohn’s diary, 2 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 68. Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 2 September 1929, CAHJP, P3/2665. 69. Hans Kohn’s letter to Buber, 25 September 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 351. 70. Hans Kohn’s letter to Martin Buber, 26 September 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 352. 71. Hans Kohn’s diary, 30 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 72. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 3 May 1930 HKRWC, reel 1. 73. Kohn’s letter to Buber, 10 December 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 357–60. Translation based on Letters of Martin Buber, 372–73. 74. Kohn was deeply indebted to Magnes, who was instrumental in obtaining him a university position in the United States, supported him with advice and kind words, and who introduced Kohn to people in the American academic community in the years following his break with the Zionist movement. In the turbulent months of the autumn of 1929, however, his relationship with Magnes deteriorated in a manner reminiscent of his disappointment with Buber. Kohn hoped that at that time of crisis, Magnes would surface as an alternative Zionist leader, but before long he was disappointed with him. He wrote in his diary that Magnes “has lost all sense of direction. . . . I doubt whether something could be achieved with Magnes. What a shame!” (24 October 1929). But as opposed to his relationship with Buber, the two seem at least to have been intimate enough for Kohn to criticize Magnes directly: “I am very much afraid that the publicity you gave to Mr. Philby’s proposals within the yishuv killed every success possible for the plan in London” (Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 29 November 1929, CAHJP, P3/2665). 75. I am referring here to Hans Kohn, Nationalismus über die Bedeutung des Nationalismus in Judentum und in der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1922); Hans Kohn, Die Politische Idee des Judentums (München, 1924); Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch, Zionistische Politik: Eine Aufsatzreihe, (Mährisch-Ostrau), 1927. 76. Moshe Beilinson, “Zionism in Two and a Half Pages,” Davar, 20 June 1928, 2; Hans Kohn, “Regarding ‘Zionism in Two and a Half Pages,’” Davar, 1 July 1928, 3. 77. Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 13 May 1929, CAHJP, P3/2665. 78. Judah L. Magnes’s letter to Buber, 4 July 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 335: “vieles davon auf Unzufriedenheit mit Dr. Kohns politischer Einstellung zurückzuführen ist.” 79. Hans Kohn’s diary, 16 August 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. On the chair in “International Peace” and Norman Bentwich’s nomination, see Nachum T. Gross, “Social Sciences at the Hebrew University before 1948,” ed. Hagit Lavsky, Toldot hauniversitah haivrit biyerushalayim: hitbasesut utsemihah (The history of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: a period of consolidation and growth) (Jerusalem, 2005), 505–8. 80. Hans Kohn’s diary, 18 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 81. Hans Kohn’s diary, 6 May 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. He had already published some of those books at the time. Others can arguably be identified with his later works, but one planned book he would never publish was “The Political Problem of Palestine,” which may hint at the emotional chaos in the wake of his break with the Zionist movement. 82. Hans Kohn’s diary, 27 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. See also Hans Kohn’s letter to Martin Buber, 10 December 1929, The Letters of Martin Buber, 372–73. 83. Hans Kohn’s diary, 25 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4.

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84. Hans Kohn’s diary, 25 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Even afterward, as long as he did not quit Brit Shalom, Kohn complained repeatedly that he “cannot work because of the distressing impact of the political situation” (Hans Kohn’s diary, 21 May 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4). 85. Hans Kohn’s letter to John Haynes Holmes, 28 January 1930, CAHJP, P3/2400. See also Hans Kohn’s diary, 7 January 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 86. Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 25 November 1929, CAHJP, P3/2665. 87. Hans Kohn’s letter to Judah L. Magnes, 17 September 1932, CAHJP. 88. Hans Kohn’s letter to Magnes, 9 October 1932, CAHJP. 89. Hans Kohn, Nationalismus und Imperialismus im vorderen Orient (Frankfurt, 1931); idem, Orient und Okzident (Berlin, 1931). 90. Kohn, Orient und Okzident, 51–52. 91. Ibid., 65. 92. Hans Kohn, Die Europaeisierung des Orients (Berlin, 1934). 93. Kohn was a member of the International Council of the War Resisters’ International from 1926 to 1928 and again from 1931 to 1934. On his pacifist career, see Dieter Riesenberger, “Hans Kohn (1891–1971): Zionist und Pazifist,” Zeitschrift für Religions u. Geistesgeschichte 41, no. 2 (1989): 166–74. See also Adi Gordon, “The Ideological Convert and the ‘Mythology of Coherence’: The Contradictory Hans Kohn and his Multiple Metamorphoses,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010): 273–93. On The War Resisters’ International in general and Kohn’s role within it, see Devi Prasad, War Is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of “War Resisters International,” (London, 2005), especially 118–32. 94. Hans Kohn, “Aktiver Pazifismus,” Neue Wege. Blätter für religiöse Arbeit (1929): 82–94. Kurt Tucholsky, the Weimar master of political satire and one of the most vocal representatives of German pacifism, corresponded with Kohn regarding the different pacifist concepts. Tucholsky flatly rejected Kohn’s “active pacifism” (which did not seem active at all to Tucholsky) on two levels: he said it was neither sufficiently socio-political nor adequately revolutionary (Kurt Tucholsky’s letter to the War Resisters’ International, 21 May 1929 and Hans Kohn’s letter to Kurt Tucholsky, 22 June 1929, HKC, box 14, folder 4). 95. Kohn, “Aktiver Pazifismus,” 84. 96. Ibid., 89–90 (emphases in original). 97. Hans Kohn’s letter to Martin Buber, 2 September 1929, Buber, Briefwechsel, 2: 437. For similar statements see Kohn’s letter to Magnes, 2 September 1929, CAHJP, P3/2665. At the end of that letter, Kohn told Magnes that he “participated here [Zurich] in the meeting of the International Council of the War Resisters International.” There couldn’t be a clearer expression of the manner in which pacifism and Zionism merged in Kohn’s world. 98. Hans Kohn’s diary, 2 September 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 99. Hans Kohn’s diary, 31 August 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 100. Hans Kohn’s diary, 22 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Equally harsh remarks on both Einstein and Buber can be found in Hans Kohn’s diary, 17 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 101. Hans Kohn’s diary, 17 October 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Robert Weltsch expressed the very same notion and eventually the same disenchantment (Robert Weltsch’s letter to Fritz Naphtali, 24 October 1929, CZA, A145/153). 102. Hans Kohn’s diary, 17 February 1930, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 103. Hans Kohn’s diary, 13 April 1933, HKC, box 18, folder 4. 104. For a discussion of his break with pacifism, see Adi Gordon, “The Ideological Convert,” especially 278–81. 105. Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, 3, 18. 106. Hans Kohn’s diary, 31 May 1929, HKC, box 18, folder 4. Later, as a historian, Kohn would discuss the monarchy’s potential to actually be transformed into a multinational federation (Hans Kohn, The Habsburg Empire, 1804–1918 [Princeton, 1961], 49–57). For a more

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contemporary discussion of the nationalities question in the late Hapsburg monarchy, see, for example, Dennison Rusinow, “‘The ‘National Question’ Revisited: Reflections on the State of the Art,” Austrian History Yearbook 31 (2000): 1–13; Gerald Stourzh, “The Multinational Empire Revisited: Reflections on Late Empire,” Austrian History Yearbook 23 (1992): 1–22; Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1765–1918 (New York, 2000), 283–309. 107. “The slowly crystallizing structure of the British Empire may be regarded as one of the most interesting and promising experiments made with the goal of superseding the conception of absolute state sovereignty in the name of general peace and supreme law, without sacrificing the independence and individuality of the parts” (Hans Kohn, A History of Nationalism in the East [New York, 1929], 81.) 108. Hans Kohn, Der Nationalismus in der Sowjetunion (Frankfurt, 1932), 38–39. 109. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 21 April 1930 HKRWC, reel 1. 110. Hans Kohn’s letter to Dr. Berthold Feiwel, 21 November 1929, in Mendes-Flohr, A Land of Two Peoples, 97–100. 111. Already in the 1940s, Kohn established cordial relations with the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Kohn wished the leadership of American Jewry in its entirety would embody a strong, liberal alternative to Jewish statehood. Having failed to convince the heads of the American Jewish Committee to take this path, he accused them of “Zionist fellow traveling.” 112. Hans Kohn’s letter to Robert Weltsch, 30 May 1930, HKRWC, reel 1. 113. Hans Kohn’s diary, 29 August 1932, HKC, box 19, folder 1. 114. Hugo Bergmann’s letter to Hans Kohn, 21 October 1933, in Schmuel Hugo Bergmann, Tagebücher und Briefe, vol. 1, 1901—1948 (Königstein, 1985), 345.

Chapter 9

Historicism and the Event Martin Jay

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What exactly happened in May 1968, in France? Or, more precisely, how can we characterize what happened? Was it a revolt, a rebellion, maybe even an unsuccessful revolution? Or was it, perhaps, merely a harmless festival of transgression in political garb, a carnival of temporary release from the constraints of normal life? Uncertain about the answer, contemporary observers fell back on the vague and undefined term “les événements”—“the events”—and the name has somehow stuck.1 Historians have continued to speak of “the events of May” to refer to the student and worker strikes and the anarchic cultural efflorescence that accompanied them, as well as the response by the forces of order that maintained President Charles de Gaulle in power. Ironically the choice of terminology seems to run counter to the position favored over the previous twenty years by the most influential school of history in France, the Annales School, which was associated with Fernand Braudel and his colleagues, who denigrated the importance of a narrative history of discrete and ephemeral events (“histoire événementielle” as François Simiand called it) in favor of a search for the deep structures that lasted over long periods of time.2 Braudel succinctly formulated the reason for their hostility: “An event is explosive, a ‘nouvelle sonnante’ [a matter of moment], as they said in the sixteenth century. Its delusive smoke fills the minds of its contemporaries, but it does not last, and its flame can scarcely ever be discerned.”3 Imitating the social sciences with their penchant for comparative analysis, enduring patterns, and statistical regularities, the Annales School eschewed traditional historical narratives of the lives of great men and women, the chronicle of political regimes, and the tactical accounts of decisive battles. The disdain of the sociologist Emile Durkheim and his school for individualist, psychological models of social explanation were echoed in the Annales program.4 Enduring or slowly

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changing socioeconomic systems and the collective mentalités of a culture were the primary focus of their attention. In disentangling temporalities, they bypassed the rapid flux of daily happenings for the more permanent rhythms of lasting structures, conditioned as much by geography as culture. Scorning vulgar empiricism, they sought to reveal glacially evolving forms of life instead of mere ephemeral surface appearances. History, they contended, should focus on perennial problems and serial patterns rather than on contingent occurrences. During that same era, in such works as For Marx and Reading Capital, which appeared only a few years before May 1968, French theorists of Marxism such as Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar also rejected the primacy of discrete events in diachronic succession. Jean-Paul Sartre’s attempt to restore the dignity of “the event” in his ungainly marriage of Marxism and existentialism was categorically repudiated.5 Drawing on Spinoza with his hostility to linear historicist temporality, the two theorists bemoaned the reduction of history by historicists to “the sequence of events [à l’événementiel], and to the effect of this sequence of events on the structure of the synchronic: the historical then becomes the unexpected, the accidental, the factually unique, arising or falling in the empty continuum of time, for purely contingent reasons.”6 Although they conceded that one might meaningfully talk of historical events, they explained that “what makes such and such an event historical is not the fact that it is an event, but precisely its insertion into forms which are themselves historical . . . [and] . . . are perfectly definable and knowable.”7 Whether or not they were called structures—and Althusser ultimately admitted that “the accidental byproduct of my theoricist tendency, the young pup called structuralism, slipped between my legs”8—these nonevents were still the more fundamental explanatory category of his historical analysis, but not primarily in terms of their long-term endurance. In his special vocabulary, change occurred in the context of the “conjunctures” of forces that were to be understood in systemic terms, most notably modes of production. Their uneven development, however, could produce a contradictory “articulation,” always overdetermined by many different structural pressures, which might either be contained through a process of displacement or fuse into a revolutionary rupture. No matter the precise nature of the uneven social formations that led to these outcomes, they existed prior to the discrete historical episodes that might be called events and were far more central to a “scientific” analysis of the past. In the wake of 1968, however, the structuralist conjuncture was itself soon over, and many French thinkers began to reconsider their hostility to the role of “the event” in history. Sociologists such as Edgar Morin and historians such as Pierre Nora were quick to speak of the “return of the event.”9 In fact, it returned with a vengeance as the pendulum swung rapidly in the other direction. Even structuralists such as Roland Barthes—still in that phase of his development—would now speak of the challenges of “writing the event.”10 Having lost confidence in the teleological narrative of dialectical development that had inspired orthodox Marxism or unwilling to embrace the liberal alternative associated with modernization theory, many French theorists looked elsewhere for the spark of redemption. “The

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event” soon gained an exorbitant meaning that lifted it beyond the conventional understanding of the term. By the late twentieth century it had assumed an aura of profound significance, which was manifested in the almost worshipful way a number of leading social theorists and philosophers came to evoke it. The question remained, however, of how to define its contours and interpret its meaning. In this chapter I first trace some of the efforts made by both historians and nonhistorians to make sense of the idea of an “event,” and I then examine possible implications for the tradition of historicism. As we shall see, the revival of interest in events had, broadly speaking, two very different implications. To anticipate our conclusion, on the one hand, it could express a renewed faith in narrative as the essential mode of historical presentation, functioning as a pivotal moment in a meaningful story; or, on the other hand, it could be used to discredit narrative even more radically than had the alternative interest in enduring structures. In the latter case, “event” was seen as the marker of something so profound or so ineffable that no coherent story could contain it. Understanding what that something might be will take us far from historicism into the realm of metaphysics, albeit not in the traditional sense of that term. Among the first to challenge the structuralist dismissal of events was the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who did so in an introduction to an unpublished book about the so-called “March 22 Movement.”11 The title referred to students at the university in Nanterre who had occupied the administration building in protest against the arrest on 22 March 1968 of six leaders of the National Vietnam Committee. In this short piece, Lyotard distinguished between “the system” and the “event.” The former was designed to regulate “the entry, distribution, and the elimination of the energy that [an ensemble of persons] spends in order to exist”12 and was manifested in institutions that bind the energy in a field of circulating objects, such as an economy, a language, or a kinship network. A structuralist analysis based on Saussurean linguistics, Lyotard argued, was inadequate to define its workings, for it lacks the ability to explain revolutionary eruptions, which involve a “dimension of force that escapes the logic of the signifier.”13 History is precisely the discipline—as opposed to political economy, social anthropology, and linguistics—that takes seriously the consideration of these forces, which it understands as events. “One could call an event,” Lyotard explained, “the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy; the event would be the traumatic encounter of energy with the regulating institutions.”14 The self-regulating system that is capitalism, Lyotard continued, is confronted with such events either when its attempts to colonize previous modes of social life are met with resistance or when energy in the present cannot be fully regulated and tamed. In the latter case, which was the one that most interested him in the wake of May 1968, there were two orders of events, which he called quantitative and qualitative, the latter being more “enigmatic.”15 The first involved those traditional Marxist favorites: overproduction and technological unemployment. Although Lyotard, not yet over his Marxist phase, did not deny their importance,

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he was more interested in the second, “when the very forms through which energy is rendered circulable (the institutions, in the sense that I have given to the term) cease to be able to harness that energy—they become obsolete. The relationship between energy and its regulation undergoes a mutation. This enigma is thus the only event worthy of the name, when the regulator encounters energy that it cannot bind.”16 To make sense of that unbindable energy, Lyotard turned to the theory of “libidinal economy,” which he was developing around the same time.17 “The event, as a qualitative force, is an inexplicable mutation in the position of desire: for example, where desire was repressed in the object (in religious societies where debt is acknowledged), it will appear foreclosed (in the scientific, economic, political, etc. ‘positivism’ of post-Renaissance and capitalist society).”18 With an optimism that would soon prove unwarranted, Lyotard concluded that the March 22nd movement was an event in all senses, but insofar as it belongs to the qualitative type, “it has performed a work of unbinding, an antipolitical work, that brings about the collapse rather than the reinforcement of the system.”19 Lyotard’s fantasy that the events of May—broadly interpreted to include those of March as well—had shaken the system to its foundations was short-lived, but his commitment to the notion of an “event” only as a radical challenge to the status quo—an uncontrollable discharge of libidinal energy, a gathering of intensity—lingered. Thus, one of his most trenchant commentators, Bill Readings, could still describe it in his l991 book on Lyotard as “the occurrence after which nothing will ever be the same again. The event, that is, happens in excess of the referential frame within which it might be understood, disrupting or displacing that frame.”20 Drawing on Lyotard’s later theory of postmodernism, he added that it also means “the radical singular happening which cannot be represented within a general history without the loss of singularity, its reduction to a moment. The time of the event is postmodern in that the event cannot be understood at the time, as it happens, because its singularity is alien to the language or structure or understanding to which it occurs. The pure singularity of its occurrence, the ‘it happens’ which cannot be reduced to a representation, cannot be identified with ‘what happens.’”21 Obviously, such a notion of “the event” is far more heavily freighted than the normal use of the term in conventional historical parlance, at least in the Anglo-American world. To take two typical examples, the American social historian William Sewell writes in his recent collection Logics of History that an event belongs to that “relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transform structures,” while the British intellectual historian M. C. Lemon defines it even more flatly as “a sequence of occurrences singled out for notice.”22 For French theorists like Lyotard, however, an event clearly had more profound significance. Although it remained a figure of radical disruption and incommensurability after Lyotard’s turn away from Marxism to postmodernism, it no longer signified a revolutionary rupture threatening the system. In fact, for Lyotard it came to function as a kind of marker of absolute freedom.23 In his 1982 discussion of Kant’s philosophy of history in “The Sign of History,” he focused on the

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German term Begebenheit, translated as “event,” which when “delivered in human historical experience must indicate a cause the occurrence of which remains undetermined with respect to time—and we recognize in this rule the clause stating the independence of causality by freedom from the diachronic series of the mechanical world.”24 In connection with the French Revolution, Lyotard claimed, the “event” was understood by Kant as related to the sublime because of its resistance to subsumption under cognitive categories and its accompaniment by the emotion of “enthusiasm.” In the present, he concluded, a Begebenheit eludes both the constraining power of the dominating subject and the attempt of capitalist rationalization to contain it. While Lyotard was elaborating his notion of the “event” as a mark of radical freedom, sublime unrepresentatiblity, and unrecuperable libidinal energy, Gilles Deleuze, another thinker whose mark on poststructuralist thought was no less profound, was developing his own idiosyncratic approach.25 In The Logic of Sense, published in 1969, Deleuze devoted special attention to the concept of the event (sometimes even spelled with a capital letter). There is no easy way to paraphrase the convoluted and challenging arguments of this remarkable book, but a few tentative observations are in order. The Logic of Sense begins, significantly, with an evocation of the enigmatic works of Lewis Carroll, which, Deleuze tells us, “involve a category of very special things: events, pure events.”26 These he defines as “the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future.”27 Paradoxically, events affirm both directions at once, “active and passive, cause and effect, more and less, too much and not enough, already and not yet. The infinitely divisible event is always both at once. It is eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening.”28 Operating on the surface rather than on some putatively deeper level, not even the rabbit hole into which Alice first tumbled in Lewis Carroll’s tale, events have no sense beyond themselves, no latent meaning into which they can be translated. Like flashes of lightning in a darkened sky, they are the folds in being that interrupt states of affairs—virtual potentialities immanent in what is actual. Although they are absolute singularities, events are nonetheless not entirely antithetical to structures. In fact, Deleuze was careful to say that singularities can be arranged in series that intersect with other series. “And for this reason,” he explicitly argues, “it is imprecise to oppose structure and event: the structure includes a register of ideal events, that is, an entire history internal to it. . . . The two heterogeneous series converge toward a paradoxical element, which is their ‘differentiator.’ This is the principle of the emission of singularities.”29 These singularities are involved in a process of endless transformation, redistribution, and displacement, which is what we might call their history. There is, however, a distinction that Deleuze draws between a proper event, which he calls pure and ideal, and a mere “accident,” which is a “spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs.”30 Here the argument gets explicitly metaphysical, with echoes of

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Nietzsche’s eternal return reverberating through the text. “Events are ideational singularities, which communicate in one and the same Event. They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist. . . . To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to elucidate events in their place, as jets of singularities. A double battle has the objective to thwart all dogmatic confusion between event and essence and also every empiricist confusion between event and accident.”31 Deleuze was clearly a philosopher with no intention of turning his theory of the event into a tool for the writing of history in any plausible sense of the term, even if he came to characterize May 1968 as “of the order of the pure event.”32 His philosophical idea of the event was, however, soon incorporated into the thinking of another poststructuralist luminary, Michel Foucault, whose archeological and genealogical methods were intended to help us make sense of the past.33 Although a student of Althusser and initially grouped among the structuralists,34 by the 1970s Foucault was rapidly moving away from many of their most fundamental assumptions. The shift is evident in his review of two books by Gilles Deleuze in 1970, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which Foucault explicitly interprets the philosopher’s work as a repudiation of structuralism’s disdain for “the event.”35 Deleuze, Foucault emphasizes, had defended it in his own unique fashion. To explain Deleuze’s complicated and challenging defense, however, required careful unpacking. For there were, Foucault argued, three other recent attempts to understand “the event” that were less persuasive than Deleuze’s explanation. These he identified with neopositivism, phenomenology, and what he called “the philosophy of history.”36 Neopositivism, he charged, confuses an event with “a state of things,” which means lodging “the event within the density of bodies, to treat it as a material process, and to attach itself more or less implicitly to a physicalism.”37 Because it is anti-transcendental, rejecting what is outside the world as it is, it fails to understand the “pure surface of the event and attempts to enclose it, forcibly— as a referent—in the spherical plenitude of the world.”38 Phenomenology, in contrast, “reoriented the event with respect to meaning: either it placed the bare event before or to the side of meaning—the rock of facticity, the mute inertia of occurrences—and then submitted it to the active processes of meaning, to its digging or elaboration; or else it assumed a domain of primal signification, which always existed as a disposition of the world around the self, tracing its paths and privileged motivations, indicating in advance where the event might occur and its possible form.”39 The first version was Sartre’s, the second, Merleau-Ponty’s. Because both claim that the significance of the event exists only for a subjective consciousness, phenomenology “places the event outside and beforehand, or inside and after, and always situates it with respect to the circle of the self.”40 In other words, it understands “the event” only in terms of its being experienced as meaningful by a conscious subject. The third inadequate approach, that of “the philosophy of history”—a category in Foucault’s review that he did not bother to identify with specific thinker—“encloses the event in a cyclical pattern of time.” In treating the present as

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a previous future in which its form was already prepared and the past as a future whose content is already predestined, it “requires a logic of essences (which establishes the present in memory) and of concepts (where the present is established as a knowledge of the future), and then a metaphysics of a crowned and coherent cosmos, of a hierarchical world.”41 Because it stresses the temporal context of events, the philosophy of history “defines its identity and submits it to a solidly centered order,” Foucault concludes.42 In short, the philosophy of history dissolves the specificity of the event in an already narrativized temporal pattern, which obscures its singular irreducibility. Deleuze, in contrast, introduces another version of the “event” that frees it from its subjection to the world in the neopositivist reading; to the self in the phenomenological understanding; or to God, who is understood in the philosophy of history as a cyclical pattern of eternal return. Rather than defining the “event” on its own, however, he situates it in a tense relationship with another key term, which is the “phantasm.” The latter, according to Foucault’s gloss, forms “the impenetrable and incorporeal surfaces of bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped that falsely presents itself as a centered organism and that distributes at its periphery the increasing remoteness of things.”43 If the phantasm is the site of false organismic wholeness, cruelly relegating what escapes it to marginal insignificance, does the event reach a deeper truth? Deleuze didn’t think so. As “pure difference,” the event resists being subsumed under a concept or a category; it refuses to be judged as commensurate with the real; it defies analogical similarity; it remains infinitely indefinite, always a singular universal that cannot be absorbed into a dialectical process of negation negating itself. What recurs is only difference, which is manifest in the unsublatable event. Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological philosophy, a nomadic affirmation of theatrical surfaces rather than cognitive or meaningful depths, was a heady mixture of Nietzsche and Spinoza and as such might seem scarcely applicable to historical analysis.44 Foucault, nonetheless, seems to have found at least some inspiration in it for his recovery of the importance of the event. But it was, to be sure, a version of the event in no way comparable to what had informed the narrative historiography disdained by structuralists in the 1960s. Whereas the latter situated events in an emplotted story as critical turning points or sites of heightened meaning fully integrated into a pattern of development or decline, Foucault followed Deleuze in stressing their idiosyncratic and irreducible singularity. In a 1977 interview entitled “Truth and Power,” Foucault claimed that his interest in the event could justify his saying: “I don’t see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself.” He then added: “But the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It’s not a matter of locating everything on one level, that of the event, but of realizing that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects.”45 Foucault, indeed, implied that because such events belong to differentiated networks and levels, operating as layers of systematic regularity, Deleuze’s notion

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of pure difference, like Lyotard’s celebration of undetermined freedom, may have gone too far. But he nonetheless shared the hostility of those two to the phenomenological search for meaning based on the priority of the subject, as well as the structuralist belief in systems of signification: “From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language [langue] and signs, but to that of war and battle . . . relations of power, not relations of meaning.”46 These relations, as he had previously explained in The Archaeology of Knowledge, might be understood in terms of a correlation between new statements in a discursive field, governed by a system of what can and cannot be said, and “external” events. In fact, the task of archaeology “is to show on what conditions a correlation can exist between them, and what precisely it consists of (what are its limits, its form, its code, its law of possibility). It does not try to avoid that mobility of discourses that makes them move to the rhythm of events; it tries to free the level at which it is set in motion—what might be called the level of ‘evential’ engagement.”47 Foucault’s notion of “engagement” did not mean he was ready to say that each event was an irruption of utter incommensurability and absolute freedom. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, Foucault emphasized the importance of seeking to reveal new ensembles of events on all levels of the decentered historical totality. “What is significant,” he insisted with an implicit bow to Deleuze, “is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without specifying the method of analysis used, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend.”48 There is certainly no “subject of history,” either actual or potential, whose intentionality produces events. Nor is there any unified process of historical evolution, dialectical mediation, teleological purpose, or a single cause-and-effect determinism, as some earlier historians had assumed. But history did not abandon this quest “in order to seek out structures anterior to, alien, or hostile to the event. It was rather in order to establish those diverse converging, and sometimes divergent, but never autonomous series that enable us to circumscribe the ‘locus’ of an event, the limits to its fluidity and the conditions of its emergence.”49 These series were perceived as discontinuous from each other, undetermined by a master code, and possessing a certain unmotivated randomness of their own. In a 1978 interview, later published as “Questions of Method,” Foucault further elaborated his reasons for adopting what he called the “eventialization” of history. “First of all,” he explained, it means a “breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all.”50 As such, it undermines the assumption that things had to happen in the way they happened. Second, it means “rediscovering

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the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary.”51 Rather than understanding the event as utterly ineffable, however, one should understand it as the effect of multiple causes, what Foucault called a “‘polyhedron’ of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never be properly taken as finite.”52 Discipline and Punish, his recently completed work on the birth of the modern carceral system, was based on this method: “eventializing different ensembles of practices, so as to make them graspable as different regimes of ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘veridication’: that, to put it in exceedingly barbarous terms, is what I would like to do.”53 For Foucault, the event remained, as Thomas Flynn has noted, “a functional concept which serves to introduce differential relations and chance occurrences into the very core of historiography. The structure/event dichotomy is simply replaced by the series/event relationship, and series are conceived as events of a higher level, enjoying their own duration and succession.”54 In short, whether understood, as in Lyotard, as an irruption of freedom, as pure, singular difference, as in Deleuze, or as a nodal point of multiple series of converging and diverging serial phenomena that allow something unexpected to happen, as in Foucault, “events” were no longer banished to the margins of historical discourse as they had been during the heyday of the Annales School prior to 1968. Certain other French thinkers of the era, in fact, elevated the importance of “the event” to even greater heights, as much metaphysical as historical. They viewed “the event” more as a “philosopheme”—a potent philosophical proposition or category—than a simple description of something that happens in history.55 Before examining the significance of this development for the legacy of historicism, I shall look at two final figures: the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. Their notoriously demanding, as well as often maddeningly obscure writings render it difficult fully to do justice to the many resonances of “event” in their extraordinarily rich oeuvres. Only a few major points will have to suffice, offered with the full realization of their vulnerability to revision on the basis of a more exhaustive account. To do so, however, we have to take a step back and first consider the impact of yet another celebrant of the “event” from across the Rhine whose thoughts on the matter were profoundly influential in France—Martin Heidegger.56 The Heideggerian term of art (i.e., a term that has a special meaning in a particular context) that is most often rendered in English as “event” is Ereignis, which has a number of meanings and connotations not present in Begebenheit.57 Although it is most closely linked with sich ereignen (to happen or to occur), its sedimented implication of owning—from the word eigen—has also allowed it variously to be translated as “appropriation,” “the event of appropriation,” or even the awkward neologism “enowning.” Heidegger himself wrote that it was untranslatable, like the Greek logos or the Chinese tao, and certainly it has many connotations that the English word “event” lacks.58 At certain points in his career Heidegger seems to have emphasized some of them and at different moments others.59

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At the risk of simplification, let me focus on a few of the salient implications of Heidegger’s complicated argument. First, it is closely linked with his mature notion of “experience,” which he differentiated sharply from the notion of “lived experience” or Erlebnis, which his earliest French readers had mistakenly conflated with subjective inwardness.60 Whereas the latter implies a world of prereflexive meanings that were located in the interiority of a subject and endowed with intentionality, the experience of Ereignis is more fundamental, passive, and impersonal. Second, it also differs sharply from the subject’s disinterested experience of an external object in the service of mastering the world, which is conveyed by the word Vorgang. It is, to cite one commentator, “not just an occurrence within the domain of beings, such as a sunrise, an auto accident, or a battle. Ereignis is not a being but that which enables beings to manifest themselves as such.”61 Third, it suggests the appropriation of Being, as opposed to the trivial happenings of the beings of daily life, which take place on the more superficial level of the ontic rather than the ontological. The appropriation that takes place, however, is not that by man (or Dasein) of Being, but rather of man (or Dasein) by Being. It is thus far more, Heidegger contended, than mere Begebenheiten, which are “visible, dramatic, but superficial public events.”62 But fourth, its appropriation of man does not imply a positive presencing of Being in a moment of fulfilled time, a kind of secular Parousia in which alienation is ended in a grand moment of reconciliation and homecoming. It is more a partial disclosure than a full possession. In Robert Bernasconi’s gloss, “This does not mean it is to be understood simply as a power of revelation. Heidegger has not become a victim of the urge to bring everything in the light so that it can be made subject to examination. Ereignis also bears within itself its own withdrawal, which Heidegger announces with the word Enteignis . . . Ereignis is not a word for Being. Ereignis is the word that arises from the experience of the lack of a word for Being.”63 Certainly it is not very easy to translate all this heady stuff into anything remotely helpful to a historian struggling to figure out what events are and how they can be understood historically. Some critics have, in fact, doubted that it has any link whatsoever to real historical events in their more conventional sense.64 Nonetheless, Derrida and Badiou, the French thinkers who pondered these questions and tried to find answers that would be relevant to our contemporary understanding of the past and the historicity of our present experience derived three important lessons. The first concerns the extraordinary importance attached to the concept of event itself, which raised it beyond the realm of mere ontic happening or occurrence and connected it with something as profound as Being itself. Although both would distance themselves from Heidegger’s notion of Being, they absorbed his lesson that an event was an unusual and profound moment that opened a tear in the fabric of everyday, mundane life. We have already seen Lyotard argue something similar, although from the Freudian perspective of a libidinal economy filtered through a Kantian notion of the causality of freedom. Unlike Lyotard, they took seriously Heidegger’s stress on the essentially passive nature of an event, at least to the extent that it was not a human appropriation of the world, imposing our meaning on

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that world or mastering or dominating objects that lay before us. An event was not the effect of intentional praxis, individual or collective, although it did involve a certain delayed response on the part of those who recognized it as such.65 And, finally, they were in accord with Heidegger’s understanding of events as having a complicated temporal dimension that prevented them from being simple momentary punctuations of a continuum of time, incarnations of what Derrida famously was to damn as the “metaphysics of presence.” For Derrida, the event is not the hinge moment of a meaningful, coherent narrative. Nor is it a punctual moment simply interrupting a routine continuum, the revelation of an ontological truth hidden by trivial ontic occurrences. Instead, it is the intensified expression of the time out of joint that he called “hauntological” in his Specters of Marx.66 That is, it perpetuates the spectral trace of past traumas as well as the promise of a future—the avenir that is perpetually à venir—always destined to be delayed in arriving. In Specters, he speaks of the inheritance of the Marxist tradition in terms of an event that cannot be absorbed into a mythological or religious or scientific narrative. “The form of this promise or of this project remains absolutely unique. Its event is at once singular, total, and uneffaceable— uneffaceable except by a denegation and in the course of a work of mourning that can only displace, without effacing, the effect of a trauma. There is no precedent whatsoever for such an event.”67 The pure singularity of an event, Derrida explained in “The University Without Condition,” cannot be anticipated by what Kantians would call a “regulative idea” or contained in what hermeneuticians like Hans-Georg Gadamer would call a “horizon of expectations.” Arriving utterly unannounced, “it would suppose an irruption that punctuates the horizon, interrupting any performative organization, any convention, or any context that can be dominated by conventionality.”68 Although performative action is often said to produce events, “where there is the performative, an event worthy of the name cannot arrive. If what arrives belongs to the horizon of the possible, or even of a possible performative, it does not arrive, it does not happen, in the full sense of the word.”69 A further implication of Derrida’s argument is teased out by fellow deconstructionist Jean-Luc Nancy in his contribution to a volume entitled Hegel after Derrida called “The Surprise of the Event.” Surprise, Nancy explains, “is not only an attribute, quality, or property of the event, but the event itself, its being or its essence. What eventuates in the event is not only that which happens, but that which surprises—perhaps even that which surprises itself (turning, in short, away from its own ‘happening’ [arrivée], not allowing itself to be event, surprising being in it, not letting it be, unless by surprise).”70 The event is not what happens—the advent of something like a birth or a death—he continues, but that it happens. It is, Nancy claims, “empty time, or presence of the present as negativity, that is, as it happens, and, consequently, as nonpresent and all this in such a way that it is not even ‘not yet present’ (which would reinscribe the whole thing in a succession of presents already available ‘in time’), but on the contrary, in such a way that nothing precedes or succeeds it: time itself in its arising, as the arising it is.”71 It is precisely

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the negativity that cannot be recuperated in a grand metanarrative as in Hegel, the emptiness that cannot be filled, the discordant note that can never be harmonized, the rupture that resists dialectical incorporation. It is, moreover, not a surprise primarily for a subject, which is surprised by it, not a happening that is then available to a subject’s representation or subsumable under a concept. For deconstruction, the event is thus beyond the actual and the virtual or the present and the absent; it is a mark of hauntological not ontological reality, containing a trace of what occurred, but is not a simple repetition of what went before.72 In one of his last essays, published in 2001, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Derrida compared the event to the unanticipated and unreciprocated gift that disrupts the smooth workings of an economy of exchange. When it occurs, it has the oxymoronic quality of an impossible possibility, something that arrives from on high, a vertical intervention in the horizontal flow of time. It also defies efforts to represent, record, indeed, merely to “say” it, certainly before it happens—to “pre-dict” it—and even after. Despite its having happened, it never entirely sheds its impossibility, or more aptly phrased, it shows the entanglement of possibility and impossibility. Rather than being reducible to information or a concept, it has the quality of a secret that cannot be fully told. But this does not mean it is only a simulacrum, purely a media fabrication, as Baudrillard falsely claimed about the Gulf War: “The event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and digestion is that thousands of people died. These are singular events each and every time, which no utterance of knowledge or information could reduce or neutralize.”73 When an event happens, Derrida claims, “not only does it come about as something unforeseeable, not only does it disrupt the ordinary course of history, but it is also absolutely singular. On the contrary, the saying of the event or the saying of knowledge regarding the event lacks, in a certain manner a priori, the event’s singularity simply because it comes after and it loses the singularity in general.”74 And yet, precisely because we insist on saying it, precisely because it comes to be represented, its singularity is always already undermined. “Repetition must already be at work in the singularity of the event, and with the repetition, the erasure of the first occurrence is already under way—whence, loss, mourning, and the posthumous, sealing the moment of the event, as the originary. Mourning is already there. One cannot avoid mixing tears with the smile of hospitality. Death is on the scene, in a way.”75 Thus, the hauntological rather than ontological status of the event as a ghost of a presence that can never be, indeed never was, fully present. Alain Badiou, the final theorist I want to consider in this chapter, adamantly separated himself from deconstruction, indeed from all poststructuralist philosophy in general, because of its disdain for unequivocal truths. Although he explicitly differentiated his interpretation of “the event” from that of thinkers like Deleuze,76 nevertheless, his reading of its role shares certain characteristics with others that we have already encountered. Developed throughout his voluminous oeuvre, it is most extensively discussed in his magnum opus Being and the Event, published in l988.77 As his title indicates, there is a certain amount of Heidegger

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in Badiou, even if his mathematical interpretation of Being—based largely on an imaginative reading of Georg Cantor’s set theory—distinguishes him from the German philosopher, with his privileging of language. When it comes to “event,” however, there are clear echoes of Ereignis, at least in the broad sense of a tear or opening in the fabric of everyday, routine existence. “The event” also transcends as well normal knowledge of Being, or “the encyclopedia” as Badiou likes to call it, revealing instead a deeper insight into what he calls “truth.” For Badiou, a genuine event is unfounded, haphazard, unpredictable, evanescent, an expression of pure chance. Whereas Being appears in mathematically legible terms, the event is “supernumerary,”78 outside of the order of the normal, not part of “the one,” but an “ultra-one.” As he puts it, “one of the names of the Outside is ‘event.’”79 It is like a gift of grace, an undeserved and unjustifiable donation, a religious analogy that is made explicit in his admiring evocation of St. Paul, about whom he was to write a later book.80 Not surprisingly, one commentator has called “the event” in Badiou’s system the “twentieth-century avatar”81 of divine revelation, an apocalyptic moment of unveiling. Another has drawn comparisons with the religious notion of kairos.82 Echoes of Kierkegaard’s anti-historicist faith in the ability of the Absolute to interrupt the course of mundane history are not hard to hear. Nor are parallels to the value of “suddenness” in the realm of aesthetic experience, moments of sublime, even violent intensity disrupting conventional cultural norms, celebrated by the German critic Karl Heinz Bohrer in his 1981 book Plötzlichkeit (Suddenness).83 Although events happen at what Badiou calls an “evental site” (situation événementale) in the conventional order of things, an abnormal place on the cusp between order and the void, rather than randomly, they are not the product of discernible forces working to produce them. Nor are evental sites evident as such before the event occurs. There is no role for virtuality or potentiality in his radical contrast between events and what they punctuate. As he puts it, “an event is never the concentration of a vital continuity, or the immanent intensification of a becoming. It is never coextensive with becoming. It is, on the contrary, on the side of a pure break with the becoming of an object of the world, through the auto-apparition of this object.”84 Rather than emerging out of or forming a new immanent unity, a Leibnizian harmony of monads, the event embodies the principle of decomposition of the rigid unities that already exist: “To break with empiricism,” Badiou writes, “the event must be thought as the advent of what is subtracted from all experience: the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous. To break with dogmatism, the event must be released from every tie to the One. It must be subtracted from Life in order to be released to the stars.”85 Badiou nonetheless considers that “the event,” which is utterly fortuitous and not the product of human will or intention, also must be recognized as such by an “intervener.” In some instances, he suggests that the actors closely involved with it are the ones who must do the recognizing. The recognition of an event, he writes in his 1998 text Metapolitics, is “simply at one with the political decision . . . the point from which a politics can be thought—which permits, even after

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the event, the seizure of its truth—is that of its actors, and not its spectators.”86 In others, the recognition apparently derives from those who remain faithful to it after the fact. “Fidelity,” he writes is “the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break.”87 His initial treatment of this issue in Being and the Event invited the reproach—by Lyotard among others—that fidelity meant a kind of purely decisionist choice concerning which occurrences could be called authentic events. Acknowledging the criticism, he would later concede: “I now think that the event has consequences, objective consequences and logical consequences. These consequences are separated by the event. The effect of the event is a profound transformation of the logic of the situation—and that is not an effect of a decision. The decision is to be uniquely favorable to the transformation.”88 And, moreover, it need not always be a transformation in a progressive direction, but might lead instead to the revelation of emptiness instead of fullness beneath the surface of quotidian existence, an example being what recently has been called “the fall of Marxism.”89 Rather than delving further into Badiou’s work or that of younger French philosophers such as the phenomenologist Claude Romano,90 I want to note in conclusion that despite all of the differences separating the French theorists we have been canvassing, a number of more or less common themes emerge. All of them reject the structuralist search for deep-seated repetitive patterns (although Foucault does acknowledge the importance of series). All invest the event with the pathos of disruptive innovation, either as a moment of freedom, radical surprise, libidinal energy, the appropriation of being, or the undermining of conventional meaning. All understand the temporality of the event as not simply punctual, bisecting the flow of routine time, but possessing a multiple time, hauntologically preserving traces of an unfulfilled past or signaling the emergence or at least promise of a radically new future. Or to put it more colloquially, for them no event is ever a “current event.” If it has any basic temporality, it is that of the future anterior (sometimes called the future perfect), the time of what will come to be a completed past in what will be the future.91 All regard the very singularity of the event, its resistance to being recuperated by contextual or conceptual meaning, as a marker of distinction. Lyotard may call the events of May l968 “anti-political” in their unleashing of desire, while Badiou may link the event with his version of a genuinely militant politics that the French call le politique, but both see it disrupting politics as usual or la politique.92 Although Foucault distances himself from the claims of “pure difference” made by some of the others and situates events at the crossroads of regular series, he, too, positions the event against both structuralist and phenomenological quests for explanatory or interpretive plenitude. For all of them, it is a mark of the ineffable, the surplus that always exceeds any attempt to contain it. Fidelity to the event, we might say, expanding a bit on Badiou’s term, involves a humility before its excessive, disruptive, unforeseen force.

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But precisely what that force may ultimately produce is by no means clear. For all their rhetoric linking the event with an explosion of freedom, the unleashing of libidinal desire or the appropriation of Being, celebrants of the event are disturbingly vague about what passes muster as a genuine instance of it, let alone who gets to decide in the rare cases when an event happens.93 As the British philosopher Peter Dews has wondered, with reference to Badiou in particular: How do specific happenings in the socio-historical world come to be nominated as events in his privileged sense? Badiou tends to draw his examples from a rather conventional repertoire of scientific, aesthetic, and political innovations: the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions, Mallarmé’s poetry, Schoenberg’s serialism, the cubism of Braque and Picasso—and of course Cantor’s mathematics. Not only is this very much the world viewed from the rive gauche. In many of these cases one can contest the implication that the event concerned is an unequivocal, irreversible advance, a breakthrough that calls for the unconditional fidelity of its inheritors.94

Badiou himself acknowledges the possibility of mistaken fidelity to “pseudo-events” such as the Nazi revolution, considering such mistakes inevitable because identifying a genuine event always involves a “hazardous” or risky decision. And, as the contested legacy of the Russian Revolution—which Badiou stubbornly still celebrates—makes clear, the judgment of something called “posterity” will not lead to certainty. Alternately, if the best way to differentiate between genuine and false events is, as Amy Hollywood has noted, “the degree to which they break from the past,”95 we are not really any closer to a criterion of useful judgment, at least if we tie the degree of separation with something as portentous as the arrival of freedom, the unleashing of desire, or the appropriation of Being. There is no plausible reason to wager on the ultimate outcome of events, any more than there is on the likelihood of their sudden and unexpected arrival. What Chou En-Lai famously said about the historical effect of the French Revolution—“it is too soon to tell”—may well apply to all other candidates for the category of an event. History students who are more interested in making sense of the past than in gauging the arrival of the apocalypse might find little of promise in French theorists’ problematic flurry of interest since 1968 in “the event.” If, as one commentator has observed, “the philosophy of the event (or events) can be as abstract as anything in philosophy,”96 we may well wonder how it can inform actual historical inquiry. There may be no easy transition from a “philosopheme” to what we might call a “historiopheme,” a concept that can fruitfully inform the practice of workaday historians. We may, however, find something suggestive in its lessons if we turn to the legacy of historicism. This is not the place to spell out all of the accumulated meanings, sometimes inconsistent and even contradictory, that have accrued around the concept of historicism.97 Suffice it to say that in its classical guise, most famously spelled out by Friedrich Meinecke in Die Entstehung des Historismus, it stressed two principal ideas: the first is that of unique and coherent development over repetition

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and the second is the priority of the individual over the collective. That is, it emphasized narrative storytelling over the uncovering of perennial structural patterns and was sensitive to the uniqueness of historical phenomena that resisted subsumption under general, allegedly timeless categories, analytic or normative. Historicism’s understanding of an event as a transformative episode in a meaningful narrative was, moreover, reinforced by the fact that it ascribed narrative meaning not merely to the external historical context but also internally to the event itself. As opposed to mere occurrences or happenings, punctual moments without duration—events like the French Revolution or May 1968—should be understood to have a beginning, middle, and end. That is, to cite one recent commentator indebted to this tradition, “an event is an individuated ordering of occurrences; it is not a single occurrence, nor a sequence of occurrences which follow on from each other as in the basic narrative form but have no beginning and ending—that is, constitute no overall individual phenomenon . . . the ‘content’ of an event has the ‘form’ of a narrative.”98 No matter the precise level of the individual element whose narrative mattered historically—for German historicism, for example, it notoriously became identified with the nation-state, not classes within it, let alone atomized selves—the theoretical point was that it was unbeholden to norms or rules above or beyond its self-sufficient, autotelic existence. Against earlier versions of the structuralist approach, represented in the German Kaiserreich above all by Karl Lamprecht with his search for historical laws, historicism argued for the irreducibility of the unique historical subject and the narrative of development in which it was embedded. Believing that “every epoch was immediate to God,” as Ranke had famously put it, historicism also refused to posit an overarching notion of historical progress, thus ultimately opening the door to the relativists’ reproach that precipitated the celebrated “crisis of historicism.”99 Here the twin pillars of historicism—unique individuality and coherent development—came into conflict, as a pantheist or even panentheist reconciliation of particular and universal lost their plausibility.100 Before linking the relativism issue to our earlier discussion, it is vital to acknowledge the importance of the singular event in historicism and its function as a repudiation of a structuralist search for lawlike regularities and patterns. At first glance, it might seem that the historicists were on the same side as the French theorists who were critics of the Annales School’s dismissal of histoire événementielle. Both were impatient with efforts to turn history into a social science with all of its aspirations to general laws and even the prediction of likely future outcomes. Both were unmoved by the search for deep repetitive patterns rather than the singular events that resist being interpreted as exemplars of those patterns. But by recalling the influence of the Heideggerian idea of Ereignis on certain contributors to the French discussion, we can see how different the two approaches are. For as has been widely acknowledged, Heidegger was a resolute foe of historicism, which he accused of being stuck on the level of the ontic, turning ontological questions of ultimate truth into subjective questions of mere ethical value and understanding value solely in terms of human ends. To cite Charles Bambach from

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his Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, “Truth is not subordinate to value, Heidegger claimed; it is a primordial ‘worlding’ or ‘eventing’ [es ereignet] whose grammatical structure follows neither the subject nor the predicate but takes the form of the ‘middle voice.’”101 In other words, whereas historicism led to a relativism of values and a focus on mere ontic stories in which events were never perceived as revealing absolute truths, for Heidegger and many of the French philosophers we have been examining, it was precisely “the event” that opened a window on a deeper truth beyond mere subjective judgments, ethical or cognitive (thus the idea of the grammatical middle voice in which the subject is at once active and passive). Although they differed over the precise nature of that truth, all of these theorists were impatient with the idea that the truths revealed by events were meaningful solely in the context of the ongoing narrative they helped shape. Against the historicist faith in narrative development, they were attracted to ruptures and caesurae in the coherent flow of time. These theorists were also often suspicious of the claim that events were self-contained mini-narratives of their own, preferring to think of them as involving iterative reworking after the fact, which led them to have a plural openness rather than meaningful closure.102 To put it in a nutshell, whereas classical historicism and most conventional historiography today103 understand an event as a punctuating moment in a coherent narrative of development, the thinkers we have been following pit it against both structure and meaningful narrative, against what Hayden White calls both “formalist” and “contextualist” strategies of explanation.104 They regard “the event” as precisely what cannot be absorbed into either, signaling instead the radical interruption of smooth development, the surprise incursion of the unexpected, even the revelation of an ontological truth and the manifestation of a freedom that exceeds human understanding. Perhaps “the event” cannot easily bear the weight placed on it by these theorists, at least if we remain on the ontic level of contingent narrative that most historians take as their proper domain. What Siegfried Kracauer characterized as the “last things before the last” in his still-valuable study of historical thinking is one in which events have more mundane consequences than the revelation of Being or the Truth or Freedom.105 And yet there is one important lesson for historians that can still be drawn from the metaphysical discourse of “the event.”106 As we have seen, historicism and its more recent champions, in their desire to pit coherent, individual stories against the social scientists’ search for regular patterns in history, perceive events as the building blocks of those narratives, indeed as mini-narratives in themselves. In the words of one recent student of the subject: “In the absence of storytelling devices, there would be no meaningful event.”107 Yet the discourse of “the event” in recent French theory tells us that the search for narrative coherence, meaningful contextualization, and emplotments as explanatory devices may be ultimately futile, or at least limited in its reach. Like the “derealized” events of modernist literature, to borrow a term Hayden White appropriated from Fredric Jameson, they rob “the event of its traditional narrativistic function of indexing the irruption of fate, destiny, grace, fortune, providence,

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and even of history itself into a life.”108 As Derrida has noted in the case of 9/11, the very act of naming events after chronological dates—and the same would apply to May 1968—indicates that we lack a meaningful concept or coherent narrative in which to situate them.109 If events are understood as ragged and unexpected ruptures with temporalities that are neither punctual bisections of the flow of history into before and after nor climactic episodes in meaningful narratives of transformation, then we have to acknowledge the radical contingency of our post facto reconstructions, which cannot count on events as hinges in a coherent plot. We have to admit that events may be sublime objects of an unfulfillable desire, denying positive representation, defying our search for coherence and contextual explanation. “The event,” as the philosopher Andrew Benjamin puts it, “marks the primacy of a necessary irresolvability.”110 And so, as in the case of les événements of May 1968, we may never really figure out where they came from or what they genuinely mean. As such, they mark the limits of the historicist faith in historicization itself.

Notes 1. Precisely how the term came into common use is not clear. One veteran observer of May 1968, Dick Howard, speculates as follows: “There was a fantastic series of articles by Edgar Morin in Le Monde in early May—mainly reprinted in La brèche. The more likely possibility is that it was journalists in general who wanted to remain neutral, not talking about revolution or anarchy . . . but be simply descriptive. That’s the theory of Pierre Hassner, who recalls that in either Je suis partout or another right-wing paper after the war, one talked of ‘events’ with reference to purges of collaborators” (Dick Howard, personal communication with author, 21 September 2009). 2. As Peter Burke points out, the assault on events in the name of structure has happened before in historiography, for example, in the Enlightenment, with Voltaire and John Millar, and during the early twentieth century, with British historians such as Lewis Namier and R. H. Tawney. See Peter Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Pa., 1992), 233. To be sure, idealists such as R. G. Collingwood, with his theory of the historical reenactment of rational actions, offer a very different critique of the importance of events for the historian. In The Idea of History (Oxford, 1956), Collingwood wrote: “Geology presents us with a series of events, but history is not history unless it presents us with a series of acts” (115). As we shall see, an event can be understood as different from both a structure and an act. In the German historiography of the same era, the so-called Bielefeld School also stressed structures over events. For a later consideration of this theme, see the essays in the Sonderheft 19 of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Struktur und Ereignis, ed. Andreas Sutter and Manfred Hettling (Göttingen, 2001). 3. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in The Mediterranean in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York, 1995), 118. 4. According to Peter Burke: “The contemptuous phrase histoire événementielle, ‘event-centered history,’ was coined at this time, a generation before the age of Braudel, Bloch and Febvre. It

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expresses the ideas of a group of scholars centered on the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his Année Sociologique, a journal that helped inspire the Annales” (“Overture: The New History, Its Past and Future,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 7). A century later, sociologists are still hostile to events. As Elihu Katz and Ruth Katz have recently noted, “Sociologists do not find much interest in events, especially disruptive ones. . . . Events are too idiosyncratic; many are one-time affairs, at least ostensibly. Events are seen as parentheses that open and close, nuisances that interfere with the routines that deserve sociological attention. Not much attention is given, somehow, to the possibility that the exception may be the rule, or come to be the rule, or illuminate the rule; or to the idea that deviant cases also need explaining if a theory is to hold” (“Life and Death Among the Binaries: Notes on Jeffrey Alexander’s Constructionism,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate [Oxford, 2009], 156). 5. In Search for a Method (trans. Hazel E. Barnes [New York, 1963]), originally published in French in 1957, Sartre had written: “Existentialism, then, can only affirm the specificity of the historical event; it seeks to restore to the event its function and its multiple dimensions. . . . for almost a hundred years now, Marxists have tended not to attach much importance to the event” (124). Althusser and his colleagues shared with structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss a deep distrust of Sartrean existentialism. 6. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1970), 108. 7. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, l970), 126. Rather than embracing the structuralist emphasis on enduring essences, Althusser and Balibar saw the event/structure opposition as itself grounded in a problematic notion of unfolding time based on the linear succession of discrete and homogeneous periods: “From this movement we get the determination of the historical object as an event, present even when it is doubted, i.e., the idea that there are not only events, i.e., not only ‘short-term’ phenomena, but also non-events, i.e., long events longterm permanences (which are wrongly christened ‘structures’)” (ibid., 294). 8. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London, 1976), 125. 9. Edgar Morin, “Le retour de l’événement,” Communications 18 (1970); Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’événement,” in Faire de l’histoire, ed., Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora, vol. 1 (Paris, 1974). The news of structuralism’s decline, to be sure, took a while to reach the Anglophone world. Thus we find the distinguished historian of ideas J. G. A. Pocock still writing in 1987: “To French historians today, of course, this would sound like histoire événementielle; they would want to draw attention to the longue durée” (“Texts and Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,” in J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method [Cambridge, 2009], 107). 10. Roland Barthes, “Writing the Event,” idem, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, l986). The article was originally written in 1968. Barthes finishes by declaring that “the critical aspect of the old system is interpretation, i.e., the operation by which one assigns to a set of confused or even contradictory appearances, a unitary structure, a deep meaning, a ‘veritable’ explanation. Hence, interpretation must gradually give way to a new discourse, whose goal is not the revelation of a unique and ‘true’ structure but the establishment of an interplay of multiple structures: an establishment itself written: i.e., uncoupled from the truth of speech; more precisely, it is the relations which organize these concomitant structures, subject to still unknown rules, which must constitute the object of a new theory” (154). 11. Jean-François Lyotard, “March 23,” Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis, 1993). Lyotard was not a historian, but his work often reflected on the assumptions of historical narrative, especially when they led to a single, normative “grand récit.” For an appreciation, see Sande Cohen, “The ‘Use and Abuse of History’ According to Jean-François Lyotard,” Parallax 17 (October–December 2000). 12. Ibid., 63. 13. Ibid., 64.

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14. Ibid. The general importance of events in Lyotard’s oeuvre is discussed in Geoff Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester, 1988). 15. Lyotard, “March 23,” 65. 16. Ibid. 17. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington, 1993). 18. Lyotard, “March 23,” 65. 19. Ibid., 65–66. 20. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London, 1991), 58. 21. Ibid. 22. William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 100; M. C. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought (London, 1995), 71. 23. The identification of the event with radical freedom became one of the general earmarks of the post-structuralist recuperation of the concept, for example, in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. See his “The Surprise of the Event,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London, 1998). 24. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass., l989), 400. 25. The distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism is, of course, a loose one during this period, and one can still find strong structuralist, specifically Althusserian, residues in works such as Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton [London, 1994], original French publication 1968). For a discussion, see Paul Patton, “Events, Becoming and History,” in Deleuze and History, ed. Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh, 2009), 35. 26. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed., Constantin V. Boundas (New York, 1990), 1. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 8. 29. Ibid., 51. 30. Ibid., 53. 31. Ibid., 54. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York, 2006), 233. 33. Thomas R. Flynn, “Michel Foucault and the Career of the Historical Event,” in At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens, Ga., 1987). 34. For a discussion of Foucault’s similarities with the Annalistes in the 1960s, see Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, vol. 2 (Chicago, 2005), chap. 1. 35. Derrida, it should be noted, also later claimed in his memorial tribute to his friend that “Deleuze the thinker is, above all, the thinker of the event and always of this event here [cet événement-ci]. He remained the thinker of the event from beginning to end.” (“I’ll Have to Wander Alone,” http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/derrida4.htm.) Badiou, as we will see, also acknowledged Deleuze’s focus on the event but radically challenged his understanding of it. 36. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 175. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 176. 39. Ibid., 175. 40. Ibid., 176. Sartre’s understanding of “the event” evolved from the early position that Foucault criticized here. Thus in Search for a Method, he defined it as “the moving, temporary unity of antagonistic groups which modifies them to the extent that they transform it. As such, the event has its unique characteristics: its date, its speed, its structures, etc. The study of these factors allows us to make History rational even at the level of the concrete” (130). 41. Ibid.

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42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 170. 44. For a discussion of the ways in which he explicitly distinguished his philosophical notion of becoming from history, see Patton, “Events, Becoming and History.” Patton nonetheless concludes that “far from being opposed to history, or a matter of flight from the world, becoming, eventness, and lines of flight are the condition of movement or change within the world” (50). 45. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 114. 46. Ibid. 47. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, l972), 168. 48. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, 230. 49. Ibid. 50. Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991), 76. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 77. 53. Ibid., 79. 54. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, 80. 55. I owe this insight to Paul Patton. 56. The early reception, to be sure, did not normally focus on the concept of the event. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, 2005). But there were some French interpreters, such as Michel Haar and Jean Beaufret, who did note its importance. See Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Anti-Humanism and Being (London, 1995). It should be noted that the political theological ruminations on the importance of singular events of two other German thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, were also influential in the French discussion. See Bernard Flynn, “Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes,” Constellations 17, no. 2 (June, 2010). 57. In the voluminous literature on Heidegger, the word has been given considerable attention. See, for example, the entry on “event, happening, occurrence” in Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford, 1999) and Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1985), chap. 6. It should be noted that he was not the first German philosopher to comment on Das Ereignis, a term used, for example, by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the section “Of Great Events.” For a general discussion, see the essays in Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, ed., Ereignis. Eine fundamentale Kategorie der Zeiterfahrung—Anspruch und Aporien (Berlin, 2003) and Gerhard Richter, Ästhetik des Ereignisses: Sprache—Geschichte—Medium (Munich, 2005). 58. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. John Stambaugh (New York, 1969), 36. 59. As one of his most insightful interpreters, Otto Pöggeler writes with reference to its use in the later work Identity and Difference: “‘Ereignis’ does not mean here, as it still did within the terminology of Being and Time, a certain occurrence of happening, but rather Dasein’s complete self-realization in Being and Being’s appropriation [zueignen] to Dasein’s authenticity. The word Ereignis cannot be made plural. It determines the meaning of Being itself.” (“Being as Appropriation,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray [New Haven, 1978], 102.) 60. For an attempt to spell out the differences, see Martin Jay, “The Lifeworld and Lived Experience,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, Mass., 2006). 61. Richard Polt, “The Event of Enthinking the Event,” in Companion to Heidegger’s Contribution to Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott, Susan M. Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu and Alejandro Vallega (Bloomington, 2001), 93. 62. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, 56. 63. Bernasconi, The Question of Language, 86. Jean-Luc Nancy glosses Ereignis in similar terms: “The appropriation of a presence and not as the (sudden) presence of a property” (The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, 1993), 113.

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64. Thus for example, Herbert Marcuse grew suspicious of his teacher’s concept of historicity. As Herman Rapaport noted: “Already in Marcuse’s terms, this represented the degradation of history through a temporalized notion of Being that worked against the significance of the historical ‘event’ per se” (Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language [Lincoln, NE, 1989], 261). He is at pains to defend Heidegger against Marcuse’s charge. 65. In other treatments of the Event, however, a more active reading has been advanced. For example, Slavoj Žižek, polemicizing in Leninist fashion against the fetishism of objective revolutionary conditions, writes: “We cannot establish the time of the explosion of the Event through a close ‘objective’ analysis. . . . There is no Event outside the engaged subjective decision which creates it—if we wait for the time to become ripe for the Event, the Event will never occur” (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity [Cambridge, MA, 2003], 135). 66. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994). For a general account of his understanding of the event, see the entry in Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA, 2004). 67. Ibid., 91. 68. Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, 2002), 234. 69. Ibid. 70. Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” Hegel After Derrida, 91. Elsewhere Nancy would link the idea of surprise with freedom in a manner recalling Lyotard’s argument. See The Experience of Freedom, chap. 11. 71. Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” 98. 72. One of Derrida’s first discussions of the event comes in his early essay “Signature Event Context,” in which the event of the individual signature is characterized as both singular and based on what went before it and what, presumably, will come after. “Does the absolute singularity of an event of the signature ever occur?” he asks. “Yes, of course, every day,” he answers. But then he adds: “In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production” (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago, 1982], 328). Are all events, however, like signatures—singular but iterable? Derrida implies they are not. 73. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 460. 74. Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 446. (The original French version was published in 2001.) 75. Ibid., 453. 76. Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” Parrhesia 2 (2007). He describes the basic difference between them in the following terms: “In the first case [Badiou], the event is disjoined from the One, it is separation, assumption of the void, pure non-sense. In the second case [Deleuze], it is the play of the One, composition, intensity of the plenum, the crystal (or logic) of sense” (37). Deleuze, he goes on, “chooses for destiny. The event is not the risky [hasardeux] passage from one state of things to another. It is the immanent stigmata of a One-result of all becomings. In the multiple-which-becomes, in the between-two of the multiples which are active multiples, the event is the destiny of the One” (39). See also his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchell (Minneapolis, 2000). 77. Alain Badiou, Being and the Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, 2006). For a helpful overview of his argument, see Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis, 2003), chap. 5. For a comparison with Deleuze, see Véronique Bergen, “The Precariousness of Being and Thought in the Philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou” and Bela Egyed, “Counter-Actualization and the Method of Intuition,” both in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh, 2006). See also the discussion of their work in John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York, 2006). 78. Badiou, Being and the Event (199 in French original), 98.

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79. Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” 37. 80. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, 2003). An Event, he writes, “is falsified if it does not give rise to a universal becoming-son. Through the Event we enter into filial equality” (49). One wonders about the half of the species omitted by this claim, as well as the explicit Christian message it conveys. 81. Amy Hollywood, “Saint Paul and the New Man,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 869. 82. Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time (London, 2007), 98–109. He does not simply argue that Badiou’s event is kairological but also says it can be enriched by introducing the concept as a way to describe the prepolitical conditions that allow the event to appear. Not all theologically inspired commentators have been persuaded, however, by his argument. For a critique from a Thomist perspective (filtered through Nicholas of Cusa), see John Milbank, “Materialism and Transcendence,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, 2005). He argues for the folding in of the event into its context via a complicated ontology of mediating analogies. 83. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des aesthetischen Scheins (Frankfurt, 1981). The importance of the event in contemporary aesthetic practice during this period should also be mentioned, as this was the moment when durable art objects began to give way to ephemeral “happenings,” “auto-destructive art,” “actions,” and other deliberately impermanent aesthetic experiences and performances. 84. Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” 39. By “auto-apparition of the object,” I take him to mean something like a miracle that defies the law-like regularities of nature. 85. Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” 42. 86. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker (London, 2005), 23. 87. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London, 2001), 67. 88. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London, 2005), 130. 89. Negative events, however, are rare for Badiou, allowing John Mullarkey to go as far as to claim that “what is vital for him is that events are always for the good (whether achieved or not), they concern emancipation and, as such, equality. Hence, there is an element of self-fulfilling, Whiggish historicism in his classification of events” (Post-Continental Philosophy, 104). 90. Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York, 2009). It first appeared in French in 1998. The translation by Stephen E. Lewis of a second volume, Event and Time, from 1999, is forthcoming in 2013. 91. An example of the future anterior tense is the sentence: “When he arrives, I shall have already left the room.” 92. For an account of the distinction, which ties it to questions of the event, see Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh, 2007). 93. It should also be acknowledged that there is another, far more trivial usage, which is part of pop culture and the marketing of unique experiences. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted: “Perhaps the most potent brands are properly advertised and hyped events: celebrity events, massively attended according to [Daniel] Boorstin’s criteria thanks to being known for their well-knownness and selling masses of tickets because the tickets are selling well. ‘Events’ have an advantage over company-fixed brands, which have to count on the lasting loyalty of faithful clients. Events are better attuned to the notoriously short spans of public memory and the cut-throat competition between enticements vying for consumers’ attention” (Liquid Life [Malden, MA, 2005], 61). 94. Peter Dews, Review of Badiou, Being and the Event, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (February 19, 2008), http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12406. Along the same lines, Bela Egyed notes: “The lack of a set-theoretical account of the event obliges Badiou to rely on historical examples in order to make his case. But these examples, such as the French Revolution, or St. Paul’s radical

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intervention in Christianity, are too easy. They are too obvious. They all emerge at the point where the actual is the noisiest. But as Nietzsche has warned us: ‘The greatest events, they are not our noisiest but our stillest hours’” (“Counter-Actualization and the Method of Intuition,” 80). 95. Hollywood, “Saint Paul and the New Man,” 275. 96. Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy, 100. 97. For one attempt, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT, 1968); for another, stressing the Italian tradition, see David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley, 1987). For earlier, but still useful efforts, see Karl Mannheim, “Historicism” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London, 1952); and Otto Hintze, who responded to the study of Ernst Troeltsch on Historicism and Its Problems, in “Troeltsch and the Problem of Historicism: Critical Studies,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (Oxford, 1975). See also F. R. Ankersmit, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” Theory and History 34, no. 3 (October 1995) and the ensuing debate. 98. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought, 71–72. Contemporary narratology decomposes events into more fine-grained event-types, for example, happenings, actions, and moves. See the discussion in David Herman, “Events and Event-Types” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London, 2007). 99. For a discussion, see Iggers, The German Conception of History, chaps. 6 and 7. 100. On the importance of panentheism (the belief that nature or history was not identical with the divine, but rather an emanation of it) for Rankean historicism, see Reinbert Krol, “Pantheism and the Crisis of Historicism,” Journal of Philosophy of History 4(2010): 195-209. When this belief declined, it was no longer possible to attribute moral meaning to the acts of individuals in history (most notably, nation-states) purely on the grounds that they were divine emanations. It was also harder to situate cross sections of historical time in the longer-term narrative of development. 101. Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, 1995), 228. 102. This feature of the event is developed by Andrew Benjamin in The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (London, 1993), where he argues that “the event can never be commensurate with itself since the ‘itself ’ will already have been a plural possibility. . . . What it can never have is absolute finality, the end as completion” (191). 103. See, for example, Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” which is a plea for a judicious incorporation of the insights of structural analysis into the narratives of historians who focus on discrete events. 104. Hayden White, “Formalist and Contextualist Strategies in Historical Explanation,” Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1999). 105. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (Oxford, 1969). 106. Historians have in fact already begun drawing on the discourse, e.g., Shruti Kapila, “History of Violence,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (August 2010). The author discusses the radical Indian nationalist B. G. Tilak’s reading of the Bhagavad Gita in terms of Badiou’s notion of the event. 107. Richard Devetak, “After the Event: Don DeLillo’s White Noise and September 11 Narratives,” Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 795. Devetak imaginatively compares DeLillo’s novel with its constitution of events via a multitude of different narrative voices with the constitution of historical events through similar means. 108. White, Figural Realism, 74. Jameson introduced this term with reference to the novels of Sartre. White’s larger point is that derealized events are typical of modernist literature in general and should be understood as informing historical discourse as well. He adopts Eric Santner’s term “narrative fetishism” to define what he opposes. In an earlier essay, he followed Louis Mink in arguing that “the very notion of an event is so ambiguous that it makes no sense at all to speak of an event per se but only of events under description. In other words, the kind of descriptive

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protocol used to constitute events as facts of a particular sort determines the kind of fact they are considered to be.” (“The Narrativization of Real Events,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 [Summer 1981]: 795). The descriptive protocols that primarily interested him were those of different kinds of emplotted stories, but one might just as easily extend the category to include events understood as anti-narrative, anti-formalist interruptions in coherent stories. 109. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago, 2003), 86. 110. Benjamin, The Plural Event, 191.

Part III



Brothers and Strangers The Issue of Identity

Chapter 10

Asiatic Brothers, European Strangers Eugen Hoeflich and Pan-Asian Zionism in Vienna

Hanan Harif



The bayonets of the European powers will subjugate them [the Asian lands] until Japan will lead the organization of Asia against Europe; the tendency toward independence, which, also in Japan, has nothing in common with European imperialism, is gaining strength by the hour. . . . If at that point of time we [i.e., Jews] shall not long ago have made up our mind for Asia, the awakening Asia will remove us from its path. What can we do? We must recognize, must comprehend the Western orientation as disastrous for us, not only because it pushes us to an anti-Asian position but also because it takes from us the last vestiges of our essence and will eventually turn us into a Hebrew-speaking part of the European folk-mixture sent to Palestine. Our orientation must immediately turn toward the East. . . . —Eugen Hoeflich, “Das Wiedererwachende Asien”

In writing these words in 1919, Eugen Hoeflich tried to convince his Jewish readers in Vienna of the need for a radical change of Zionist political and cultural perspectives—from Europeanism to Asianism. Hoeflich’s appeal was profoundly influenced by pan-Asianism, an ideology that called for a revival of old Asian traditions, all-Asian unification, and a rejection of Western cultural influences and political hegemony over the Asian lands. This chapter discusses pan-Asian Zionism, an idea that existed on the margins of German-speaking Zionism in post–World War I Vienna and, as will be shown, shared some of the tendencies of wider pan-Asian thought. Pan-Asian Zionism perceived Jews as Orientals and Zionism as a cultural odyssey that stretched back

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to the Jewish people’s Eastern, Asiatic roots—a return from Europe but not as Europeans. It stressed Zionism’s crucial need to reject Europe and its attributes and create an Arab-Jewish Palestine as a part of a greater Asia—including the Far East. According to this view, the Jews, as an Oriental nation, needed to sever their thousand-year-long connection to Europe and reintegrate into their original geographical, cultural, and spiritual homeland—Asia. The key figure in pan-Asian Zionism was the Viennese-born writer, poet, and journalist, Eugen Hoeflich (1891–1965, who changed his name to Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriel after he moved to Palestine). Although he was not the first intellectual to reflect about the Jews’ essential Asianism, Hoeflich was certainly the most active in trying to politicize it. Born to an acculturated Jewish family, Hoeflich abandoned his youthful socialism and adopted a unique version of Zionism—the idea of Jews and Judaism as a part of the Asian world—which he espoused for many years, beginning with his stay in Palestine as an Austrian officer during World War I, to his life back in Vienna in 1917, to his later days in Palestine (to which he immigrated in 1927). By means of numerous articles, books, letters, and meetings, Hoeflich tried to gain support for his ideas about the crucial need to change the official Zionist orientation from Western European to Oriental Asiatic. In order to attain this objective, he contacted various intellectuals and politicians, resolutely trying to establish links between Zionism and other Asian movements—especially Japanese pan-Asianism because he regarded developments in Japan as a hopeful precursor to Asian unification. An analysis of this almost-forgotten activity and its underlying cultural-ideological assumptions will make it possible to contextualize this marginal phenomenon within the broader transnational activity of the time. Placing it in its relevant context will, I hope, deepen our understanding of the political significance of what appears, at first sight, to be no more than ephemeral Orientalist fantasies but in reality is an instructive example for contemporary transnational thought and activity.1

Background: Pan-Asianism in Japan The above-mentioned reference to Japan was significant. One of the main outcomes of the astonishingly fast modernization of Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912) was the emergence of sharp counterreactions within the country. The official policy, encouraging and supporting the “Westernization” of Japan, brought about far-reaching changes in almost all aspects of the country’s social and cultural life. It is within this context that Japanese pan-Asianism developed. Pan-Asianism was not an exclusive Japanese phenomenon. It developed in other Asian countries such as China, India, and Korea as a reaction to the colonial exploitation of Asia and its peoples. Only in Japan, however, were pan-Asian ideas fueled by astounding military achievements such as the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). Becoming a world power had

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assured modern Japan’s self-image as the “savior of Asia” and supported its claim for hegemony in Southeast Asia.2 Not surprisingly, Japanese pan-Asianism contained many variations and internal tensions and was deeply influenced by domestic and foreign factors. Some panAsian thinkers stressed Asian spirituality, describing Asia as a source for universal peace and harmony, as opposed to Europe’s “materialistic” and “warlike” culture. Others, however, utilized it primarily as a means for supporting Japanese imperialist expansion in the Far East.3 It seems that the increasing influence of pan-Asianism over Japan’s official policy during the early decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by an inner change in the essence of pan-Asianism—from a romantic anti-Western cry in the name of Asian values to a militant position that utilized modern “Western” technologies in order to fight against Western interests in East Asia. Despite the conflicting tendencies and inner tensions, pan-Asianism can be defined roughly as a transnational ideology, which focuses on the region (i.e., Asia) rather than on the nation-state per se and which aims at strengthening the ties between its different parts and increasing its international influence.4 As a cultural ideology, however, pan-Asianism was never completely separated from the concepts of “Europe” and “the West” as the ultimate opposite of “Asian” spiritual values.5 In fact, it was almost impossible to speak of “the essence of Asia” without comparing it to Europe as its antithesis. Interestingly, Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” regularly presented as the ultimate expression of Western “Orientalism,”6 can be used just as easily as an articulation of pan-Asian worldviews. Ironically, pan-Asian thought, which stresses the decline of “materialistic” Western civilization and the triumph of Asia, is in itself an instructive example of the encounter between Western and Eastern ideas and ways of thought.

Hoeflich’s Path to Pan-Asianism As already noted, Eugen Hoeflich spent a few months in Palestine during World War I as an officer in the Austrian army. In Palestine, he stayed in Jerusalem and other places around the region. It seems that his stay in Jerusalem affected him deeply. In two early publications, both written in Jerusalem and published in Der Jude in 1917 (“Letter to a Skeptic” and “From a Jerusalemite’s Diary”),7 he expressed his anti-European sentiments and strong attraction to Asia, emphasizing the urgent need for the rejection of European influences in Palestine in all aspects of material and spiritual life. Hoeflich gave candid expression to his “conversional” feelings in his “Letter to a Skeptic,” writing, “The fact that I once embraced socialism was a healthy sign. Outgrowing it, however, was equally healthy, for I told myself that it [socialism] is justified in Europe, but I, after losing all interest in Europe, must look for a new basis. As in Rousseau’s return to nature, I found it

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best to return to spiritual Asianism, which lies in the pure incarnation of Buddhism, the teachings of Tao, and, finally, in Judaism.”8 Such reliance on Rousseau’s “return to nature” (and, in the same article, also on Nietzsche’s Übermensch!9) in a “letter” dedicated to a complete rejection of Europe and its culture is at first sight surprising. However, using the work of European thinkers to express a rejection of Europe demonstrates that Hoeflich, like many other anti-European intellectuals, could not detach himself completely from his culture. Furthermore, this ethos is firmly rooted in the philosophical heritage of modern Europe. Hoeflich’s statement (naïve as it was) seems to express his feelings as a young man passionately looking for a new worldview after the destruction of the older European order in the world war. On 11 November, immediately after his return to Vienna, he wrote in his diary: “Constantinople is spread before me, Asia, all the oriental world. I am in Western Europe again, or, rather, my body [is]. I cross streets, see people, hear voices speaking—and feel myself a stranger. . . . by no means do I belong to all the uproars around me.” And a few days later: “Within me there is an uncontrollable yearning for Palestine, so strong that I am a total stranger here in Europe.”10 In the following days, Hoeflich redefined Judaism as “Asiatic” (as in his “Letter to a Skeptic”), combining his Jewish feelings, his alienation from Europe, and his longing for Asia. At the start of his first book, Der Weg in das Land, Palaestinensische Aufzeichnungen (The way the land, Palestinian chronicles)—a sort of literary diary describing his experiences while traveling across Palestine and its surroundings, he wrote: “I experience the Orient from the standpoint of a Jew who is fully and totally aware of his Oriental origin, his Asiatic blood.”11 The first time Hoeflich explicitly mentioned pan-Asianism as an actual undertaking, however, took place a few weeks after his return, in a short article titled “Jerusalem,” which he wrote “on the occasion of the city taken over by English soldiers”12 and which was later published in Der Weg in das Land. Toward the conclusion of the article he wrote: “One thing, however, I must note: abolition of the caliphate, protecting the Suez Canal, the way to India, the Baghdad train, freeing Palestine, etc. are all only slogans directed against the great spiritual movement that, eventually, will surely come, against the pan-Asianism of tomorrow, to which Asia will give birth in Japan, in India, or else, in Palestine.13 This statement, written shortly after his return to Vienna, manifests the political content that Hoeflich attempted to incorporate into his Jewish-Oriental sentiments. The sharp anti-imperialist tone here marks the inception of Hoeflich as an original pan-Asian–Zionist thinker. The spiritual longings for “Asia” were “translated” into a “pan” ideology, and from that moment on, apparently, Hoeflich saw himself as the single promoter of pan-Asianism in Europe. It is not known whether there was a specific trigger for this transition from spiritual to political statements concerning Asia or whether Hoeflich had heard of pan-Asianism before his own references to it. His diary does not reveal a specific source of influence during his stay in the Middle East in 1917. Moreover, later

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comments in his diary and letters indicate that at that time Hoeflich was not, or was only superficially, acquainted with “official” pan-Asian thought. Perhaps because of the military censorship, he abstained earlier from writing explicitly about burning political issues. But it seems most unlikely that Hoeflich was au courant concerning Japanese or other pan-Asian thought, because it was not then widely known outside Japan and Hoeflich could not read Japanese. As a matter of fact, it was not before 1917 that Asianism as a political agenda emerged and gained any political influence, specifically through Kodera Kenkichi’s work from 1916, Treatise on Greater Asianism (Dai-Ajiashugi-ron; this 1,300 page work, apparently, was not translated).14 Actually, Hoeflich first mentioned an Asian thinker only in April 1919, noting that the Chinese Ku Hung Ming’s book, Die Verteidigung Chinas gegen Europäische Einflüsse (The defense of Asia against European influences)—particularly its essay about the Chinese “Oxford Movement”—was instructive for a Jewish Palestine.15

“Pan” Ideologies in Vienna It is most likely, however, that Hoeflich’s “conversion” to pan-Asianism was not independent of the contemporary political atmosphere in his native Vienna, to which he returned at the end of the war. There is little doubt that his identification with Asia was influenced by his feelings as a young man in Vienna, exposed to increasing anti-Semitic rhetoric that labeled the Jews strangers in Europe. Furthermore, the pan-Germany movement propagated by Georg Ritter von Schoenerer (1842– 1921) and his supporters had a strong appeal in early twentieth-century Vienna. This combination of radical nationalism, anti-Semitism, and pan-Germanism in post-imperial Vienna was likely to inspire various counterreactions among contemporaries. Thus Hoeflich’s adoption of pan-Asianism may have been, at least in part, a response to the pan-Germanic challenge. Indeed Asian thinkers were often exposed to “pan” ideologies in Europe before formulating their own pan-Asian theories. Sven Saaler indicates that Kodera Kenkichi, the first Japanese thinker to write about “greater Asianism,” was exposed to pan-Germanism (among other pan-movements) while studying in Western universities such as Heidelberg (1902) and Vienna (1903–4); “the concept of regionalism advocated by Kodera was strongly influenced by the racial theories popular in Europe and the United States from the mid-nineteenth century.”16 An enlightening example of a counterreactive anti-racial “pan” ideology is to be found in Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi’s pan-Europa movement, established in Vienna in 1922. Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) was a Viennese historian, author of several pan-European books, and the founder and editor of the Paneuropa periodical in 1924. His struggle for a federated pan-Europe was motivated by his revulsion toward pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism (to which he was exposed during his studies in Vienna). His pan-European thought was strictly anti-nationalistic and anti-chauvinist, describing nationalism as “a terrifying force” and calling for a “brotherhood of all men.”17

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It is not surprising, then, to find Hoeflich, who from an early age experienced chauvinist nationalism in fin-de-siècle Vienna and later felt himself a “stranger in Europe,” aspiring toward a large pan-Asian framework.18 Pan-Europeanism and pan-Asianism, clearly, were very different from each other. Given CoudenhoveKalergi’s background as a descendant of the Bohemian aristocracy and the son of a Hapsburg diplomat, his lifelong commitment to the idea of a Paneuropa (with Vienna as its capital!) can be seen as a means of coping with the disintegration of the empire. Hoeflich, on the other hand, promoted a strictly anti-European agenda, calling for the unification of Asia and the rejection of Europe and its influences. Nevertheless, both thinkers’ anti-nationalistic motivations and striving for a regional framework seem closely related. In other words, both Paneuropa and Panasien, as distant from each other as they were, represent the same tendencies. It is likely that despite the possible influence of Asian thinkers on Hoeflich, the European and Viennese atmosphere played a significant role in shaping his pan-Asianism. Furthermore, even prominent Asian advocates of Great Asianism such as Kodera were affected by a Western atmosphere so that one cannot speak of Japanese (or any other) pan-Asianism as a pure Asian phenomenon, but rather as a dialectical interplay of reception and rejection.19

Pan-Asian Writing and Activity Hoeflich wrote and published rather extensively on the topic of pan-Asianism in an attempt to gain supporters and partners for his vision. The first journal in which he tried to promote pan-Asianism as a significant theme was Esra: Monatsschrift des Jüdischen Akademikers (Esra: Periodical of the Jewish Academics), which he established and edited during the years 1919–20.20 The journal, named after the biblical figure of Ezra the Scribe (the religious leader of the Jews who left Babylon and immigrated to the land of Israel a few decades after the declaration by Cyrus, 538 BCE), contained articles by Hoeflich and a group of Zionist intellectuals such as Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch, Felix Weltsch, Oskar Karbach,21 Meir Wiener,22 and others. As stated in its subtitle, the periodical—which promoted cultural Zionism, called for a Jewish renaissance, and tried to create an ideological opposition to official Zionism—was originally aimed at “young academics.” It devoted considerable attention to the idea of pan-Asianism and its connection to Zionism. The propagation of pan-Asian thought took place in articles discussing “the Arab Question” from a pan-Asian perspective and also in translations of Asian thought, such as Rabindranath Tagore’s “Asien und Europa.” This is not to say that Esra was officially a pan-Asian periodical. Despite the editor’s agenda, it can generally be described as a cultural Zionist journal, an outstanding expression of the contemporary Jewish renaissance combined with criticism of the official Zionist establishment.23 Nevertheless, Esra was the first Jewish periodical to include pan-Asianism in its list of priorities and to give it considerable prominence.

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Other journals in which Hoeflich wrote about pan-Asianism and related topics were Der Jude, Wiener Morgenzeitung, Jüdische Rundschau, Menorah, and Das Zelt. Das Zelt, subtitled “A Jewish illustrated periodical for art, literature, and science,” 24 was a “nonpolitical” journal that was also edited by Hoeflich and dedicated mainly to so-called Jewish (and related) art and literature. The ten issues of Das Zelt (all published in 1924) contained original as well as translated literature, various essays in art criticism, and an impressive number of high-quality artistic illustrations and photographs of works of art. Not surprisingly, Hoeflich contributed mainly literary and art criticism pieces to this journal, all of which were related to Oriental themes rather than pan-Asian ideas. His political views were published simultaneously in his most prominent contribution to pan-Asianism, the book The Gates of the East (Die Pforte des Ostens). 25 The Gates of the East, Hoeflich’s theoretical work, is composed of three major parts: “Basic approach”—a critical discussion of Zionism and the political European orientation it adopted, marking the Balfour Declaration as a crucial element in the Zionists’ failure to become a part of the East and pointing to the connection between European capitalism and militarism; “the Arab Question”—stating the importance of a local, Palestinian orientation for Zionism and the essential need for Islamic recognition and for cooperation with the Arabs; and “Pan-Asia”— based upon the previous chapters, this chapter proclaims the imminent unification of Asia, a unification in which the Jews, as an Oriental people, had a role to play. According to this view, Zionism must not focus only on Palestine and its surroundings but, rather, see the common interests and values it shares with Asia in general. Combining socialist anti-bourgeoisie criticism with anti-rational elements, the book actually creates an antipodal picture in which Europe and America (which he classified as a radicalized version of Europe) represent capitalist exploitation, militarism, the tyranny of logic, cold rationalism, false individualism, and stagnant religion, whereas Asia symbolizes spirituality, living religiosity, devotion and self-sacrifice, morality, and harmony with nature. Hoeflich quoted Asian writers such as Okakura Tenshin (whom he admired) and others, but he repeatedly maintained that the idea of pan-Asianism came independently to his mind and that during World War I, he had propagated it in the Middle East, not knowing that far away, in Japan, the same ideas were elaborated “from a similar heartbeat.”26 His diary notes indicate, indeed, that books such as Okakura’s Ideals of the East and Tagore’s Nationalism were unfamiliar to him at the time.27 Despite the manifestly nonpolitical agenda of Das Zelt, Hoeflich allowed himself a few small exceptions. In the first volume, the section “Buch, Kunst und Künstler” (“Book, art, and artist”) was dedicated to two works by Hans Kohn— Nationalism: About the Importance of Nationalism in Judaism and in the Present and The Meaning and Fate of the Russian Revolution.28 In his short review, Hoeflich wrote: “For him [i.e., Kohn], Zionism is not ‘the individual’s insurance company for his fortunate future’; for him this notion . . . is a striving for the goals that are immanent in Asia. He thus brings himself closer (one of the essays is titled “Pan-Asia”) to the

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movement [Bewegung] that, for the lack of another term, is called pan-Asianism. Although Kohn has not yet drawn all the relevant conclusions, he is, nevertheless, on the way to the first postulate of pan-Asian Zionists: fraternal compromise with the Arab people.”29 In reality, no essay in Kohn’s book was titled “Panasien.” The relevant essays were actually titled “The Arab Question” and “Asia’s Nationalism.” Kohn, as is well known, was indeed one of the most zealous supporters of an Arab-Jewish compromise. Pan-Asianism, however, was never part of his Zionist worldview.30 Another effort at deviating from the journal’s stated policy regarding theoretical essays is found in a short letter written to Hoeflich by Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi on 3 May 1924. In his letter Coudenhove-Kalergi thanked Hoeflich for sending him his book, which he found “most interesting,” and apologized for not contributing an unpublished article to Hoeflich’s periodical Das Zelt (as he had been asked to) for lack of time caused by his obligations to his own periodical, Paneuropa.31 Hoeflich had likely hoped that Coudenhove-Kalergi would write a theoretical pan-European article for Das Zelt, to which he and others could respond and develop a discussion around these issues. Then again, Hoeflich may have also hoped that the pan-European Coudenhove-Kalergi would find his approach toward the Jews as non-Europeans convincing and would support his pan-Asian views regarding them and the other Asian nations. These two instances illustrate Hoeflich’s ongoing efforts to disseminate his pan-Asian views among wider circles, despite attaining only modest success. His attempts to gain support for Zionist pan-Asianism were by no means confined to his editorial positions. He contacted various Zionist figures, trying to convince them of the necessity of pan-Asianism. In response to one of his newsletters (Rundschreiben), in which he unsuccessfully promoted an anti-colonialist “Black Book” describing the colonialists’ atrocities in Asia, Hans Kohn refused to accept Hoeflich’s a priori anti-Western attitude as he considered that “Western” (specifically, British) atrocities in the East were no worse than the “Eastern” ones: “The English acted against the Irish with much more brutality then they ever did against the Indians, their government is much more liberal than that of the Turkish sultan over the Turks or that of the Persian court camarilla over the Persians. Japanese cruelty in Korea was seconded by no colonial nation.”32 Hoeflich did not confine his efforts at promoting his ideas to Zionists, as shown by his correspondence with Coudenhove-Kalergi; he earnestly tried to find supporters and partners outside the Jewish-Zionist scene. Browsing through his diary and correspondence, as well as the Hoeflich [Ben-Gavriel] family’s guestbook,33 it is possible to discern a vast network of connections that he tried to set up around his pan-Asian agenda. On 17 April 1922, for instance, he described his meeting with Mahmud ibn Shamsa’din al-Husainy, his “Jerusalemite Arabic friend.”34 At their meeting, in addition to recalling shared memories from Hoeflich’s days in Jerusalem during World War I, they discussed politics. Whereas Mahmud held anti-Zionist views (for which Hoeflich tended to blame the “chauvinist” Zionist leaders, as he considered Mahmud “a true friend of the Jews”), they both shared

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a hatred of England, and Hoeflich was pleased to hear that “the Arab’s hatred towards the British is strong.” In addition, Hoeflich wrote: “He agrees with me [Hoeflich], however, concerning an autonomous Jewish-Arab Palestine within the larger Arabic alliance. He agrees [with the idea]—if Zionists cease to be chauvinistic, if they start viewing the Arab as their brother, at any rate to see him as a brother. What he said is what I myself have been saying for a long time.”35 Although Mahmud al-Husainy, apparently, did not share Hoeflich’s larger panAsian view, both did see Palestine as a part of a larger, transnational Arab fraternity, a place where Arabs and Jews must live together “as brothers.” Another example of a pan-Asian connection was the visit on 19 August 1926 of Dr. Mansur Mustapha Rifat, whom Hoeflich described as “an Egyptian nationalist, pan-Asian, and an enemy of England.” In his diary Hoeflich hardly referred to the content of their conversation, but the short note Rifat left in Hoeflich’s guestbook is instructive. Rifat described his host as a man aspiring to work for “the genuine benefit of the entire East (and) all suffering humanity”—the pan-Eastern tone is rather evident.36 The most prominent example, however, of Hoeflich’s pan-Asian connections is his correspondence with the Japanese intellectual Professor Kazunobu Kano­ kogi. Kanokogi, the founder of the “German-Japanese society,” was a key figure in the intellectual connections between Japan and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.37 In his first letter to Kanokogi, after reading the latter’s book about Gandhi, Hoeflich expressed his enthusiasm, noting that he found in it much of what he himself had stated time and again in his own books.38 He compared the experience of reading the book to the one he had while reading Okakura Tenshin’s The Ideals of the East a few years earlier.39 He also sent Kanokogi his book The Gates of the East, describing it as “the first[!] pan-Asian book written in a European language” by a “Europe-rejecter, Eastward-attracted Jew.”40 Hoeflich’s description of The Gates of the East as the first pan-Asian book ever written in a European language might indicate that he did not know that Okakura’s Ideals of the East was originally written in English or possibly that he did not consider it a pan-Asian book, perhaps given the lack of explicit political content. In any case, it reveals Hoeflich’s self-image as a pioneer of pan-Asianism in Europe, where his appeal was unique indeed. It seems that in 1917, when he first mentioned pan-Asianism, it was actually a pioneering move, even in Japanese terms.41 As mentioned earlier, his inability to read Japanese makes his vision even more surprising, for there was probably no way in which he could have heard of developments such as Kodera Kenkichi’s Treatise on Greater Asianism or other formative pan-Asian texts. In his reply, Kanokogi expressed his appreciation of Hoeflich and stressed what he saw as the similarities between their cultural and ideological anti-European views. His letters provide a fascinating illustration of the feelings of a modern Japanese intellectual who was brought up in a Western-oriented society.42 In the last letter of their correspondence, dated July 1926 (the specific day is illegible), Hoeflich expressed his great surprise when he heard of a pan-Asian congress that was going to take place in Tokyo:

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Now, however, I find in the newspapers a report about a pan-Asian congress in Japan, a report that left me dumbfounded. Not only the fact that I cannot take part in this most eagerly awaited congress, but, rather, that such a congress is taking place at all. Eight years ago, when I dreamt aloud about such a thing, I was laughed at. Today people don’t laugh anymore; for, indeed, they have become accustomed to taking the political prophecies in my books a bit more seriously. . . . Only one thing causes me pain: the fact that not a single Jew, not a single representative of my people, will attend. I beg you, dear professor, announce to the congress’s board that there are a few Jews who are rethinking their past and wholeheartedly join the demand “Asia for the Asians!”43

This letter is essential for an understanding of Hoeflich’s self-image as the first thinker to propagate pan-Asianism “in a European language.” It is rather clear that he was unaware of contemporary pan-Asian developments in Asia.44 On the one hand, the “pan-Asian congress” was, in his eyes, a realization of a political “prophetic dream” of his; on the other hand, though, this realization was totally independent of his vision and activity, and reading between the lines of Hoeflich’s letter reveals the frustration he felt at that fact. Moreover, beyond the personal disappointment caused by his absence from the congress, Hoeflich did not hide his disappointment that no Jews had been invited as representatives of the Jewish “Oriental” nation, and he tried to solve this problem by asking Kanokogi to announce to the congress’s board the existence of the Jewish pan-Asians. It was not only the fact that no Jews were to attend the congress that bothered Hoeflich. Whereas earlier he spoke optimistically about the “tendency toward independence” that had nothing in common with European imperialism or Japanese imperialism for that matter, this time the very fact that he was a zealous supporter of Asian spirituality made him suspicious of the actual political content of concrete pan-Asian activity. In Hoeflich’s eyes, viewing the political implementation of pan-Asianism as its culmination could also lead to its undoing, for he viewed Asian unity as much more than a mere political agenda. As we have seen, for him it represented a spiritual essence, uncorrupted by Western civilization and its capitalist-militarist values (to mention only a few of its maladies). Endowing pan-Asianism with political content and ignoring its spiritual meaning was, in Hoeflich’s eyes, a fatal error: “A large part of my hopes lies with the congress in Tokyo. It would have been all of my hopes if only I were sure that the friends gathering in Tokyo view the pan-Asian demand as not only a political category but, rather, first and foremost, as an ethical one.”45 Toward the end of the 1920s, the ties between these two “Europe rejecters” ended. In Hoeflich’s archive there is no answer to his excited letter to Kanokogi. The Nazi regime in Germany and Kanokogi’s admiration of Hitler had undoubtedly affected his “admiration of the Jewish people,” as noted in his letters to Hoeflich, and it probably also affected his personal connections with Jewish figures.46 Hoeflich, however, did not lose hope altogether. In a letter to Dr. Karl Kiendermann in Berlin, dated 3 January 1937, he wrote, inter alia: “Japan Institute: I beg you to inquire there for the address of Professor Kanakogi [sic]. He—a friend of

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mine whom I have not heard from for many years—was at one time the director of this institute and he can surely tell you a lot.”47 But Hoeflich’s efforts to find Kanokogi and continue the intellectual and personal bond between them were in vain. Retrospectively, asking Kiendermann, a Gestapo official (a fact of which Hoeflich might not have been aware), to locate Kanokogi and reestablish the connection between these two pan-Asians seems ironic.

Conclusion The failure to create a common Jewish-Japanese pan-Asian movement symbolizes a larger failure. The militaristic direction that Japanese pan-Asianism took during the 1930s and Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany practically nullified Hoeflich’s hopes for pan-Asian Zionism based on cooperation between Japan as “the leader of Asia” and the Jews who aspired for an “Arab-Jewish Palestine.” The geopolitical developments during that period proved that modern Japan was, indeed, a fullfledged member of the world’s power game and that eventually, contrary to Hoeflich’s early enthusiastic assessments, the policy of Asian countries, and especially Japan, had much in common with European brutal imperialism. Kanokogi’s turn during the 1930s toward militant right-wing nationalism and his admiration of Hitler may be viewed as a clear expression of this failure. Similarly, Palestine, to which Hoeflich immigrated in 1927, turned out to be the location of a bloody conflict between the two fraternal Asian peoples, leaving little hope for “pan” ideology whatsoever. Hoeflich’s pan-Asian Zionism—as well as early pan-Asianism in general—was characterized by the aspiration for unity—a cultural, political, and aesthetic Asian unity. For Hoeflich, this utopian regional system would include Arab-Jewish Palestine as an organic part of Asia. A transnational attitude was at the root of his thought, and his pan-Asian writing and activity should be viewed in this wider perspective. Despite significant differences, this story of an unfulfilled pan-Asian Zionist ideology hints at instructive parallels between the existential experience of Jewish-European and modern Japanese intellectuals, parallels originating in the modernization process of Japan.48 Furthermore, both pan-Asianism and pan-Europeanism originated within the same atmosphere and in response to similar challenges, whereas their different courses of development were influenced by crucially different circumstances. Vienna of the 1920s was a unique milieu in which both projects functioned simultaneously. Pan-Asian Zionism, combining prominent contemporary cultural elements, was, in fact, a part of a larger phenomenon: the effort to create networks of transnational connections between intellectuals of different nationalities, an attempt to promote a regional ideology rather than a purely national one. Although largely forgotten, it provides us today with a vivid example of the complexities and varieties of early twentieth-century cultural and political developments.

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Notes 1. The most important work on Eugen Hoeflich is Armin A. Wallas’s edition of Hoeflich’s diary: Eugen Hoeflich (Moshe Ya’akov Ben Gavriel, Tagebücher, 1915 bis 1927), published and annotated by Armin A. Wallas (Vienna, 1999), henceforth Tagebücher. This critical edition of Hoeflich’s diaries for the years 1915–1927 is a valuable contribution to research into modern Germanspeaking Jewish cultural history. Wallas (1962–2003), an overwhelmingly prolific scholar of Austrian and German literature, also published two of Hoeflich’s early books in one volume: Eugen Hoeflich, Feuer im Osten; Der Rotte Mond, published with an afterword by Armin A. Wallas, with the collaboration of Andrea Lauritsch (Vienna, 2003). On Wallas’s edition of Hoeflich’s diary, see Asher D. Biemann, Modern Judaism 21 (2001): 175–92. 2. Sven Saaler, “Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History, Overcoming the Nation, Creating a Region, Forging an Empire,” Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History, ed. Sven Saaler and JulianV. Koschmann (New York, 2007), 6; Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for our Times,” Journal for Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (November, 2010): 969–70. 3. See Saaler, “Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History,” 2–3. 4. It goes almost without saying that despite attempting to transcend “narrow” nationalism by transforming it into a greater regionalism, pan-Asianism (similar to other “pan” movements) was never really removed from nationalism and nationalistic discourse. 5. See, for example, Christopher Szpilman, “The Dream of One Asia: Okawa Shumei and Japanese Pan-Asianism,” The Japanese Empire in East Asia and its Postwar Legacy, ed. Harald Fuess (Munich, 1998), 56. 6. For an early example see Rabindranath Tagore’s, Nationalism (London, 1917), 20: “This Nation [i.e., Britain] pacifies its conscience by calling us names, by sedulously giving currency to the arrogant cynicism that the East is east and the West is west and never the Twain shall meet.” 7. “Aus einem Jerusalemer Tagebuch,” Der Jude 2, no. 7 (1917): 448–51; “Brief an einen Mißtrauischen,” Der Jude 2, no. 5 (1917): 419–20. 8. “Es war ein gesundes Zeichen, dass ich seinerzeit zum Sozialismus gekommen bin, und ebenso gesund war es, als ich ihm entwuchs, da ich mir sagte, dass es für Europa wohl seine Berechtigung habe, ich aber, nachdem ich einmal an Europa alles Interesse verloren, mir eine neue Basis suchen müsse. Ähnlich wie Rousseau in seiner Rückkehr zur Natur, fand ich das Beste in einer Rückkehr zum geistigen Asiatismuss, der in der reininkarnation des Buddhismuss, der Tao-Lehre und schließlich im Judentum liegt” (Eugen Hoeflich, “Brief an einen misstraurischen,” Der Jude 2, no. 5 [1917]: 419). 9. “Wenn es hier gelingen wird eine reinkultur zu erzielen, etwas Unvermischtes, dann kann der, der an den Übermenschen im Sinne Nietzsche’s glaubt, hier das Sprungbrett zu ihm suchen.” (If a pure, unmixed culture will be successfully achieved here, then anyone who believes in the “Supermen” in Nietzsche’s meaning would be able to look here for the springboard) (Hoeflich, “Brief an einen misstraurischen,” 420). 10. “In mir ist eine ungeheure Sehnsucht nach Palästina, so gross ist die, dass ich völlig fremd hier in Europa bin” (Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 28). 11. “Ich den Orient vom Standpunkte des Juden erlebe, der sich seiner orientalischen Abstammung, seines asiatischen Blutes voll und ganz bewußt ist” (Hoeflich, Der Weg in Das Land, Palaestinensische Aufzeichnungen [Vienna, 1918], 1–2). 12. Hoeflich, Der Weg in Das Land, 62. The British conquered Jerusalem on 9 December 1917; the official occupation took place two days later. 13. “Eines aber möchte ich bemerken: Übertragung des Kalifats, Sicherung des Suezkannals, Weg nach Indien, Bagdadbahn, Befreiung Palästinas usw. Sind alles nur Schlagworte gegen die kaum vorgeahnte gröste geistige Bewegung, die einst sicher kommen wird, gegen den Panasiatismus von Morgen, den Asien in Japan, in Indien oder aber—in Palästina gebären wird” (Hoeflich, Der Weg in Das Land, 66). 14. Sven Saaler, “The Construction of Regionalism in Modern Japan: Kodera Kenkichi and His ‘Treatise on Greater Asianism’ (1916),” Modern Asian Studies, 41, no, 6 (2007): 1261–94. 15. Hoeflich, entry for 10 April 1919, Tagebücher, 69–70. The accurate name of Ming’s book is Chinas Verteidigung Gegen Europäische Ideen (1911). For further discussion of Ming’s influence (among

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others) on Hoeflich’s Asian thought, see my article “‘Pan-Asian Zionism’: Between Oriental Aesthetics and Transnationalism” (Hebrew), Hidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 15 (2011): 77–96. 16. Saaler, “The Construction of Regionalism,” 1273. 17. See, for example, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Paneuropa (Vienna, 1923), 123–9. On Coudenhove-Kalergi, see Louis Snyder, Macro Nationalisms, a History of the Pan-Movements (London, 1984), 71–74; Internet site: “European navigator, the authoritative multimedia reference on the history of Europe,” http://www.ena.lu/. 18. Hoeflich’s “anti-Semitic” experiences are described in his autobiographical novel Die Flucht nach Tarschisch (The flight to Tarshish) (Hamburg, 1963). 19. Another crucial example is Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), the famous pioneer Asian thinker who had great influence in and outside Japan; he was brought up and educated in a Western atmosphere, and his Asianism was a later, reactive development. See F. G. Notehelfer, “On Idealism and Realism in the Thought of Okakura Tenshin,” in Journal of Japanese Studies 16, no. 2 (1990): 309–55 (for a detailed analysis of his early education see especially 312–27). 20. Starting with volume 6 the subtitle of the periodical changed to “Eine Jüdische Monatsschrift” (A Jewish Periodical). 21. Oskar Karbach was the only member within this circle who contributed an explicitly pan-Asian article to Esra (except for Hoeflich himself ). See his article “Der Asiatische Kurs,” Esra (1919) 2: 47–52. For biographical details see Tagebücher, 358–9 (in Wallas’s notes). 22. For Wiener’s pan-Asian period, see Mikhail Krutikov’s From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, 2011), 58, 62–64. Krutikov’s description of Wiener’s move from cultural Zionism to communism via “the more radical camp of the ‘pan-Asiatic’ Zionism of Eugen Hoeflich” is enlightening and firmly contextualized. Despite their friendship and certain mutual intellectual influences, however, it seems somewhat exaggerated to label Wiener’s writing in Esra as pan-Asian. Moreover, it is hard to speak of a pan-Asian “camp” that actually existed around Hoeflich. 23. The last volume is somewhat an exception, dedicated (almost) exclusively to political criticism and characterized by a radical socialist agenda. See Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle, 62–63. 24. Eine Juedische Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft. The apolitical orientation is stated both in the opening manifesto of the journal, “Vorbemerkung zu dieser Zeitschrift” (“We shall keep as far as possible from politics, polemics, and theoretical debate, for that is the role of other periodicals,” 1: 1), and also in each issue’s masthead (“this apolitical periodical [unpolitische Zeitschrift]”). 25. Eugen Hoeflich (M.j. ben gawriël)[sic!], Die Pforte des Ostens. Arabisch-Juedische Palaestina vom Panasiatischen Standpunkt aus (Vienna, 1923) (The gates of the east: Arab-Jewish Palestine from a panAsian standpoint). The book was, in fact, published in 1924. 26. Ibid., 103. 27. The first time he encountered The Ideals of the East was on 15 January 1922; see Tagebücher, 142. 28. Hans Kohn, Nationalismus, Über die Bedeutung des Nationalismus im Judentum und in der Gegenwart (Vienna and Leipzig, 1922); idem, Sinn und schicksal der Russischen Revolution (Leipzig, 1923). 29. “Ihm ist Zionismus nicht ‘eine Versicherungsanstalt des Einzelnen für seine glückliche Zukunft,’ ihm ist dieser Begriff des Nationaljüdischen, der im Kosmischen irgendwie verankert ist, ein Streben zu jenen Zielen, die Asien immanent sind. Da nähert er sich (einer der Aufsätze trägt ausdrücklich den Titel ‘Panasien’) jener Bewegung, die mann, in Ermanglung einer anderen Bezeichnung, die panasiatische nennt. Wenn auch Kohn noch nicht alle die Konsequenzen daraus zieht, geht er dennoch den Weg zum ersten Forderung des panasiatischen Zionisten: brüderlichen Ausgleich mit dem arabischen Volke” (Hoeflich, “Buch, Kunst und Künstler,” in Das Zelt 1(1924): 40. 30. See, for example, his book Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im Orient (Berlin, 1928), where he discusses pan-Asianism, however, never as his own view. For more on Kohn, see chapter 8 of this book, “‘Nothing but a Disillusioned Love’: Hans Kohn’s Break with the Zionist Movement,” by Adi Gordon.

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31. Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi was the editor of Paneuropa from 1924 to 1938. The letter is located in the Central Zionist Archives (CZA), A/357. 32. “Die Englaender sind mit viel groesserer Grausamkeit gegen die Iren vorgegangen als jemals gegen die Inder, wo allses in allem genommen, ihre Regierung eine viel liberalere als etwa die des tuerkischen Sultans ueber die Tuerken oder die der persischen Hofkamarilla ueber die Perser. Japanische Grausamkeit in Korea ist von keinem europaeischen Kolonialvolk uebertroffen worden” (Hans Kohn to Eugen Hoeflich, 1 August 1925 [CZA, A/357];. quoted [by Wallas] in Tagebücher, 547). 33. The Ben-Gavriel’s guestbook for the years 1922–1965, containing priceless information from countless visits, is kept in Eugen Hoeflich’s archive at the National Library of Israel (NLI), Ms. Var 365/7. 34. Tagebücher, 147. The first time Hoeflich mentioned Mahmud al-Husainy was in his article “Die Oase” in Der Weg in das Land (see note 12 above), 115. Al-Husainy was one of the most important Arab-Palestinian families at the time. See Ilan Pappé, Aristocracy of the Land: The Husayni Family, Political Biography (Jerusalem, 2002). My references to this essay are from the Hebrew edition. Mahmud al-Husainy is also mentioned in Gad Frumkin’s autobiography, Derekh shofet biyerushalayim (A judge’s way in Jerusalem) (Tel Aviv, 1955), 195. It seems that Ottoman atrocities during World War I had a positive effect on Jewish-Arab relations in Jerusalem. For a description of friendly meetings in Jerusalem between several al-Husainys and Zionist figures (among them Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, David Yellin, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi) in December 1915, see Pappé, Aristocracy, 180–82. 35. “Er pflichtet mir aber bei: ein autonomies jüdisch-arabisches Palästina im grossarabischen Bund. Er pflichtet bei— wenn die Zionisten aufhörenchouvinistisch zu sein, wenn sie anfangen im Araber ihren Bruder zu sehen. Er sagt mir nur, was ich schon so lange sagen” (Tagebücher, 148). 36. Mansur Mustapha Rifat, from “Guestbook of the Ben-Gavriel’s House,” NLI, Ms. Var 365/7. I am most grateful to Dr. Hillel Cohen of the Hebrew University for his help with the translation of Arabic phrases. 37. Katō Tatsurō, “Personal Contacts in Japanese-German Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early 1930s,” Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945, ed. C. W. Spangand and R. H. Wippich (New York, 2006), 121, 128–30; Hoeflich, Tagebücher, 524. In my article “‘Pan-Asian Zionism’: Between Oriental Aesthetics and Transnationalism” (see note 15 above), I briefly discuss the connections between Hoeflich and Kanokogi and the surprising proximities between the Jewish European and the Japanese experience at the beginning of the twentieth century. 38. Kazunobu Kanokogi, Gandhi: der Geist der Indischen Revolt (Berlin, 1924). 39. Hoeflich read Okakura’s The Ideals of the East about three years earlier, writing in his diary: “I am at the beginning of a great spiritual experience. Yesterday the Insel press sent me the book for which I have been looking instinctively for years, Okakura Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East. The book starts with the sentence, ‘Asia is one’” (Tagebücher, 142). 40. “Es ist das erste in einer europäischen Sprache geschriebene panasiatische Buch, das zu schreiben ich als ein Europa ablehender, nach dem Orient wieder tendierender Jude, legitimiert sein dürfte.” The correspondence is kept at the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, 357/A. 41. See note 15 above. 42. A detailed analysis of this correspondence is presented in my forthcoming Ph. D. dissertation, entitled “The Revival of the East, Pan-Semitism and Pan-Asianism Within Zionist Thought.” 43. “Nun aber finde ich in den Zeitungen eine Meldung, dass in Japan ein panasiatischer Kongresse stattfindet, eine Nachricht die mich aufs höchste erschüttert. Nicht nur der Umstand, dass ich an diesem sehnlichst erwarteten Kongress nicht teilnehmen kann, sondern, dass ein solcher Kongress überhaupt stattfindet. Als ich vor acht jahren etwas laut davon träumte, werde ich ausgelacht. Heute lacht man nicht mehr, da man sich gewöhnt hat, gewisse politische Profezeiungen in meinen Büchern doch ein wenig ernster zu nehmen. Dennoch aber ist der Gedanke für mich erschütternd, dass Vertreter von so und so vielen asiatischen Völkern zusammenkommen, um zu manifestieren dass der Zielruf ‘Asien der Asiaten!’ ein reales Postulat auszudrücken beginnt. Nur eines tut mir weh: dass kein Jude, kein Vertreter meines Volkes anwesend sein wird. Ich bitte sie, lieber Herr Professor, lassen[?] sie das Büro des Kongress wissen, das es ein paar Juden gibt, die sich auf ihre Vergangenheit besinnen und von ganzen Herzen in die Forderung ‘Asien

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den Asiaten!’ einstimmen. . . . Aber ich hoffe, dass wir, die wenigen, die wissen, dass nur ein freies Asien die Freiheit des jüdischen Volkes garantieren kann, stark und [?] genug sein werden, am schliesslich das panasiatische Postulat zu einem der Zentralen Probleme des Judentums zu machen . . .” (July 1926, CZA, A/197/1). 44. As a matter of fact, the first pan-Asian conference had already taken place six years earlier (1920) in Nagasaki. See Snyder, Macro Nationalisms, 220. 45. “Ein grosser Teil meiner Hoffnungen ist bei dem Kongress in Tokyo. Alle meine Hoffnungen würde ihm gelten, wenn ich sicher wäre, dass die Kameraden, die in Tokyo zusammenkommen, in der panasiatischen Forderung nicht nur eine politische Kategorie sondern in erster Linie auch eine ethische sehen” (July 1926, CZA, A 197/1). Another example of Hoeflich’s ambivalent attitude toward institutionalization of pan-Asianism appears in his letter to Mr. Dienstfertig: “Sie fragen ob es eine panasiatische Organisation gibt. Nein. Organisation, Partei, im europäischen Sinn widerspricht der Idee, die nicht, auch nicht die äusseren Formen, von Westen übernehmen will oder kann, ohne erst äusserliche, später ganz innerliche Einbüsse zu erleiden. . . .” (You ask whether there is a pan-Asian organization. No. An organization [or] party, in the European sense contradicts the idea, which cannot be influenced by the West without being damaged from without and then also from within) (23 March 1925, CZA A 197/5). 46. See, for example, the letter he sent to Hoeflich concerning the founding of the Hebrew University, published in the Jüdische Rundschau, 24 April 1925. 47. “Japaninstitut: ich empfehle ihnen, sich dort nach der Adresse des Professors Kanakogi zu erkundigen. Er—ein Freund von mir, von dem ich aber viele Jahre nichts gehoert habe—war seinerzeit Leiter dieser Instituts und kann ihnen sicherlich viel sagen” (CZA, A197\1). Karl Kiendermann, a former communist and a prisoner in the Soviet Union, a Jewish Gestapo official who moved to Japan in 1938 and was also judged by the allies in 1945, deserves a separate discussion; for general details on him, see Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism (New Brunswick, 1982), 325–6 (n. 12). The correspondence between Kiendermann and Hoeflich was based on Kiendermann’s intention to write a book about the Orient. (See Hoeflich’s letter to Kiendermann in CZA, A 197/1). 48. See Harif, “‘Pan-Asian Zionism,’” 91–92.

Chapter 11

“Brothers and Strangers” The American Example

Pierre Birnbaum

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As in the past, the Jewish world is currently riven by a multitude of divisions. Despite a shared destiny and history, Jews confront one another, and their differing values and interests have aroused many conflicts among them. In the modern period alone, the force of these internal disagreements was manifest in the ruthless competition between the Jews of Bordeaux and those of Alsace during the French Revolution and the often brutal way that the French “Israélites” opposed the “Polacks,” occasionally going so far as to request that the prefect expel them from Lorraine. In their unceasing migrations the Jews also frequently encountered another kind of direct opposition: what Robert Merton termed the “local” Jews versus the “cosmopolitan” ones, that is, the Jews who held the nationality of a given country and were deeply assimilated to its values, as opposed to Jews from the outside, who came with different values and ideologies. These conflicts between “native” Jews and newer immigrants recurred incessantly from one period to another, from one country to another. One need only recall the Memoirs of Elias Canetti1 to realize how deeply the aristocratic Sephardim of Bulgaria despised the German Ashkenazim, with whom any marriage was regarded as an unacceptable misalliance. This gaze at the Other—at the Jew regarded as inferior in terms of culture and manners—wounds the very soul of the rejected one to the depths of his being. As much as they were “brothers,” the Jews were “strangers” to one another just as often. Weimar Germany, to which so many Ostjuden migrated, is undoubtedly one of the most recent and tragic examples of this difficult encounter between brothers and strangers. Steven Aschheim has described in detail the collision between widely differing cultures, destinies unlike each other in every respect. In Brothers

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and Strangers he notes that “many West European Jews expressed their disdain for Eastern Jews, but it was in Germany that such notions were given their most radical formulation. . . . The Eastern Jew [was the] embodiment of all of those negative traditional traits German Jews had purportedly overcome.”2 Whereas the German Jews presented themselves outwardly as “useful citizens” of long standing, they “looked with distaste upon the habits of their ‘Asian’ cousins,”3 those shnorers, so foreign to their Bildung but with whom they nevertheless shared similar beliefs. Because almost all the routes taken by the Ostjuden to the United States passed through Germany, the German Jews, the majority of whom wished to integrate into German society, found themselves confronting, with deep shame, hundreds of thousands of these “brothers,” who acted as if they came directly out of an epoch that in their view had long since faded away. Thus “everybody—European and American Jewry—wanted to help the East European Jews and alleviate their plight. [However] nobody wanted them in his own country.”4 More than 700,000 Jews from the East passed through Germany, often quite painfully,5 before embarking in Hamburg or Bremen for the great voyage to the United States, where the American Jews, at that time mostly of German origin themselves, found themselves, in turn, facing these strange brothers whom they too would have preferred to send somewhere else, perhaps to Palestine. In this sense, could one say that the German Jews, in Germany as well as in the United States, regarded these Ostjuden as strangers at home but brothers in Palestine? Upon rereading Aschheim’s study, by now a classic, one feels how upset the author is by this rejection, how moved he is by the cultural shock, and how outraged he is by the logic of assimilation that fractures the idea of a Jewish people to make the Zionist solution the last resort for dealing with the Fremden of every country. This is likely why he places so much emphasis on Heinrich Heine’s favorable reaction to the Ostjuden and on the subsequent positive opinions of Nathan Birnbaum, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem, as well as Arnold Zweig, who, for varying reasons, regarded Zionism as the legitimate solution to the scandalous rejection of the Ostjuden by the assimilated German Jews. Aschheim devotes considerable space to these views, although they were held by a minority of German Jews. He shows little sympathy for the yekke, and he also knows that “the Ostjuden were clearly a metaphor for all Jews well before the undiscriminating devastation of the Holocaust,”6 which mixed together brothers and strangers without distinction, condemning them to the same fate—the brutal anti-Semitic rejection that they both had experienced at the end of the nineteenth century and even more at the turn of the twentieth century. The personal dimension of his research, which is certainly a response to inner questioning, is illuminated by a short autobiographical text that describes his own sudden realization that he belonged to the world of the Ostjuden when he discovered his father’s true identity—a German Jew who had always hidden the fact that he was, indeed, a Galitsianer!: “I always took my father’s ‘Germaness’ for granted. His great warmth and humor seemed, indeed, to point to the fundamental inaccuracy of the ‘stiff yekke’ stereotype. It was only years after his death that I discovered he was born an Ostjude, a Galitsianer who had come

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to Kassel as a small boy and, like so many others, elegantly combined those two inheritances! The fact that he had chosen never to reveal those origins was made even more poignant by the fact that I learned all this as I was completing my dissertation on the problematic interdependencies between Eastern and Western Jews.”7 Upon reading Aschheim’s short, little-known text, I felt even more touched by his scholarly and personal research, particularly because I myself learned very recently that my mother, a yekke through and through—a woman in love with Goethe and Schiller, proud of the magnificence of Dresden and thus all the more wounded by Germany for being responsible for the Holocaust and by her own rejection—told me, without much reflection, that even though she was born in Dresden, she had in fact remained a Romanian national, because her father, who was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had become a Romanian citizen. Even better, my mother, that German woman who bore a Romanian passport and stemmed from Minsk on her mother’s side, was severely reprimanded by her rabbi when she wanted to marry my Polish father! In the view of Herr Rabbiner Doktor Wolff, a yekke could not marry a Polack without endangering her values and even her very existence. Ostracism of this kind pervades Jewish history and undermines the ideal of solidarity. One finds it clearly expressed by many French “Israélites,” who, in the past, did not hide their disdain for the “Polacks,” and, even more today, display it toward the Sephardim who arrived from North Africa. At this point, however, I would like to return to the example of America, where, at the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Ostjuden converged. In a few dozen years, two million immigrants from the distant lands of Eastern Europe crossed the Atlantic to make their way to the “Promised Land” of the United States. There they encountered the very same German Jews, in this case those who had immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the question arises whether the same misunderstandings and prejudices—the rejection described by Aschheim as having occurred on German soil—were repeated in the New World. Moses Rischin, in his moving book The Promised City about Jewish New York at the end of the nineteenth century, names one of his chapters “Germans versus Russians.”8 In the United States substantial scholarship in the past few years has focused on this question, with an emphasis on the conflict involved in the issue. Eli Lederhendler resolutely rejects these conclusions—even as they contradict one another—claiming that the authors with whom he disagrees all share a similar, rather reductionist ethnic vision of the identity of “Russian” and “German” Jews. In his view, the “Russian” immigrants regarded “Jewish issues as subsidiary to class issues.” Moreover, the labor leaders of the Jewish world argued for “prioritizing . . . class over ethnicity.” Hence, these immigrants were conspicuously preoccupied with obtaining work, employment, and their living conditions and consequently [had only] a secondary interest, if at all, in identity politics.9 Lederhendler, therefore, considers it necessary to switch from a discussion of brothers and strangers that is based solely on identity issues to one focused on class relations. One must show that the “Russian” Jews and others, to accept the distinctions of Tönnies,

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passed from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, marked by the division of labor, industrialization, class relations, and reflective thought, far from organic thinking.10 From this point of view it is imperative to set aside the “harangues” that accuse German Jews of severe hostility toward the Ostjuden, as well as the “countervailing literature,”11 which seeks to redeem the German Jews, contending that in fact they demonstrated solidarity with their brothers from the East. In order to evaluate the nature of the encounter in the American framework, it is nevertheless worth returning to the complex and uncertain conclusions of the scholarly literature, especially because some writers explicitly refer to Steven Aschheim’s perspective, which is deeply estranged from any purely socioeconomic interpretation and based, rather, on values and ideologies. Indeed, for Selma Berrol, “Aschheim demonstrates that the gulf between American Jews of German background and their East European counterparts was wider than . . . anyone had recognized because the established community feared a replication of what had been a very serious problem for them in Germany.”12 Taking inspiration from Aschheim’s work, which, based on the German example, definitively describes both the misunderstandings and a certain degree of solidarity, even admiration, between these two groups, I would like to examine the differences in the interpretations of the respective roles of the Yahudim (a term used to designate German Jews) and the Ostjuden in the United States. The same situation applied in the United States, and the authors most determined to describe the intensity of the “Germans’” prejudice against the “Russians” ultimately acknowledge the inexactness of their analyses. In 1950, Zosa Szajkowski published a long article devoted entirely to depicting the “Germans’” rejection of the “Russians,” whom they regarded as uncivilized. In June 1882, Simon Wolff addressed the Jewish organizations of New York, telling them that during a trip to Paris he had told an audience “that the Jews in Russia were as capable of rising to the full stature of manhood as are the negroes of the South.”13 Given prejudice of this kind, it is easy to understand why, in response to the flood of Ostjuden, German Jews took part in efforts deliberately to disperse the Ostjuden throughout American territory. Thus in June 1882, Louis Schram wrote: “If you send many more Russians to Milwaukee . . . they will be shipped back to you without permitting them to leave the depot.” At the same time, M. Buchman of Cleveland declared: “We now say emphatically and positively that no more emigrants will be received by us, if any [are] sent, they will have to be sent back to New York.”14 Nevertheless, in September 1973, Zosa Szajkowski published another article on this subject entitled, “The Yahudi and the Immigrant: A Reappraisal,” in which he writes in the first lines, with a seldom-encountered courage: “This writer confesses that he also helped perpetuate this negative view of the yahudi. Recent research has shown that this is not true.”15 This time he concludes: “The German Jews did everything possible for their East European brethren who came to these shores, defending them in individual cases and fighting restrictive legislation.”16 He emphasized the constant efforts, not always fruitful, of the American Jewish

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leaders of German origin such as Louis Kohler and Jacob Schiff, but also of the prominent attorney Louis Marshall, or even Oscar Strauss, the first Jew in American history to be appointed to the cabinet, serving as secretary of the Commerce and Labor Department under Theodore Roosevelt. Within the limits of the law, these figures exerted all their power to fight against the restrictive measures taken by the authorities against Eastern European Jewish immigration and to oppose immigration quotas, and they did everything to avoid the application of literacy tests to the Ostjuden. In this sense, while making a distinction between the periods when the “Germans” had quite different attitudes toward the Ostjuden, now Zosa Szajkowski, without saying so explicitly, agrees with the conclusions of Esther Panitz. In 1965, between the publication of Szajkowski’s two noticeably different articles, she wrote: “The current monograph deals with the period from 1891 to 1924, when a complete reversal of attitudes prevailed. During this time, when the country moved in the direction of tighter controls over alien entry, representative American Jews battled for a more liberal approach to immigration.”17 In her view, Marshall, Kohler and other German Jews “reminded policy makers of the basic principles upon which this republic was founded.”18 Hence, it is truly on the basis of reflection upon the values of the republic, on the rights and duties of its Jewish citizens of German origin, that we may understand their change in attitude toward the Ostjuden. We need not revert to ethnicity to get around the purely economic and social arguments in terms of class, nor is it necessary to speak in terms of “caste” to avoid using the terminology of social class. The argument in terms of “republican” values did not prevent these American Jews of German origin from taking determined action against the official policy of their country, and, as Naomi Cohen correctly emphasizes, “Although logically the Americanized German Jews as hyperpatriots and as self-conscious Jews should have joined the restrictionist chorus, they chose after 1891 to fight for the preservation of free immigration. . . . The responsibility of kinship won out over embarrassment and fear. . . . In all its aspects the focus on philanthropy automatically reinforced the bonds of ethnicity.”19 Therefore, while it is wise to apply the “ethnic paradigm” prudently and it is necessary to avoid “ethnic essentialism,”20 it now seems impossible to avoid considering the role of the “ethnic catalyst,” to use the term coined by Naomi Cohen. In her fine book Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914, she illuminates the constant presence of friction among the Jews of the United States, who defended their symbolic status but nonetheless demonstrated solidarity with the newcomers, as she shows by comparing the Spanish, German, and finally the Russian immigrations: The Sephardic congregation became more castelike after 1825. Confidence in assimilation gave way to feelings of exclusiveness and zealous resentment. . . . The old Jewish elite reinvigorated social barriers against the tedescos. Their reactions stemmed less from a distaste for the socio-economic status or cultural behavior of the newcomers than from a dread of being inundated by the vast numbers. . . . When the heavy immigration from Russia began in the 1880s, the newly established

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German Jews had the advantage of economic affluence, ethnic origin, and prior arrival. Nevertheless, since their status and hegemony were threatened by the vast numbers, a violent antipathy emerged toward the newcomers. And so the pattern repeated itself.21

To better understand these mixed emotions—from initial “antipathy” to ultimate “altruism”22—we would do well to seek new inspiration from Steven Aschheim’s work and to reflect on values and prejudices on the one hand and on feelings of solidarity, which depended upon an interpretation of American democracy, on the other hand. This would facilitate an understanding of the relations between brothers and strangers in the United States, which do not imply a lost awareness of shared destinies and values. After all, in the United States both German and Russian Jews “became strangers and at home simultaneously . . . they remained strangers at home.”23 As Selma Berrol wrote: “East European Jews had been migrating to Germany all through the nineteenth century and thus the Americanized German Jewish community had long and unfavorable memories of the OstJuden. . . . The roots of the issue of German versus Russians in the United States, therefore, lie in Germany, and the American experience can be understood only if nineteenth-century German Jewish history is taken into consideration. This has been done only superficially and thus Aschheim’s work is extremely important. . . . Aschheim’s work makes the attitudes and actions of the Yahudim much more understandable and thus his book constitutes a major contribution to American Jewish history.”24 I would like to dwell upon a specific example demonstrating the reality of these “relationships marked ultimately by cooperation, if not gemütlichkeit,” by examining the course of the strikes that broke out in New York in the second decade of the twentieth century, which was the second period studied by both Esther Panitz and Zosa Szajkowski. A large number of Ostjuden settled in New York, particularly on the Lower East Side, where they lived in extreme poverty, in small, overcrowded tenements. Generally lacking previous professional training, thousands of them were employed in the garment industry, which flourished in infamous sweatshops. Not only was employment precarious and poorly paid, but the factories were also dangerous and unhealthy; the foremen were brutal and the hours were interminable. Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, this exploited Jewish population, often already politicized by struggles waged previously in Russian or Polish settings, decided to protest and strike against the Jewish bosses, who had arrived with the same wave of Eastern European immigration. In New York, between the “Uprising of the 20,000” (the strike of the women’s shirtwaist makers in 1909) and the Great Revolt of 60,000 (the cloak makers’ strike of 1910), a union organization led mainly by East European Jewish workers, both men and women, was established.25 The first significant strike broke out in 1909. The striking workers were mainly women, 55 percent of whom were Jewish and all of whom were from the “Russian” wave of immigration that had undergone politicization in the framework of

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the Revolution of 1905. The strike was concluded after the “Yiddish Philippic”26 of Clara Lemlich, a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman from Ukraine, who became the heroine of the movement. With the agreement of Benjamin Feigenbaum, a socialist author who wrote in Yiddish, she rose to the podium and, in Yiddish, called for an immediate strike. Once they had voted for it, the striking workers took a traditional oath in Yiddish, as suggested by Feigenbaum: “Will you take the old Jewish oath? ‘If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.’”27 Most of the strikers were “Russian” Jewish women, “Unzere vunderbare farbrente meydelekh” [our wonderful, fervent girls],28 who committed themselves en masse to this strike, which was bitterly resisted by the bosses. Alongside Clara Lemlich were other figures from “Russian” Jewry such as Rose Schneiderman, who was born in Poland, and Fanny Cohn, a veteran Bund member.29 These “Russian” women were not alone; a significant contingent of Italian women also joined this social movement. Yet can we conclude that this was an action based solely on common class interests,30 largely underplaying the “Russian” origin of the vast majority of the women and the constant use of Yiddish that gave a cultural tone to this collective action? As noted by J. Hardman, “The originally Jewish complexion of the unions in New York” was particularly striking, because a large number of the workers had belonged to the Bund in the Pale of Settlement, from which thousands of them came. Their democratic appeal to action was, he argues, a reflection of their communal organization, formerly centered around the synagogue as a locus of collective action.31 The rallying cry of the striking workers was in Yiddish: “Mentshlekhe bahandlung!” (humane treatment) The sight of the strikers aroused the emotions of Abraham Rosenberg, the president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), who said: “To my mind, I could only picture to myself such a scene taking place when the Jews were led out of Egypt.”32 This was not, as Howe notes, a descent into exaggerated “sentimentalism” by imagining a true community created on the basis of Jewish values.33 One cannot deny, however, the Jewish dimension of these collective actions. Certainly one could digress slightly from this presentation by emphasizing the presence and role of non-Jewish activists and leaders, but it is difficult to ignore the partially ethnic character of this struggle, in which both sides were mainly Jewish. The strike waged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was a powerful action that led to a provisional agreement in February 1910. It was followed by the Great Revolt of the 60,000. In March 1911 a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, whose owners were German Jews who had rejected the collective settlement.34 In that fire, 146 women workers, mainly “Russian” Jews, burned to death, because the building had been locked, preventing escape. Emotions ran high, as can be seen in The Forward: Now let us light the holy candles, And mark the sorrow Of Jewish masses in darkness and poverty.

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This is our funeral, These our graves, Our children And Rose Schneiderman cried out: “The Old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instrument of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today. . . . The rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire.”35

The effect of these agitated, dramatic events on public opinion facilitated certain major social advances in addition to progress in the labor movement. The bosses, as well as the “Russian” female workers acting through their unions, agreed to turn to Louis Brandeis as an arbitrator. Brandeis, a famous jurist, was appointed to the Supreme Court a few years later. Without a doubt, he leaned toward the “German” side: “Brandeis’s earliest reform activities reflected the mid-nineteenth century German-Jewish liberal tradition from which he emerged.”36 He arrived in New York on 24 July 1910 and announced: “I am trying to bring the parties into conference. It remains to be seen whether my journey will be futile as that of the French King and his 40,000 men.”37 Brandeis was prepared to consider all sorts of compromises, although he was opposed to the closed shop, which he termed “un-American and unfair to both sides.” During discussions with his partners in the arbitration effort, he again stipulated “the complete elimination of the demand for a closed shop.” In private correspondence he emphasized that the closed shop was “antagonistic to the American spirit,” and that “the American people should not and will not accept the closed shop. They will not consent to the exchange of the tyranny of the employer for the tyranny of the employee.”38 Confronting a delegation of workers, Brandeis clung to his position, in keeping with a certain pluralistic and liberal American tradition to which he was fiercely attached.39 “The closed shop could not be discussed at all.” In his view, social relations must rest upon the “good faith” of all involved. Hence the two parties must “educate” those whom they represent.40 Brandeis, the famous Jewish attorney from Boston, where he had personally encountered the anti-Semitism of the Brahmins, was aware that his role as peacemaker in a conflict between Jewish adversaries was acceptable because he himself was an acculturated and prestigious “German” Jewish leader. His German-speaking family came from Prague, and he had studied in Dresden for several years. As a function of this symbolic position, he had the task of separating the adversaries, who for their part often expressed themselves in Yiddish. “[He] could not help but notice that the bonds of religion and culture seemed to reach across economic bridges. Virtually all representatives for both labor and management were Jewish, or ‘Hebrews’ as they were often called. And in the course of debate they often fell back upon their heritage to make a point. At times the Boston attorney heard the men yell at each other in Yiddish, ‘Ihr darft zikh shemen! Past dos far a yid?’ (Shame on

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you: Is this worthy of a Jew?) In other instances the delegates would support their arguments with quotes from the Hebrew Bible.”41 On one occasion Brandeis heard an angry worker fling the following words, straight out of Isaiah 3:3, at the boss’s face: “It is you who have devoured the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your business. What do you mean by crushing My people, By grinding the face of the poor? Says the Lord God of hosts.”42

Brandeis emphasized several times that the protagonists were all Jews. As early as 1905, when he gave the opening address at the ceremony in honor of the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in New Amsterdam, he wrote in a letter to his father: “I am inclined to think that there is more hope in the Russians Jews than from the Bavarians and other Germans. The Russians have idealism and reverence.”43 In this sense, while acting as a mediator during the strikes, “Brandeis served as a bridge between two cultures, that of the assimilated American [Jewish] society and that of New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side, even if he had practically no roots among the latter.”44 His action plunged him into the heart of the Jewish world and was to play a considerable role in his commitments: “It was a delight to witness the understanding Jewish bosses and Jewish workers displayed of each other’s problems.  .  .  . The garment strike of 1910 influenced Brandeis’ life profoundly. He discovered during those hot days in August that he was a Jew. He recognized his own passion for justice as an identical spirit in the two camps.”45 Brandeis took on the defense of the Ostjuden, men and women workers, in accordance with the interest he had shown during the past few years in the mistreated workers, in the name of the democratic ideals that he sought to defend in the spirit of Jefferson or Madison. He added: “Discipline is not common in democracies and it is particularly difficult to introduce it where the ranks of the privates are largely composed of thinkers. . . . I am confident that the Jewish workers, with their many good qualities, intellectual and moral, will in time learn discipline also.”46 Later, in February 1912, in a personal letter, he denounced the social policies of the “large trusts,” as well as the “abuses” of the unions. Fighting against “the curse of bigness,” he was firmly opposed to the financial oligarchies, and in the eyes of the business world he passed for a dangerous progressive. In addition to advocating for improvements in working conditions, shortening the working day, and so forth, Brandeis also demanded the establishment of a kind of union shop that he wished to call a “preferential shop.” That meant the de facto preservation of voluntary union membership. Louis Marshall called that union shop a “protocol” to make it palatable to the unions, but that solution failed and was abandoned several years later. Again we note that the great leaders of German Jewry in the United States—Louis Brandeis, Louis Marshall, as well as Jacob Schiff—who were

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enlisted as reinforcements, all sought to put an end to the socioeconomic conflicts that set the “German” bosses against the “Russian” workers. Such was the enthusiasm that “on the East Side the word ‘preferential’ slipped into the Yiddish vocabulary; bearded old men used it in excited discussions after synagogue services and in coffee shops.”47 However, the ultimate failure, the breaking of the “protocol,” once again gave expression to a dimension that reverted to the old attitudes: in the summer of 1913, Isaac Hourwich, a militant leader of the workers, sent an angry letter to Brandeis in which he demanded new negotiations with the bosses and denounced Brandeis’s “paternalistic” and “dictatorial” character. This accusation ineluctably evoked the atmosphere that had prevailed twenty or thirty years earlier, at the time of the great migration from the Pale of Settlement. The behavior of Jews from German-speaking countries was, as always, regarded as arrogant. The solidarity implicit in Brandeis’s action was once again perceived as a purely “paternalistic” move made by assimilated Jews in relation to their Yiddish-speaking “brothers.”48 But it gave “Isaiah” a strong sense of his Jewishness not so long before he became the leader of the American Zionists. It thus allowed him, once he was at the Supreme Court, to claim a kind of legitimacy for a vision that was still rejected by most “German” Jews.

Notes 1. Elias Canetti, Histoire d’une vie (Paris, 1980). 2. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 4–5. 3. Ibid., 20. See also Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York, 1987), 143–161. 4. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 34. 5. Zosa Szajkowski, “The Suffering Transit of Jews to America through Germany,” Jewish Social Studies (Winter–Spring 1977): 105–16. 6. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 245. 7. Steven Aschheim, “The German-Jewish Legacy Beyond America: A South African Example,” in The German-Jewish Legacy in America: 1938–1988, ed. Abraham Peck (Detroit, 1989), 176. 8. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 1962), 95–111. 9. Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920. From Caste to Class (Cambridge, UK, 2009), 72, 73, 92. 10. Ibid., 102, 106. 11. Ibid., 103. For him, “both ‘Germans’ and ‘Russians’ saw the logic and benefit of transcending the separate and limiting character of ethnic folkways in order for the immigrants to achieve rapid social and economic integration” (106). 12. Selma Berrol, “Germans Versus Russians: An Update,” American Jewish History 73 (December 1983): 149. 13. Zosa Szajkowski, “The Attitudes of American Jews to East European Jewish Immigration (1881–1893),” American Jewish Historical Society 40 (September 1951): 231.

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14. Szajkowski, “The Attitudes of American Jews to East European Jewish Immigration,” 238. For other negative references, see also Irving Aaron Mandel, “Attitudes of the American Jewish Community Toward East-European Immigration,” American Jewish Archives (June 1950): 33. On relations that became smoother between “Germans” and “Russians,” in small cities in the South, see Lee Shai Weissbach, “East European Immigrants and the Image of Jews in the Small Towns,” American Jewish History, no. 3 (September 1997). 15. Zosa Szajkowski, “The Yahudi and the Immigrant: A Reappraisal,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly (September 1973): 13. 16. Zosa Szajkowski, “The Yahudi and the Immigrant,” 17. 17. Esther Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant (1891–1924),”American Jewish Historical Quarterly, no. 1 (1965): 57. It is true that in her first article, dating from 1963, she concluded her analysis as follows: “From 1891 until the passage of the Johnson Bill of 1921, prominent American Jews tried to stave off every piece of restrictive immigration legislation. Regardless of old resentments borne toward the newer immigrants . . . American Jewish leaders were prepared to fight for their kin from Eastern Europe” (“The Polarity of American Jewish Attitudes Toward Immigration [1870–1891],” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, no. 2, [1963]: 129). 18. Esther Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant,” 95. 19. Naomi Cohen, “The Ethnic Catalyst: The Impact of the East European Immigration on the American Jewish Establishment,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York, 1983), 134, 137. 20. Eli Lederhendler, “The New Filiopietism, or Toward a New History of Jewish Immigration to America,” American Jewish History, no. 1 (2007): 11. 21. Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States 1830–1914 (Philadelphia, 1984), 57–58. 22. Ibid., 328. 23. Ira Katznelson, “Jews on the Margins of American Liberalism,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, eds. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton, 1995), 159, 205. 24. Selma Berrol, “Germans Versus Russians,” 150, 152. 25. J. B. Hardman, “The Needle-Trades Unions: A Labor Movement at Fifty,” Social Research 27, no.1/4 (1960): 321. The classic study remains that of Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies Garment Workers (New York, 1924). Several articles on these struggles can be found in Dirk Hoerder, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working-class Immigrants (Dekalb, IL, 1986). 26. J. B. Hardman, “The Needle-Trades Union,” 327. 27. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1980), 304. 28. Ibid., 305. 29. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” Labor History 17 (Winter 1976). 30. Using the example of this strike, Eli Lederhendler states that it constituted a “shift from ethnic economy to Gesellschaft-oriented ‘class’” (Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 57). Nancy Green provides a detailed account of these conflicts from a point of view similar to that of Lederhendler’s, writing that this strike “dépassait les frontières ethniques et devenait un symbole des revendications ouvrières en général et de l’activisme des femmes, en particulier” (crossed over ethnic frontiers and became a symbol of workers’ demands in general and of women’s activism in particular) (Du Sentier à la 7è Avenue. La confection et les immigrés Paris-New York, 1880–1980 [Paris, 1998], 77). 31. Hardman, “The Needle-Trades Unions,” 332, 338. 32. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 307. 33. Ibid., 309. 34. Richard Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia, 2005). 35. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 312. 36. Morton Keller, “Brandeis-Reformer,” American Jewish History, no. 3–4 (1996): 397.

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37. Quoted by Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (New York, 1956), 292. 38. Ibid., 292–93, 301–3. 39. Nelson Dawson, ed., Brandeis and America (Lexington, KY, 1989). 40. Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life, 297. 41. Lewis Paper, Brandeis: An Intimate Biography of One of America’s Truly Great Supreme Court Justices (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983), 139. This Yiddish expression is quoted similarly in Milton Konvitz, Nine American Jewish Thinkers (New Brunswick, 2000), 67. 42. Quoted by Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 179–80. 43. Melvin Urofsky, Louis Brandeis: A Life (New York, 2009), 401. 44. Ibid., 418; see also 245. 45. Alfred Lief, Brandeis: The Personal History of an American Ideal (New York, 1936), 187, 191. 46. Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life, 312. 47. Lief, Brandeis, 187. 48. Paper, Brandeis: An Intimate Biography, 142.

Chapter 12

“Man kann verjuden ” Paradoxes of Exemplarity

Vivian Liska

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“One can become a Jew, just as one can become a human being; one can Judaize. . . . I consider this commendable.” 1 This sentence in Paul Celan’s preliminary notes for his “Meridian” speech, delivered in 1961 on the occasion of receiving the Büchner Prize, the highest literary distinction in Germany, paradoxically names a universal human capacity in terms of a particular culture, tradition, or ethnic group. This paradox is not resolved, but, on the contrary, is intensified in the subsequent elaborations on this odd verb, “verjuden”: “Verjuden: es ist Anderswerden”—”Judaizing: that is, becoming other.” Beyond the mere provocation of invoking in a positive sense a word referring to an age-old anti-Semitic myth signifying the contamination of something—most often a place or an institution, but also an entire society—by Jews, Celan’s sentence is problematic, because it posits a universal potential—the “becoming other” of “man,” of anyone—in the name of a particular—the Jew. This discursive procedure seems questionable in both logical and ideological terms and calls for careful and skeptical scrutiny. Attributing characteristics and values associated with Jewishness to Jews and non-Jews alike partakes of a long and loaded tradition. In “‘The Jew Within’: The Myth of Judaization in Germany,”2 Steven Aschheim reconstructs the history of “the strange doctrine of ‘Judaization’” from the inception of Christian theology until the Third Reich, finding its most prominent representatives in the late nineteenth and twentieth century in figures like Richard Wagner and the Nazi ideologues. Verjudung, in Aschheim’s words, connoted a condition in which Jews were not only considered poisonous for German society but also in which the “Jewish spirit” ostensibly had “seeped through the spiritual pores of the nation to penetrate and undermine the German psyche itself.”3 As Aschheim

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points out, this myth and its consequences, which, in the extreme, led to the desire to purge an entire society of any manifestation of Jewishness, was made possible by the “detachability” of the “Jewish spirit” from actual Jews, who were considered both the carriers and the symbol of a variety of traits considered despicable and dangerous to the German body politic. Above and beyond the stereotypical associations with uprootedness, materialism, and parasitism, the Jew became both the agent and the metaphor for the feared degeneration of the German nation’s unity and cohesion. Precisely this possibility of detaching Jewish attributes from actual Jews allowed for a reversal of the myth of Judaization in late twentieth-century thought. In their works, several—mainly French—postmodern thinkers such as JeanFrançois Lyotard and Maurice Blanchot viewed the identification of non-Jews with presumably Jewish characteristics in a positive light and associated it with a subversive power apt to undermine an oppressive existing order. Jewish critics such as Alain Finkelkraut, Jonathan Boyarin, and Daniel Boyarin have strongly criticized this reversal, objecting to this backhand universalizing of the Jew and insisting on retaining the distinction between “real” and “figural” Jews and thereby their historical and cultural particularity. Celan’s notes, while seemingly affirming a universalizing “troping” of the Jew, articulates a third possibility that is equally distant from universalism and particularism, a figure of thought that ultimately aims to undermine the boundary between these options.4 The complexity arising from Celan’s lines pertains to what Jacques Derrida, in his “Philosophical Nationality” seminars conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, calls the “paradox of exemplarity.” In those seminars, recently discussed in exemplary ways by Dana Hollander,5 Derrida explores “discourses of national affirmation” that yield statements of the sort: “To be most particularly French is to be most devoted to the universal value of equality.”6 Or, in Derrida’s example of Fichte, the claim that Germanness is the exemplary expression of “freedom of the spirit.”7 How, and, above all, to what effect, Derrida asks, can authors of such statements invoke a particular entity in their articulation of universalist values such as equality or freedom? Derrida indicates that beyond their nationalist chauvinism, such statements are paradoxical at their core: in both cases an irresolvable tension between a specific nation and a claim to universal attributes puts the particularity of this nation into question. Derrida points out that a similar structure underlies the role assigned to Europe in the discourses of Husserl and Heidegger: they regard it as “world civilization” and “culture” as such, as the “telos of all historicity: universality.”8 This idea of Europe implies that in order for Europe to be most itself—a world civilization—it must open itself to its other, to humanity in general: “Europe as a cultural project striving to universalize its particular heritage would then consist in equating the European project with the very project of denying its specific identity.”9 In Derrida’s words: “It is necessary to make ourselves the guardians of an idea of Europe . . . that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity and in advancing itself in an exemplary way towards what it is not.”10

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Derrida recognizes a similar paradox in the Jewish claim of election. Implicitly referring to Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida defines the Jewish claim of being “elected” as “having been chosen as a guardian of truth, a law, an essence, in truth here, of a universal responsibility,”11 and he then explores the boundaries of this claim. Derrida is understandably critical of such statements and speaks of the “temptations of exemplarism.” However, in a kind of “counter-reading” that turns these statements on their head, Derrida goes beyond objections to such claims and reveals a redemptive dimension in the paradox inherent in them. For Derrida, such statements become instances in which “national affirmations” are neither simply particularistic, as they take place in the name of universal philosophical values, nor simply universalist because they make their claims in the name of cultural particulars. Instead, they draw both the particular and the universal into a logical impasse that opens up closed identities and destabilizes petrified dichotomies within and between established discourses. They thereby undermine the oppositions between positions bent on strengthening particularist identities and those that encourage the dissolution of differences in the universal. Despite their seemingly paradoxical and contradictory nature, statements of “national exemplarity” would thus present a welcome tertium datur that would resolve both the egocentric chauvinism of particularism and the disregard for cultural differences characteristic of universalist discourses. Derrida regards what he calls “the German-Jewish phenomenon” as an especially powerful expression of this dynamic. In “Kant, the German, the Jew,”12 a reading of Hermann Cohen’s Deutschtum und Judentum, Derrida formulates the “paradox of exemplarity” explicitly in the German-Jewish context: “What happens when a people presents itself as exemplary? . . . In what sense and how, since the Aufklärung . . . has . . . the German-Jewish pair been doubly exemplary of this [paradox of ] exemplarity?”13 In response to this question, Derrida forges a link between the privileged status of the German and the Jewish: the “German” as an exemplary site of the elaboration of a nationalism with a universal mission and the “Jewish” in the experience of the election of a people with a universal responsibility.14 In intertwining these two self-images and their respective “paradoxes of exemplarity” into each other, the German-Jewish pair becomes the very site of self-difference, a mode of being, thinking, and writing that invokes Jews but is not necessarily embodied by them. Associating Jewishness with universally available values and ideals has for a long time been considered a prerogative of German-Jewish thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition, who searched for what Aschheim aptly calls an “honorable synthesis,” a way of accommodating their Jewish particularity with a universalist ethics grounded in imperatives addressed to a common humanity. Since the early twentieth century, the Jew has indeed been regarded by German-Jewish thinkers as a kind of noble “other”—a paradigmatic stranger for Georg Simmel, a conscious pariah for Hannah Arendt, a representative of a spirit free of preconceptions for Walter Benjamin, and a figure independent of the “consensus of the compact majority”15 for Freud. While adopting a similar vision of the Jew as both an outsider and

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one who disturbs the established order in a positive manner, Derrida attempts to undo the self-laudatory dimension of these more-or-less hidden manifestations of exemplarism and pursues this paradox to its ultimate logical impasse: “If the self-identity of the Jew or of Judaism were to consist of this exemplarity, that is, in a certain non-self-identity,” meaning the German-Jewish situation par excellence, “then the more one dislodges self-identity, the more one says ‘my own identity consists in not being identical to myself, in being foreign, non-coincident with myself etc.,’ the more one is Jewish! And at that moment, the word, the attribute Jewish . . . the logical proposition ‘I am Jewish’ thus loses all assurance, is swept up in an ambition, a claim, an outbidding without end.”16 The exemplary discourses of national affirmation that concern us here assert the most universal philosophical values in the name of the most particular, national-cultural, or linguistic entities. Thus they have the structure of an aporia. Yet far from seeing in such an aporia a mere dead end, Derrida argues that these discourses lead to a relentless mise en abîme, an unending experience of undecidability, an “outbidding without end” that corresponds in its logical structure to the groundlessness of the figure of noncoincidence with itself. This figure, as we have seen, is regarded as Jewish, an attribute that is, in turn, being put into question by that very groundlessness and so on, ad infinitum. It is in this very structure of infinite regress that Derrida sees an opening toward an ethical stance no longer grounded in or aiming for a stable identity, but, on the contrary, emerging from and oriented toward this vertiginous dynamic itself. To better understand this dynamic it may be helpful to consider a critique of Derrida’s views formulated by Jonathan Boyarin. In Thinking in Jewish,17 Boyarin is critical of Derrida’s blindness to the particularity of Jewish difference, which, for him, is constituted by the Jews’ “diasporic experience” and the concrete historical legacy generated by this mode of existence. “Allegorizing all difference into a univocal difference,” Boyarin writes, “is to be blind to concrete particularity.”18 He claims that the Jews invoked by Derrida—but also by other French thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy—stand for an abstract, “paradigmatic other,” because of their importance for European modernism. Boyarin points out that Freud, Benjamin, Kafka, Adorno, Arendt, Celan, and the like, are not “the Jews” as such. They are not representative of actual Jews but are, for these French thinkers, figures that embody the abstraction of selfdifference. Boyarin traces the role of the Jew as ultimate disturber of the universal—which he equates with Christianity—back to the apostle Paul, for whom, paradoxically, becoming “good Jews” meant precisely renouncing their specific difference. In Boyarin’s critique, however, it is not only the figure of the Jew as “paradigmatic other” that ignores the Jews’ concrete specificity. For him, the very act of allegorizing becomes problematic because it divests those with historically grounded identities of their difference. “Real Jews,” Boyarin concludes, “end up being a trope” and lose all reference to their concrete historical and cultural experience. It is thus crucial how the operation of “troping” the Jew is regarded and whether there is a way of approaching Jewishness in a figural way while at

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the same time doing justice to the particulars of the Jewish historical experience and cultural tradition. First, it can be demonstrated that Jonathan Boyarin’s critique does not quite do justice to Derrida. Circumventing both conceptual fixation and factual description, Derrida introduces the historical concrete in a performative mode of writing that has far-reaching consequences. As neither a historian who stays with the concrete particular nor a traditional philosopher who aims at universal abstractions, Derrida thematizes—and in his mode of writing, enacts—the passages and breaks that occur when concrete experiences, specific situations, and particular linguistic forms turn into general possibilities. In a continuous shifting of registers between philosophical conceptualization and personal narration, Derrida’s writings in many ways resemble belles-lettres. The importance Derrida attaches to the specific way of articulating general content—a characteristic generally attributed to literary texts and explicitly invoked by Derrida—has significant implications for his approach to the “paradox of exemplarity.” As the example of his reading of Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses will show, the seemingly contradictory logic of attributing universal values to a particular national affirmation can be a source of awareness that the universal always and necessarily articulates itself in a specific narrative mode, a particular idiom, and from within a specific and concrete historical, cultural, existential situation.

Freud—Yerushalmi—Derrida Attempts to uncover the Jewish dimension of the great figures of German-Jewish literature and thought such as Kafka, Benjamin, or Freud are a privileged locus of exemplarism. Numerous studies exploring the Jewish dimension of the lives and works of these figures emphasize their universal relevance precisely in light of their existence as Jews in a foreign, often hostile environment. Their existence as both participants and outsiders has become an emblem of universal modernity. Because of the correspondences between the split or multiple identities acquired by Jews in such contexts and the multilayered structure of the self uncovered by psychoanalysis, investigations into the Jewish dimension of Freud’s life and work are a particularly fertile ground for such reflections. These studies range from the most straightforward recovery of a “Jewish Freud” to the most sophisticated and subtle reflections on the implications of this approach itself. Many of these studies take literally Freud’s answer to the question: “What is left to him that is Jewish after he has abandoned all common characteristics of his compatriots?” to which he famously replied, “A very great deal, and probably the essence.” Those who then go on to search for this Jewish “essence” in his life and writings will collect and aggrandize all things Jewish in Freud and emphasize their universal significance. These instances of exemplarism are, in many ways, inspired by Freud’s own attributions of universal values to national characteristics such as the Jewish primacy in the “Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit,” the advance in spirituality or intellectuality, which,

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although paired with a repression of drives and ensuing pathologies, is taken as a praise of things Jewish. Yosef Yerushalmi’s book on Freud, written in the early 1990s, is probably the most famous and, in many ways, the most subtle example of “reading Freud Jewish.”19 In Archive Fever Derrida expresses his admiration for Yerushalmi’s book, but he is critical of passages in which he succumbs to the “temptation of exemplarism.” Derrida, as Hollander points out, dwells on one of Yerushalmi’s remarks to Freud in a fictive address in which the historian implies that “Freud’s thinking lacks ‘the anticipation of a specific hope for the future.’ . . . It is on this question of hope or hopelessness,” Yerushalmi adds, “that your teaching may be at its most un-Jewish.” Derrida draws a parallel between this claim—the attribution of “Jewishness” to hope—and one Yerushalmi makes in an earlier book, Zakhor, that “only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”20 Derrida reacts to this statement by Yerushalmi in an overtly personal and astonishingly emotional tone: “I would have liked to spend hours, in truth an eternity, meditating and trembling before this sentence.” This trembling represents both a poignant response to and a critique of these claims: “How can one not tremble before this sentence,” Derrida continues. I wonder, while trembling, if they are just, the sentences which reserve for Israel both the future and the past as such, both hope . . . and the duty of memory. . . . [Unless, in the logic of this election, one were to call by the unique name of Israel all the places and the people who would be ready to recognize themselves in this anticipation and in this injunction.] Because if it is just to remember the future and the injunction to remember, . . . it is no less just to remember the others, the other others and the others in oneself, and that the other peoples could say the same thing—in another way.21

Despite his criticism of Yerushalmi’s exemplarist claims, Derrida affirms Yerushalmi’s mode of approaching Freud—a highly personal perspective that concludes with a fictive monologue, a direct address by Yerushalmi to Freud, “which in reading, contesting, or in calling to Freud, repeats in an exemplary fashion the logic of Freud’s Moses. The strange result of this performative repetition . . . is that the interpretation of . . . the Jewish legacy can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it.”22 Derrida insists that the question of Freud’s Jewishness, and indeed of the meaning and significance of Jewishness as tradition and legacy, cannot be approached from a neutral, indifferent perspective but only as a performative act by a specific speaker inscribed in a particular situation. Fully acknowledging the discomfort— das Unbehagen—that he experiences in the face of attempts to identify Freud as Jewish, to identify hope and memory and psychoanalysis as Jewish, Derrida nevertheless does not advocate submitting to universalist demands. Instead, Yerushalmi’s confrontation with his Jewishness brings out an acknowledgement of the weight of Derrida’s own—and in the end anyone’s own—legacy. Each person, Derrida suggests, bears his or her inheritance and faces it as legacy, a legacy that can and must be faced from within one’s life. “Even if hope and the injunction to remember

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are universals,” Hollander concludes in her analysis, “one will always find oneself giving particular, singular names and idioms to this recognition: Others will, can, must say these universals—such as hope and memory—too, but in another way.”23 This insight brings us back to Boyarin’s criticism: Far from obliterating the concrete historical experience, Derrida confronts the appeal to Jewish exemplarity from within his own situation and through his own particular mode of writing, which intermingles personal memories of his childhood in Algiers with his early experiences of anti-Semitism, experiences he describes as the autobiographical origin of his critique of “national affirmations” and of the “temptation of exemplarism” itself. His own mode of writing is indeed “another way” of approaching those questions and contrasts with Boyarin’s historiographical writings. Derrida’s wavering between philosophical speculations and personal narrative performs the transition—the “becoming other”—from particular experience to universal possibility and thereby approaches the realm of literature, of poetry, of Paul Celan, to whom we shall now return.

Alle Dichter sind Juden Celan’s Jewishness, though less elusive than Freud’s, has also been a matter of contention. Any attempt to situate Celan and his work in relation to Judaism or the Jews must face the controversies that accompanied his rise to fame as the most important postwar poet writing in the German language. Even prior to assessing the “Jewishness” of Celan’s poems, critics disagreed about the concreteness of their signification—the literalness of their references, the specific historicity of their dates, or the identity of their addressees. These controversies arose even in Celan’s lifetime and were at least partly generated by Celan’s own seemingly contradictory statements. While no one contests the impact of his Jewish origins and fate, the importance he attached to several Jewish precursors or fellow poets, or the presence of Jewish topics and motifs in his poetry, the critics do disagree about “what it means to identify Celan as a Jewish poet.”24 The elucidation of this relationship is complicated by Celan’s own warning against “forcing his poems into the confines of Judaism or the fate of the Jews,”25 on the one hand, and on the other, by the famous epigraph “Vse poety zhidy,” meaning, “All poets are Jews [Yids],” which introduces his poem “Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa.”26 This epigraph, a variation on a verse by Marina Tsvetayeva, has itself given rise to multiple conflicting interpretations. For some, the epigraph’s fusion of poet and Jew proves that Celan regarded Jewishness as essentially a metaphor for a sensibility originating in subjugation, exile, and oppression and universally applicable to all poets independent of their origin or history because poets are inherently outsiders with regard to mainstream society. Others read the epigraph as an affirmation and consolidation of Celan’s identity as a Jewish poet or—in a more disparaging mode—as a poetic “caretaker of Jewish collective suffering.”27 The French critic Henri Meschonnic, who accuses Celan’s

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first French translators of disregarding the poet’s Jewish origins, of universalizing the specific experiences voiced in his poems, and of concomitantly transforming “historical into metaphysical suffering,”28 insists that the epigraph was meant to convey his commitment to the tortured Jewish community. For Meschonnic, who argues in a spirit similar to Boyarin’s, universalist readings of Celan’s verses imply a denial of the poet’s concrete Jewish identity. But for Jean Bollack, who knew the poet personally and who became one of the prominent readers of Celan in France, Meschonnic doesn’t go far enough in his critique of universalist interpretations of Celan, because he neglects to mention the insult implied in the Russian word “zhidy” quoted by Celan from Tsvetayeva: “This is hard to understand. Does the quote, with this positive connotation of the word Jews [instead of the Russian slur “zhidy,” which Celan actually uses] transfer Celan’s experience to all poets? These would then be compelled to become Jews like himself. This does not make sense.”29 Likewise, Bollack rejects the interpretation of the epigraph by Derrida, who wrote in Schibboleth pour Paul Celan: “The wound, the experience of reading itself, is universal. . . . To say that ‘all poets are Jews’ is a statement that marks and crosses out the marks of a circumcision. It is metaphorical. All those who inhabit language as poets are Jews, but in a metaphorical sense. And therefore the one who, speaking as a poet and using a metaphor, no longer presents himself literally as a Jew.”30 After noting that “Celan strictly avoided metaphors,” Bollack explains that “Derrida transferred the specific community addressed by Celan to the structure of language” as such, and he comments sarcastically: “They all should be Jews, as poets are Jews. They are all exiled, even the Jews. Everyone a Celan.”31 (Bollack, however, does not note the multiple ways in which Derrida does account for the singularity of Celan’s life, his Jewish heritage, and mode of writing. The very word Shibboleth, which Derrida’s title quotes from the eponymous poem by Celan, refers to the specific story from the biblical book of Judges in which the pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites from Gileadites and, simultaneously, signifies a distinguishing practice indicative of a speaker’s particular origin, thereby evoking untranslatability—the singularity of an idiom—as a universal condition.) These controversies perhaps reveal more about these writers than about Celan. Determining how Celan’s epigraph “All poets are Jews” is to be understood requires a closer look at its source. It is worth noting that the epigraph is already a variation on Tsvetayeva’s original verse: “Poety—zhidy!” (poets—Yids). In a lucid reconstruction of the epigraph’s origins, Christina Ivanovic quotes the original verse by Tsvetayeva in its context, a poem entitled “Poem of the End,” written on the occasion of a last walk with a lover that led the two past the Prague Ghetto and that includes the lines: Ghetto of the chosen ones! Wall and ditch. Expect no mercy! In this most Christian of all worlds, The poets are Yids!

Getto izbrannichestv! Val i rov. Poshchady ne zhdi! V sem khristianeishem iz mirov Poety—zhidy!

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Tsvetayeva, a non-Jewish poet, expresses her solidarity with the Jews on the other side of the ghetto’s fence. Celan’s response honors this gesture by extending his own identity as a Jewish poet to all poets. This solidarity across religious, ethnic, or cultural divides is undone by critics who want to enclose him strictly within Jewish folds. At the same time, however, Celan’s variation on Tsvetayeva’s verse implicitly labels as “Jewish” Tsvetayeva’s poetic expression of solidarity with those on the other side of the ghetto wall. He thereby enacts the “endless outbidding” described in Derrida’s “paradox of exemplarity.” It both characterizes the poetic gesture as such as a universal possibility, while at the same time it keeps the memory of—and remains true to—a singular experience and situation and to a speaker inscribed in it, in the language of poetry.

The Poem, the Jew In light of these reflections, we can now return to the beginning, to Celan’s notes that state “Man kann verjuden,” and read it as an exemplary instance of the “paradox of exemplarity.” Here is the full quote: One can become a Jew, just as one can become a human being; one can Judaize, and, I would like to add, from experience: today most of all in German . . . Judaize. One can Judaize; this is, admittedly, difficult, and—why not admit this too?—many a Jew has failed in it; that is precisely why I consider it commendable. . . . Judaize: it is the becoming other. . . . Not because the poem speaks of irritation, but because it unshakably remains itself that the poem becomes irritation—that it becomes the Jew of literature—The poet is the Jew of literature—One can Judaize; this admittedly happens rarely, but sometimes it does happen.32

Celan’s lines seem full of contradictions. They indeed articulate the “paradox of exemplarity” in its most succinct form.33 They unmistakably invoke a particular—“the Jew”—to describe a universally accessible condition of “becoming other,” and they run into the logical impasse described by Derrida: Would not this “becoming other” at the moment where the process succeeds undo the identity suggested in the very word verJuden? But there is more: “One can become a Jew, just as one can become a human being” (in the German original: “Man kann zum Juden werden, wie man zum Menschen werden kann”). Yet can one really “become a human being” and if so, how can this “universal” question serve as an analogy to becoming a Jew? And, even more paradoxically, how can the poem be praised for remaining just like the Jew, “unshakably itself,” while at the same time signifying the process of “becoming other?” In bringing into play the word “verjuden,” Celan both speaks of and performs a transformation: he invokes a vocabulary of exclusion and discrimination and simultaneously turns this historically loaded, negative term—a term indicating an abject contamination by the Jew and “his spirit”—into an affirmative metaphor for transformation, for “becoming other.” “Verjuden” thus comes to stand for an

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affirmation of the other in one’s midst. Beyond the provocative reversal of an anti-Semitic insult, Celan’s use of “verjuden” performs an ingenious crossing of the universal and the particular: one—anyone—can “become other,” can be transformed, can relinquish his closed selfhood. At the same time, however, the metaphor’s vehicle, the verb verjuden, retains in its resonance the singularity of its idiomatic use at a specific moment in GermanJewish history. Far from dissolving the concrete particular, the universal possibility—that “man,” “one,” “anyone” can Judaize—is attained here through reference to a particular situation experienced at a concrete time and in a specific space, to a particular usage by a group of people and its language, German, which designates another particular group, the Jews, as intruding, unwanted strangers. Celan links the process of Verjudung explicitly to the effect of poetry, its unsettling of common discourse, its power to transform the one it addresses, and its own openness to being transformed by the addressee through his or her experiences, language, situation, and individual reading. Celan enlists the power of poetic language in order to invert a murderous trope directed against the stranger into a metaphor of a positive self-estrangement performed by poetry itself. The striking, and, in many ways, dizzying imbrications of particular and universal are, in turn, achieved in a radically particular, idiomatic language. Just as “verjuden” ultimately cannot be translated without losing its concrete reference to the German myth reconstructed by Aschheim, so too, the only way in which the opening words of Celan’s notes (where “becoming Jewish” is identified with “zum Menschen werden”) make sense is if the universal “Mensch” is understood in its particular Yiddish signification as an “ethical human being.” Similarly, the German and uniquely German word “verjuden” is untranslatable and, at the same time, designates the very act, the ideal of translation: the becoming other while remaining “unshakably itself.” Although Celan indeed reverses the “value” of the term verjuden and translates it as “becoming other,” he is far from mystifying Jewishness as the ultimate, essential otherness. Instead he writes in a somewhat jocular tone: “One can become Jewish. Admittedly this is difficult and many a Jew has failed in it.”34 If a Jew can fail to “become Jewish,” then a gap opens up between the literal use of Jude in verJuden and its self-conscious meaning of “becoming other” as a trope—from the Greek τρόπος (tropos)—“a turn, a change.” This gap in which verjuden changes into something “commendable” transforms the insult into an appeal for responsibility, for accomplishing the impossible yet urgent task of remaining “unshakably oneself ”—and of remaining, in the old Christian vocabulary, “verstockt,” of refusing assimilation—while letting oneself be infiltrated and contaminated by the other. The meaning generated here is central to matters German-Jewish: In finding words for an interrelationship that negates both self-identity and dissolution, both insularity and assimilation—even dialogue between separate entities, on the one hand, and symbiosis, on the other—we open up alternative ways of envisaging the German-Jewish phenomenon. The painful history of this pair remains ineradicably inscribed in the word verjuden; yet, at the same time, this word itself is transformed

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and inverted through an act of poetic renaming into a universal name for the very act of ethical transformation itself. What are the implications for the German-Jewish situation? Can these insights be applied to other situations or used as a model or metaphor for other intercultural and interethnic relations? Can literature play a role in a possible answer to this question? Celan’s note, although in many ways unsettling, is an exemplary instance in which literature demonstrates its potential to undo dichotomies such as the universal and the particular and even reach beyond a mere reversal of the habitual ways in which these terms and their relationship are regarded. Like Derrida, Celan does not resolve the contradictions of these paradoxes at a conceptual level but engages in an existential confrontation with them that ends up in a commitment and a responsibility to be taken up individually, in a most concrete situation. As in Tsvetayeva’s verse, connected to the very specific context of her walk alongside the Jewish ghetto where she points to the other side of the wall, this responsibility is a call to open up to the other who resides both “inside”—as in Aschheim’s “Jew Within”—and the “actual” other on the other side. This, to quote Celan, “admittedly happens rarely, but sometimes it does happen.” “Man kann verjuden”: this is how Celan terms this possibility. Others may say the same thing—in another way. Celan says this in German, from within his own experience, from his situation as a Jewish poet writing in the language of the perpetrators in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He says it with all the ambivalence of the painful memory captured in the word and the faint hope for a different future. He gives this memory and this hope a name recalling his inheritance, his experience, his history. Celan says it in German, a poisoned German that is not his language but a language that he makes his own through a poetic act of bitter remembrance and playful irony. “It is in this way that,” as Derrida writes of his own Jewish legacy, “the oscillation and the undecidability continue, and I would dare say, must continue to mark the obscure and uncertain experience of heritage. In any case,” he continues, “I have been unable to halt this experience in me, and it has conditioned the decisions and the responsibilities that have imprinted themselves upon my life.”35 Similarly, the oscillation at work in Celan’s “Man kann verjuden,” its oscillation between singular inheritance and universal significance, continues and is imprinted in his poetry as it was in his life. If Celan did not include this observation from his notes in his actual Büchner Prize speech delivered in 1961 in Germany, perhaps he felt that the situation was not yet ripe for such words, that Germany at that point had not yet sufficiently “become other.” Today, in discussing the German-Jewish legacy, the awareness that one can speak of the possibility of reaching across partitions and walls while remaining—at least to some extent—“unshakably” oneself is as urgently required as ever. Equally urgent is the understanding that others can speak of this possibility and this urgency, too, in other ways, in German or in English, in Hebrew or in Arabic. The German-Jewish legacy was not—and is not—necessarily innately a universal instance of humaneness and humanism that is offered to each of its heirs, within his or her concrete situation, whether in Germany or the rest of Europe, in the

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United States, or perhaps most of all, in Israel. Steven Aschheim, to whom this chapter and this volume are dedicated, is an exemplary representative of one with this awareness and this legacy.

Notes 1. “Man kann zum Juden werden, wie man zum Menschen werden kann; Man kann verjuden . . . Ich [halte] das für empfehlenswert” (Paul Celan, Der Meridian. Endfassung, Vorstufen, Materialien [Frankfurt, 1999], 130). 2. Steven Aschheim, “‘The Jew Within’: The Myth of Judaization in Germany,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover and London, 1985), 212–24. 3. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe, 45. 4. For an excellent discussion of this reversal in French postmodern thought, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago, 2010). She notes the differences in the situation when the figural identification with the Jew occurs in a self-conscious literary mode and involves “comparison, performance and irony” (23). 5. Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, 2008). 6. Ibid., 103. 7. Ibid., 103–4. 8. Ibid., 112. 9. Ibid., 113–14. 10. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading, trans. P. A. Brault and M. B. Naas (Bloomington, 1992), 12. 11. Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness, 114. 12. Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London, 2002), 135–88. 13. Derrida, “Interpretations at War,” 138. 14. Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness, 123. 15. Sigmund Freud, “Ansprache an die Mitglieder des Vereins B’nai B’rith (1926),” in S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. A. Freud et al. (London, 1941), 17:52. 16. Jacques Derrida, “Zeugnis, Gabe,” in Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich, ed. E. Weber (Frankfurt, 2004), 65. 17. Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago, 1996). 18. Ibid., 67. 19. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, 1993). 20. Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness, 198. 21. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, 1996), 76–77. 22. Ibid., 67. 23. Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness, 199. 24. Christine Ivanovic, “All Poets Are Jews: Paul Celan’s Readings of Marina Tsvetayeva,” Glossen 6 (1998), http://alpha.dickinson.edu/departments/germn/glossen/supertitel2.html; (consulted 27.01.2010). 25. Reported by Dietlinde Meinecke, Wort und Name bei Paul Celan. Zur Widerruflichkeit des Gedichts (Bad Homburg, 1970) and quoted in: Ivanovic, “All Poets Are Jews,” footnote 3 26. Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. B. Wiedermann (Frankfurt, 2003), 164. 27. Ivanovic, “All Poets Are Jews.”

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28. Henri Meschonnic, Pour la Poétique II. Épistémologie de l’écriture, poétique de la traduction (Paris, 1973), 383. 29. Jean Bollack, Poetik der Fremdheit (Vienna, 2000), 201. 30. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris, 1986), 98–105. 31. Bollack, Poetik der Fremdheit, 201. 32. Celan, Der Meridian, 130–31. 33. This note, as I understand it here, refutes Derrida’s critique in “Abraham l’autre” that “even Celan” surrendered to “the formidable temptation of exemplarism” (Jacques Derrida, “Abraham l’autre,” in Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida, ed. J. Cohen and R. Zagury-Orly [Paris, 2003], 32). 34. Celan, Der Meridian, 130–31. 35. Derrida, “Abraham l’autre,” 33.

Part IV



In the Shadow of the Holocaust

Chapter 13

A “Usable Past” and the Crisis of European Jews Popular Jewish Historiography in Germany, France, and Hungary in the 1930s

Guy Miron



In a review article published in response to the renewed publication of the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Moritz Stern, a German rabbi and historian, stated that the journal would not only serve science, but “it also has advantages for our current struggle and aims.” The understanding of the legal status of German Jews throughout history, their participation in the political, social, and economic life of Germany, and their link to the German language is crucial for the present, claimed Stern, expressing a common view in the liberal Jewish camp.1 This chapter will discuss how French, German, and Hungarian Jewish intellectuals and publicists of the 1930s and early 1940s utilized representations of the past as a tool for contending with the contemporary political challenges vis-à-vis the rise of Fascism and Nazism.2 Historical topics were prominent in Jewish public discourse of this period not only in professional publications but also in the Jewish press and popular publications that aspired to find meaning in contemporary events and calm and comfort their readers. This approach was not entirely novel, having been employed already in the nineteenth century. As we shall see, however, the turn to the past was intensified with the rising threat of Fascism. Moreover, under the changed circumstances, Jewish spokespeople devised new strategies to come to terms with the past. Using a comparative perspective to describe developments, this chapter will deal with three European Jewish communities—in Germany, France, and Hungary—whose major political orientation in the modern era was based on the legacy of emancipation.

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The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the pioneer of the study of collective memory, distinguished between memory, which is shaped in retrospect by a variety of social forces and therefore subjective, and history, which he viewed as a science that presents the past objectively. This sharp distinction has been modified in recent decades as it has become clear that historical writing is also affected by subjective tendencies while still remaining valid.3 Subsequent scholars such as Paul Connerton have dealt more systematically with the social role of memory in shaping the past.4 The German scholar Jan Assmann made the fruitful distinction between short-term “communicational memory,” on the one hand, and “cultural memory,” on the other, in order to characterize the long-term, intergenerational process of shaping memory in human society.5 In the field of Jewish history these problems were posed predominantly after the publication of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor and the ensuing debate.6 During the last two decades, a variety of empirical works that address these topics from various perspectives have appeared. Additionally, the concept of a “usable past” entered the field.7 This concept suggests that the public discourse about the past is directed, at least partially, toward satisfying contemporary political, social, and cultural needs. The phenomenon appears not only in historical writing and popular publications but is also prevalent in public activities of commemoration and in educational settings. The formative experiences of modern Jewish communities in Germany, France, and, to a certain degree, Hungary have been the multigenerational development of legal emancipation and integration into their surroundings. By the end of the nineteenth century an intensive process of acculturation had transformed French and German Jewry. These modern, mostly bourgeois, Jews became patriotic citizens of their homelands and were usually associated with the local version of a national, liberal political culture. Although not characteristic of the vast majority of the Jews in Hungary, during the late nineteenth century a parallel liberal Jewish type became common there, too. Those individuals developed a class identity, self-consciousness, and historical discourse fundamentally similar to the French and German examples. German, French, and Hungarian Jews were influenced by the national historical discourse in their countries and endeavored to take part in it. Enjoying formal civil equality and social and cultural integration into their surroundings, these Jews also viewed themselves as part of the culture of the nations in which they resided. Because they had been considered aliens in their countries of residence prior to their emancipation and owing to the fact that many Jews had arrived in these countries as immigrants, it became necessary for them to invent or imagine (in Eric Hobsbawm’s and Benedict Anderson’s terms) or to redevelop (according to Anthony Smith’s conception) a “usable past” that could facilitate their becoming members of their respective nations—both in their own eyes and in the eyes of their fellow citizens.8 The culture of memory that they developed and disseminated during the nineteenth century was therefore meant to provide them with “homemaking myths,” a term that was proposed in the research literature as a way

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to characterize the attempts of immigrants to create or even invent historical links to their new homeland.9 Based on the experience of emancipation and integration, these three modern Jewish communities elaborated a cultural memory that came to terms both with the Jewish and the local national (German, French, or Hungarian) past. The desire to harmonize between these two depictions of the past was, therefore, typical of the Jews’ historical discourse in all three countries. As we shall see, Jewish spokespeople attempted to link their communal histories to the national histories of the countries in which they resided. They thus emphasized the process of Jewish emancipation, commemorated its Jewish and non-Jewish historical protagonists, and presented its political principles in accord with the national spirit of their European homeland. They also pointed to the deep roots of Jewish settlement in each of these countries. The Fascist and anti-Semitic threat to the Jews differed in each of the three countries. The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 with their racial ideology had immediate repercussions on the status of the German Jews; in Hungary, Jewish emancipation was abolished gradually from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. In France, Jewish emancipation remained in force until the Vichy government, established after the military defeat in June 1940, abrogated it in October 1940, but Jews felt a growing threat, especially in the late 1930s. The impact of these developments in each of these three countries, as well as in the whole European context, undermined the liberal formula that had served as the foundation of Jewish emancipation. Through an examination of a few major historical topics that entered the Jewish discourse, this chapter will elaborate the ways in which liberal Jewish spokespersons constructed and disseminated usable representations of the past in order to help their fellow Jews cope with the harsh new reality. It will also deal with a variety of anniversaries that were marked during those years by liberal Jewish spokespersons.

Germany: Revaluation of the Jewish Emancipation Era In the late eighteenth century, German-Jewish intellectuals already began to create a “usable past” and to develop modern, rational, Jewish historical thought. They also created a pantheon of historical heroes who supported the values of the Enlightenment movement.10 The emergence of the modern scholarly study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) in the early nineteenth century provided German Jews with new images of the past that helped them integrate into the liberal political culture of the German bourgeoisie, reform their religious tradition, and redefine their collective identity in a way that facilitated their social integration. These initiatives were not limited to a narrow group of scholars and intellectuals. From the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of German-Jewish writers, publicists, and communal activists vigorously disseminated the new culture of memory by means of historical novels, popular essays in the Jewish press, and the formation

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of Jewish reading associations. This culture of memory, which was deeply rooted in the German Bildung’s legacy, was based on a belief in human rationality and the idea of progress.11 The era of the Weimar Republic—especially the last years before its fall—was characterized by an escalation in the scope and brutality of German anti-Semitism that, naturally, had a major impact on German-Jewish public discourse. The crisis of the Weimar Republic engendered a decline in rational forms of historical interpretation and a growing rejection of the idea of progress. Whereas the Second Reich’s economic and political successes had influenced the emergence of an optimistic teleological historical narrative—a national German history progressing toward Bismarck’s unification—the defeat in World War I and the fragile political reality of Weimar induced pessimism and an emphasis on the inevitable repetition of catastrophes throughout history. As the awareness of the crisis deepened, the historical discourse that rejected the liberal idea of progress in favor of a deterministic, cyclical view of history became more dominant. This new historical discourse, characterized by Bernd Faulenbach as entailing “eternal high points and low points” (ewigen Auf und Ab des Geschehens) and by Dietmar Schirmer as “archaic-mythic,” inspired Germans to believe in the possibility of recovery from a seemingly hopeless situation.12 This discourse was popular in conservative and nationalistic rightist circles but also infiltrated the republican and socialist milieus. Many contemporary Jewish spokesmen continued to believe, as their nineteenth-century predecessors had, in Germany’s future as an enlightened liberal country. Unable to ignore the changes in their surroundings, however, some liberal Jewish figures began to view the Enlightenment legacy more critically. Nevertheless, most German-Jewish liberal discourse of the late 1920s and early 1930s was based on the ideas of rationalism and progress, as was evident in 1929, when German Jewry marked the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (in January) and Moses Mendelssohn (in September), whose friendship was for many a symbol of progress and enlightenment.13 The fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis’ rise to power came as a great shock to German Jews and represented a turning point in their history. In September 1933, most of the Jewish organizations joined together to form the new “national representation of German Jews” (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden). At the same time, their activities as separate associations within the internal Jewish political landscape, as well as the ideological tensions among them, intensified in the first years of the new regime.14 Jewish journals and periodicals continued to be published in Germany until late 1938. Under the new circumstances the Jewish press served the growing communal needs of German Jews while continuing to reflect their political and ideological diversity, and its readership expanded considerably. Thus CV Zeitung, the journal of the Central Union of the German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, or the CV), represented the liberal line; other journals supported Zionist or Orthodox positions; and others were apolitical.15

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The majority of writers who dealt with historical issues, particularly in the liberal camp that will be discussed here, were rabbis, graduates of the modern German rabbinical seminaries who were also trained as historians. In the spring and summer of 1934, the CV Zeitung published a series of seven articles about the history of the Jews in Germany from the Roman era to the age of emancipation that serves as an example of professional historians’ efforts to establish a usable past. 16 One of the writers was Ismar Elbogen—the rector of the liberal institution for Jewish studies (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums) in Berlin, the editor of the historical journal Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, and from 1933 a central member of the new Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden. Emerging as one of several Jewish professional historians who turned to popular writing and to the creation and development of a usable Jewish past, Elbogen clearly demonstrated the linkage between presentation of the past and present needs in a 1934 article that dealt with the fate of German Jews during the Crusades, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.17 According to the common view, that period was a turning point in the position of the Jews from quite comfortable integration to harsh social exclusion. Writing for a public that was then experiencing a historical turning point and severe exclusion, Elbogen not only related to the pogroms and “blood libels” of the Middle Ages but also focused on certain positive aspects of that period. He thus mentioned various Christians’—including priests’—attempts to defend Jews during the Crusades, as well as the fact that the German emperor acquitted the Jews of the “blood libel” of 1235. Elbogen emphasized the continuous settlement of the Jews in Germany throughout the Middle Ages in spite of the escalating hostile atmosphere. He also marked the steady growth of the German-Jewish population during those centuries, the fundamentally good relationship between the Jews and the Christian urban dwellers, and even the flourishing Jewish cultural life in fields such as biblical scholarship and Talmudic interpretation. Still believing at the time in the capability of the Jewish community in Germany to survive the Nazi era, Elbogen indicated that one could derive optimism with regard to the future from even the more difficult periods in German-Jewish history. Elbogen’s allusions to medieval German-Jewish history as a source for a usable past represented a broader tendency in the German-Jewish public discourse. Already in February 1933, the Berlin rabbi Max Eschelbacher asserted in Der Morgen, the CV’s monthly magazine, that if the Weimar Republic’s constitution, which afforded civil equality to the Jews, collapsed, German Jews would have to turn again to “our ancient Jewish past and our almost two-thousand-year history in Germany.”18 A few months later, the retired liberal rabbi of Frankfurt urged rethinking the view of preemancipation Jewish history as merely a chain of persecutions and humiliation to which recent events were linked.19 Only a reevaluation of Jewish history, he implied, would restore the Jews’ self-respect and even the joy of being Jewish. The turn to the Middle Ages, which continued and even intensified in the following years, was also expressed in articles dealing with past Jewish heroes as well as anniversaries.20 The bankruptcy of the idea of progress led to a gradual

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transformation of the Jewish public discourse from focusing on the modern era of emancipation to a wider view of Jewish history that was independent of the idea of progress. Elbogen’s publication in 1935 of the first comprehensive scholarly work in the field of German-Jewish history evoked various comments in the Jewish press, many of which questioned the very need for a usable past.21 In a review of the book, the CV activist Fritz Friedländer related to the paradoxical fact that such a book, which had long been awaited by the German-Jewish readership, was eventually published at the very time that German Jews were facing such a great crisis.22 The timing of the book’s publication, he added, raised the question of when is the best time to deal with the meaning of history: should this be done from the perspective of achievement and success or, perhaps, from the experience of crisis and confusion? Without giving a clear answer to that question, Friedländer praised Elbogen’s commitment to write for the wider public, even at the price of the book’s scope and depth. Elbogen was the most prominent among a few liberal Jewish historians who turned to more popular writing during those years. Ismar Freund, Elbogen’s colleague at the Berlin liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, whose main research field—the history of emancipation in Prussia—became most relevant after 1933, turned to publishing popular articles defending Prussian Jewry’s historical path and to rehabilitating its historical heroes.23 Selma Stern-Täubler, author of the biography Jud Süss (1929) and articles about the Prussian state and the Jews (1925), also turned in the 1930s to more popular writing. Her biographer, Marina Sassenberg, asserted that Stern-Täubler’s publications from the first years of the Nazi regime—including a biographical discussion about Mendelssohn and a review of the legacy of Enlightenment and emancipation—expressed growing ambivalence concerning the German-Jewish synthesis.24 This tendency, however, was only implicit. As a professional historian, Stern-Täubler avoided any attempt to impart meaning to the present agonies on the basis of the past.25 The activities of historians like Elbogen, Freund, and Stern-Täubler illustrate the complexity of our topic: on the one hand, the new circumstances motivated all three to turn to popular writing; on the other hand, they struggled to preserve their fundamental professional principles and did not create a totally new historical narrative. The articles of Fritz Friedländer, a central figure in the liberal Jewish education system during the first years of the Nazi regime, provide a fascinating example of a communal activist’s utilization of historical writing to serve the community. From 1933, Friedländer published several articles, mostly in the CV Zeitung, that addressed history and its public use. In May 1934, he discussed the challenge of teaching history in Jewish schools, which had to operate according to the Nazi state regulations but were obliged to meet their students’ needs.26 A few months later, in September 1934, he examined the role of Jewish historical research vis-à-vis the escalating crisis in Jewish life, explicitly advocating the need to develop a usable past. Historical writing, he asserted, should be based more on the Jewish public’s needs at present than it had been in the past. Liberal Jews needed the help of these

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works in coping with the ideological confusion caused by the events in Germany and in gaining insight into the question of the Jewish-Gentile relationship.27 In defending the CV’s liberal values and the historical memory of Jewish integration in Germany, Friedländer not only confronted the contentions of certain Zionist spokesmen but also challenged the various Nazi commentators who declared that the collapse of Jewish emancipation and assimilation were evidence of a historically misdirected path. In an August 1934 article—the final contribution to the seven-article series about German-Jewish history—Friedländer strove to impart meaning to the decline of Jewish emancipation by presenting its historical course as a cyclical process of high points and low points.28 Friedländer added a more fundamental argument against those who were using the present events (the Nazis’ abolition of emancipation) to repudiate the legacy of the past (the nineteenth-century era of Jewish integration in Germany). Alluding to Ranke’s famous saying, Friedländer stated that all historical ages are equally close to God. Each age, therefore, should be evaluated by its own unique values and not by those that are dominant in the present. The emergence of this cyclical view of Jewish history in popular writings exemplifies the transformation of the German-Jewish liberal discourse. Similar ideas had appeared before 1933 in the writings of certain historians and intellectuals, but only the profound change in the situation of German Jews and the growing rejection of the idea of progress enabled the cyclical view to serve as a foundation for a liberal usable past. The cyclical view thus figured prominently in the reactions of liberal Jewish intellectuals and communal activists to the young Zionist rabbi Joachim Prinz’s broadside against the German-Jewish path of modernization.29 “Our history is characterized by eternal high points and low points,” asserted Manfred Swarsensky in reaction to Prinz. “Ages of outward success, which were almost always times of ‘assimilation,’ are followed by ages of distress. Both are crucial and eventually also fruitful.”30 A more systematic response to Prinz’s public lectures and book was expressed by Bruno Weil, the deputy chairman of the CV. Weil, a generation older than Prinz and Swarsensky, offered his listeners and readers his own version of the cyclical narrative of German-Jewish history. A glance at the fate of the Jews living on German soil from Roman times, he contended, revealed that their history had been characterized, from its very beginning, “by large wavy lines with steep heights and horrible abysses.” 31 Liberal spokespersons’ acceptance of such a historical view enabled them to protect the values and legitimacy of the emancipation era, even when they were forced to recognize that it was over. This view also implied the possibility of a better future for German Jews, hinting that the harsh present crisis would inevitably end with a turn to better times. An additional aspect of Friedländer’s turn to the usable past was expressed in his brave public critique of the positions of the Nazi historian Wilhelm Grau, who was in charge of the “history of the Jewish Question” in the Nazi-founded “National Institute for the History of the New Germany” (Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands). Friedländer not only contested Grau’s historical interpretation of Jewish emancipation in Germany but also lambasted its acceptance by

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certain Zionists who utilized Grau’s work to undermine Jewish liberal positions. Recognizing that the restoration of liberal values in politics was an unrealistic goal in late 1935, he pleaded merely to retain the dignity of the liberal heritage.32 This was not the only case in which a liberal Jewish writer openly contested historical interpretations that were expressed by Nazi spokesmen. In a situation that excluded open political struggle on behalf of liberal values and against Nazi policy, Jewish communal activists and publicists could still openly criticize Nazi views of the past in the Jewish press.33 Jews were also able to express their reservations about Nazi views through allusions to the historical past.

France: Local and Immigrant Jews Reexamine the Revolutionary Legacy The modern Franco-Jewish culture of memory, which crystalized during the nineteenth century, naturally focused on the French Revolution. Toward the mid-nineteenth century, the mainstream of emancipated French Jewry adopted an ethos that has been termed in recent research “Republican Judaism” or “Jewish Republicanism.” It perceived the events of the French Revolution in general and the granting of citizenship to the Jews in particular as near-messianic phenomena that fundamentally changed the nature of Jewish-Gentile relations. This view became the basis of modern Franco-Jewish collective consciousness and was the foundation of a newly developed historiography that optimistically glorified historical progress.34 During the interwar period, French Jewry was comprised of two main groups: native French Jews, whose forefathers had already lived in France—most of them originally in Alsace—in the prerevolutionary era, and East European immigrants, who came to France starting in the late nineteenth century, predominantly during the interwar period. Each group—neither of which was monolithic—maintained its own organizational framework and political culture; each had its own newspapers and periodicals that appeared in different languages—French and Yiddish. Spokespersons from the two groups also articulated distinct historical narratives and utilized differing symbols from the past in responding to the difficult challenges of the 1930s.35 As in Germany, among the local French Jewry, modern rabbis who were also trained in history were the dominant figures in the creation and dissemination of the usable past. French-Jewish communal spokespersons expressed their views in several journals, including the Parisian L’ Univers israélite, the most widely distributed community weekly of the local French-Jewish establishment (the Central Consistory), the more national Jewish journal Archives israélites, and later La Tribune juive, the conservative journal of the Jews of eastern France. In the 1930s, French Jews clearly perceived the revolution as the central event in modern Jewish history, linking it to their current patriotism.36 Despite the rising strength of the French anti-republican right, especially after 1934, local French-Jewish writers tended to

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ignore the fact that the values of Bastille Day (14 July) were being contested within French society. Instead they continued to relate mainly to the festive and ceremonial aspects of the French national holiday, presenting the values of 1789 as a matter of national consensus.37 In the early 1930s, local French-Jewish figures did not extensively portray the past. This changed, however, in the late 1930s, as the situation in Germany was exacerbated, the rise of Fascism became much more threatening for all of European Jewry, and France itself had to deal intensively with the challenge of Jewish refugees.38 Reacting to apparent public hostility to the entry of immigrants, many of whom were Jews, French-Jewish spokespersons felt the need to emphasize the deep roots of the local French-Jewish community, as well as their firm belief in the legacy of the revolution. Furthermore, some of them also referred to the past in order to strengthen the case for the integration of immigrant Jews into French society. Already in 1933–34, in the context of the arrival of the first Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, writers alluded to the history of Jewish immigration to France, depicting France as a natural asylum for refugees of anti-Semitic persecution in the modern era.39 A 1937 book on French-Jewish history written by Leon Berman, chief rabbi of Lille, systematically attempted to present French-Jewish history in a way that integrated images of a long and deep-rooted history of a Jewish presence in France with the portrayal of France as a hospitable refuge. Describing French Jewry as composed of a variety of groups with different cultural traditions, Berman claimed that until the revolution there was no single French-Jewish history, but several, each of which had developed separately.40 He emphasized the long period of continuity of Jewish settlement in France, presenting the 1394 expulsion decree as a severe injustice to a community that had lived in France and contributed to its wealth and development for 1,400 years.41 The next four centuries, between 1394 and 1791, seem, in Berman’s presentation, like a temporary hiatus that eventually ended with the emancipation, which restored justice and the natural order. Berman’s book created a French-Jewish narrative that was accessible to the Jewish immigrants. He especially emphasized the mobilization of 13,000 Jews without French citizenship into the French army in World War I and their willingness to risk their lives for the country that had granted them asylum. A sourcebook compiled by the prominent Parisian historian, Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, serves as an outstanding example of an attempt to preserve historical memory and create a usable past as a source of community inspiration and comfort. Kaplan compiled hundreds of short, topically arranged excerpts from the writings of key figures in French history and culture that were related to Jews and Judaism. In the introduction, Kaplan explicitly states his point of view: shock at the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and an attempt to come to terms with it by clinging to the French legacy of opposition to anti-Semitism. Given the way in which French scholars—among whom were several who were considered to be antiSemitic—related to the Jews over the generations, he assessed that current attempts to turn the French against the Jews would fail.42 Kaplan presents anti-Semitism

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as an anti-French, anti-Christian, and anti-humanistic phenomenon—the starting point for an all-out attack against civilization. In a review of Kaplan’s work published in April 1938 in L’ Univers israélite, the journal of the liberal French-Jewish establishment, Raymond-Raoul Lambert43 emphasized Kaplan’s efforts to contribute to the development of a French-Jewish liberal usable past that would serve the founding principles of a Jewish republican ethos in its anti-Fascist struggle. Lambert related also to another aspect of Kaplan’s book—its potential use as a tool to acquaint Jewish immigrants with the French-Jewish heritage. Lambert encouraged readers of Kaplan’s book to derive from it a belief in eventual progress, viewing the current anti-Semitic wave (his review was published shortly after the Anschluss) as a temporary eclipse that would not long darken the French sun of freedom. Lambert continued to affirm this optimistic belief in articles he published in various French journals until the war. Another French rabbi, Nathan Netter, compiled a documentary history of the Jews of Metz, the most important urban Jewish community in prerevolutionary France.44 Netter, who had served for decades as chief rabbi of Metz and the surrounding area, described the community as a microcosm of Jewish history in France. Drawing on documents from “two thousand years of the history of a Jewish community,” the subtitle he gave to his book, Netter strove to reinforce the Jews’ link to France in general. This objective is clearly stated in the introduction written by Georges Samuel, the president of the local consistory, who expressed optimism about the future of the Jews in the area despite unfortunate contemporary trends.45 Netter’s work is another example of reinforcing rather than changing the basic narrative of emancipated French Jewry. After depicting Jewish life in early medieval Metz as a stronghold of Christian-Jewish fraternity, Netter related briefly to Jewish suffering during the Crusades and then devoted greater attention to the modern era, especially the revolutionary period.46 The Parisian Yiddish press was a central element in the public life of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who constituted about half of all the Jews in France in the 1930s. Although neither the Yiddish writers nor their readers could identify directly with French-Jewish history, they used it, nevertheless, in order to connect themselves to the fundamental symbols of the French-Jewish past or to examine them critically. Coming from an Eastern European Jewish political culture that was deeply attached to the French Revolution, they viewed France, and especially Paris, as symbolizing universal values. During the 1930s, those who wrote for the immigrant press and shaped the immigrants’ public opinion developed their own interpretations of the French past. This figured prominently in the two Yiddish newspapers published in Paris, Parizer haynt, the journal of the federation of the immigrants’ organizations that tried to combine moderate Jewish nationalism and Jewish integration in France, and its Jewish communist rival, Naye prese.47 Unlike local French-Jewish communal figures, immigrants’ spokespersons were not inclined to obscure the internal French dispute about the legacy of the French Revolution and the memory of 14 July. Instead they clearly turned to this legacy in support of their political agenda. This strategy was prominent in the articles

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of Marc Jarblum, a key figure in the federation of the immigrants’ organizations and an ardent socialist and Zionist, who also served as a political analyst for Parizer haynt. In his view, the fate of French democracy following the violent events in Paris of 6 February 1934—a mass demonstration of right-wing elements against the newly formed government of Daladier, which was seen by many as an attempt at a Fascist putsch—was now unequivocally intertwined with the future of democracy all over Europe. The struggle was not only against the external enemies of the revolution’s legacy (i.e., Nazi Germany) but was also an internal French struggle. A victory of the right-wing forces and the Action Française, he added, would result in the eradication of fundamental human and civil rights and of the values of the great revolution of 1789; it would harm the peace and would bring chaos to all of Europe.48 Other Yiddish writers turned more systematically than Jarblum to French-Jewish history. For example, a series of more than seventy articles on French-Jewish history was published in the Parizer haynt in 1935–36. 49 The publication of such a long series was designed to offer Yiddish readers a widely popular version of French-Jewish history. In another series of articles published in Parizer haynt in the spring of 1937 that dealt with the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, Joseph Hollander expressed a more critical view, which was especially clear in the third article of the series in which Hollander evaluated Alsace-Lorraine Jews’ treatment of Jewish immigrants and refugees in France in the 1930s. The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine behaved, according to Hollander, like a poor person who has made a fortune, aspires to integrate among the wealthy, and therefore alienates his former brethren who remind him of his impoverished origins.50 As the external and internal crises became more severe, a twenty-part series of articles in Parizer haynt about the Jews during the French Revolution expressed the immigrants’ view of the revolutionary legacy. In these articles, which were published between April and July 1938 by Wolf Wieviorka, the author did not merely present an historical overview of the period but also drew parallels to contemporary problems. It is only natural, he argued in the opening article published a few weeks after the Anschluss, that Fascism, which was leading the current crusade against the values of the French Revolution, combined the general anti-democratic struggle and an attempt to abolish Jewish emancipation.51 In the ensuing articles Wieviorka emphasized the major struggles that preceded the emancipation, implying that the struggle itself was part of the revolutionary legacy.52 He also portrayed the general French public as having embraced emancipation approvingly and sympathetically and characterized the anti-emancipation opposition in the revolutionary era as mostly the product of conservative and religious right-wing groups.53 This description corresponded to the way Jews in France understood their situation in 1938. Wieviorka also presented the revolution’s dark side, as manifested predominantly during the Reign of Terror. He nevertheless concluded his series by stating that such destructive events were only temporary episodes, whereas the revolution had bestowed civil equality on the Jews and inculcated universal humanitarian

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values. This legacy, he affirmed, would eventually defeat the tyranny and barbarism of the twentieth century.54 As France marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1939, Parizer haynt again discussed its legacy and the war that followed it (predominantly the great French victory in the Battle of Valmy) in the context of what seemed an increasingly inevitable confrontation with Nazi Germany.55 In contrast to the center or moderate left political views of spokespersons for the immigrants’ federation in Parizer haynt, Jewish communist figures writing in the journal Naye prese developed their own, more radical interpretation of French and French-Jewish history. Formerly alienated from French political culture, Yiddishspeaking Jewish communists were influenced by the position adopted by French communists in the mid-1930s and sought to relate more actively to the French national myths and to form their own version of the revolutionary legacy.56 On 14 July 1937, Naye Prese devoted a few pages to mark the date that now stood for two anniversaries—the 148th Bastille Day and the second anniversary of the Parisian mass demonstration that had brought about the establishment of the Popular Front. A few weeks earlier, in June 1937, Leon Blum’s government had fallen as a result of internal disagreements between its partners. Naye prese’s commentator, A. Rayski (the pseudonym of the young communist activist Adam Raigadski [b. 1914], who emigrated from Poland to France in 1932) accentuated the contemporary meaning of the 1789 legacy, presenting it as a highly disputed element in the 1930s. In Rayski’s view, 14 July, the historical symbol of the assault on absolutism, was institutionalized as a French national holiday but had lost its real meaning.57 Subsequent French regimes had tried to make the people forget the true significance of the revolution; only more recently, i.e., on 14 July 1935, had this day once again become a day of freedom in its original sense. Fascism is our century’s Bastille, asserted Rayski, and, as in 1789, so too in 1935—only a coalition of the working class with the petit bourgeoisie (i.e., communists, socialists, and radicals, the political components of the Popular Front) would be able to defeat it. Jewish communist writers’ appeal to French history was prominent in a special volume of Naye prese published in February 1939 to mark the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the revolution. Various articles discussed French-Jewish history in the revolutionary era and the Jews’ involvement in the revolution from a Marxist perspective.58 For example, one writer asserted that the events of the revolution did not peak in 1789 but later, in 1793–94; he presented its radical leaders, primarily Robespierre, as the real historical heroes. 59 In sum, attempts to refer to history and use past images to cope with the present’s challenges were much more explicit in the 1930s Yiddish press, which was more ethnically Jewish and tied to Eastern European political culture. Eastern European Jewish immigrants’ turn to French and French-Jewish history reflected their effort to legitimize their presence in France and develop an active, positive attachment to their new homeland without necessarily giving up their Jewish political and ethnic legacy.

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Hungary: The Usable Past of the Neologs vis-à-vis the Decline of Emancipation Most Hungarian Jews—both in the Neolog (liberal) stream, which was led by the Pest community, and in the Western Modern Orthodox stream (but not the more traditional, eastern Hungarian Orthodox)—underwent an accelerated process of Hungarian acculturation in the last decades of the nineteenth century.60 During the liberal dual monarchy era in Hungarian history (1867–1914), Jewish historians portrayed the Hungarian national tradition as distinctively tolerant toward the Jews; important Hungarian kings and statesmen were presented as pro-Jewish cultural heroes; and the Jews’ deep roots and loyalty to Hungary throughout the generations were emphasized, creating the impression that historically, anti-Semitism was fundamentally distant from and alien to the Hungarian nation.61 Hungary’s defeat in World War I and the subsequent series of revolutionary events deeply transformed its political culture and led to the decline of Hungarian liberalism and the rise of a conservative Christian regime.62 This transformation negatively affected the status of Hungarian Jews—a process whose clearest expression was the 1920 numerus clausus law aimed at reducing the number of Jews in universities. Despite an orientation toward nonliberal and even anti-Semitic positions in mainstream Hungarian historiography, Hungarian-Jewish historiography, even after World War I, adhered predominantly to liberal values and an optimistic faith in the future of emancipation.63 Such views were challenged by the harsh events in Germany of the late 1930s, by the escalation of anti-Semitism in Hungary, and by the country’s political and military alliance with Nazi Germany. In the late 1930s Hungarian politics was characterized by a struggle between the conservative rightwing establishment, which had a relatively mild anti-Semitic orientation, and the Arrow Cross Party, whose racial anti-Semitism was modeled after that of National Socialism and posed an existential threat to Hungarian Jews.64 In these difficult circumstances, the central camp of Hungarian Jews, with its two streams—the liberal Neolog and the Orthodox—still clung to the forms of historical memory that had been shaped in the era of emancipation. After the Nazi rise to power, Hungarian-Jewish publicists began to question whether those developments were the result of forces unique to Germany. In speculating on the implications for the future of emancipation specifically and the idea of progress in Jewish history in general, they were implicitly questioning whether similar events might occur in their own homeland. Ernő Ballagi (b. 1890), a Neolog publicist and member of the editorial board of Egyenlőség (Equality), the main journal of the Neolog community, attempted to ascertain the deeper meaning of events in Germany through an imaginary dialogue between two voices. One, an optimistic voice, still believed in the ultimate victory of progress, viewing the events in Germany as no more severe than the pogroms in Russia; the other, a pessimistic voice, portrayed German anti-Semitism as the strongest in many centuries, exposing the idea of progress as an empty vessel.65 A

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year later, when the Nazi regime marked its first anniversary, Ballagi inclined to the more optimistic view because the crisis was limited to German Jews.66 Rabbi Samuel Löwinger expressed a different interpretation in 1934 in Magyar Zsidó Szemle, the yearbook of the Budapest rabbinical seminary. Löwinger viewed the current calamities as typical of unstable revolutionary periods that the Jews had experienced in the past and would continue to endure in the future. “For the Jews,” he stated, “there is no antiquity, Middle Ages, or modern era, not even the latest modern times.”67 Löwinger did not, however, apply this pessimistic assessment of Jewish history to the question of the future of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. As new doubts concerning the validity of the concept of progress were voiced at the margins of the Jewish liberal discourse, many other Hungarian-Jewish figures continued to cling to the more optimistic pre–World War I narrative of modern Jewish history. For example, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Samuel Kohn’s book on the history of Hungarian Jews was marked in 1934 by a favorable examination of Hungarian-Jewish historiography based on the values of the emancipation.68 Retelling the Jewish struggle for emancipation in Hungary and highlighting the philosemitic attitude of central figures from the Hungarian national historical pantheon figured prominently in Egyenlőség. In 1935–36, this liberal Jewish weekly published two series of historical articles entitled “The Hungarian Jewish Past” (“Magyar zsidó múlt”) and “Unfamiliar Pages from Jewish History” (“A zsidó történelem ismeretlen lapjai”).69 Furthermore, in an effort to counter the rising tide of anti-Semitism, allusions to nineteenth-century Hungarian national historical figures such as Lajos Kossuth and Sándor Petőfi can also be found in Orthodox and even Zionist journals.70 Various Hungarian-Jewish periodicals described the struggle over delineating the past as an integral part of the Jews’ broader political struggle for their civil status and future. In early 1937, for example, Egyenlőség reported dangerous attempts by the fascist Arrow Cross to revise Hungarian history and impugn the reputation of those who had emancipated the Jews in the nineteenth century. Egyenlőség urged Jewish organizations in Hungary to unite in defending the legacy of Kossuth, Petőfi, and the other heroes of the 1848 liberation struggle, the formative event of Hungarian liberal nationalism.71 At approximately the same time, István Virág wrote in Libanon, a more intellectual and scholarly journal: “It is a luxury to claim today that historiography is a discipline in and of itself. Jewish history in Hungary, especially the history of the emancipation era, is particularly important at this time, when Hungarian Jewry is fighting for reemancipation —i.e., the full reestablishment of liberal emancipation and a halt to the attempts to curb or repeal it.”72 Adherence to the emancipation era resounded during the public debates regarding the proposed laws to limit the Jews’ participation in the country’s economic and cultural life, laws that later were known as the First Jewish Law (1938) and the Second Jewish Law (1939).73 Samu Stern, head of the Neolog community in Pest and president of the Neolog Communities of Hungary, published a pamphlet entitled “The Jewish Question in Hungary.”74 Stern’s historical outlook was based on the premise that Jews were not newly arrived migrants from abroad but were

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long-time residents who had lived in Hungary before the Magyar conquest in the ninth century. Moreover, Stern depicted the era of the founding of the Árpád dynasty that ruled Hungary until the early fourteenth century as the first golden age of Hungarian Jewry. At that time, he wrote, the Jews had many privileges and made important contributions to the country. Hatred of Jews, Stern asserted—in much the same manner as other Jewish writers at the time—had always been alien to the Hungarian national character. Reflecting his reading of the situation in the spring of 1938, Stern portrayed medieval anti-Semitism as an alien movement that had been imported to Hungary chiefly from Germany, where the rulers had repressed the Jews.75 Basing his picture on earlier Hungarian-Jewish historiography, Stern merely adapted old ideas of the Neologs to the new reality in which Germany became the center of European anti-Semitism. About a year later, after the enactment of the Second Jewish Law, which was much harsher and defined Jews in racist terms, an anonymous Neolog spokesman commented very differently, bidding farewell to a bygone era while concurrently adhering to the Hungarian-Jewish historical heritage as a source of consolation. In an article published in May 1939 in the new Neolog journal Magyar Zsidók Lapja, the author described a visit to the Jewish Historical Museum during which he viewed the original text of the 1867 Emancipation Law.76 The encounter evoked glum reflections regarding the upheavals of Jewish fate, but he also expressed thoughts of hope and comfort in contemplating the passing of eras, changes in the spirit of the times, and the way in which Jewish fate is decided: How rapidly the happy days come to an end, and long eras with deep shadows follow the short periods of light. I heaved a big sigh. Suddenly a stranger looked at me as though he was reading my thoughts. He told me: “Don’t sigh. The seventy-one years and five days that stand between these two laws will have to be examined from a historical perspective. . . . There is no better place than the Jewish Museum to try to understand the upheavals of fate. Look,” he continued to speak, now with a pedagogical and confident voice, “every document here, from the time of the Árpád dynasty, describes how ages of our agony were always, ultimately, followed by bright days.”

Whereas Stern continued to cling to the traditional Neolog positions, this commentator adopted a new, more sober and realistic position concerning the concept of progress. Like Fritz Friedländer and Bruno Weil in Germany, a cyclical view of Jewish history, in this case in Hungary, is implied as an alternative, reassuring model to the failed narrative of linear progress and emancipation in order more reliably to interpret present events and future threats. In the late 1930s, Hungarian Neolog figures, most notably the outstanding Jewish essayist Endre Sós, more openly criticized the Hungarian-Jewish path of emancipation, but without rejecting the very ideas of emancipation and integration. In 1939, after the enactment of the Second Jewish Law in Hungary, Sós wrote a hard-hitting article criticizing the erroneous concept of assimilation that, he asserted, for several decades characterized the majority of Hungarian Jewry,

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who tragically denied their religious and national-ethnic background in order to participate in the culture of their homeland. “We Hungarian Jews,” he wrote, “were good Hungarians and bad Jews.”77 An additional Neolog critic of Hungarian Jewish history was the literary historian, writer, and poet Aladár Komlós, who articulated views on the development of Hungarian-Jewish literature in the Hungarian-Jewish yearbook Ararát, which he edited between 1939 and 1944.78 Like Sós, he called for an initiative to develop a more balanced and solid Hungarian Jewish identity. It should be emphasized, however, that such critical Neolog positions were minority voices within the Neolog camp. Most Neolog spokesmen continued during the early 1940s, and even in spring 1944, to cling to the traditional emancipation narrative and to the nineteenth-century cultural heroes.79

Commemorative Anniversaries—A Comparative Perspective Jewish writers from all three countries in the 1930s and (in Hungary) in the early 1940s also mobilized commemorative anniversaries as part of their effort to legitimize Jewish emancipation or at least to comfort their readers after its decline. Indeed, anniversaries of major events, institutions, and historical figures had been used consistently by Jewish spokespersons in order to express their attachment to their new homelands, to emphasize their deep roots, and to mark various stages in the development of Jewish emancipation. For example, the anniversaries of the birth and death of Moses Mendelssohn were discussed extensively in the GermanJewish press; French Jews turned again and again, especially around 14 July, to the memory and legacy of the revolution and its impact on Jewish history; and Hungarian spokesmen marked major events in Hungarian-Jewish history such as the 1848–49 Hungarian liberation struggle (szabadságharc).80 In the 1930s, the tendency to mark anniversaries and emphasize their meaning in the current political situation was intensified. In 1933 and 1934, the German-Jewish press marked several relevant anniversaries, of which the nine hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Worms synagogue was the most prominent.81 Participants at a central ceremony included members of the “national representation of German Jews” (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden), headed by Rabbi Leo Baeck. The Reichsvertretung’s special greeting to the Worms communal board emphasized the historical importance of the anniversary, as it represented the long association of German Jews with the German soil (Boden) and spirit (Geist) and the long road that led them “from a very meaningful past to the present and the future.”82At the same time, the local communal board’s introduction to the special anniversary volume of the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland emphasized the uniqueness of the Worms synagogue—the only one in Germany and in all of Europe that had been continuously active since the Middle Ages. Worms exemplified Jewish communal strength and vitality in contrast to the lethargy caused by the contemporary situation.83 An article by

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Offenbach’s liberal rabbi Max Dienemann illustrates the attempt to use the Worms anniversary for delivering a contemporary message. Dienemann suggested that the history of the Worms community epitomized the entire history of the Jewish people, typifying not only Jewish suffering in times of persecution but also Jewish participation in Germany’s bourgeois life in better times—a possible hint to the ability of the 1930s German Jew to survive their crisis.84 It is noteworthy that the attitude toward the Worms anniversary highlighted disagreements between liberal and Zionist interpreters of Jewish history. Dienemann and other liberal spokespersons who favored a nonlinear interpretation of Jewish history presented Worms as a model of “ancient emancipation.” Depicting the “ancient emancipation” era as a prologue to the modern one created the impression that the Jews’ integration in Germany was the normative path of history whereas their exclusion in the late Middle Ages and, implicitly, in the Nazi period was no more than a temporary deviation from this path. The publicist and educator Moritz Spitzer criticized this interpretation in the Zionist weekly (later biweekly) newspaper Jüdische Rundschau. Spitzer considered that the Jewish liberal spokespersons missed the true meaning of the Worms anniversary, which he said served to express both the strong spirit of Jewish survival in exile and the power of its sacrifice under external pressures. In contrast to the liberals’ attempts to link the Worms synagogue’s history to the modern emancipation era, Spitzer connected it to the martyrdom of the great Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva and his disciples who were killed by the Romans following the Bar Kokhba revolt in second-century Judea. 85 In marking some anniversaries, the German-Jewish press reinterpreted the accomplishments and life stories of Jewish and non-Jewish historical figures in the light of present needs. This continued the German-Jewish legacy of a “pantheon of heroes” that had originated in the late eighteenth century.86 The most prominent of those anniversaries was the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Moses Mendelssohn’s death, in January 1936. That anniversary, only seven years after the two hundredth anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth but under entirely different historical circumstances, gave Jewish publicists a new opportunity to reshape his image. Although the participants in the 1929 anniversary had been fully justified in celebrating Mendelssohn’s achievements, which seemed valid at that time, in 1936, after the Nuremberg Laws had canceled the results of the emancipation, there was an opportunity to understand Mendelssohn in a different way. Thus Fritz Bamberger, a central figure in the Jewish liberal culture and education system, rejected the image of Mendelssohn as the “founding father of emancipation,” presenting him instead as the “founding father of modern Hebrew.” 87 Such an image of an apolitical Mendelssohn with greater doubts about the German-Jewish synthesis could be a much more useful icon for those Jews who needed to accept the loss of the nineteenth-century political achievements than the 1929 portrayal of him as the founding father of Jewish emancipation. Mendelssohn was the most prominent of many historical figures, including Jews such as David Friedländer, Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, as well as non-Jews

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such as Wilhelm von Humboldt—considered one of the founding fathers of Jewish emancipation in Germany—whose legacies were debated by various German-Jewish writers.88 In addition, Jewish thinkers, primarily from 1935 onward, began writing and reflecting on the legacy of non-German Jews of earlier generations. In the nineteenth century, German Jews had developed a “myth of Sephardic supremacy” that was tied to the historical memory of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) and Don Isaac Abravanel, the most prominent representatives of the Sephardic Jewish legacy.89 Anniversaries of their births, in 1935 and in 1937, gave German-Jewish intellectuals an opportunity to reassess their legacy vis-à-vis the current crisis.90 The CV Zeitung also published a long series of biographies in a section called “Jewish Figures in Their Epochs,” in 1935–36. Major historians and publicists, including Ismar Elbogen, Isaak Heinemann, Max Wiener, Fritz Friedländer, and Ludwig Feuchtwanger, contributed articles about a variety of historical Jewish figures, from the biblical Moses and David to Jewish leaders in the early modern period.91 Another series entitled “Personalities in Jewish History,” which mainly highlighted Talmudic scholars, was published in the Jewish communal journal of Berlin and, later, of Frankfurt. Most of these biographical articles were written by the young, Polish-born rabbi Abraham Heschel, who later became an important Jewish theologian and philosopher in America.92 It is noteworthy that liberal authors harked back to the ancient Jewish sages much more frequently than did the Zionists, who were more focused on the development of the Jewish national home in Palestine. In contrast to the centrality of historical heroes in the German-Jewish cultural memory, the French-Jewish one was based more on formative historical events, first and foremost the French Revolution. French Jewry, however, also included the representation of key figures from their history as part of their cultural memory and adapted them to meet contemporary needs and challenges. The most prominent non-Jewish figure in the French-Jewish “pantheon of heroes” was the priest Abbé Henri Grégoire, who was fundamentally associated with the French-Jewish struggle for emancipation during the revolutionary era. The one hundredth anniversary of Grégoire’s death, on May 28, 1931, provided the supporters of the republic, including the Jews, with another opportunity to commemorate him not only for his stand against anti-Semitism but also as an icon of Jewish emancipation in France.93 One writer in L’Univers israélite asserted that marking Grégoire’s centenary was the appropriate Jewish reaction to the Hitlerian propaganda against Jewish immigration that had also spread to France.94 Grégoire’s legacy was seen as a guarantee, in contrast to the alarming developments in Germany, that there was no chance for an anti-Semitic revival in France. It is crucial to remember Grégoire’s legacy, especially nowadays, when the political rights of so many Jews are being denied in the name of racism, asserted one writer in an article published to mark the 1937 memorial day.95 In addition, the writers in the French-Jewish press dealt quite extensively with the figure of Adolph Crémieux, the founder of Alliance Israélite Universelle, president of the Central Consistory, and minister of justice of France, who was portrayed as the most prominent Jewish representative of

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the French emancipation’s legacy and a person who struggled for Jews’ political rights outside of France as well.96 French Jews’ appeal to the legacy of the French Revolution peaked in 1939, as France marked the revolution’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Starting in February 1939, the French-Jewish press began to follow the preparations for the celebrations, repeatedly emphasizing Jewish support and participation.97 The writers in the Yiddish press, which tended, as we have seen, to use the past more explicitly, seized upon the anniversary as a suitable occasion to encourage their readers to believe that the true French values would eventually win. For example, in January 1939, an article in the Parizer haynt expressed the hope that the celebration of the revolution’s anniversary, at a time when the dark forces were trying to obliterate its spirit, would contribute to a reawakening in France. Joseph Milner was optimistic about the stability of the revolutionary legacy, asserting that no Koblenz (i.e., the anti-revolutionary monarchic-aristocratic alliance of the late eighteenth century) and no fascism would be able to defeat it.98 In commemorating a variety of anniversaries linked to Hungarian national history, Hungarian Jewish anti-Nazi spokespersons emphasized the difference between the Hungarian and German national legacies, implying that the events in Germany should not have a direct impact on Hungary. The 15 March Memorial Day for the Liberation Struggle in 1848–49 and “the ideas of March” were major symbols for the activities of an anti-fascist Hungarian political coalition (Márciusi front) that opposed the alliance with Nazi Germany and characterized it as an affront to the Hungarian national heritage.99 Similarly, in an editorial article marking 15 March, which was observed in 1938 in the shadow of the grim news of the Anschluss in neighboring Austria and the discussion surrounding the First Jewish Law in Hungary, the Jewish journal Zsidó Élet argued that 15 March’s values of liberty, equality, and fraternity continued to stir hearts in Hungary, which—unlike its neighbors—had not lurched to the right.100 Even in 1944, a few days before the German occupation, Neolog spokesmen continued to associate 15 March with Hungarian national independence and freedom along with non-Jewish Hungarians who used this historical symbol to oppose cooperation with Nazi Germany.101 Another anniversary that was particularly noted by Hungarian-Jewish spokespersons was the nine hundredth anniversary of the death of King Stephen (St. Stephen for the Catholics), who, according to Hungarian tradition, had been crowned by the pope in the year 1000. Their approach clearly demonstrates their efforts, similar to those of Catholics and Protestants, to shape Hungarian history and heritage to fit their own needs and worldviews.102 In the figure of King Stephen, the Jews pointed to a unique Hungarian Christian legacy that included justice and tolerance toward the Jews. In line with the tendency to attribute all of Hungary’s woes to German influence, Bernát Heller, a teacher at the Neolog rabbinical seminary in Budapest, alleged there was a contradiction between the humanistic legacy of St. Stephen and the more parochial patrimony bequeathed by Charlemagne, the medieval lawgiver of the German tribes. The Hungarian legislation enacted by the first king was formulated in conjunction with the bishops and the subjects,

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asserted Heller, and thus emerged as a tradition that could not be reconciled with the practices of contemporary dictators—a clear allusion to Hitler’s and perhaps even to Szálasi’s (leader of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party) pretensions.103 Ernő Munkácsi, the director of the Jewish Museum in Budapest and a major spokesman for the liberal Neolog stream, contended that unlike other countries, St. Stephen’s kingdom was not based on a racial (faji) concept but on the national (nemzeti) idea and, therefore, developed a tolerant and inclusive policy towards the Jews. This approach had been successfully put to the test when an Árpád king closed the borders to an embittered Christian rabble—mostly German—during the Crusades and another king granted Jews political rights at a time when no other European ruler did so.104 Such views provide a key to Munkácsi’s interpretation of the situation in Europe in 1938 and his hope that the future of Hungarian Jews would be different from those under German rule. The nineteenth-century Hungarian statesman who was most identified with the emancipation was József Eötvös. In the summer of 1940, the Jewish press marked the one hundredth anniversary of his essay on Jewish emancipation. It is true, Ernő Ballagi asserted, that some of Eötvös’ ideas had become outdated, but his deep love for the discriminated Jews of his time had not. A hundred years ago, he stated, those who struggled against the emancipation were primarily materialistic and narrow-minded, whereas the broader interest of national development was linked to the Jews’ integration. Ballagi thus clearly indicated his view of the present (1940) situation.105 A few months later, in February 1941, the editors of Magyar Zsidók Lapja commemorated the seventieth anniversary of Eötvös’s passing by calling him “our closest friend in Hungary from the previous century.” They also published a segment from his 1840 essay, which they described as “the nicest words ever written on our behalf and for our freedom.” 106 Hungarian-Jewish liberal spokespersons often related to other Hungarian national heroes such as Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the 1848–49 liberation struggle. A few days before the Nazi conquest of Hungary, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kossuth’s death, 16 March 1944, an editorial in Magyar Zsidók Lapja referred to him as the figure “whose name represents forever the ideals of national independence, the nation’s freedom, general and proportionate sharing of taxation, and equality before the law.”107 Even István Széchenyi, the most prominent Hungarian statesman of the Reform age (the second quarter of the nineteenth century), who had explicitly expressed his reservation about the naturalization of the Jews in Hungary, in the early 1840s, was presented in Magyar Zsidók Lapja in August 1941 as pro-Jewish.108

Conclusion This chapter presents certain aspects of the public discourse of emancipated European Jewry during its final years of crisis and decline. It shows how Jewish

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spokespersons continued to use central elements from the homemaking myths that had been developed during the “golden years” of emancipation in Germany, France, and Hungary even during the decline of the emancipation era and on the eve of the Holocaust. The political crisis motivated thinkers in all three communities to turn to the past for the sake of the present—both as part of the Jews’ political struggle and in order to comfort their Jewish readers. Although historical circumstances in each instance were unique, there were also significant parallels in the reactions of Jewish liberals in Germany, France, and Hungary. Spokespersons for the integrationist liberal camps—the mainstream of interwar German, Hungarian, and local French Jewish communities—all employed similar strategies, to a certain degree, when determining how to represent the past. Writing in the Jewish liberal presses in Germany, France, and Hungary, which served as the central arena for the creation and dissemination of the usable past, Jewish spokespersons, many of them rabbis who were trained in Jewish history at the modern rabbinical seminaries in Breslau, Berlin, Paris, and Budapest, emphasized the deep historical roots of Jewish life in their homelands. Many articles attempted to present Jewish integration into the surrounding society as characteristic of the local national legacy. This picture was facilitated by depicting key figures in the national history as active supporters of Jewish emancipation. These forms of a usable past built upon the orientations shaped in all three communities during the nineteenth century and developed them further. The racial, anti-Semitic policy of the Nazi regime in Germany motivated liberal Jewish writers in France and Hungary to differentiate between the German national history and legacy and that of their homelands, in an attempt to demonstrate why the events in Germany would not repeat themselves in their homelands. This tendency continued in Hungary in the first year of World War II, until the eve of the Holocaust in that country. In France, not only the local Jews but also the spokespersons of the immigrants forged and disseminated a French-Jewish usable past, in addition to their use of the revolutionary legacy. Certain liberal Jewish spokespersons (predominately, but not only, in Germany) diverged from the tendencies to continue and reinforce the elements of a usable past that were developed in the golden era of emancipation. Acknowledging the fallacy of the idea of linear progress, those writers used the past as a tool for interpreting the harsh present events as part of a wavy or cyclical movement in Jewish history. The images of the past that are presented here were not only part of the liberal Jews’ political struggle against external threats on their civil rights. They were also part of internal Jewish struggles between the liberal orientation in each of the three Jewish communities and alternative visions, elaborated predominantly by Zionist and Orthodox circles—a topic that is beyond the scope of this chapter. In short, one can say that during those harsh years, the usable past served as a central tool to strengthen the Jews’ self-consciousness in times of crisis, to impart meaning to their experiences, and to offer comfort to Jewish readers.

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Notes A different version of this chapter was published originally in Hebrew in the journal Iyunim bitkumat Yisrael/Studies in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel 18 (2008): 307–339. 1. Moritz Stern, “Brauchen wir eine historische Zeitschrift,” Central Verein Zeitung (CVZ), 22 February 1929. 2. See also Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit, 2011). 3. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago and London, 1992). 4. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, UK, 1989); see also John R. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994). 5. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992). 6. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982). 7. See, for example, David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, 1999). 8. Hobsbawm’s position was presented in Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK, 1983). For Anderson’s and Smith’s positions, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1993); Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH, 2000). 9. Orm Øverland, Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870–1930 (Urbana and Chicago, 2000), 7–8, 175. 10. Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Oxford and Portland, 2002), 9–70. 11. See, for example, Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH, 1994); Michael A. Meyer, “The Emergence of Jewish Historiography,” in idem, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Modern Jewish History and Religion (Detroit, 2001), 44–63; Shulamit Volkov, “Inventing Tradition: On the Formation of Modern Jewish Culture,” in Jewish Studies at the Central European University 3 (2002–2003): 211–27; Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison, 2005), 66–78. 12. Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges, (Munich, 1980): 26–27; Dietmar Schirmer, Mythos-Heilshoffnung-Modernität, Politisch-kulturelle Deutungscodes in der Weimarer Republik (Opladen, 1992); Erich Wittenberg, Geschichte und Tradition von 1918–1933 (Lund, 1969), 279–80. 13. Andrea Hopp, “Das Jahr 1929: Erinnerung und Selbstverständnis im deutschen Judentum,” Trumah 7 (1998): 113–34. For a more extensive discussion, see Guy Miron, “Between History and a ‘Useful Past Picture’: Representations of the Jewish and the German Past in the Jewish Liberal Historical Discourse in Weimar Germany,” Zion 66 (2001): 297–330 (in Hebrew). For different tendencies of Jewish intellectuals during the Weimar period, see Steven Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (London, 1996), 31–44. 14. The research literature about Jewish life in Nazi Germany is very extensive; see, for example, Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4, Renewal and Destruction, part 2 (New York, 1998); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York and Oxford, 1998). 15. On the Jewish press in Germany in the first years of the Nazi regime, see Herbert Freeden, The Jewish Press in the Third Reich (Providence, 1992); Katrin Diehl, Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich: Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung (Tübingen, 1997). 16. CVZ, 17 May1934, 14 June1934, 28 June 1934, 12 July 1934, 26 July 1934, 9 August 1934, and 30 August 1934. 17. Ismar Elbogen, “Jüdisches Schicksal in Deutschland im 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert,’’ CVZ, 28 June 1934.

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18. Max Eschelbacher, “Der deutsche Jude und der deutsche Staat,’’ Der Morgen, February 1933, 414. 19. C. Seligmann (Gemeinderabbiner), “Ein Glück, Jude zu sein? Zum Schowusfest,’’ Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, June 1933. 20. See, for example, Selma Stern, “Eine kulturgeschichtliche Skizze,’’ Der Morgen, April 1933, 30–41; Stefan Fraenkel, “Geschichte lehrt Gegenwart,’’ CVZ, 19 April 1934; M. Fr., “Regensburg im Mittelalter,’’ CVZ, 19 July 1934. 21. Ismar Elbogen, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Berlin, 1935). 22. Fritz Friedländer, “Elbogens ‘Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland,’’’ Der Morgen (November 1935): 369–71. 23. Ismar Freund, “Grundlagen der Emanzipation,’’ CVZ, 7 November 1935; Ismar Freund, “David Friedländer und die politische Emanzipation der Juden in Preussen,’’ Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 6 no. 2 (1936): 77–92. 24. Marina Sassenberg, Selma Stern (1890–1981), Das Eigene in der Geschichte (London and Tübingen, 2004), 188–95. 25. See her remarks in Selma Täubler-Stern, “Das Judenproblem im Wandel der Zeiten,” CVZ, 7 November 1935. 26. Fritz Friedländer, “Der Geschichtsunterricht in der jüdische Schule,” CVZ, 10 May 1934. 27. Fritz Friedländer, “Hemmung und Ziel jüdischer Geschichtsforschung,” CVZ, 6 September 1934. 28. Fritz Friedländer, “Jüdische Assimilation im Zeitalter der Emanzipation,” CVZ, 30 August 1934. 29. Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden (Berlin 1934). See also in this context, Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography—The German and Early American Years, ed. Michael A. Meyer (Bloomington, 2007). 30. “Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden, Angezeigt von Rabbiner Dr. Manfred Swarsensky,” CVZ, 16 November 1933. 31. Bruno Weil, Der Weg der deutschen Juden (Berlin, 1934), 13. 32. Fritz Friedländer, “Eine Charakterbild in der Geschichte, Zu Wilhelm Grau: ‘Wilhelm v. Humboldt,’” CVZ, 7 November 1935. 33. K.L.[most likely Kurt Loewenstein], “Zwei Seiten der Judentum, Was wollen die Juden?” Jüdische Rundschau, 13 February 1934; “Die deutsche Judenheit des spätmittelalters,” Israelitisches Familienblatt, 15 November 1934; Hans Liebeschütz, “Zur Frage des jüdischen Geschichtsbildes von heute,” Gemeindeblatt der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde zu Hamburg, 12 June 1936. 34. Jay R. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia, 2004), 219–30; Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971), 86–121. 35. For an overview of the history of the Jews in France during the interwar period, see Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1998), 137–59. 36. David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago and London, 1977), 46. 37. For possible allusions to contemporary conditions in a sermon given by the chief rabbi of Strasbourg to mark 14 July, see “Le quatorze juillet au temple consistorial: Un émouvant sermon de Mr. Le Grand-Rabbin,” La Tribune juive, 17 July 1936. 38. On French politics and public opinion, as well as the dilemma of French-Jewish leaders with regard to the question of Jewish immigration to France during those years, see Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, 1999), mainly chapters 4, 5, and 6. 39. H. Prague, “Une histoire qui recommence,” Archives israélites, 16 March 1933. 40. Leon Berman, Histoire des Juifs de France des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1937), 7–8. 41. Ibid., 207. 42. Jacob Kaplan, Témoignages sur Israël dans la littérature française (Paris, 1938), 4–7.

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43. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, “La thèse d’Israel dans la symphonie française,” L’ Univers israélite, 8 April 1938. 44. Nathan Netter, Vingt siècles d’histoire d’une communauté juive (Metz et son grand passé) (Paris, 1938); Metz was a model Jewish community for other Alsatian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see Berkovitz, Rites and Passages, 19. 45. Georges Samuel, “Préface,” in Netter, Vingt siècles, xii. 46. Netter, Vingt siècles, 152–83. 47. On the Yiddish press in Paris during the interwar period, see Shmuel Bunim, “La presse yiddish parisienne dans l’entre-deux guerres: un miroir du monde du travail,” Archives Juives 33, no. 2 (2000): 47–66. 48. M. Jarblum, “Der politisher krizis in frankraykh,” Parizer haynt, 9 February 1934. On the events in Paris of 6 February 1934, see Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London, 1995), 140. 49. A. Gelernter, “Di geshikhte fun di yidn in frankraykh,” Parizer haynt, series of articles from 1935 to 1936. 50. Joseph Hollander, “Yidn in elzas-lotringen” Parizer haynt, 30 March 1937. 51. W. Wieviorka, “Yidn in der frantsoyzisher revolutsiye” (part 1), Parizer haynt, 8 April 1938. 52. W. Wieviorka, “Yidn in der frantsoyzisher revolutsiye” (part 3): “Der kamf far emantsipatsiye,” Parizer haynt, 17 April 1938; (part 8): “Parizer komune shikt a delegatsiye tsu der natsional farzamlung,” Parizer haynt, 13 May 1938. 53. W. Wieviorka, “Yidn in der frantsoyzisher revolutsiye” (part 11): “Vi azoy di yidishe glaykhbarekhtikung iz opgenumen gevorn,” Parizer haynt, 7 June 1938. 54. For various references to the negative phenomena, see W. Wieviorka, “Yidn in der frantsoyzisher revolutsiye” (part 14): “Der religiezer teror,” Parizer haynt, 24 June 1938; (part 15): “Yidn in der ‘kult fun seykhl,’” Parizer haynt, 1 July 1938; (part 17): “Ekonominsher teror,” Parizer haynt, 26 July 1938; for the closing article of the series, see (part 20):”Nokhn termidor,” Parizer haynt, 12 August 1938. 55. Y. Chomsky, “Frankraykh hot tsurikgefunen ir koyekh,” Parizer haynt, 16 July 1939; Yoysef Kruk, “150 yor nokh der frantsoyzisher revolutsiye,” Parizer haynt, 16 July 1939. See also in this context similar opinions by Bundist interpreters: Zh. Sl., “Di simbolishe mil in valmi,” Unzer shtime, 30 June 1939; Y. Goles, “Di yerushe fun dem yor 1789,” Unzer shtime, 23 June 1939. 56. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 39–40, 120–21. 57. A. Rayski, “A groyse date,” Naye prese, 14 July 1937. 58. See, for example, Y. Panin, “Frantsoyzishe revolutsiye gibt yidn glaykhbarekhtikung,” Naye prese, Anniversary edition, February 1939, 20–21. 59. Aren Bekerman, “Hundert fuftsik yor frantsoyzishe revolutsiye,” Naye prese, Anniversary edition, February 1939, 20–21. 60. For a detailed historical survey of the religious streams in pre-Holocaust Hungarian Jewry, see Kinga Frojimovics, “Who Were They?: Characteristics of the Religious Streams Within Hungarian Jewry on the Eve of the Community’s Extermination,” Yad Vashem Studies 35, no. 1 (2007): 143–77. 61. Nathaniel Katzburg, “Jewish Historiography in Hungary” (in Hebrew), Sinai, 40 (1956/57): 113–26, 164–76. 62. Concerning the impact of the war’s outcome on Hungarian political culture, see Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest, 1999); Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 108–36. 63. Katzburg, “Jewish Historiography in Hungary,” 116–20. 64. For an overview of Hungarian anti-Semitism and Jewish reactions during the interwar period, see Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943 (Ramat Gan, 1981). 65. Ernő Ballagi, “Párbeszéd 1933 nyarán,” Egyenlőség, 22 July 1933.

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66. For an article concerning the first anniversary of the Nazi regime, see Ernő Ballagi, “Goethe és Hitler,” Egyenlőség, 3 February 1934; for Ballagi’s criticism of the positions of Zionist spokesmen in Germany regarding assimilation and a return to roots, see Ernő Ballagi, “Disszimiláció,” Egyenlőség, 19 May 1934; Ernő Ballagi, “Cséplő és jégverés (Válasz a cionista sajtónak),” Egyenlőség, 9 June 1934. 67. Samuel Löwinger, “Hitlerizmus és bojkottmozgalom a XVI. század második felében,” Magyar Zsidó Szemle 51 (1934): 295–329; citation from 329. 68. Fülöp Grünwald, “A magyar zsidó múlt histórikusai,” in Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (IMIT) Évkönyv (1934): 208–25. 69. For articles from these series, see, for example, “Deák Ferenc és a zsidóság,” Egyenlőség, 12 October 1935; “Bethlen Gábor és a zsidók,” Egyenlőség, 21 December 1935; “Különös világ Európában 140 év előtt,” Egyenlőség, 27 February 1936. 70. For an Orthodox example, see “Ha Kossuth ma élne . . . ,” Zsidó Újság, 15 January 1937. For a Zionist example, see Ármin Beregi, “Petőfi és a zsidók, Marcius 15- re,” Zsidó Szemle, 9 March 1934. 71. “Nemzetgyalázás! A Királyi Kúria a nyilaskeresztes izgatás ellen,” Egyenlőség, 14 January 1937. 72. István Virág, “A magyar zsidó történettudomány célkitűzéseihez,” Libanon, Zsidó tudományos és kritikai folyóirat 2 (1937): 145–48. It is noteworthy that German Jews expressed similar attitudes during the political struggle before the Nazi rise to power; see, for example, Hans May, “Subjektive Geschichtserkenntnis,” Jugend und Gemeinde, Beilage zum Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Gemeinde Frankfurt a. Main (October 1932). 73. On the political process that led to the enacting of these laws and the public discourse around them, see Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews, 94–157. On the Jewish discourse during these debates, see also Guy Miron, “History, Remembrance, and a ‘Useful Past’ in the Public Thought of Hungarian Jewry, 1938–1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004): 131–70; Anna Szalai, “Will the Past Protect Hungarian Jewry? The Response of Jewish Intellectuals to Anti-Jewish Legislation,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004): 171–208. 74. Samu Stern, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon (Budapest, 1938). For a brief discussion of Stern’s pamphlet, see Nathaniel Katzburg, “Zionist Reactions to Hungarian Anti-Jewish Legislation, 1939–1942,” Yad Vashem Studies (1984): 162. 75. Stern, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, 6. 76. G.G., “Megható látogatás a zsidó-múzeumba,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 4 May 1939. 77. Endre Sós, “Bevezetője,” Magyar zsidó írók dekameronja (Budapest, 1939), 5–14, citation from 13. 78. See, for example, Aladár Komlós, “Előszó,” Ararát, magyar zsidó ékönyv (1941): 6–8 and Aladár Komlós, “Zsidóság, Magyarság, Európa,” Ararát, magyar zsidó ékönyv, (1943): 24–27. 79. For example, see “Március 15-ének ünneplése a budapesti izr. templombam,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 21 March 1940; Ernő Ballagi, “Egy eszme és könyv centennáriuma, Báró Eötvös József: A zsidók emancipációja [1840],” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 1 August 1940; “Március tizenötödikét,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 9 March 1944; “Kossuth,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 16 March 1944. 80. On the history of Mendelssohn’s anniversaries, see Christhard Hoffmann, “Constructing Jewish Modernity: Mendelssohn Jubilee Celebrations Within German Jewry, 1829–1929,” in Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen, 2003), 27–52. On the French Jews’ celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the revolution, see Pierre Birnbaum, The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy (Stanford, 1996), 115–16. On the views of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in France concerning the revolution, see Nancy L. Green, “La révolution dans l’imaginaire des immigrants juifs,” in Histoire politique des Juifs de France, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris, 1990), 153–62. For an example of Hungarian Jews’ attitude to the legacy of 1848, see Béla Bernstein, A negyvennyolcas magyar szabadságharc és a zsidók (Budapest, 1898). 81. On the unique place of Worms in the German-Jewish cultural memory and in German-Jewish tourism, see Nils Roemer, German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (Waltham, MA, 2010), 71–141.

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82. “Glückwünsche an die Wormser Gemeinde,” CVZ, 31 May 1934. For a report about the central ceremony and the speeches, see “Die Neunhundertjahrfeier der Wormser Synagoge,” Israelitisches Familienblatt, 7 June 1934. 83. “Der Vorstand der israelitischen Religionsgemeinde Worms, ‘Zum Geleit,’” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1935): 85. 84. Max Dienemann, “Die Geschichte der Einzelgemeinde als Spiegel der Gesamtgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1935): 115–21. 85. M. Spitzer, “Die 900-Jahr-Feier in Worms,” Jüdische Rundschau, 8 June 1934. 86. On the “pantheon of heroes” of the German-Jewish Enlightenment movement, see Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Oxford and Portland, 2002), 50–60. 87. Fritz Bamberger, “Moses Mendelssohn, Zur 150. Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” CVZ, 3 January 1936. 88. For a more comprehensive discussion on this topic, see Guy Miron, “The Emancipation Heroes’ Pantheon in German-Jewish Public Memory of the 1930s,” German History 21 (2003): 476–504. 89. Feiner, Haskalah and History, 53–55; Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 47–66. 90. See, for example, Fritz Bamberger, “Sinn des Maimonides-Jubiläums,” CVZ, 28 March 1935; Seligmann, “Zum 800. Geburtstag des Moses ben Maimon, Das Leben des Maimonides,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt (April 1935); Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Die Welt der Abarbanel,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 20 June 1937; Ismar Elbogen, “Don Jsaak Abarbanel,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 7 February 1937. 91. See some twenty articles under the title “Jüdische Gestalten und ihre Zeit,” which were published in CVZ from 21 February 1935 to the summer of 1936. 92. See the articles written by Abraham Heschel in the section “Persönlichkeiten der jüdischen Geschichte,” for example, in Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 8 March 1936, 29 March 1936, 12 April 1936, 26 April 1936, 17 May 1936; Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, January, February, March, June, November 1938. 93. Alyssa Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2005), 222–23. For an overview of the ceremonies in various Jewish communities in France, see “La célébration du centenaire de la mort de l’Abbé Grégoire,” L’ Univers israélite, 5 June 1931, 12 June 1931; “L’Abbé Grégoire,” La Tribune juive, 5 June 1931; “La Centenaire de l’Abbé Grégoire,” La Terre retrouvée, 25 May 1931. 94. Pierre Paraf, “Français . . . Juif . . . Israélite,” L’ Univers israélite, 29 May 1931. 95. “A la Mémoire de l’Abbé Grégoire,” Samedi, 19 June 1937. 96. See, for example, G. Bernard, “Une noble intervention de Crémieux en faveur de chrétiens massacrés,” L’ Univers israélite, 24 November 1933; “Un professeur de patriotisme Adolph Crémieux,” La Tribune juive, 25 May 1934. 97. Pierre Geismar, “Cent cinquante ans,” L’ Univers israélite, 3 February 1939; L. D., “La cent cinquantième anniversaire de la révolution française,” La Tribune juive, 12 May 1939. 98. Yoysef Milner, “89 . . . , 150 yor frantsoyzishe revolutsiye,” Parizer haynt, 13 January 1939. 99. On the importance of 15 March as a cultural symbol in the struggle of Hungarian intellectuals against the Nazi influence, see Árpád Von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte, Geschichte. Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europäischen Kontext (1860–1948) (Munich, 2003), 311–15. 100. “Március 15,” Zsidó Élet, 16 March 1938. 101. “Március idusán .  .  . ,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 14 March 1940; “Március 15-ének ünneplése a budapesti izr. templombam,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 21 March 1940; “A szabadság napját,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 12 March 1942; “Március 15,” Képes Csáládi Lapok, 15 March 1942; “Március tizenötödikét,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 9 March 1944.

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102. Concerning the Catholic and Protestant discourses during this era and the variety of meanings that were attached to St. Stephen, see Árpád von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte, 273–77; Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary, 148–54. 103. Bernát Heller, “Szent István éve,” Zsidó Élet, 9 July 1938. 104. Ernő Munkácsi, “Szent István,” Egyenlőség, 11 August 1938. 105. Ernő Ballagi, “Egy eszme és könyv centennáriuma, Báró Eötvös József: A zsidók emancipációja [1840],” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 1 August 1940. 106. “Báró Eötvös József beszél . . . ,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 13 February 1941. 107. “Kossuth,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 16 March 1944. 108. “Gróf Széchenyi István és a zsidóság,” Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 14 August 1941.

Chapter 14

Three Jewish Émigrés at Nuremberg Jacob Robinson, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin

Michael R. Marrus

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By exploring three very dissimilar Jewish perspectives that emerged at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, this chapter will present a different slant on the Holocaust at Nuremberg. I shall examine three Jews who appeared at Nuremberg, each of whom had a lasting, although utterly different impact—three Jews, each of them a lawyer, each of them an émigré from an Eastern Europe ravaged by the slaughter of Jewish people during the war, and each, in his own way, drawing an important conclusion from the catastrophic events that had just occurred.1 In doing so, I hope to dispel the mistaken notion that there was one set of Jewish interests at the time, and one alone. One need hardly point out, particularly to those who appreciate the work of Steven Aschheim, that this is seldom the case.

Three Jewish Émigrés The three Jewish “lobbyists,”2 if I may call them that, are Jacob Robinson of the Institute of Jewish Affairs; Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, the Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, arguably the most distinguished and influential living exponent of that discipline at the time of Nuremberg; and Raphael Lemkin, who was without a permanent job at the time but had been appointed to the War Crimes Office of the Judge Advocate General’s Office in the Pentagon and was on the fringes of the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson’s very large Nuremberg staff. At Nuremberg, these three complex, not easily classifiable individuals offered three quite different perspectives on the Jewish catastrophe. These views involve reflections upon the meaning of Nuremberg to

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them and others. To a significant degree, they represent three directions that are still followed to this very day. Their perspectives, each part of the broader legacy of the place of the Holocaust at Nuremberg, can be summarized as follows: Robinson focused on what he called “the Jewish case,” Lemkin on genocide, and Lauterpacht on human rights. Interestingly, despite their differences, their backgrounds were similar: all three were Eastern European trained lawyers, although Lauterpacht also had a doctorate from the London School of Economics; all three attended the trial for a certain amount of time, although I cannot precisely ascertain whether or for how long they may have overlapped; and all three were associated in some way with Jackson. Lauterpacht knew the American Supreme Court judge the longest, but the other two were in contact with him in the run-up to the London Conference that drafted the Charter of the International Military Tribunal.3 And finally, it should be added, in addressing Nuremberg issues all three worked against the grain of public and juridical opinion. “Contrary to conventional assumptions,” writes Samuel Moyn in a necessary corrective, “there was no widespread Holocaust consciousness in the postwar era.”4 Each of our lobbyists had to struggle to make his voice heard on the significance of the Jewish catastrophe of which they had all been a witness. Robinson, the eldest of the three, was born in 1889, in the Lithuanian village of Seirijai (pronounced Saray) and studied law at the University of Warsaw.5 Graduating in 1914, he fought in the Russian campaign against Germany and was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. A Zionist deputy in the Lithuanian parliament and chairman of the Jewish faction there, as well as being a Hebrew educator after the war, Robinson was active in minority affairs and became a legal advisor to the Lithuanian foreign office during the 1930s. A respected expert on international law, he represented Lithuania at the International Court in The Hague and took an active part in minority issues at the League of Nations. Escaping from Europe via Portugal in 1940, he came to New York with his family and in 1941 helped set up the Institute of Jewish Affairs, an arm of the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress. Lauterpacht, certainly the most famous of the three at the time, is considered by many to have been the founder of the modern discipline of international law.6 A few years younger than Robinson, he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the town of Żółkiew, outside Lwów, in Eastern Galicia, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was educated first at the Polish-language university in Lwów, which he left at the end of World War I when it came under Polish control and became Jan Kazimierz University. A brilliant student, Lauterpacht completed his doctoral degree in international law in Vienna, under Hans Kelsen, and then went to England in 1923, finishing a second doctorate at the London School of Economics, in 1925. He rapidly achieved success in his academic career, teaching first at the LSE and then the University of London. In 1938 he was elected to a chair at Cambridge, at the time the most prestigious such position in the English-speaking world.7 In 1944 he joined the British War Crimes Executive and became deeply involved in preparing the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that assembled at Nuremberg.

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Raphael Lemkin, the youngest of the three, was born in 1900, in the village of Bezwodne, some 250 kilometers northeast of Warsaw in what was then the Russian Empire, which later became eastern Poland and is now in Belarus.8 From a traditional Jewish environment, he and his family were familiar with the pogroms in nearby Bialystok and the famous Beilis case of 1911, together with the violent anti-Jewish outbreaks at the end of World War I. As Michael Ignatieff puts it, “Lemkin was born and raised in a place where it was a matter of life and death for a Jew to anticipate the worst.”9 After studying philosophy in Lwów, at Lauterpacht’s alma mater, he went on to obtain a degree in law at the University of Warsaw and to practice his profession there. Focusing on international law, he became active in European minorities issues while remaining loosely involved in Polish academic life. Then, lightly wounded in the campaign of 1939 against the German invaders, he escaped to Kaunas, in Lithuania, traveled to Vladivostok, and eventually reached the United States via Japan. Obtaining a temporary position at Duke University, in North Carolina, he joined the staff of the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington, in June 1942. All three, thus, shared a Yiddish-speaking, traditional Eastern European Jewish background; all three were profoundly and personally touched by the Holocaust, having known many of its victims before their own departure. One can probably apply to all of them what Samantha Power says about Lemkin, that they “belonged to a kind of virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses.”10 In the case of Robinson, from the time of his institute’s establishment, it assiduously collected material on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. His birthplace, Seirijai, a shtetl community in southern Lithuania where 1,800 Jews lived in 1914, endured a particularly horrifying fate: the entire population—men, women, and children—was shot on 10 and 11 September 1941. According to one author, “. . . 229 men, 384 women and 340 children, altogether 1,953 people, are buried in the mass graves about three kilometers from the town.”11 Lauterpacht, for his part, lost his parents, brother, sister, and their children there—his entire family except for one niece—murdered in the Generalgouvernement of Poland.12 At least one commentator, Professor Brian Simpson, links Lauterpacht’s turning to the unfashionable topic of human rights to this personal catastrophe and that of his people.13 And finally, Lemkin, according to his own account, eventually learned details about forty-nine members of his own family who perished in the Holocaust: some of the information about the catastrophe reached him only at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, when he finally met his brother who had survived the massacres.14

Three Paths at Nuremberg Robinson and the “Jewish Case” From the time of the establishment of the Institute for Jewish Affairs, Robinson and his team labored to make the “Jewish case”—collecting material and making

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the point that the massacre of European Jewry was a unique and distinct crime: “We have been working in this field for four and a half years,” he wrote to Jackson in June 1945, staking out not only his expertise on the matter but also his claim for the prominence of this atrocity in the trial that was being planned for Nuremberg.15 A close study of World Jewish Congress archive materials by Professor Mark Lewis sheds important light on Robinson’s tactical goals—in particular, his acquiescence to the American decision to present prewar anti-Semitism as a means of unifying the Nazi regime and helping clear the way for military aggression.16 Tactically, it made sense to go along with the American argument that spoke to the heart of Jackson’s case—a focus on aggressive war. But in more general terms, Robinson and the World Jewish Congress also wanted acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of the Germans’ crimes against the Jewish people as a whole—what he called the “collectivistic approach.”17 “The crimes committed against the Jews,” as Robinson explained to the institute’s staff in December 1944, “were . . . one collective crime directed against a people—a crime [that] started when Hitler took power.”18 At the heart of Robinson’s and the World Jewish Congress’s case was thus the notion of a grievously victimized Jewish collectivity—a new idea for many in 1945–46. “The ultimate goal of Nazi-German policies with regard to the Jewish people was nothing short of complete physical annihilation,” he noted in a report—an understanding that is commonly accepted today but which was little understood or appreciated at the time.19 And, similarly, Robinson claimed that the evidence collected by the institute left no doubt that Nazi policy “was aimed from the very start at . . . complete annihilation. . . .”20 Profoundly concerned with documenting this perspective, Robinson felt considerable satisfaction with the way in which this material was ultimately used at the trial. As he put it much later: “The evidence submitted [to the International Military Tribunal] in the Jewish case was overwhelming: more than eight hundred Nazi self-accusing documents . . . were presented and thirty-three witnesses were heard in addition to all defendants present. A careful analysis of this documentation leads inexorably to the conclusion of the existence of a conspiracy to destroy the Jewish people and its ruthless implementation, resulting in the death of some six million Jews, which constituted 75 percent of the Jewish population in Europe.”21

Lauterpacht and Crimes Against Humanity Lauterpacht, too, was seriously preoccupied with what we have come to term the Holocaust, although he hardly ever referred to it in his writings or his scholarship. Known for his restraint and academic formalism, he steered clear of public discourse on the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program—doubtless aware that his words likely would be taken, in the British legal establishment in which he moved, as a mark of inappropriate partisanship.22 He nevertheless shared Robinson’s sense of the Nazis’ distinct crimes against the Jewish people. In 1944, working to assist the

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World Jewish Congress, he ardently urged the British authorities to pursue Nazi war criminals when the war was over, and he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the London-based United Nations War Crimes Commission to establish a special unit to investigate anti-Jewish crimes.23 At Nuremberg, Lauterpacht was particularly moved by the presentation of evidence on the Jewish catastrophe. He found the trial an “unforgettable experience,” he wrote his wife. “The day of Jackson’s opening address was packed with emotion,” he continued. “It was a great satisfaction to watch the faces of the accused when Jackson was unfolding the story of the Jewish atrocities.”24 However Lauterpacht had a much broader perspective on which he had built his professional standing: the ultimate importance of the trial, he felt, was its promotion of natural law as the source of international legal norms, its implied challenge to state sovereignty, and its championship of the notion of an international rule of law. In addition to his articulate and learned case for the need to prosecute war crimes and to establish individual criminal responsibility, summed up in an influential article he published in the British Year Book of International Law in 1944, Lauterpacht’s distinct contribution to the Nuremberg Trial, written into article 6 of the IMT, is now widely recognized as having helped to formulate the notion of a tripartite definition of Nazi criminality (crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity) and, in particular, the idea of the latter—clearly one of the major legal innovations of the trial. The concept of “crimes against humanity”—which Jackson later referred to as having been suggested by an “eminent scholar of international law,” now acknowledged to have been Lauterpacht—was elaborated at the London planning conference that assembled in the summer of 1945 to plan the trial. It was developed because of the Americans’ concern to include Nazi crimes that while associated with the war, were committed before the outbreak of the conflict in 1939 and also were perpetrated against victims in the Germans’ own population.25 Lauterpacht also played an important role in drafting the speeches for his friend, the first British chief prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, and subsequently, when the Conservatives were replaced by Labour, his successor, the new attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross. The latter, interestingly, became a stout opponent of Raphael Lemkin’s drive for a genocide convention in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials.26

Lemkin and Genocide Genocide, in Lemkin’s historic conceptualization, was a universal plague, not derived merely from the destruction of European Jews. Lemkin traced his “discovery” back to a report prepared for an international legal conference in Madrid, in 1933. As Anson Rabinbach points out, this “set forth a narrative in which the concept of ‘genocide’ antedated and anticipated the murder of European Jewry. By locating the origin of the concept in the decade prior to the Holocaust, Lemkin

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could and often did disassociate the origin of the term from his personal experiences as a Jew and a Pole, situating it in the pre-Nazi (or early) Nazi era.”27 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Nazi wartime crimes against civilian populations and, in particular, what we now term the Holocaust, gave his ideas widespread public standing. Lemkin achieved this public recognition through his introduction of the term “genocide,” which he popularized in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in late 1944. Based on a careful study of German occupation regimes, Lemkin’s work was widely publicized and discussed in the lead-up to Nuremberg. Prominent reviews, together with supportive editorials in The New York Times and Washington Post, became calling cards for his case for the identification and punishment of the crime of genocide. And with these assets in hand, Lemkin was not afraid to go to the top. Immediately upon Robert Jackson’s appointment as American chief prosecutor by President Harry Truman, Lemkin contacted him and set out on a path that would take him to Nuremberg.28 Mainly through his own initiative as a tireless campaigner, Lemkin had some impact on the preparation of the trial, both through his book’s treatment of Nazi organizational responsibility and through its comprehensive presentation of the Germans’ attack on “racial minorities and subjugated populations.” While preparing for a major trial, War Department official Colonel Murray Bernays received an advance copy of Lemkin’s book from David “Mickey” Marcus, an American military officer and legendary war hero involved in the investigation of war crimes and the planning of postwar prosecutions.29 In the spring of 1945, when work on drafting details of the Nuremberg Trials was well under way, Lemkin’s work fit neatly into the detailed conceptualization. Jackson, says his biographer Professor John Barrett, even added the word “genocide”—in his own hand—in a planning memorandum prepared at a meeting in Washington, in May 1945.30 The very opposite of a team player, Lemkin found himself on the periphery of Jackson’s staff—”largely unsupervised,” as Barrett shrewdly notes, respected (at least by some) for his expertise but hardly involved in day-to-day planning or discussion and increasingly bothersome as he lobbied all and sundry to focus more attention on and to utilize his term genocide.31 Lemkin was obviously gratified when the indictments at Nuremberg referred to genocide in specifying the defendants’ crimes: “[The accused] conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others.” It should be noted that these acts were included under war crimes and not crimes against humanity—a reflection of the way in which these charges were understood at the time.32 Robinson, who, as we have seen, focused on the “Jewish case,” was unimpressed. Exasperated rather than elated, he implied to some notables from the World Jewish Congress in a confidential briefing in December 1945 that Lemkin was some sort of unwelcome interloper in the discussions: “Suddenly the idea of Genocide

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[Lemkin’s term] came into being, and the term was inserted into the document but was not developed. As an example of the application of the concept of ‘Genocide,’ ‘Jews and Gypsies’ were cited. When I saw that I got mad, because it so reeked of the Nazi method of humiliation of Jews by putting them in a class with the gypsies. It is a doubtful source of satisfaction that the word, ‘Poles,’ was inserted to make the phrase read: ‘Jews, Poles, and Gypsies.’”33 Already in the latter part of 1946, Lemkin was preoccupied by the prospect of the genocide convention and the need for its subsequent ratification.34 Before the end of the trial, Lemkin became completely absorbed by his project for the acceptance of the crime of genocide, traveling to conferences in Cambridge (where Lauterpacht was a prominent attendee), to Paris, and to Lake Success, New York, for a meeting of the UN General Assembly. Lemkin subordinated everything else to this campaign. Those who caught a glimpse of him at Nuremberg saw him as a driven man. He showed up there in June 1946, keen to persuade the British prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, to utter the term and to get the leading Soviet authority, Professor Aaron N. Trainin, onside.35 The young American soldier/attorney, Benjamin Ferencz, later a prosecutor himself, described Lemkin as a “nudnik”—a person whose dogged persistence on a matter turns him into a pest.36 Another American prosecutor, Henry T. King, Jr., who thought Lemkin was a “crank,” remembered running into him at the Grand Hotel: “At that time he was unshaven, his clothing in tatters, and he looked disheveled. . . . Lemkin was very upset. He was concerned that the decision of the International Military Tribunal . . . did not go far enough in dealing with genocidal actions.”37 More appreciative after the passage of time, William Korey saw him as “a one-person non-governmental organization to change the landscape of international law.”38 Commenting on Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s respective contributions, legal scholar Ana Filipa Vrdoljak notes that “the relationship between crimes against humanity and genocide remained problematic and confused,” a point that Lauterpacht clearly recognized. “Where genocide referred to atrocities committed against groups,” she continues, “crimes against humanity spoke of acts committed against its individual members.”39 Robinson’s third approach, as we have seen, focused explicitly on crimes against the Jews. There is no indication that the three ever discussed this issue or even overlapped at the Nuremberg proceedings they each attended. It is difficult to imagine the three sitting down together, let alone resolving their differences.

Common and Disputed Ground This section will explore the common and divergent perspectives developed by the three émigrés in reaction to the terrible news of the Jewish catastrophe. Starting with the obvious, all three could not help but respond as Jews; all three were deeply influenced by their Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. All three had been involved in Zionist politics as youngsters—and Robinson, whose affiliation lasted

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the longest of the three, even represented the Zionists in the Lithuanian parliament from 1922 to 1926. By the time of Nuremberg, Lauterpacht had only the most tenuous outward links to Jewish identity of the three, but there is no doubt that his early ties had been substantial.40 It is worth noting that when he lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1950, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the institution’s founding, he gave two lectures, one in English and one in Hebrew, a language that he had learned as a child.41 All three men came from polyglot regions of East Central Europe with turbulent and complex histories that were interwoven with potentially explosive issues of national, religious, and ethnic identities. Each of them grew up in a milieu that fostered a cosmopolitan outlook, favoring familiarity with many languages, nationalities, and cultures.42 All three had immediate, personal experience of the dreadful war that impacted their region so catastrophically and whose aftershocks continued beyond the “settlement” in Paris of 1919—no settlement at all for their region and their people. All three adopted international perspectives and sought legal solutions to the world’s ongoing problems. All three were supporters of the League of Nations system, especially its effort to protect minorities through the League’s minorities treaty regime. Like so many other Jews attracted by a secular education and engagement with the non-Jewish world, all three were drawn to the law, believing that it could resolve questions about ordering a world in which conflict constantly threatened but opportunity also beckoned. In particular, all three were liberal internationalists in the sense that they looked beyond national sovereignty for the ordering of international affairs, part of a general movement among interwar international lawyers, and Jewish international lawyers in particular, to oppose the vesting of all legal authority in nation states. All three, I believe, shared what the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi refers to as “the sensibility of a generation of lawyers who had grown up in the shadow of the First World War and [who] sought to make international law and organization the instruments of a global federalism within which peace, the rule of law and individual rights could be safeguarded.”43 All three, in some sense, hearkened to what Koskenniemi calls the Victorian tradition in international law: anxious when great forces threatened, they “looked back to the middle of the nineteenth century, hoping to resuscitate its liberal rationalism and its ideal of the rule of law, its belief in progress, its certainty about the sense and direction of history.”44 By the second half of the 1930s, Hersch Lauterpacht was the acknowledged theorist of such a legal project. Robinson, however, perhaps the least explicit of our émigrés on this point, was a coauthor, along with four others, of a 1943 book entitled Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? that viewed the League of Nations minorities regime as flawed and unfinished yet also a remarkably progressive effort to redress grievances and build an international structure of peace.45 Lemkin, the youngest of the three, who apparently became disillusioned even before the war with the functioning of the minorities treaties, sought a more muscular international order, and, according to his biographer, he devised a plan to criminalize

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concerted attacks upon helpless and peaceful groups.46 Note that it all came back to the law. In sum, all three shared what has been deemed “liberal cosmopolitanism,” a perspective widely shared among Jews in the interwar period, “for whom the only safe place was in the kingdom of the law.”47 Notwithstanding this common ground, one should not understate the ways in which their divergent views on Nuremberg derived from the fundamentally different conclusions our émigrés drew from the Jewish catastrophe. Each of them looked beyond Nuremberg, conscious of what they perceived as the trial’s legal shortcomings, deficiencies that spoke, in their opinion, to matters of fundamental concern. While generally satisfied with the place of the Holocaust at Nuremberg, Robinson seemed especially to regret the limitations that the tribunal put on crimes against humanity—notably that these were tied to war-making and war crimes. While understandably gratified at the presentation of evidence on the destruction of European Jewry, he lamented that Nuremberg had failed to consider this great crime “as a unit in fact and in law”—or, put otherwise, that “the Jewish case was not singled out as a specific crime but was drowned in the abstractions of Articles 6(b) and 6(c) of the Charter.”48 Differing from Robinson, Lemkin articulated German criminality as involving the destruction of all kinds of groups, not just Jews. With respect to Nazi crimes, he commonly referred to twelve million murdered and seven million uprooted from their homes and enslaved—numbers that encompassed other groups besides Jews, for whom the number six million was established and validated by Nuremberg.49 In a bold leap to what might have been, Lemkin apparently persuaded himself that had the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law held in Madrid in 1930 accepted his proposals, the accused at Nuremberg would have been convicted of crimes against humanity committed before the outbreak of war in 1939.50 Lemkin remained deeply unhappy that the Nuremberg judges did not see things his way and did not enshrine his term genocide in their judgment. He lamented that Nuremberg did not tell the world that “a national, racial, or religious group as an entity has the right to exist,” and later referred to the day in which the judgment was read as “the blackest day of my life.”51 Of the three, Lauterpacht turned out to be the one with the wind at his back—although it remains to be seen what the ultimate impact will be of the conclusion he drew from Nuremberg. For him, crimes against humanity were to be understood in a quite different sense than that of the strategists who drafted the Nuremberg Charter at the London Conference. Far from an afterthought included to capture some unfortunately neglected dimensions of Nazi criminality, these crimes were to be understood as violations of the very structure of individual human rights: “To lay down that crimes against humanity are punishable is . . . to assert the existence of rights of man grounded in a law superior to the law of the State. Thus, upon analysis, the enactment of crimes against humanity in an international instrument signifies the acknowledgment of fundamental rights of the individual recognized by international law.”52 A “major purpose of the war,” he wrote in 1944, had been the creation of an effective instrument

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for the protection of human rights. That year, with the material support of the liberal, internationally minded American Jewish Committee, he completed his important book, An International Bill of the Rights of Man, which appeared in 1945, to be followed by International Law and Human Rights five years later. Together these works had an impact on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950. Looking forward, Lauterpacht stood out among his peers as the most important academic promoter of the idea that the individual human being should be the subject of international law, with rights and duties rooted in the law of nations. According to Brian Simpson, Lauterpacht was “the only international lawyer of repute who had devoted serious attention to the idea of an international Bill of Rights, and [who had] published on this subject.”53 In making this case, Lauterpacht identified Nuremberg as a defining moment for the cause of human rights. His point was well illustrated—and significantly so because of the venue—at his Hebrew University lecture mentioned above. The cause of international law, he argued on that occasion, “the discipline of the rule of law among nations,” was tied up with developments at the end of World War II, in which Nuremberg was a major landmark. Of these developments, the three most important, which Lauterpacht referred to as the “Nuremberg principles,” were: (1) that the enforcement of international law must cover not only war crimes but also the crime of war itself; (2) that international law is concerned not only with the actions of sovereign states but also with the conduct of individuals; (3) the enactment, in the Nuremberg Charter, that offenses against humanity constitute an international crime and are subject to the jurisdiction of an international tribunal. It thus laid down the law that there are fundamental human rights superior to the law of the state and that their violation is a crime, even if committed in obedience to the law of the land.54 Following Nuremberg, Lauterpacht’s focus was neither the Jews nor groups, but rather individual human rights—for which he sought international protection through new institutional structures. Promoting the cause of international human rights, he worked as a consultant for the American Jewish Committee, notably joining a delegation to Paris in 1946 seeking to strengthen human rights provisions in postwar treaties and addressing the needs of the victims of Nazi persecution. In particular, Lauterpacht insisted on the fundamental importance of crimes against humanity, helping to transform the significance of those crimes into their present-day meaning as one of the most heinous kinds of criminal behavior. His argumentation on behalf of human rights was consistently learned and philosophically grounded, carrying on his scholarship of the interwar period. Reticent as always on Jewish issues, he had practically nothing to say explicitly about the Holocaust. But there seems no doubt about the link in his own mind between the murder of European Jews and his human rights project.

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Conclusion: The Jewish Context Our émigrés’s encounter with Nuremberg suggests that all three were profoundly affected by the destruction of European Jews even as they pursued quite different paths, each touching in some way on questions of rights that should be internationally guaranteed. Their common operational starting point, I argue, was their experience with the minorities regime of the League of Nations. It could not have been clearer from the terrible events of the war that something had gone quite wrong with this system. And the problem was not only Hitler. It was also the whole idea of attempting to fortify the rights of Jews and others by considering them “minorities” that should ultimately rely on international guarantees. “By 1945,” as historian Mark Mazower puts it, “many Jews, if they had not turned to Zionism, felt that being singled out as a minority was itself inviting trouble: better to stand—as they had done in the nineteenth century—on their rights as individuals.”55 In any event, as Jacob Robinson pointed out, “the problem of minorities in Europe was solved not by the League’s protection but largely by spontaneous or enforced repatriation, by mass expulsions, and by mass murder.”56 It thus was not surprising that acute observers such as our three émigrés struck out in some new directions. When it came to linking his perspective with that of the interwar order, Lauterpacht was, ironically, the most explicit of the three. I say “ironically,” because of the émigrés he had the least to offer—in fact, practically nothing—about the slaughter of European Jews, at least publicly. Nevertheless, in the preface to his 1945 volume, he set his work in that Jewish context. It was fitting, he wrote, that the American Jewish Committee “should have actively interested themselves in the problem of an International Bill for the Rights of Man. No people in history has suffered more cruelly from a denial of elementary human rights,” he wrote. He then went on to talk about the Jewish lobbyists of 1919: “At the end of the First World War representatives of Jewish organizations, from the United States and elsewhere, played a prominent part in securing the adoption of the Minorities Treaties—a significant step in the direction of the general international protection of the rights of man.”57 What was to be the counterpart of these treaties after the world war that had just ended? Robinson’s, Lauterpacht’s, and Lemkin’s work at Nuremberg may be understood as three different efforts to contend with the inadequacies of the interwar mechanisms for minorities’ protection on which all three had worked and which all three had supported in one way or the other during an early part of their careers. Robinson’s answer was to tie Jewish fortunes to the story of the Jewish catastrophe, seemingly in a belief that the moral effect of knowledge of the Holocaust, energetically promoted by the United States, would help achieve justice for a people so sorely wronged. This is doubtless what he meant when he gave a speech in London, before Nuremberg, on “The Jewish Political Agenda.” Facing a host of problems, Robinson sought at Nuremberg to achieve global recognition for the terrible suffering world Jewry had endured.58 Less bound to

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specifically Jewish perspectives, Lauterpacht and Lemkin looked to the trials for new structures of international law. Consistent with his longstanding critique of national sovereignty, Lauterpacht’s great cause was international human rights, defining their juridical and institutional platforms and seeking a way forward for their international acceptance. For him, Nuremberg’s insistence on the accountability of German war criminals was an important step on a path to achieving this goal.59 And finally Lemkin, for his part, saw in the cause of genocide the most fitting response to the global catastrophe. Consumed, not to say obsessed, by his project, he failed to appreciate much of the trial’s accomplishments or the significance of the 1948 UN General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lemkin could see nothing but genocide. Human rights were well and good, he thought, but as he protested a decade after Nuremberg, they “are concerned with different levels of existence, while genocide deals with nonexistence.”60 Notwithstanding these differences, each of the émigrés agreed that the postwar world order had to address, as a matter of priority, the most vulnerable. That was how they understood the significance of Nuremberg and its inescapable background of the Holocaust, both of which we continue to turn to as we seek answers to the problems of our time.61

Notes 1. In earlier works I attempted to show that much of what we now understand as the Holocaust— the persecution of the German Jews in the 1930s; the evolution of systematic, European-wide mass murder during World War II; the number six million; ghettoization; the rampages of the Einsatzgruppen; the death camps in Eastern Europe; the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto—became part of the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46 (certainly in the presentation of the American case) thanks in good measure to the tireless lobbying of Jacob Robinson and his associates at the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York, and to the willingness of Robert Jackson, the leader of the American prosecution team, to include this evidentiary material in the proceedings. See Michael R. Marrus, “A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–46,” Cardozo Law Review 27 (February 2006): 1651–65; idem, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 4–45. 2. I am acutely aware of the unintended pejorative connotation of the term “lobbyist” in countries with political systems different from those in Canada and the United States. In the context of this chapter, however, lobbying has, for the most part, a more positive resonance. 3. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal, or London Charter, as it became known, dated 8 August 1945, emerged from negotiations in London between representatives of the Great Powers who were to participate in the Nuremberg tribunal. The charter set the terms for the trial of the major German war criminals and the proceedings of the Nuremberg court. 4. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 7. 5. See Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen, “Jacob Robinson,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven and London, 2008), 2: 1567–68; idem, “Im Dienste der jüdischen Nation. Jacob Robinson und dass Völkerrecht,” Osteuropa 58 (August–October

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2008): 279–94; Dov Levin, “Jacob Robinson,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York, 1990), 3: 1286. 6. Martti Koskenniemi, “Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960),” in Jurists Uprooted: German-speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain, ed. Jack Beatson and Renhard Zimmermann (Oxford, 2004), 601–61. See also Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, QC, FBA, LLD (Cambridge, UK, 2010). 7. Hans Kelsen et al., “Hersch Lauterpacht,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 10 (1961): 2; Stephen M. Schwebel, “Hersch Lauterpacht: Fragments for a Portrait,” European Journal of International Law 2 (1997): 306. 8. John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Houndmills, England and New York, 2008); William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York, 2001). 9. Michael Ignatieff, “The Danger of a World Without Enemies: Lemkin’s Word,” The New Republic, 21 February 2008. 10. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 1993), 31. 11. Josef Rosin, Preserving Our Litvak Heritage: A History of 31 Jewish Communities in Lithuania (League City, TX, 2005), 444. 12. Koskenniemi, “Hersch Lauterpacht,” 639; A.W. Brian Simpson, “Hersch Lauterpacht and the Genesis of the Age of Human Rights,” Law Quarterly Review 120 (2004): 53; see also Lauterpacht, The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, 208 ff. On 7 December 1942, Lauterpacht wrote to his wife, Rachel: “I am writing this letter in a slightly sentimental mood. It is 6 p.m. on a Sunday and I have been fasting all day. It is the Day of Fast and Intercession for the murdered Jews in Poland, and I felt I would like to join in. My very dear ones are there, and I do not know whether they are alive. And the situation there is so terrible that it is quite conceivable that they may prefer death to life. I have been thinking the whole day about them.” (Lauterpacht, The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, 220.) 13. Simpson, “Hersch Lauterpacht,” 53. 14. Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, 72. 15. Minutes, meeting of the World Jewish Congress with Robert H. Jackson in New York City, 12 June 1945, Records of the World Jewish Congress, Jacob Radler Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, (hereafter WJC Archives), Truman Presidential Museum and Library (hereinafter TPML), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945. Retrieved, 6 September 2005. 16. Mark Lewis, “The World Jewish Congress and the Institute of Jewish Affairs at Nuremberg: Ideas, Strategies and Political Goals, 1942–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 36 (2009): 182–210. 17. Marrus, “Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg,” passim; Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 191–92. According to Lewis, “The collectivistic approach meant that the overall attempt to eradicate the Jews as a people was recognized, rather than concentrating on individual crimes in an ‘atomistic’ fashion” (“World Jewish Congress,” 200). 18. Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 192. 19. Report, “Criminal Conspiracy Against the Jews, Part Two: Successive Stages of the Crimes Committed Against the Jewish People,” n.d., WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate=1945–00–00&documentid=C192–2-3&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=1 Retrieved, 7 September 2005. 20. Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 188. 21. Jacob Robinson, “The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust: Some Legal Reflections,” Israel Law Review 7 (January 1972): 6. 22. Martti Koskenniemi, “Lauterpacht: The Victorian Tradition in International Law,” European Journal of International Law 2 (1997): 244. 23. Hersch Lauterpacht, “The Law of Nations and the Punishment of War Crimes,” in Guéaël Mettraux, ed., Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trial (Oxford, 2008), 13–54; Martti Koskenniemi, “Hersch Lauterpacht and the Development of International Criminal Law,” Journal of International

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Criminal Justice 2 (2004): 811; Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 190; Lauterpacht, Life of Lauterpacht, 246. 24. Lauterpacht, Life of Lauterpacht, 277. 25. See Koskenniemi, “Hersch Lauterpacht,” 639–40; Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law, Being the Collected Papers of Hersch Lauterpacht, ed. E. Lauterpacht (Cambridge, England, 1970–78), 5: 483; Lauterpacht, Life of Lauterpacht, 272. 26. Koskenniemi, “Lauterpacht: Victorian Tradition,” 244; Lauterpacht, Life of Lauterpacht, 277. 27. Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Uprecedented—Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 406. 28. John Q. Barrett, “Raphael Lemkin and ‘Genocide’ at Nuremberg,” in The Genocide Convention Sixty Years after its Adoption, ed. Christoph J. M. Safferling and Eckart-Alexander Conze (The Hague, 2010), 35–54. 29. Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York, 1987), 12. 30. Barrett, “Raphael Lemkin and ‘Genocide,’” 39. 31. Barrett, “Raphael Lemkin and ‘Genocide,’” 43. 32. Indictment, The United States et al v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al, in Robert H. Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals (New York, 1946), App II, 111, 137–38. 33. General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial, Thursday, 6 December 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www. trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate=1945–12–06&documentid=C14–16–1&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=1 Retrieved, September 6, 2005. See also Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 199–200. 34. Rabinbach, “Challenge of the Unprecedented,” 402. 35. Lewis points to Lemkin’s success in this regard, noting that supporting material was also passed along to Sir Hartley Shawcross (Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 207). 36. Quoted in Korey, Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin, 25. 37. Henry T. King, Jr., Benjamin Ferencz, and Whitney R. Harris, “Origins of the Genocide Convention,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 40 (2008): 13. 38. Korey, Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin, iii. 39. Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, “Human Rights and Genocide: The Work of Lauterpacht and Lemkin in Modern International Law,” (2008), available at http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1015&context=ana_filipa_vrdoljak; last retrieved, 13 May 2010. 40. Koskenniemi provides some details on Lauterpacht’s background: “While his parents were ‘extremely orthodox,’ he himself was not very devout. However, he received complete instruction in the Torah, spoke Yiddish and Hebrew with ease and could chant the Passover service in the Ashkenazi style. In Lwów he had been active in the Zeire Zion movement . . . and had worked for the establishment of a Jewish Gymnasium. Anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews at the University of Lwów compelled his move to Vienna in 1918, where he became the first president of the newly established World Federation of Jewish Students. According to his son, Professor Elihu Lauterpacht, he was neither ‘Austrian’ nor ‘Polish.’ His identification was Jewish” (Koskenniemi, “Lauterpacht: Victorian Tradition,” 228–29, n. 80). 41. Lauterpacht, International Law, 3: 416. At least for some in the audience, the manner of the Whewell Professor did not seem particularly Jewish. “‘What good Hebrew he speaks for a Goy [a non-Jew],’ observed someone who was there” (Lauterpacht, Life of Lauterpacht, 339). 42. Vrdoljak, “Human Rights and Genocide,” 6. 43. Koskenniemi, “Hersch Lauterpacht and the Development of International Criminal Law,” 823. 44. Koskenniemi, “Lauterpacht: Victorian Tradition,” 216. 45. Jacob Robinson, Oscar Karbach, et al., Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? (New York, 1943). 46. Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, 24. 47. Rabinbach, “Challenge of the Unprecedented,” 416. 48. Robinson, “International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust,” 1–13.

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49. Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, 71. 50. Korey, Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin, 33. 51. Ibid., 25. 52. Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (London, 1950), 36. 53. Simpson, “Hersch Lauterpacht,” 63, emphasis mine. 54. Lauterpacht, International Law, 2: 166–67. 55. Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Journal of Modern History, 47 (2004): 388. 56. Jacob Robinson, “International Protection of Minorities: A Global View,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1 (1971): 80. 57. Hersch Lauterpacht, An International Bill of the Rights of Man (New York, 1945), vii. 58. Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 208–9. 59. See Hersch Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights (London, 1950), 4. 60. Quoted in Rabinbach, “Challenge of the Unprecedented,” 411.

Chapter 15

The Frankfurt School and the “Jewish Question,” 1940–1970 Anson Rabinbach

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Characteristically, Gershom Scholem once called the Frankfurt School a remarkable “Jewish sect.”1 Scholars have often seized upon his comment to point to “the Jewish elements in the teachings of the Frankfurt School,” as if this group of philosophers and academics set out to distill a particular “Lehre” or set of Jewish-socialist teachings for future generations.2 It is undeniable that virtually all of the central figures of the Institut für Sozialforschung had, to one degree or another, grown up in a Jewish milieu. The varied Jewish backgrounds of the Frankfurt School members have been closely analyzed, most extensively by Jack Jacobs, demonstrating that there was no direct connection between the degree to which its members had been given Jewish educations or were engaged in specifically Jewish activities and their later intellectual concerns.3 Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock’s families were moderately observant. Erich Fromm’s parents were Orthodox and provided him with a traditional Jewish education. Although a handful of Horkheimer’s youthful literary efforts demonstrate his clear anxiety about anti-Semitism, that particular issue seems to have disappeared by the time he became the institute’s director in 1931. Leo Löwenthal, by contrast, was raised in a secular anti-religious family but became Orthodox and, for a time, a Zionist, and was deeply involved in Jewish cultural and religious affairs in Frankfurt, after World War I. Despite his break with Zionism and Orthodoxy, he remained actively engaged in Jewish culture and politics until the early 1930s (as did Fromm). Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, of course, had only one Jewish parent and little, if any, Jewish religiosity (except through his contacts with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer).4 As a half-Jew declared a “non-Aryan,” (under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws), Adorno may have been particularly sensitive to anti-Semitism, though in mixed families, such

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sensitivity is no indicator of any positive knowledge of Judaism. In short, apart from the “elective affinity” that the predominantly German-Jewish intellectuals of the institute may have had for each other and apart from the occasional “Jewish” remark or joke, there was little evidence or significance of this fact in the institute’s Frankfurt-era writings. As Jacobs concludes: “The Institute per se did not devote sustained attention to Jewish affairs or to anti-Semitism during the Weimar years.”5 What, then, was the significance of the Jewish background of the members of the Frankfurt School? Martin Jay, Ralf Wiggershaus, and others have shown that Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern with anti-Semitism changed dramatically once they arrived in the United States.6 As early as 15 February 1938, eight months before Kristallnacht, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer, predicting that no country would admit the Jews who remained behind in Germany, and, with astonishing prescience, predicted that those who remained behind would be exterminated.7 In the summer of 1940 Horkheimer circulated the first proposal for a project on anti-Semitism, drafted by Adorno and himself, which he hoped would attract funding from Jewish organizations in the United States.8 One Jewish theme in particular, the Bilderverbot, or proscription on images, took on increasing theoretical importance during the writing of Dialektik der Aufklärung, where it became a key concept for Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of anti-Semitism and, ultimately, for their self-understanding of critical theory itself. The Bilderverbot is the link between the excursus “Elemente des Antisemitismus” and the larger project of the Philosophische Fragmente, as Dialektik der Aufklärung was still called during its drafting between 1939 and 1944. In 1942, Adorno formulated the basic idea as follows: “We must therefore grab the bull by the horns—in light of the truth—without having to elaborate on these things in our text because I nevertheless agree with you and Benjamin that the invisibility of theological truth is today an element of this truth.”9 The growing importance of the concept in subsequent years profoundly affected Horkheimer’s conception of his own narrative of critical theory, after his return to Frankfurt in 1949, and in Switzerland, where he retired in 1961. The accuracy of Horkheimer’s later penchant for inscribing critical theory in what might be called a Jewish narrative as opposed to one which emphasized its German Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment antecedents (Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx) can certainly be debated. There is, however, much evidence to suggest that during the fall of 1940 both Adorno and Horkheimer changed the way that they imagined their own project. I shall first briefly trace this development and then discuss how this altered perspective, which put anti-Semitism at the very center of the Dialektik der Aufklärung, affected their later thinking, especially in the postwar United States and upon their return to Frankfurt. The penultimate section of Dialektik der Aufklärung, “Elemente des Antisemitismus,” was composed in the summer of 1943, four years after work on the book had begun and after all the other sections had been completed. As was the case only with the first chapter, the “Elemente” section was a collaborative enterprise. Leo

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Löwenthal contributed to the first three theses, and it is likely that the remaining three, and certainly the fifth and most original thesis on “idiosyncrasy” and “mimesis,” were jointly dictated by Horkheimer and Adorno, in July 1943.10 The seventh thesis, added in 1947, was solely the work of Horkheimer. Not initially intended for the volume published in 1944, the “Elemente” are usually described as theoretical elaborations intended for the Institute for Social Research’s “anti-Semitism project,” which was started in 1939 and announced in the 1941 issue of the institute’s journal.11 The relationship between the “Elemente,” as we shall soon see, and the institute’s work in the United States, however, is far more complicated. Horkheimer’s first effort to confront the Jewish catastrophe was written in 1938 and published the following year. Die Juden und Europa was an imperfect but by no means wholly unpersuasive effort to connect the eruption of Jew-hatred in Europe with developments marking the transition from liberal capitalism to a new, administered, bureaucratic, and authoritarian order that declared the Jewish association with trade and commerce to be obsolete. The putative extinction of the sphere of circulation, so Horkheimer claimed, had rendered the Jews superfluous. As the representatives of individualism and the exchange principle, their very existence threatened the new mechanisms of administrative power: “The result is bad for the Jews,” he wrote, “They are being run over. Others are the most capable today: the leaders of the new order in the economy and the state.”12 Those perceptions, shared in one form or another by many other European Marxists who saw anti-Semitism as a kind of displaced anti-capitalism, turned out to be extremely short-sighted, a limitation that Dialektik der Aufklärung implicitly acknowledged in its refusal to attribute a primacy of economics in the genesis of anti-Semitism. As Horkheimer wrote to the British political philosopher Harold Laski in March 1941: “Just as it is true that one can understand anti-Semitism only from our society, so, too, it appears to me that it is becoming true now that society itself can be properly understood only through anti-Semitism.”13 The change was evident in a letter Adorno sent Horkheimer in August 1940, in which Adorno proposed to Horkheimer that the fate of the Jews, not the fate of the “bourgeois subject,” could indeed be the focal point of their joint enterprise: “Gradually it seems to me, in light of the latest news from Germany, that I can no longer detach myself from the thought of the fate of the Jews as a whole. Often it appears to me, as if all of that which we are used to seeing from the situation of the proletariat has been transposed to the Jews with terrible intensity.”14 If this is, indeed, the case, we might ask, does this not affect the argument of Dialektik der Aufklärung as a whole? Do the “Elemente” contain, as Wiggershaus suggests, the “hidden center” of the book? At first glance this seems historically implausible, as little attention was devoted to anti-Semitism during the first few months of work on what they then called the “dialectic book.” Nor was anti-Semitism mentioned in the internal institute memoranda at the time. “It appeared,” Wiggershaus comments, “as if Horkheimer and Adorno were still afraid of this theme.”15 No doubt, a decision to shift the focus of critical theory from the traditional Marxist questions of monopoly capitalism

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or class conflict to the fate of the Jews would have evoked skepticism among some of the institute’s more orthodox Marxist contributors such as Franz Neumann, for example, who wrote Adorno in 1940: “I can imagine, and I have done this in my book [Behemoth], that one can represent National Socialism without attributing a central role to the Jewish problem.”16 From the outset, Horkheimer saw a practical aspect to what he called the “Antisemitismus Projekt” in securing funding for a larger empirical study that would ensure the financial stability of the institute.17 At the same time, he remained skeptical of Adorno’s assertion that anti-Semitism was “integral” and not merely a phenomenon of the “totalitarian order.” Adorno’s concerns were of a different order. By placing the Jews and not “the individual” at the center of the narrative, the whole question of the role of the bourgeoisie in history would be displaced: “How would it be, if we let our book crystallize around anti-Semitism? That would mean the concretization and reduction that we have sought. It would furthermore enable us to engage a large part of the coworkers of the institute because anti-Semitism today really represents the central point of injustice and our sort of physiognomy must turn to the world where it shows its most horrible countenance. Finally, the question of anti-Semitism is the one that, in our writing, best fits this complex, without revealing anything about it.”18 Perhaps Benjamin’s death and the appearance of his philosophical testament provided Horkheimer and Adorno, as Wiggershaus notes, with a kind of “guiding star” around which to organize the constellation of themes—the fate of the exile, the fate of the Jews, and the catastrophe of civilization—that ultimately make up Dialektik der Aufklärung. To be sure, a few references to the “anti-Semitism project” antedated Benjamin’s death. A few weeks after Benjamin’s suicide, however, Adorno mailed Horkheimer what he called “a couple of completely unformulated thoughts on the theory of anti-Semitism,” accompanied by some remarks in which Adorno was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about his discovery. “We have arrived at a really important place,” he wrote, “namely, at a unified and nonrationalistic explanation for anti-Semitism.” Adorno had obviously been deeply engaged in the question of anti-Semitism and the Jews for some time. He characterized his “thesen” as something of an imaginary prehistory of anti-Semitism. “This primordial history [Urgeschichte] cannot, as Freud attempted, be psychological but must seek its origin in an archaic but socially real movement.” His portrayal of that prehistory emphasizes the Jews’ persistent nomadic existence long after the world consisted of permanent settlements. As “the secret gypsies of history,” he wrote, the Jews are a “prematriarchal” people whose lack of ties to the earth and to a fixed locale always threatened to subvert the ideals of civilized life: home, family, labor. From the standpoint of other peoples “the image of the Jew represented a stage of humanity that did not yet know labor, and all later attacks on the parasitic, thieving character of the Jews were mere rationalizations.” Here the Jews represent—in an argument that eventually found its way into the “Elemente”—not merely the “colonizers of progress” (Kolonisatoren des Fortschritts) nor the purveyors of a universal enlightenment but also the embodiment of the refusal to be “civilized” and submit

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to the primacy of labor. The Jews’ collective remembrance of “a land of milk and honey” is the “Jewish utopia.” What motivates anti-Semitism is not the desire for utopia per se but rather revenge on the Jews for establishing a taboo on that image—which, presumably initiates the Bilderverbot. “This prohibition is the origin of anti-Semitism, the expulsions of the Jews are attempts to imitate and realize the expulsion from Paradise.”19 Horkheimer responded enthusiastically to Adorno’s “nomad” theory of Jewish prehistory. The “nomad theory” found its way into the “Elemente” in a somewhat expurgated form, transformed from a desert diaspora to ocean-bound exile. In the Odysseus essay, written just one year later, the exiled, nomadic Odysseus is not merely the primordial “subject,” the bourgeois in nuce, but also the Hellenic prototype of Ahasverus, the wandering Jew. Odysseus reveals “the fate that the language of the cunning man, the middleman, brings down on himself.” He is described in terms that suggest the stereotype of the Jewish tradesman: he is a rootless wanderer, physically weak, deceitful, and babbles incessantly. In his excessive attachment to speech, to language, Homer embodies in his hero, as did the eternal Jew, “the calamity which the enlightened word brings on itself.”20 The “Semitic element” of The Odyssey is also suggested in a footnote that echoes the theme in Odysseus that “the feudal lord bears features of the oriental merchant” (“trägt der Feudale die Züge des orientalische Kaufmanns”).21 At first glance, the “Elemente” reiterates Freud’s claim that it is ultimately the special character of the Jewish religion that has made the Jews and the anti-Semites what they are and that it is Christian self-hatred, the displacement of Christian resentment at the constraints of monotheism, and the desire to overturn the ban on images and return to paganism that account for the persistence of hatred and the belief in a Jewish conspiracy. “Precisely the reflective moment of Christianity, the spiritualization of magic is responsible for the calamity.”22 Jewish self-confidence, optimism, and what Freud called the “secret treasure” of the Jewish people—that they regard themselves as superior to other peoples—turns into the anti-Semitic belief in a secret Jewish power. But in contrast to the image of the Jews in the first chapter of Dialektik der Aufklärung, where, in Freud’s words, they achieve the triumph of “Geistigkeit über Sinnlichkeit”—which ushers in the modern world and provokes Christian resentment—the Jews appear in the “Elemente” in a more ambivalent, indeed contradictory light, both as those who impose the taboo on mimesis and as the carriers of a “premythological,” “prematriarchal” residue. Adorno’s thesis that anti-Semitism preserves the negative image of Jews as “nomadic” explicitly identifies them not merely with the perpetration of the taboo (as in Freud) but also with the refusal to adapt to it. The Jews embody the process of civilization and the sins of capitalism as well as the refusal to accommodate to its civilizing maxims. Totalitarian domination is hostile to the Jews because “no matter what the Jews as such may be like,” they represent “happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth”23 (“des Glückes ohne Macht, des Lohnes ohne Arbeit, der Heimat ohne Grenzstein, der Religion ohne Mythos”).24 These characteristics are despised because, perversely, their tormentors desire them.

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The above idea, which is in some respects the opposite of Freud’s conviction that Christianity was, in fact, a regression from the rationality of Judaism, can be found, as Yosef Yerushalmi shows, in Carl Gustav Jung’s 1934 infamous attack on Freud’s “soulless rationalism.” There we find Jung’s ruminations on the creative energies of the Aryan unconscious and his claim that the Jew “is something of a nomad [and] has never yet created a cultural form of his own.”25 (For Horkheimer, the Jewish nomad also had its parallels in German history: “There is a great similarity between Jewish and German prehistory. Both peoples were originally nomads, i.e., pastoral tribes, and as such looked with great contempt on agricultural activities. Should we accept Jung’s terminology, we could say that the two nations share certain traits of their collective unconscious with the Mohammadans in contrast to the Greeks. However, if both Germans and Jews show a militant sort of patriotism, the patriotism of the Jews is characterized by a longing for the soil that was lost, whereas the Germans want to have soil that they never possessed.”26) This argument is an elaboration of Adorno’s provisional 1940 theses: the Jews are sacrificed as the ultimate victims of the taboo on mimesis for having inflicted the prohibition on thinking beyond or outside the prescribed norms of civilization. It is not that they have eliminated sacrifice and converted it into ritual per se. Rather, they are the bearers of an image of the wholly other, which, paradoxically, their religion forbids representing. The taboo on mimesis, on representation, is simultaneously the fate of civilization and the Jews. Civilization, they argue, replaces mimetic behavior proper, by “organized control of mimesis” (“die organisierte handhabung der Mimesis”) and ultimately by prescribing rational practice, by work: “The severity with which, over the centuries, the rulers have prevented both their own successors and the subjugated masses from relapsing into mimetic behavior— from the religious ban on graven images through the social ostracizing of actors and gypsies to the education which ‘cures children of childishness’ is the condition of civilization.”27 Uncontrolled mimesis is expunged first in the religious prohibition on idolatry, on images of God, subsequently in the general contempt for all image-bound wanderers, and finally, in rationalization in which “the ego has been forged” (“das Ich ist geschmiedet worden”).28 Modernity consigns to oblivion “the ineradicable mimetic heritage present in all praxis”29 (“das untilgbar mimetische Erbe aller Praxis”).30 The murder of the Jews is a form of revenge for civilization’s triumph over nature; those who first turned ritual sacrifice into rationality by carrying out the prohibition are themselves sacrificed as the expression of “repressed mimesis” (verdrängte Mimesis). Modern Jew-hatred is the return of the archaic impulse to mimesis in its “repressed form” (yet which, in its paranoid fear, envies, imitates, and liquidates the Jew, all the more consequentially). Unlike mimesis, whose illusion is self-conscious, repressed mimesis always contains a principle of self-deception and destruction: “This form of repressed mimesis and the destructive are the same— the no-longer-selfhood.”31 The Jews represent not only the carriers of the taboo on mimesis but also those who have tenaciously refused to succumb to its logic. (Horkheimer would later simplify this argument by pointing to the Jewish refusal,

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even under extreme threat, to assimilate to other religions—a claim belied, by the way, by German-Jewish history in the modern era.) By 1944, the fate of the Jews was now inscribed in a very different narrative from the one encapsulated in Die Juden und Europa. During the most intense phase of work on the “Elemente,” Horkheimer explained to Herbert Marcuse, “The problem of anti-Semitism is much more complicated than I thought in the beginning. On the one hand, we have to differentiate radically between the economic-political factors that cause and use it and the anthropological elements in the present type of man that respond to anti-Semitic propaganda as they would respond to other oppressive incentives; on the other hand, we must show these factors in their constant interconnection and describe how they permeate each other.”32 This dual (actually triple) purpose accounts for the “Elemente’s” unsystematic juxtaposition and intertwining of anthropological, sociological, psychological, and economic perspectives. The economic dimension is still present in the assertion that the ultimate purpose of bourgeois anti-Semitism is “to conceal domination in production” (“die Verkleidung der Herrschaft in Produktion”) and to make the Jews scapegoats so that “the economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to him”33 (“das ihm das ökonomische Unrecht der ganzen Klasse aufgebürdet wird”).34 But the emphasis here is no longer on the obsolete presence of the Jews in the sphere of circulation but on the Jews in the mental “imagery” of Nazism, which metaphorically substitutes the Jews as the “hated mirror image of capitalism.” However, as the argument deepens, anti-Semitism appears in more fundamental terms as “a well-rehearsed pattern, indeed, a ritual of civilization”35 (ein eingeschliffenes Schema, ja ein Ritual der Zivilisation).36 The Jews still appear in the “Elemente” as the colonizers for progress and as the victims of a massive shift in the tectonic plates of capitalism, a theme not entirely compatible with the assertion that anti-Semitism belongs to the primitive instincts negated by civilization.37 Horkheimer conceded as much when he remarked to Marcuse, “the Jews seem to be the aliens under all circumstances.”38 As Horkheimer and Adorno point out, it is of little consequence whether the Jews really do have the “mimetic features” attributed to them. Anti-Semitism is not, as the conventional arguments go, either the result of Christian Jew-hatred or of modern scientific racial thinking, but it emerges at the very threshold of human evolution. As Adorno remarked during their discussions, anti-Semitism is a form of “ idiosyncrasy” that evokes the “desire for that situation in which such reactions as being paralyzed with fear still existed, that is, the desire for mimicry.”39 Freud once referred to this approach as exemplified in the anthropo-theological works like Totem and Taboo and Future of an Illusion, as a “phylogentic fantasy”— the theoretical construction of a set of mechanisms that humanity developed in its primordial confrontation with the terrors of nature. As if in flight from the excessively time-bound Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of anti-Semitism, Horkheimer and Adorno embraced a global theory of the origins of anti-Semitism as a timeless reaction to the terror of the overpowering force of nature. Mimicry is rooted in fear, in the impulse to become like nature by hardening oneself against it. Anti-Semitism is a primitive, infantile, indeed (in Horkheimer and

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Adorno’s words) “aboriginal” desire to return to the mimetic practice of sacrifice that finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jew-hatred. This analysis raises many questions. On one level, it holds the Jews responsible for the fate of civilization, in return for which they are victimized. On another, it obviously does not help to distinguish between modern racism or Christian Jew-hatred (ancient or primordial) or explain whether, ultimately, anti-Semitism has anything to do with Jews at all. One can almost imagine a group of terrified Neanderthals blaming the latest volcanic eruption on the Jews—or their available substitutes, because Jews did not yet exist. Nor is it possible to distinguish totalitarian anti-Semitism from “bourgeois” anti-Semitism or American racial prejudice or any other form of group projection. Horkheimer himself later admitted, “It is no mere accident that the great explosion of anti-Semitism occurred in Germany”; yet this fact plays no role whatsoever in the “Elemente,” which underscores Horkheimer’s paradoxical assertion that “the basic features of destructive hatred are the same everywhere.”40 Although Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized in an institute memorandum that “anti-Semitic feelings are not aroused by Jewish behavior but by prejudice pure and simple,” their private correspondence indicates that they were not entirely convinced that this was the case. Horkheimer was, in fact, more preoccupied with the opposite possibility that at a much deeper level the Jews were not merely an arbitrary target of economically or psychoanalytically rooted “scapegoatism.” As he wrote to Löwenthal about the “Theses” in March 1944: “I am particularly eager to know my answer to your question as to why the Jews are such an appropriate object of projection. I think I referred to mimesis, but there was something else, too.”41 Recall that Horkheimer had remarked that “wittingly or unwittingly” the Jews had become the martyrs of civilization. His remark suggests—as do large parts of the “Elemente”—that the Jews’ very success in perpetrating the “civilizatory virtues” is the ultimate reason for their sacrifice.42 “The Jews have been the pioneers of civilization. Their recent history is deeply interconnected with the progress of industry, commerce, and science. Their existence is a constant challenge to those who want to be lazy. The Jews are the competitors par excellence.”43 As the war drew to an end, Horkheimer asserted that “objective” factors were at work and that anti-Semitism was elicited by the Jews; in this case he is speaking of the “partly involuntary role of the Jews”: it “is good to remember that the slight lack of assimilation in our assimilated Jewish individuals consists exactly of the unflinching readiness and impatience to outdo all bystanders in just that society that has no pity for the dumb.”44 During the drafting of the “Elemente,” Adorno wrestled with the theological implications of the Bilderverbot. If, as Adorno asserted in Minima Moralia, all that is human is “indissolubly linked to imitation,” any claim to genuineness is ultimately disingenuous. Theology adopts the “likeness” of self to God but never assumes an identity. As opposed to the idea of genuineness and authenticity, Adorno argued, the “self should not be spoken of as the ontological foundation, but, at most, theologically, in the name of its likeness to God.”45 The mimetic world of

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fascism—with its alluring images, rituals, and symbols—points to the destructive and deceptive potential of mimetic identification with nature. The fascist return to what they called “mimetic modes of existence” was the ultimate price of civilization. But, as dark as their tale might have been, it was still not the last chapter. Just as Odysseus replaced Oedipus because his wit permitted him to evade the fate to which Oedipus blindly succumbed, so Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung was an effort to philosophically outwit myth and to create “the possibility of escape” through enlightenment sensitized to the power of mimesis. This conclusion, that only the end of the Dialektik der Aufklärung can make anti-Semitism disappear, makes the connection between the first chapter and the “Elemente” clear: “Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea that has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives the Jews as well as the others into sickness. . . . The Jewish question would indeed prove to be the turning point of history.”46 In the years after America’s entry into the war, what Horkheimer and the other institute members called the anti-Semitism project took on new importance, especially in light of the Roosevelt administration’s ongoing restrictive immigration policies. The news from Europe that the Jews were being systematically exterminated—fragmentary and unconfirmed as it was—had a profound impact. As Horkheimer wrote to Löwenthal at the end of 1942, “These days are days of sadness, the extermination of the Jewish people has reached a dimension greater than at any time in history. I think that the night after these events will be very long and may devour humanity.”47 By February 1943, Horkheimer’s dogged efforts to find support for the project were finally successful in securing funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the most influential Jewish organizations in the United States. For the next seven years, the “anti-Semitism project” became the main effort of the exiled institute. As Wiggershaus has rightly emphasized, the idea of extending the “Philosophische Fragmente,” was by then severely curtailed by the anti-Semitism project, which was to remain a separate empirical study (or, as it turned out, multiple studies) and which, because of its magnitude, multiple authors, and volumes, was not completely under Horkheimer and Adorno’s control. More important, accepting the AJC funding and a contract meant openly acknowledging their Jewish connections and identity and expressly and publicly making anti-Semitism the center of the institute’s enterprise in exile.48 The following year, the American Jewish Committee selected Horkheimer as its director of scientific research and launched an ambitious program culminating in the five-part Studies in Prejudice series, completed in March 1950 with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality.49 By 1944, when it was clear to Horkheimer and Adorno that publication of the results of these ongoing research projects would be so demanding, the now-orphaned parts of Philosophische Fragmente, including the “Elemente,” were simply included in the mimeographed edition presented to the institute’s cofounder Friedrich Pollock on his fiftieth birthday. The appearance

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of the book as Dialektik der Aufklärung did not occur until 1947, when the Dutch émigré house Querido Verlag published it. In November 1944, when the first confirmed reports of the extermination camps began circulating in the United States, Horkheimer acknowledged to the editor of the magazine The Jewish Forum that: “Wittingly or unwittingly, the Jews have become the martyrs of civilization. To protect them is no longer an issue involving any particular group interests. To protect the Jews has come to be a symbol of everything mankind stands for: anti-Semitic persecution is the stigma of the present world whose injustice weighs entirely upon the Jews. The Jews have, thus, been made what the Nazis always pretended that they were—the focal point of world history. Their survival is inseparable from the survival of culture itself.”50 One of the most profound discoveries of the German-Jewish refugees—not just the members of the institute—was that anti-Semitism was not merely alive and well in the United States, but also that the war against Nazi Germany had done almost nothing to diminish it. As Leo Löwenthal later recalled, when they arrived in the United States they “suddenly discovered that something like a really everyday anti-Semitism did exist here and that as a Jew one couldn’t freely participate in all social spheres.”51 Horkheimer also later confirmed that he believed American anti-Semitism differed fundamentally from its European manifestations, where it was more deeply rooted: “It is my conviction that the role which a firmly established anti-Semitic tradition plays in Europe is assumed here largely by the psychological phenomenon of mass imitation—that is, political anti-Semitism in America has rather the character of a contagion, of an epidemic, rather than of a deep-seated and slowly developing illness.”52 Twenty-five years later, Adorno recalled that the “Elemente” ultimately attained their “literary impact” in The Authoritarian Personality. He emphasized that despite its empirical basis, The Authoritarian Personality was not conceived as an illustration of their theory of anti-Semitism in Dialektik der Aufklärung, which did not rely on empirical data. As Adorno put it: “We never regarded the theory simply as a set of hypotheses but as in some sense standing on its own feet, and, therefore, we did not intend to prove or disprove the theory through our findings but only to derive from it concrete questions for investigation that had then to be judged on their own merit and to indicate certain prevalent socio-psychological structures”53 The findings do, indeed, have to be judged on their own merit, and as mentioned below, there is reason to suppose that the procedures used to verify the theory went well beyond the bounds of normal scientific practice. This explanation, however, is not entirely borne out by the ample correspondence now available from the Horkheimer correspondence and in the AJC archives. More accurately, he emphasized that the “Elemente” were a counterpoint to the exclusively psychoanalytic and empirical character of The Authoritarian Personality. The “Elemente’s” explicitly theoretical and “objective” character also led Adorno to regret that Dialektik der Aufklärung was not available in English translation (an idea proposed at the time), because he thought that the “Elemente” might have prevented the (not entirely unjustified) “misunderstanding” that usually accompanied

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The Authoritarian Personality, namely, “that the authors had attempted to explain anti-Semitism, and even fascism in general, from a solely subjective perspective.”54 Adorno recalled that in contrast to The Authoritarian Personality, the “Elemente” situated racial prejudice in the context of an objectively-oriented critical theory of society. Indeed, as work developed on The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno increasingly worried that economic and social aspects of anti-Semitism would be eclipsed by a more limited psychological theory. In the “Elemente,” in “contrast to a certain economic orthodoxy, we did not rigidly oppose psychology, but .  .  . we never allowed any doubt about the primacy of objective factors over the psychological.”55 In retrospect, the “misunderstanding” that Adorno lamented was not occasioned merely by the relative inaccessibility of a book first produced in a mimeographed edition and subsequently made available by a Dutch exile press. Given the preference of the AJC for a project conceived as “the psychology of anti-Semitism,” the theoretically more abstruse parts of “Elemente” were relegated to the published text of the Philosophische Fragmente in order to focus on the more conventional, social science dimensions of the project. The “psychologism” of the institute’s empirical studies were to no small extent the product of several other factors: Horkheimer and Adorno’s frustration with the magnitude of the problem of providing a unified and adequate explanation of anti-Semitism and the immediate demand for “a thesis simple enough to be understood and appreciated by those who are trying to fight the giant fire with means that are by definition inadequate.”56 External pressures to produce a study acceptable to the AJC also played a considerable role. As an internal institute memorandum reveals: “When we drafted our first plan of a study of anti-Semitism, we had in mind a comprehensive work covering all the aspects of the problem, showing the development and the functions of anti-Semitism in various countries and periods of history, describing its interconnection with other social phenomena and analyzing the economic and cultural forces behind it. However, when we started our work in the spring of 1943, we became aware that the hour was too late for such a general historical and international survey. We decided to devote our efforts immediately to the drafting of methods that might lead to a better grasp of the social and psychological mechanisms underlying anti-Semitism.”57 Even more candid was Horkheimer’s acknowledgment in a letter to Marcuse that, “I have studied the literature in this respect. I don’t have to tell you that I don’t believe in psychology as a means to solve a problem of such seriousness. I did not change a bit my skepticism toward that discipline. Moreover, the term psychology as I use it in the project stands for anthropology and anthropology for the theory of man as he has developed under the conditions of antagonistic society.”58 The finished product, however, and the varia of the Studies in Prejudice as it evolved over seven years belie Horkheimer’s conviction that psychology was only a linguistic convention for something philosophically much more encompassing. During the initial stages of work on The Authoritarian Personality, Horkheimer expressed his doubts that anti-Semitism coincided with a specific personality type (as the study was to argue): “If,” he wrote to Adorno, “one is born into an average

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Gentile family, one does not have to be a ‘type’ in order to be an anti-Semite.”59 Although in a nonfascist society, it was not respectable to be involved with violently anti-Semitic organizations, what he called “anti-civilizatory tendencies” had been and could be tolerated in a “pseudodomesticated form.”60 The psychological emphasis of the anti-Semitism project was contemporaneous with any number of pioneering psychoanalytic studies of the subject by other émigré German-Jewish social scientists, many of which were published in Ernst Simmel’s Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease (1944). Finally, it should be pointed out that in 1945, the AJC, fearing a backlash, did not want to place undue emphasis on American anti-Semitism during the war with Germany. Anti-Semitism, from their point of view, was not a “Jewish” problem and not even an “American problem,” and it could prove divisive for wartime unity. In the “Elemente” there is more than a hint that Jews play a role in the dramaturgy of anti-Semitism, though an unwitting one: “Commerce was not their occupation, it was their fate.”61 One can even say that some of their formulations were anti-Jewish stereotypes: “Even the Jewish head of an American entertainment trust is hopelessly defensive amid his wealth.”62 Indeed, Adorno appears to have believed that American working-class attitudes toward Jews were “less irrational” than the anti-Semitism of other classes.63 Perhaps out of sensitivity toward the AJC and the American Jewish elites— many of whom were, of course, capitalists and contributors to the organization— the entire topic was avoided in the Studies of Prejudice, partly to avoid exposing the institute to the accusation that it was turning the problem of anti-Semitism into a Jewish problem.64 In the United States, Horkheimer not only reestablished the institute, but, after his move to California, became deeply engaged in Jewish affairs, specifically with the Los Angeles chapter of the American Jewish Committee. It was through these carefully nurtured personal and professional connections that Horkheimer became director of the Scientific Research Department of the AJC and was able to direct the Studies in Prejudice series from 1945 to 1950. As research director, Horkheimer concentrated his energies on the problem of anti-Semitism in the United States, which he carefully distinguished from the German experience. Perhaps not entirely accurately, Horkheimer drew up a balance sheet of the Jews’ strengths in America—their greater numbers, the absence of a civil service with deep anti-Semitic traditions, and the lack of feudal and absolutist traditions—versus the disadvantages that Jews experienced—a lesser degree of assimilation, the more outspokenly minority character of Jews, and their exclusion from the most important economic positions.65 In this capacity Horkheimer also expressed his fears that overidentification with Zionism could have a deleterious effect on American Jews. If American Jews were excessively identified with Zionism, he argued, they could be held morally culpable for events in Palestine. In a November 1945 letter to Samuel Flowerman, Horkheimer’s coeditor of the Studies in Prejudice series and his successor as AJC research director, he related a conversation with the sociologist Dr. Maurice Karpf, whom he described as “one of the few non-Zionist members of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.” According to Horkheimer, Karpf ’s “general outlook

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for the future is rather dark. . . . [Karpf] is afraid that Zionist policies within and without Palestine might lead to an acute situation, possibly to rioting and bloodshed. Only a strong assertive position by the non-Zionist Jewish friends of Palestine can, in his opinion, prevent Judaism as a whole from being held morally responsible for the fallacies of Zionism. Any delicate diplomatic situation that might arise for our own government in this connection will not fail to have repercussions on American Jewry.” Horkheimer emphasized that because “no Jewish voice is heard in this country but the Zionist clarion, I find myself in agreement with Dr. Karpf on this point.”66 Horkheimer’s skeptical thoughts on Zionism were rarely expressed, even in his private correspondence. It is evident, however, that Horkheimer regarded Karpf ’s “suggestions for organizing a properly constituted agency or committee with a definite non-Zionist program” as “perfectly reasonable.” He worried that the AJC might soon find itself in the awkward position of having to declare itself an independent, non-Zionist body “in order to protect American Judaism against being identified with Zionism.” He also noted that “even the Manchester Guardian criticizes the Zionist demand that Palestine be ‘an undivided and undiminished Jewish state’ as ‘far beyond the bounds of reason.’”67 It is important to stress that Horkheimer was not opposed to cooperation with American Zionists. He hoped that a “non-Zionist body would also be free to affirm, theoretically and practically, its active interest in the development of Palestine. It could, to some extent at least, collaborate with those Zionists who are interested generally in resolving the Jewish cause as a whole and helping in particular the harassed Jews of Europe, rather than furthering their own nationalistic philosophies.”68 In other words, Horkheimer was not opposed to Zionists engaged in Jewish welfare work or even in the establishment of a Jewish refuge in Palestine, but only to the nationally oriented Zionist movement. Horkheimer’s concerns were shared by John Slawson, one of the founders of the AJC, who assured him, “We have been very much concerned with the whole question of organizing a non-Zionist constituency.”69 In February 1946, the Committee on Scientific Research discussed the advisability of doing a study to determine the effect of Zionism and Zionist propaganda on the attitudes of Gentiles toward Jews and America. The committee agreed that its staff should examine polls and letters on this subject with the aim of conveying their recommendations to President Truman.70 Although the studies were never undertaken, the proposal was symptomatic of the trepidation and concern that Horkheimer (and other refugees) experienced with the exacerbation of events in the Middle East leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel. Horkheimer’s return to Germany in 1949 and his assumption of the rectorship of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt produced not so much a change in orientation but certainly one of audience. The insecurity of the so-called “remigranten” is evident in Horkheimer and Adorno’s outraged response to the remark of Karl-Uwe von Hassel, minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, that “the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] respects only those former émigrés who

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returned to Germany immediately after the collapse and resumed their former citizenship”71 The remark was a thinly disguised attack on Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, but one that derided all those who, like Horkheimer and Adorno, had taken US citizenship. For Horkheimer, it was more than a sign of the times. The linguistic term “emigrant” with its negative overtones, as opposed to “heimatvertriebenen” and “Flüchtlingen,” he warned, evoked precisely those emotions that political education in the Federal Republic was trying to overcome.72 The incident was echoed in his 1961 lecture “The German Jews,” in which he proposed what he called a modest aim: “that the Jews be regarded in Germany not as foreigners but simply as a group of men who, like other groups, share much with each other by reason, faith and destiny, while also have having much in common with the rest of the German people.”73 Asserting the “right to be different,” Horkheimer’s lecture is a mélange of stereotypes in the guise of challenging them. He writes, for example, of Jewish seriousness of purpose, intellectuality, and about Jews as “patriotic citizens,” which he compared to the “Jewish-style nationalism of the Zionist movement.” In the late 1950s there was barely a hint of comment on events in the Middle East, and even the establishment of the State of Israel did not warrant mention in Horkheimer’s voluminous correspondence. He broke the silence only after the Suez crisis of 1956 and the brief war over the canal, which had been nationalized by Egyptian prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser that summer. The invasion, mounted by Britain, France, and Israel, elicited a strong anti-British and anti-French reaction from the German left, which, of course, bristled at what it regarded as an imperialist misadventure, an attack on Egypt by the Western powers. In contrast, Horkheimer responded positively to a Der Spiegel article by Julius Ebbinghaus, the distinguished Kantian philosopher at Marburg, in which he criticized the United Nation’s condemnation of the illegality of the joint British-French-Israeli military action against the Egyptian seizure of the canal. Horkheimer wrote Ebbinghaus personally to express “how much we both agree with you. That they just now discover humanity in a fascist chieftain who conspires with Moscow like Nasser, that they, as in Hitler’s time, respect the breaking of a treaty more than the treaty and its sanctions, and that nobody speaks of how those Arabian pirate states for years have just lain in wait to attack Israel and slaughter those who have found refuge there—that is a symptom of public consciousness that is hard to take.”74 After Suez, Horkheimer’s growing sense that in postwar Germany it was necessary to make common cause with Israel despite his misgivings about Zionism was also evident in a 1958 letter in which he refused a request for permission to reprint part of “Die Juden und Europa.” “The work appeared at that time in America,” he wrote, “and had, in part, the purpose of reminding those Jews living outside of Germany of their responsibility to absorb the Jews persecuted by Hitler. Today, the article could have the completely opposite effect, namely of a rejection of Israel and of the Jews in Germany themselves.”75 In letters to American colleagues during the early 1960s, Horkheimer indicated that he believed German ultranationalism had come to “express itself more openly” in the Federal Republic, by which he

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meant the rightist NPD and those in the CDU/CSU (like Franz Josef Strauss) who wanted to recruit their voters.76 Horkheimer’s qualified support for Israel was soon shaken by the capture of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires, in May 1960. The pending trial further reinforced Horkheimer’s alarm about the effect of Israeli actions on Europe. At first, he made notes on the incident with no intention of publishing them, but, after the Israeli government publicized its decision to try Eichmann for “crimes against the Jewish people,” he decided “it would, perhaps, be good not to hide the matter behind the mountain.” (das es vielleicht gut wäre, damit nicht hinterm Berg zu halten).77 He sent to Adorno a draft of the article that he penned on that occasion, entitled “On the Seizure of Eichmann” (Zur Ergreifung Eichmanns), noting that he had written it quickly without much thought but, “In light of the ruckus and incidents that the show trial will elicit, shouldn’t we say something in advance?”78 Adorno cautioned him not to publish it, above all, because of its excessively judgmental tone: “It is too wise for me, too clarifying.”79 Adorno advised him to cut it considerably if he were to publish it. With regard to Eichmann’s illegal kidnapping, he (Adorno) would, for example, not say that “Eichmann was in the right according to current law; formally, the old one was valid.”80 From Adorno’s standpoint, no intervention in the Eichmann case would prevent a misunderstanding: “Everything that is said about E. can only lead to calamity, to speak about him falls prey to that complex of guilt that your piece tries to avoid.”81 Horkheimer, in fact, heeded Adorno’s advice and did not send the piece to the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) as he had planned. It first appeared in print in 1967, long after the end of Eichmann’s trial and execution. But even in its published form—without the passages marked for deletion by Adorno—Horkheimer’s condemnation of Israel’s misuse of the law is crystal clear: he sharply rejected the method of Eichmann’s arrest in a commando raid, his illegal extradition, and the use of a trial calculated for public pedagogy. Arguing that such “show trials” belong to the arsenal of anti-Semites, not that of the Jews, Horkheimer claimed, “The refusal to use violence as an argument for truth constitutes an ongoing strand in its [the Jews] history.”82 Nothing good would come from the trial, he concluded: “The trial is a repetition; Eichmann will create havoc for the second time.”83 Jews, in other words, cannot dispense justice through injustice, no matter how justified it may appear, without damaging their own belief in justice. The subsequent 1963 Eichmann controversy provoked by Hannah Arendt’s series in The New Yorker had far less resonance in Germany than in the United States, where it became a crise de conscience for an entire generation of American Jewish intellectuals who had never before been confronted with a debate on the Holocaust.84 Horkheimer, certainly aware of the affair, rejected Arendt’s book tout court (perhaps without having read it). “Even if every sentence in A[rendt’s] book is right, it is still a lie. The concept of the Banality of Evil, in which sadism plays no role, is crap.”85 To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno embodied what has been called a “Diasporic” Jewish solidarity that did not question the legitimacy of the State of Israel

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but refused to give blanket sanction to the use of state-sanctioned violence or lawlessness. From Horkheimer’s standpoint, there were alternative Jewish philosophical and religious traditions besides Zionism, as well as distinctly secular Jewish perspectives, emerging from the specific historical situation of the Jews that emphasized the criticism of injustice. By breaking the law to assert justice in the Eichmann case, Israel abandoned a fundamental fidelity to international human rights in favor of a specific and universally condemned “Jewish” law. This violated what Horkheimer elsewhere termed the “highest [Jewish] value” (oberste Wert), “the duty to realize that the law derives from the will to belong to a people that is, indeed, constituted by respect for law.”86 Though Horkheimer did not refer to the early debates on Zionism, he clearly distinguished his own brand of theological politics from the nationalist vision of Herzl: “It is the saddest aspect of the history that has thus far taken place, the saddest for the Jews as for Europe, that Zionism has been proven right.”87 Throughout his numerous remarks on the Jewish people (jüdisches Volk) in the 1960s, we find Horkheimer’s contention that the feature that historically distinguished the Jews from other peoples was the mutual exclusion between existence (Existenz) and power (Macht). In a letter to the Protestant theologian Hans Jürgen Schultz, Horkheimer asserted, “It seems to me that the Jews represent a very different meaning of a people, despite the term’s problematic character. For millennia their persistence was not identical with their power. The symbol of the crisis in which the Jews find themselves today is the emergence of Israel through their persecution, the rescue of Jewish people, which, not improbably, anticipates the end of the Jews in the spiritual sense. A bad, but for the present, indicative dialectic.”88 In an undated note entitled “Israel oder der Verrat” Horkheimer expressed the problem even more pessimistically: “In Israel, what Christianity did writ large is being repeated on a smaller scale: from a people without power and territory, the Jews have become a nation-state, analogous to the way that Christendom collapsed into nations that made war with each other.”89 The June 1967 Six-Day War drew Horkheimer, as it did many Jews living outside the Middle East, closer to Israel. In a note entitled “The Confusion Today” (Die Verwirrung Heute), Horkheimer wrote that young people in Germany “who desire a good society” (die die gute gesellschaft wollen) believed that they had to show sympathy for the East (meaning the Soviet bloc) although the East offered nothing but “a new fascism.” He specifically referred to the similarities during the Six-Day War between the language of the Deutschen Nationalzeitung and the GDR papers during what both called the Israeli “Blitzkrieg.”90 Yet he and Adorno refrained from public expressions of solidarity (which were given at that time by both Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse). Adorno wrote that he agreed with Horkheimer, when the latter informed him that he had refused to take part in a pro-Israeli event that included Bloch, among others. Sympathy rallies for Israel, Horkheimer observed, were merely superficial. Far more important were the foreign policy motives of the (European) states or their “establishments,” which demanded a “negative stance” toward Israel. The ideological underpinning for that was the

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activation of anti-Semitism, which he wrote was “pretty thick” just below the surface among the masses at large. The question remains: did Horkheimer and Adorno still continue to adhere to the arguments of the “Elemente” after their return to Germany? What became of their philosophical theses? To be sure, the Studies in Prejudice series was not completed until March 1950, by which time Horkheimer had already received the “Ruf” to Frankfurt and had stepped down from his post as research director of the AJC. Horkheimer returned only intermittently to the themes of Dialektik der Aufklärung in the 1950s. There is considerable evidence, however, that he returned to some of the main themes of the “Elemente” beginning in the 1960s. In a text entitled “Judenfeindschaft,” written at some time in 1968, he succinctly expressed his doubts about the conventional explanations for the origins of hostility to the Jews. First, Christianity and Christian anti-Semitism did not suffice as an explanation as many of the leading figures of the Enlightenment—he mentions Voltaire and Kant—were outspokenly hostile to the Jews. Second, the explanation of anti-Judaism based on the Jews’ economic role as tradesmen and moneylenders was equally insufficient, especially given the persecution of other groups where economic motives were absent. Horkheimer concluded: “The task remains to discover whether in all of these hostile attitudes . . . there exists a deep-seated root that is hitherto unknown and is linked to the history of civilization. In any case, one cannot be satisfied with the recourse to psychological causes, like projection or an outlet for overweening aggression.”91 An aspect of the “Elemente” that Horkheimer retained was his ever more frequent allusions throughout his later career to the theme of the Bilderverbot as the hidden commandment of critical theory. In his philosophical conversations with Paul Tillich at the University of Chicago, where Horkheimer spent two weeks each semester from 1954 to 1959, he reiterated this theme: “The similarity between the thought of Tillich and Jewish thought exists, perhaps, insofar as the Jews are not capable of representing or depicting God.”92 This theme surfaces often in Horkheimer’s writings and interviews in which he postulated a theological renewal of philosophy without God or the reassertion of a moral absolute as a response to the administered world of the West and the totalitarian bureaucracy of the East. “What moves me is the application of the theological idea to a rational theory of society.”93 In the famous 1970 Der Spiegel interview, Horkheimer distinguished his own political theology (theologisches postulat) from the messianism of Ernst Bloch and Marx: “For both of them, I feel, messianism was, above all, the determining thing; for me, it is the idea that God cannot be represented.”94 It was not Marx’s philosophical messianism but his idolatry that Horkheimer regarded as the source of all his theoretical errors. “Marx,” he wrote, “betrayed the Jews. The betrayal does not consist of his anti-Semitism. It is much more the son of God on the cross than God’s not having been brought into the world. In this way, for Marx, the classless society became an idol created by the unbearable suffering of the proletariat. It is a sort of ersatz Christianity.”95 This rejection of idolatry, and not messianism per se, is what distinguished the negative theology of

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critical theory from secular messianism, whether fascism, communism, or Zionism (“Is Israel the Biblical Zion?” he added). More important, in the 1970 Der Spiegel interview, Horkheimer explained that what distinguished critical theory was its explicit refusal to describe the final or absolute goal in terms of a contrast to the present. Asked how he could sanction what he had called a “renewal of theology” without God or founding a new religion, Horkheimer replied that he and Adorno had always referred not to God, but to the “yearning for the entirely Other” (Sehsucht nach dem Anderen). This prohibition on uttering the name of God, he added, was a hidden Jewish maxim in critical theory: “You shall not make an image of God, reads the Bible. You cannot depict what is the absolute good. The pious Jew tries as far as possible to avoid the word ‘God’; indeed, he does not spell it out but substitutes an apostrophe. In the same way, critical theory takes care to call the Absolute the ‘other.’ What moves me is the theological idea applied to a rational theory of society.”96 In this act of not-naming—as Dialektik der Aufklärung argued, lay the subversive power of the Jews (and the origins of anti-Semitism), and, as Horkheimer believed, of critical theory as well. In a 1945 letter to Adorno, Horkheimer explicitly traced the origins of critical theory directly to his Jewish forebears: “Even as authors of the Old Testament, the Jews were somehow those who brought about changes and unrest. I emphasize,” he added, “I am speaking here much more of the partly involuntary role of the Jews than of their own intentions.”97 Was the Bilderverbot always implicit in the Frankfurt School’s “negative theology”? Should we read the writings of the Frankfurt School before 1938 as clues to a Jewish legacy buried in the texts? This seems to me to be based on the false assumption that there was something “Jewish” there to begin with. Only when confronted with the fate of the Jews of Europe—their own fate—did this conviction begin to take root.

Notes 1. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem (New York, 1980), 131. 2. J. Marcus and Z. Tar, “The Judaic Elements in the Teachings of the Frankfurt School,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21 (1986): 339–53. 3. Jack Jacobs, “A ‘Most Remarkable “Jewish Sect”’?: Jewish Identity and the Institute of Social Research in the Years of the Weimar Republic,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 37 (1997): 73–92. 4. Evelyn Wilcock, “Negative Identity: Mixed German Jewish Descent as a Factor in the Reception of Theodor Adorno,” New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000): 169–87. 5. Jacobs, “A ‘Most Remarkable “Jewish Sect,”’?” 74. 6. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1986), 90–100. 7. Theodor Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 15 February 1938; see Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt, 1985), 16: 392 (Gesammelte

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Schriften is hereafter cited as GS, Theodor Adorno as TWA, and Max Horkheimer as MH); Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Gesten aus Begriffen. Konstellationen der kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1997), 133. 8. TWA to MH, 29 July 1940, GS, 16: 734. 9. “Wir müssen also den Stier bei den Hörnen packen—der Wahrheit zuliebe—ohne dass dabei von diesen Dingen auch nur eines explitiz in unseren Text einzgehen brauchte, dann darin allerdings stimme ich mit Ihnen und Benjamin Überein, dass das Unsichtbar-werden der theologischen Wahrheit heute ein Element dieser Wahrheit ist.” TWA to MH, 4 September 1941, Max Horkheimer Correspondence, Max Horkheimer-Archiv, Stadt und Universitatsbibliothek, Frankfurt (hereafter cited as MHA). 10. Max Horkheimer, “Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949,” GS 12: 586–92. 11. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9 January 1941. For a discussion of the “Anti-Semitism project,” see Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung (Munich, Vienna, 1986), 346, 347. 12. Horkheimer, “Die Juden und Europa,” [Schriften 1936–1941], GS, 4: 325 13. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 347. 14. “Mir geht es allmählich so, auch unter den Eindruck der letzten Nachrichten aus Deutschland, dass Ich mich von dem Gedanken an das Schicksal der Juden überhaupt nicht mehr losmachen kann. Oftmals kommt es mir vor, als wäre all das, was wir unterm Aspekt des Proletariats zu sehen gewohnt waren, heute in furchtbarer konzentration auf die Juden übergegangen” (TWA to MH, 5 August 1940, GS, 16: 764). 15. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 96. 16. Franz Neumann to TWA, 14 August 1940, MHA. 17. MH to TWA, 14 August 1940, MHA. 18. “Wie ware es, wenn wir unser Buch .  .  . um den Anti-Semitismus sich kristallisieren liessen. Das würde die konretisierung und Einsschränkung bedeuten, nach der wir gesucht haben. Es wurde weiter einen grossen Teil der Mitarbeiter des Instituts zu aktivieren vermögen, . . . Dann bezeichnet der Anti-Semitismus heute wirklich den Schwerpunkt des Unrechts und unsere Art Physiognomik muss sich der Welt dort zukehren, wo sie ihr grauenvollstes Gesicht Zeigt. Endlich aber ist die Frage der Anti-Semitismus die, in der, was wir schreiben, noch am ehesten in einen Wirkungszusammenhang eingehen könnte, ohne dass wir darüber etwas verrieten” (TWA to MH, 10 February 1941, in Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 346). 19. “Dieses Verbot ist der Ursprung des anti-Semitismus, die Vertreibungen der Juden sind Versuche, die Vertreibung aus dem four Paradies zu vollenden sei es nachzuahmen” (TWA to MH, 8 Sept. 1940, MHA). The theses consist of four typescript pages. 20. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (hereafter DA) (Frankfurt, 1988), 76. English: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (hereafter DE), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford, 2002), 54. 21. DE, 48; DA, 68. 22. “Gerade das reflective Moment des Christentums, die Vergeistigung der Magie ist schuld am Unheil” (DA, 186; DE, 145). 23. DE, 165. 24. DA, 208, 209. 25. TWA to MH, 2 October 1941, cited in Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 346. 26. MH to Leo Löwenthal, 24 July 1944, MH; GS, 17: 521. 27. “Die Strenge, mit welcher im Laufe der Jahrtausende die Herrschenden ihrem eigenen Nachwuchs wie den beherrschten Massen den Rückfall in mimetische Daseinsweisen abschnitten, angefangen vom religiösen Bildverbot über die soziale Achtung von Schauspielern und Zigeunern bis zur Pädagogik, die den Kindern abgewöhnt, kindisch zu sein, ist die Bedingung der Zivilisation” (DE, 148; DA, 189, 190). 28. DE, 148. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. DA, 190. 31. Max Horkheimer, Nachgelassene Schriften, 1931–1949, GS, 12: 591. 32. MH to Herbert Marcuse, July 17, 1943, GS, 17: 463.

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33. DE, 142. 34. DA, 183. 35. DE, 140. 36. DA, 180. 37. See Dan Diner, “Reason and the ‘Other’: Horkheimer’s Reflection on Anti-Semitism and Mass Annihilation,” in On Max Horkheimer, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John Mc Cole (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 356. 38. MH to Herbert Marcuse, July 17, 1943, GS, 17: 463. 39. GS, 12: 590. 40. See, for example, Max Horkheimer, “Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York, 1946), 6. 41. MH to Löwenthal, 17 March 1944, GS 17: 549. 42. MH to TWA, 27 December 1944, GS 17: 614. 43. MH to TWA, 11 October 1945, GS 17: 658–59. 44. MH to TWA, 11 October 1945, GS 17: 657. 45. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans., E. F. N. Jephcott (London, 1974), 154. 46. “In der Befreiung des Gedankens von der Herrschaft, in der Abschaffung der Gewalt, könnte sich erst die Idee verwirklichen, die bislang unwahr bliebe, dass der Jude ein Mensch sei. Es wäre die Schritt aus der anti-Semitischen Gesellschaft, die den Juden wie die andern in die Krankheit treibt. . . . Die Judenfrage erwiese sich in der Tat als Wendepunkt der Geschichte” (DE, 165; DA, 209). 47. MH to Leo Löwenthal, 27 November 1942, GS, 17: 384. 48. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 397. 49. “Scientists Mark Publication of AJC Studies in Prejudice Books,” American Jewish Committee, The Committee Reporter (New York, April 1950), 1. To read further about the Jewish Labor Committee, the American Jewish Committee, and the institute, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (Boston, 1973), 224, 225. 50. MH to Isaac Rosengarten, 12 September 1944, GS 17: 599. 51. Leo Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Löwenthal, ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1987), 30, 31. 52. MH to Philip Klein, 24 July 1944, GS 17: 572. 53. Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. D. Fleming and B. Bailyn (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 363. 54. Ibid. 55. Theodor W. Adorno, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrung in Amerika,” Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt, 1969), 132. 56. MH to Herbert Marcuse, 17 July 1943, GS 17: 463. 57. Institute memorandum, 30 December 1943, GS 17: 522. 58. MH to Herbert Marcuse, 17 July 1943, GS 17: 463. See also Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 398. 59. MH to TWA, 11 October 1945, American Jewish Committee Archives (New York) www. ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive. 60. Ibid. 61. “Der Handel war nicht sein Beruf, er war sein Schicksal” (DA, 184). 62. “Selbst der jüdische Regent eines amerikanischen Vergnügungstrusts lebt in seinem Glanz in hoffnugsloser Defensive” (DE, 143; DA, 184). 63. Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 369. 64. Ibid., 366. 65. TWA to MH, GS 3: 470. 66. MH to Samuel Flowerman, 17 November 1945, American Jewish Committee Archives. It should be noted that Martin Jay makes reference to a letter Horkheimer wrote to Leo Löwenthal

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on the same day using the same phrase, “[to] prevent Judaism, as a whole, from being held morally responsible for the fallacies of Zionism” (cf. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 343). 67. MH to Samuel Flowerman, 17 November 1945, American Jewish Committee Archives. 68. MH to Samuel Flowerman, 17 November 1945, American Jewish Committee Archives. 69. John Slawson to MH, 11 September 1945, GS 17: 648. 70. Minutes of the Meeting of the Committee on Scientific Research, 21 February 1946, American Jewish Committee Archives. 71. “die CDU respektere nur diejenigen ehemaligen Emigranten, die unmittlebar nach dem Zusammenbruch nach Deutschland zurückgekehrt seien und sogleich ihre alte Stataatsburgerschaft angenommen hätten” (MH and TWA to Kai-Uwe von Hassel, 12 December 1960, GS, 18: 496–98). 72. Ibid., 497. 73. Max Horkheimer, “The German Jews,” The Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York, 1974), 101–18. 74. “wie sehr wir beide mit Ihnen übereinstimmen. Dass man die Humanität gerade einem mit Moskau konspirierenden Faschistenhäuptling wie Nasser gegenüber entdecket; das man, wie zu Hitlers Zeiten den vertragsbruch mehr respetiert als den Vertrag und die Vertragssanktionen; und dass kein Mensch auch nur zur Sprache bringt, dass diese arabischen Raubstaaten seit Jahren einzig darauf lauern, über Israel herzufallen und die dort Zuflucht gefunden haben abzuschlachten—das ist ein Symptom des öffentlichen Bewusstseins, das man überaus schwer zu nehmen ist” (MH and TWA to Julius Ebbinghaus, 7 January 1957, MH, GS, 18: 377). 75. “Die Arbeit ist damals in Amerika erschienen und hatte zum Teil die Aufgabe die ausserhalb Deutschlands lebenden Juden an ihre Pflichten zur Aufnahme der von Hitler Verfolgten zu erinnern. Heute könnte der Artikel in einem ganz Anderen Sinn wirken, nämlich als eine Absage an Israel und die Juden in Deutschland selbst” (MH to Achim von Borries, 7 June 1958, MH GS, 17: 423). 76. MH to John Slawson, 4 August 1965, GS, 18: 611. 77. MH to TWA, 25 December 1960, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Briefe und Briefwechsel, 1927–1969, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt, 2006), Band IV: 1950– 1969, 639 (hereafter Briefe). 78. “angesichts des Getöses und Zwischenfälle die der Schauprozess auslösen wird, sollten wir im voraus etwas Sagen” (ibid). 79. “Er ist mir zu weise, zu abgeklärt” (ibid). 80. “das E[ichmann] nach herrschenden Gesetz im Recht war; formell galt das alte” (ibid., 641). 81. “alles was man über E. . sagt nur zum Uheil sein kann; uber ihn zu reden fällt in jenen Schuldzusammenhang, aus dem Deine Glosse heruasmochte” (TWA to MH, 30 December 1960, Briefe, 4: 641). 82. “Die Weigerung, Gewalt als Argument der Wahrheit anzuerkennen, bildet in seiner [das Judentum] Geschichte den durchgehenden Zug” (Max Horkheimer, “Zur Ergreifung Eichmanns,” GS, 8: 156–59). 83. “Der Prozess ist eine wiederholung: Eichmann wird zum zweitenmal Unheil stiften” (ibid., 159). 84. See Anson Rabinbach, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 97–111. 85. “Auch wenn jeder Satz in A[rendt]s Buch richtig ist, ist er doch eine Lüge. Der Begriff der “Banalität der Bösen”, in dem der Sadismus keine Role spielt, ist Mist” (MH, GS, 14: 323). 86. “die Verpflichtung das Gesetz zu verwirklichen, wird abgeleitet aus dem Willen, zum Volke zu gehören, das eben durch die Einhaltung der Gesetze konstituert wird” (MH, “Judentum und westliche Philosophie,” GS, 14: 222). 87. “Es ist der trübste Aspekt der Geschichte, die seither sich abspielte, der trübste sowohl für das Judentum wie für Europa, dass der Zionismus recht behielt” (MH, “Über die deutsche Juden,” GS, 8: 167). 88. “Einen anderen Sinn des Volkes scheint mir, in all seiner Problematik, das Judentum zu Bilden. Seit Jahrzehtausenden war seine Dauer mit seiner Macht nicht eins. Das Symbol der Krise, in der das Judentum heute sich befindet, ist die durch Verfolgungen bedingte Entstehung Israels, die Rettung jüdescher Menschen, die, nicht unwahrscheinlich, das Ende des Judentums im geistigen Sinn vorhersehen lasst. Eine schlechte aber für die Gegenwart kennzeichende Dialektik” (MH to Hans Jürgen Schultz, 15 March 1967, GS, 18: 643). 89. “In Israel weiderholt sich in kleinen was die Christenheit im grossen getan hat: die Juden wurden aus einem Volk ohne Macht ohne territorium ein Nationalstaat, analog wie die Christenheit in Nationanen zerfiel, die sich bekriegten” (MH, “Israel oder der Verrat,” GS, 14: 370).

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90. MH, “Die Verwirrung Heute,” GS, 14: 412. 91. “Die Aufgabe bleibt, herauszufinden, ob nicht all diesen feindlichen Haltungen . . . eine bisher unbekannte, tieferliegende, aufs engste mit der geschichte der Zivilisation verknüpfte Wurzel zugrundeliegt. Jedenfalls darf man sich nicht mit dem Hinweis auf psychologische Ursachen, etwa Projection oder outlet für übermächtige Agressionen, begnügen” (MH, “Judenfeinschaft,” GS, 14: 482). 92. “Die Ähnlichkeit zwischen dem Denken Tillichs und dem jüdischen Denken besteht vielleicht, darin, dass auch die Juden Gott, das heist das Absolute, nicht darzustellen oder abzubilden vermögen” (MH, “Erinnerung an Paul Tillich,” GS, 7: 279). 93. “Was mich bewegt, ist die theologische Idee angewandt auf eine vernünftige Theorie der Gesellschaft” (MH, “Was wir ‘Sinn’ nennen, wird verschwinden,” Interview, Der Spiegel (5 January 1970), GS 7: 352). 94. “Für diese beiden ist-meinem Gefühl nach—zuvörerst der Messianism bestimmend gewesen, für mich, die Idee das Gott nicht darstellbar ist” (ibid., 352). 95. “Das Verrat besteht nicht in seinem Anti-Semitismus. Vielmehr darin, dass man Gott nicht in diese Welt gebracht worden ist, als Gottesohn, am Kreuz. So wird bei Marx, die klassenlosen Gesellschaft der Götze, der durch die untragbaren Leiden des Proletariats geschaffen wurde. Es handelt sich um einen Art Ersatz Christentum” (ibid., 351). 96. “Du sollst Dir kein Bild von Gott machen, heisst es in der Bibel. Du kannst nicht darstellen was das absolute Gute ist. Der fromme Jude versucht, das Wort “Gott” nach Möglichkeit zu vermeiden, ja er schreibt es nicht aus, sondern macht ein Apostroph. So nennt auch die Kritische Theorie das Absolute vorsichtig “das Andere” Was mich bewegt ist die theologische idée angewandt auf eine vernünftige Theorie der Gesellschaft” (ibid., 351, 352). 97. MH to TWA, 11 October 1945, GS, 17: 658.

Chapter 16

Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities

Christopher R. Browning

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I first became aware of the emotional volatility of my subject matter when I attended a conference at the University of Haifa in 1986. Raul Hilberg delivered a talk on the documentary sources and historiography of the Holocaust, in which he valued contemporaneous German documents above Jewish survivor testimonies for the purposes of understanding Nazi policies and reconstructing historical events. The following day an indignant Israeli press announced that Hilberg had proclaimed Nazis more trustworthy than Jewish survivors! Hilberg did not include his original remarks in the printed version of his talk but presumably in no small pique instead quoted the Holocaust survivor Samuel Gringauz, who in 1950 had disparagingly characterized many survivor memoirs as “Judeocentric, logocentric, and egocentric . . . full of preposterous verbosity, graphomoric exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks, and apologies.”1 The controversy over Hilberg’s presumed disdain for survivor testimonies as a historical source has obscured another passage in his Haifa lecture that was later restated in his final book Sources of Holocaust Research.2 On both occasions he singled out a small group of books based either primarily or even entirely on postwar testimonies that he valued highly. His favorite in this regard was John K. Dickinson’s German and Jew: The Life and Death of Sigmund Stein, based on the author’s 172 focused interviews tracing the life and death of one obscure individual. He likewise praised Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness for its comprehensive interviews, not only of Franz Stangl, but also of his family and associates, and of both personnel and victims

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from the Treblinka death camp he commanded. He also praised Gordon Horwitz’s In the Shadow of Death, a study of the Mauthausen concentration camp that included numerous interviews with local Austrian “bystanders.” Two factors were key for Hilberg: first, that a knowledgeable interviewer was asking the questions; second, that the collected testimonies were all focused on a specific topic. The resulting books were “very intensive, casting a bright light on a small stage.”3 My own baptism of fire on the issue of survivor testimonies followed the publication of Ordinary Men in 1992.4 Several Israeli historians and one American political scientist, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, criticized the book’s primary reliance on postwar German testimonies, arguing that had I only listened to the voices of the survivors, I would not have been duped into several of my contested conclusions: specifically, that only an important minority within the German reserve police battalion were “eager killers”; that a not-insignificant minority evaded participation in the actual shooting, though not in other enabling actions; and that for a majority of the rank-and-file—conscripted, middle-aged reservists—a mix of situational factors was more crucial in shaping their behavior than a priori anti-Semitic hatred of their victims. My reply to the criticism was twofold. First, I had used survivor testimonies for the crucial re-creation of the chronology and itinerary of the battalion’s killing actions. For the perpetrators, after the trauma of the initial massacre, the repeated killing actions became a blur. In contrast, survivors knew exactly when their particular town had been struck and their families murdered. For this information, they were an invaluable and reliable source. Second, survivors had no vantage point with regard to the battalion’s internal dynamics, particularly the spectrum of behavior among the policemen and the change in their behavior and attitudes over time. They could no more provide information about this than they could tell me what had happened at the Wannsee Conference. Despite all the flaws and problems of the perpetrators’ postwar judicial testimonies, it was the best available evidence to cast light on fundamental issues. I was initially drawn to my most recent project, a study of the factory slave-labor camps in the small industrial town of Starachowice (in Poland), because of my indignation over the grotesque miscarriage of justice in which the German police chief in that town, Walther Becker, was acquitted by a Hamburg court. At the heart of that judicial travesty was Judge Ehrhardt’s complete rejection and disparagement of the testimony against Becker by dozens of Jewish witnesses. They had survived by virtue of what Bella Guterman has aptly called “the narrow bridge to life” of the slave labor camps.5 As I pursued my research, the factory slave-labor camps—a major lacuna in Holocaust historiography—increasingly became the focus of my research. In this case, with German records virtually all destroyed and the small number of postwar German testimonies transparently mendacious, in a situation in which the Jews had been in intimate contact with their local tormenters through both the ghetto and camp periods, survivor testimonies were the best available evidence not only for what the Jews had experienced but also for what the Germans had done. If the factory slave-labor camp was to be my topic,

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my near total evidentiary dependence on survivor testimony was to be the key methodological challenge. In the course of nearly a decade of research, I ultimately gathered the accounts of 292 survivors of the Starachowice camps, some of whom gave multiple testimonies. The testimonies could be divided into four clusters. The first cluster was composed of 11 early testimonies recorded between the summer of 1945 and 1948, most by what would become the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and one by the American psychologist David Boder, the pioneer of audio-recording of survivor testimonies. Three of these early testimonies were quite substantial and indispensable, but most were rather perfunctory. The second cluster was recorded in the 1960s, 3 by Yad Vashem workers and 125 by German judicial investigators, after the founding of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen (Central Agency of the State Justice Administrations) for the investigation of Nazi crimes. The third cluster consisted mainly of taped testimonies recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with the Fortunoff Archive videotaped collection at Yale and Yaffa Eliach’s audiotaped collection, now at the Museum of the Jewish Heritage in New York and climaxing with 123 videotaped testimonies in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute. In addition to the numerous taped testimonies in this cluster, there were 6 traditionally transcribed testimonies from Yad Vashem. Fourth, between 2000 and 2006, I personally interviewed 15 survivors, 14 of whom had been teenagers in the camps and one even younger. Thus in terms of Hilberg’s two desiderata, my collection failed on one count. The bulk of these testimonies were not the result of interviews conducted by a historian who was an expert in the subject. Rather they were products of either broad but random collection projects or focused judicial investigation by more well-informed interviewers for primarily legal rather than historical purposes. Most of the randomly collected testimonies were unstructured and noninterventionist, that is, the survivors were free to reconstruct and narrate their stories without interruption, questioning, or guidance. The main exception in this regard was the procedure of the Visual History Archive. In this case, briefly oriented interviewers structured the interviews so that roughly one-quarter of the time was devoted to the pre- and postwar periods respectively and one-half to wartime experiences. The goal was to document life histories, not just Holocaust memories. Furthermore, each interviewer was provided with a list of fixed questions to be posed to all survivors of each country, in order to create a standardized database. The result was mixed. At times, interviewers, guided by their questions, drew out information from survivors who were otherwise incapable of constructing a narrative on their own. On one occasion the interventionist interviewer, insisting on chronological coherence, prevented one survivor—who was about to jump from his harrowing escape from Warsaw to his arrival in Birkenau—from skipping his intervening but less dramatic Starachowice experiences entirely. On other occasions, however, clueless interviewers interrupted survivors who were working their way toward sensitive

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topics of great interest to me. Obviously under instructions to impose discipline and keep their subjects on track, the interviewers deemed the survivors’ indirect approaches as mere digressions. The German judicial interviews were conducted by people who were more well informed about their topic, but here again there were both advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of the interviews was to collect evidence to be used in court, and undoubtedly the survivors said many things that would have been of great interest to the historian but were simply not recorded because they were deemed legally irrelevant. Valuable collateral information can be found in these interviews, but we shall never recover much that was undoubtedly omitted. On the other hand, the judicial interviews contain immensely valuable information, particularly about the perpetrators. In unstructured interviews survivors focus on their families and rarely mention any but the most notorious perpetrators in detail, or even by name. But under focused judicial questioning, survivors provided considerable specific information about a large number of Germans in Starachowice that is almost entirely absent from the other testimonies. While none of the interview formats was ideal, having substantial numbers of all three kinds—free-form, structured, and judicial—was important. Ultimately, I could both obtain the benefits and compensate for the inadequacies of each. And the fifteen interviews of the fourth cluster, those that I conducted myself, were of an inestimable value that far exceeded their meager percentage (5 percent) of the whole. It must be noted that given biological realities, time has almost run out for trained historians to conduct their own interviews with survivors. Soon we shall have only the previously collected testimonies to work with. Hilberg’s second criterion—that the testimonies cast an intensive and “bright light on a small stage”—is clearly met in my project. My 292 witnesses all experienced the Starachowice camps from varying perspectives and vantage points, and each has remembered, refashioned, forgotten, and repressed aspects of this experience in his or her own way. But the very density of multiple perspectives and multiple accounts allows the historian to make reasonable judgments about plausibility, based on the overall credibility of a survivor’s testimony; the vividness and detail of the particular event being recalled; the absence of contradiction with other plausible narratives; and—to be honest—the highly subjective intuition of the historian that gradually develops from prolonged immersion in the materials. For many scholars, memory and postwar testimony are themselves the object of study, not the events being remembered.6 In particular, the “authenticity” of the testimony is the prime value, revealing how survivors felt about their experiences, how they constructed their narratives, and how they have coped with their traumatized past. From this point of view, concerns about “factual accuracy” are inappropriate and misplaced. Indeed, to subject survivor testimony to the methods of historical scrutiny and criticism that are deemed normal for other forms of evidence can seem to be a cold act of disrespect. For a historian of my age and background, it can seem to be even an act of presumption and hubris. But if survivor testimony is to be used as historical evidence for the reconstruction of what

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happened, then issues of factual accuracy cannot be set aside. Some conflicting testimonies simply represent an inevitable difference in vantage point and perspective and remind us that different people not only remember but even experienced differently the same events, at the same time and place. Sometimes, however, conflicting testimonies simply cannot be reconciled, and the historian has to make critical judgments and choices. In using survivor testimonies as historical evidence, it is vital for the historian to keep in mind that the event and the memory of the event are not the same thing. Indeed, while I use the singular “memory,” it is important to note that the historian working in this source material must be ever conscious of strata of memory. The deepest, most inaccessible stratum is “repressed” memory. This usually involves events so searing and potentially debilitating that they were mercifully repressed as a psychological defense mechanism crucial for the victim’s continued functioning and survival. While some such “repressed” memories may eventually be recovered, others will remain permanently buried. Less traumatic are simply “lost” memories, experiences that are naturally forgotten over time but may easily be recalled with the right triggering reminder, such as a book, a photograph, a conversation with another survivor, or even an interview with an interested historian. Another stratum is that of “secret” memories that individuals still possess— systemic in the “choiceless choices” victims constantly faced—which are so painful that they have never been shared with others. Some memoirs contain certain “confessional” points where such secrets are painfully revealed but, clearly, such confessional moments are the visible tip of an iceberg that remains mostly hidden. There are also “communal” memories that are shared and discussed by survivors from the same ghettos and camps, among themselves. A tacit consensus exists, however, that outsiders might not understand these memories of events and behavior; hence, dissemination could be potentially embarrassing or hurtful to certain members of the community. It would thus be an inappropriate and antisocial act to bare these “communal” memories before others. There are openly shared “public” memories that constitute the bulk of the survivor testimonies upon which my study of the Starachowice camps is based. The line that separates secret, lost, communal, and public memory is not, of course, rigidly fixed. Under changing conditions and over time, some hitherto secret, lost, and communal memories shift into the public realm. If the public memory with which the historian can work is but one among many layers of memory and represents therefore a mere fraction of the overall potential eyewitness evidence that might aid in the reconstruction of events, a befitting awareness of the historian’s limits is needed. Furthermore, the historian must be acutely aware of several ways in which public memory has been reshaped and distorted. The first is the process of “collective memory” formation, in which current concerns, priorities, and agendas act selectively upon an array of individual memories to filter out some aspects and emphasize others. This process of creating a more homogenized “collective memory” often reveals more about the period and circumstances in which it is formed than the events it purports to remember.

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In my case study, this phenomenon is most vividly illustrated in the portrayal of prewar life in the old Jewish community of Wierzbnik, adjacent to the new industrial town of Starachowice. The testimonies of Jews who settled in North America after the war portrayed Wierzbnik as a predominantly religiously Orthodox and traditional Yiddish-speaking community of craftsmen and shopkeepers, and a place with a network of social support and charitable giving. Modern Jewish movements such as the socialist Bund and Hashomer hatsair were virtually ignored. The Revisionist Zionists of Jabotinsky and the Betar youth movement are the only explicitly mentioned Zionist organizations, and that was by people who vaguely referred to themselves as both religious and Zionist. In stark contrast to the recollections of North American survivors is the picture of prewar Jewish life in Wierzbnik as portrayed in the memorial book (sefer yizkor) put together primarily by survivors in Israel and published in 1973. Here Zionism was seen as the dominant feature of Jewish life. In one account, Wierzbnik was “teeming with Zionist activity,” and in another, Judaism and Zionism were “one and the same.”7 Two factors are at work here. First is a process of self-selection, in which prewar Zionist activists would have later immigrated to Israel in greater proportions than to North America and vice versa for the non-Zionists. Second is the impact of environment. Once survivors were in Israel, circumstances would have strengthened their desire to remember and emphasize their past as active Zionists rather than allegedly passive Diaspora Jews, whereas the process of assimilation in North America would have diminished the tendency to remember and emphasize earlier Zionist identities. The result is what Jeffrey Herf in another context has called “divided memory.”8 A second peril facing the historian using public memory as historical evidence is the dilemma of “incorporated” memory. Most common in this regard are testimonies that incorporate iconic Holocaust tropes through postwar exposure to widespread representations in documentaries, movies, memoirs, and novels. One advantage of a case study of a relatively unknown topic like the complex of factory slave-labor camps in Starachowice is that the memories of survivors’ experiences there remain relatively pristine and less likely to become intermingled with iconic Holocaust images. This situation changes abruptly in survivor testimonies about the prisoners’ transfer to Birkenau in the summer of 1944. The preponderance of testimony states that the transport—deemed an internal transfer of workers from one labor camp to another—entered Birkenau intact, without the normal decimating selection on the ramp. The Starachowice camps were in some respects family camps, in which, at least in some cases, both parents and older children had gained safe entry through the purchase of work permits and younger children survived either with permission as the children of privileged prisoners or as “illegals” smuggled into the camp and hidden. Many survivors, the children in particular, attribute their survival to the “miracle” that no selection took place in their atypical entry into Birkenau. Nonetheless, a significant number of testimonies relate the iconic account prevalent in the most widely read memoirs and widely seen documentaries, namely, that the transport was subjected to selection on the ramp, with none other

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than the notorious Dr. Mengele himself directing people to the right or the left— to the gas chambers or to the labor camp. The important point here is not that so many accounts proved so susceptible to incorporated memory at this particularly vulnerable moment, but that it is still possible to ascertain the factually correct version by means of a careful analysis of the conflicting testimonies. Having noted the various strata of memory to which the historian does not have access—repressed, lost, secret, and communal—as well the two major forms of memory distortion—collective and incorporated—I shall conclude by focusing on two areas where evidentiary problems in the assembled testimonies did not prove as serious as anticipated. Because the Starachowice survivors clustered in three areas in the postwar period—Toronto, the northeastern United States, and Israel—I had expected that as the survivors periodically met with one another regionally and retold their stories to one another, three geographically disparate “memory communities” would take shape, increasingly homogenized internally but increasingly divergent from one another. I also expected that as time passed, the survivors would speak less often about sensitive topics such as the roles of the privileged Jewish prisoners in the camp—the Lagerrat and Lagerpolizei in particular—and increasingly cast their narratives in the less ambiguous terms of undifferentiated perpetrators and undifferentiated victims, with the various shades of Primo Levi’s “gray zone” disappearing from sight. These expectations were not fulfilled. I now share the counterintuitive conclusion of Henry Greenspan that the lack of differences between early and late testimonies is “most noteworthy and remarkable.”9 Despite the fact that my 292 assembled witnesses gave testimonies that spanned 60 years and 3 continents, I came to the conclusion that I could rely on a basic “core memory” that emerged from my study. The “divided memories” of the prewar period aside, survivor memories proved to be more stable and less malleable than I had anticipated. I also found that several highly sensitive topics, rather than being increasingly consigned to silence, were broached more frequently and with greater candor in the later testimonies than in earlier ones. The assumption that earlier testimonies are always inherently more reliable and valuable than later ones did not always prove valid, as can be seen, for example, with regard to the revenge killing of a number of the camps’ “privileged prisoners” in the train car on the way to Birkenau the moment they were beyond the protection of their German sponsors. This outbreak of revenge killing is a classic example of “communal” memory—known to every survivor but for years not shared with others outside the community. The early testimonies make no mention of it, and only a few of the 1960s testimonies hint at it. Obviously, German investigators were not the most propitious audience before whom survivors would detract from their accusations against German perpetrators by also speaking of Jews killing Jews. It was not until 1989 that the dam of reticence burst, and communal memory transformed into public memory. A flood of testimony quickly confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that the last contingent of prisoners transferred into Starachowice—hardened veterans from the Lublin district via Majdanek who deeply resented the prevailing camp culture

284 | Christopher R. Browning

of inequality and the lowly station in the pecking order of prisoners to which they were consigned upon arrival—deliberately slipped into the lead train car carrying the privileged prisoners. Once the trains got under way, they strangled the notorious head of the Lagerpolizei, Jeremiah Wilczek, his teenage son, the head of the camp kitchen, and others in Wilczek’s coterie, as well as several bystanders who attempted to intervene and stop the killing. There are many “black holes” in the surviving documentation of the Holocaust. For many events, if we do not use survivor testimony, we must forego any attempt to write their history at all. In my opinion these topics are too important to be passed over simply to avoid the challenges of using survivor testimony. But this evidence must be used with care and subjected to the same critical historical methods that the profession applies to all other evidence; otherwise, one risks discrediting not only survivor testimony as useful evidence but also the reputation and integrity of Holocaust scholarship itself. All kinds of evidence are problematic in their own right; the crucial issue is acknowledging and taking these problems into account rather than ignoring the problematic evidence itself. Indeed, if the historian must wait until he or she has perfect evidence, very little history would ever be written.

Notes 1. Raul Hilberg, “Developments in the Historiography of the Holocaust,” Comprehending the Holocaust: Historical and Literary Research, ed. Asher Cohen, Yoav Gelber, and Charlotte Wardi (Frankfurt, 1988), 28–29. 2. Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research (Chicago, 2001), 45–49. 3. Hilberg, “Developments in the Historiography of the Holocaust,” 29. 4. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992). 5. Bella Guterman, A Narrow Bridge to Life: Jewish Forced Labor and Survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940–1945 (New York, 2008). 6. For the study of “collective memory,” the foundational text is Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, ed. and trans. from the French, Lewis A. Coser (New York, 1980). For the study of postwar testimonies, see Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY, 2006) and Zoe Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford, 2008). 7. Yitzhak Kerbel, “The Youth Movements in Wierzbnik,” and Moshe Sali, “Wierzbnik, A Proud Example of Zionism,” Wierzbnik-Starachowitz: A Memorial Book, ed. Mark Shutzman (Tel Aviv, 1973), with quotes taken from the English translation in the CD version produced by the Wierzbniker Society of Toronto, 121 and 136. 8. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA, 1997). 9. Henry Greenspan, “The Awakening of Memory: Survivor Testimony in the First Years after the Holocaust and Today,” Monna and Otto Weinmann Annual Lecture, May 2000, printed as an occasional paper of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC, 2001), 20.

Contributors

Adi Armon is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Jeffrey Andrew Barash is professor of philosophy at the University of Amiens, France. His publications, which focus on the themes of political philosophy, historicism, and modern German thought, include Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (2003) and Politiques de l’histoire. L’historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe (2004). He is currently completing a book entitled Collective Memory and the Historical Past. David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Secular Jewish Thought (2010). Pierre Birnbaum teaches at the University of Paris. His most recent book is Geography of Hope (2008). Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author, among other works, of Ordinary Men (1993) and Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (2010). Richard I. Cohen holds the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests have focused on the history of Jews in Western and Central Europe and on the interrelationship between art and society in the modern period. Among his publications: The Burden of Conscience: French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust (1987); Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (1998); he recently edited and introduced Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History (vol. 26 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 2013). Adi Gordon is the Amherst College and Five College visiting assistant professor of Judaic Studies. He is the author of Bepalestinah benekhar—hashavuon Orient byn “galut germanit” le “aliyah yekit” (In Palestine. In a foreign land. The Orient:

286 | Contributors

a German-language weekly between “German dispora” and “German aliyah”) (2004) and the editor of Brit shalom vehatsiyonut haduleumit: “hasheelah haaravit” kesheelah yehudit (Brit Shalom and binational Zionism: the “Arab question” as a Jewish question) (2008). He is currently writing a biography of Hans Kohn. Hanan Harif is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jewish history department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include “Pan-Asianist Zionism: Between Oriental Aesthetics and Transnationalism” (Hebrew) in Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 15 (2011); and, as coauthor with Arie Dubnov, “Zionisms: Roads Not Taken on the Journey to the Jewish State,” in the e-journal Ma’arav (www.maarav.org.il) (2012). Stefani Hoffman is the former director of the Mayrock Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her recent essays include “Voices from the Inside: Jewish Activists’ Memoirs, 1967–1989,” in The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro’i (2012) and “The Other Side of the Coin: Differing Views of Jewishness and Zionism from the 1970s–90s,” in Bounded Mind and Soul: Russia and Israel, 1880–2010 (2013). She is coeditor, with Richard I. Cohen and Jonathan Frankel, of Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry (2010). Zvi Jagendorf is professor emeritus in English literature and theatre studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the novel Wolfy and the Strudelbakers (2001). Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010) and Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (2011). Vivian Liska is professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on German and comparative modernist literature, German-Jewish literature and culture, and literary theory. Her recent publications include: Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus (2008, also published in Hebrew in 2010) and When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2009). Zohar Maor teaches modern history at Bar-Ilan University and Herzog College (Israel). His publications include New Secret Doctrine: Spirituality, Creativity, and Nationalism in the “Prague Circle” at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2010 [Hebrew]) and “Hans Kohn and the Dialectics of Colonialism: Insights on Nationalism and Colonialism from Within,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 55 (2010). Michael Marrus is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Toronto.

Contributors | 287

He is the author, among other works, of Vichy France and the Jews (with Robert Paxton) (1995); The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (1985); and The Holocaust in History (1987). His most recent work is Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (2009). Ezra Mendelsohn is professor emeritus at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry and in Russian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent book is Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002). Guy Miron teaches modern Jewish history and courses on contemporary Jewry at Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, in Israel. His main research interests are German and Central European Jewish history in the twentieth century; Jewish identity and historical memory; and Jewish and Israeli historiography. Miron’s latest book is The Waning of the Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (2011). Jerry Z. Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His books include The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (2002) and Capitalism and the Jews (2010). Anson Rabinbach is professor of history at Princeton University. His publications include The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (1990); In the Shadow of Catastrophe (1997); Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg: Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid (2009); and he is coeditor of The Third Reich Sourcebook (2013). He is also cofounder and editor of New German Critique. Shulamit Volkov is professor emerita of modern history and incumbent of the Konrad Adenauer Chair for Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University, Israel. A member of the Israeli Academy of Science and the Humanities, she has published books and essays on German social history, German Jewish history, and the history of anti-Semitism; aspects of the Enlightenment; and the historiography of National Socialism. She is the author of Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (2006), and her new biography is Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (2012).

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———. Die Flucht nach Tarschisch. Hamburg, 1963. ———. Die Pforte des Ostens. Arabisch-Juedische Palaestina vom Panasiatischen Standpunkt aus. Vienna, 1923. ———. Der Weg in Das Land, Palaestinensische Aufzeichnungen. Vienna, 1918. ———. “Das Wiedererwachende Asien.” Viennaer Morgen Zeitung, 12 October 1919: 3. ———. (Mosche Ya’akov Ben Gavriel). Tagebücher 1915–1927. Ed. Armin A. Wallas. Vienna, 1999. Hollander, Dana. Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy. Stanford, 2008. Horkheimer, Max. Gesammelte Schriften, 17 vols. Ed. A. Schmidt and G. S. Noerr. Frankfurt, 1985. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York, 1980. Idel, Moshe. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-century Thought. Philadelphia, 2010. Ignatieff, Michael. “Lemkin’s Word: The Danger of a World without Enemies.” The New Republic (26 February 2001): 25–28. Ivanovic, Christine. “All Poets Are Jews: Paul Celan’s Readings of Marina Tsvetayeva.” Glossen 6 (1999). http://www2.dickinson.edu/glossen/heft6/celan.html. Jacobs, Jack. “A ‘Most Remarkable “Jewish Sect”‘?: Jewish Identity and the Institute of Social Research in the Years of the Weimar Republic.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 37 (1997): 73–92. Jacobson, Eric. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York, 2003. Janicaud, Dominique. Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Paris, 1992. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston, 1973. ———. “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Antisemitism.” In Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America, ed. Martin Jay. New York, 1986. Kanokogi, Kazunobu. “Die Prophetische Sendung.” Jüdische Rundschau 24 April, 1925: 1. Kaplan-Feuereisen, Omry. “Jacob Robinson.” In The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert. New Haven and London, 2008. ———. “Im Dienste der jüdischen Nation. Jacob Robinson und dass Völkerrecht.” Osteuropa 58 (August–October 2008): 279–94. Karay, Felicja. Death Comes in Yellow: Skarzysko-Kammienna Slave Labor Camp. Amsterdam, 1996. Karbach, Oskar. “Der Asiatische Kurs.” Esra 2 (1919): 47–52. Katzburg, Nathaniel. Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943. Ramat Gan, 1981. Kelsen, Hans et al. “Hersch Lauterpacht,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 10, no. 1 (January 1961): 1–17. Kessler, Harry Graf. Walther Rathenau. Sein Leben und sein Work. Berlin, 1928. Kohn, Hans. Geschichte der Nationalen Bewegung im Orient. Berlin, 1928. Korey, William. An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin. New York, 2001. Koskenniemi, Martti. “Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960),” In Jurists Uprooted: German-speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain, ed. Jack Beatson and Renhard Zimmermann. Oxford, 2004. ———.”Hersch Lauterpacht and the Development of International Criminal Law.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 2 (2004): 810–25. ———. “Lauterpacht: The Victorian Tradition in International Law.” European Journal of International Law 2 (1997): 215–63. Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, 1991. Lauterpacht, Sir Elihu. The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, QC, FBA, LLD. Cambridge, England, 2010. Lauterpacht, Hersch. “The Law of Nations and the Punishment of War Crimes.” In Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trial, ed. Guéaël Mettraux. Oxford, 2008. Lazier, Benjamin. God Interrupted. Princeton, 2008. Lederhendler, Eli. Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class. Cambridge, 2009. Levin, Dov. “Jacob Robinson.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman. New York, 1990. Levinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être; Au-delà de l’essence. Dordrecht and Paris, 1996.

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Index

A

Abravanel, Don Isaac, 28n9, 230 absolutism, 97, 102n11, 224, 266 acculturation, 3, 5, 172, 193, 214, 225 Action Française, 223 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 201, 255–72 aesthetics, 73, 93, 106, 155, 157, 165n83, 181 Afghanistan, 46n9 Agudat Yisrael, 67 Ahad Ha’am, 21–22, 57, 120 Ahasverus, 259 Akiva, Rabbi, 229 Algiers, 204 Al-Husainy, Mahmud ibn Shamsa’din, 178, 179, 184n34 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 230 Alsace-Lorraine, 186, 220, 223 Alter, Robert, 53, 75 Althusser, Louis, 144, 148, 161n5, 161n7, 162n25 American Council for Judaism, 142n111 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 142n111, 249–50, 263–67, 271 American Jewish Congress, 241 Anarchism, 22, 42, 53, 57–59, 61, 65, 67–69, 74, 76, 78, 143, 160n1 Anderson, Benedict, 214 Annales School, 143, 151, 158 Anschluss, 222, 223, 231 anti-Semitism, 7, 21, 24, 187, 193, 198, 204, 207, 253n40, Chapter 15 French, 215, 221–22, 230 German/Austrian, 3, 6, 9–10, 20, 25, 175, 215–16, 221, 225–26, 233, 243, 278 Hungarian, 215, 225–27 Antisemitism: a Social Disease, 266 Arab-Jewish Federation/binational state, 63n34, 118, 172, 179, 181 Arab Question, 118, 123, 128, 176–78 Arabs, 3, 11, 58–59, 71–72, 74, 117–18, 125–26, 131, 177–78 riot and general strike of 1936, 58

riots of 1929, 120–23, 128, 134 world of, 132, 135 Ararát, 228 Archives israélites, 220 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 47n24, 52, 56, 58–59, 200–201, 269 Aristotle, 40, 43–44 Árpád dynasty, 227, 232 Aschheim, Steven, 1–12, 21, 52, 69, 79, 186–89, 191, 198, 200, 207–9, 240 At the Edges of Liberalism, 2 Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, 2, 17, 22 Brothers and Strangers, 2, 7 The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, 3, 21, 45n2, assimilation, 5, 53, 132, 190, 261–62, 266 in America, 194–95, 282 bourgeois, 51 in France, 186 in Germany, 3, 8, 187, 207, 219 in Hungary, 227 Liberal, 24 post, 20 and Zionism, 23–24, 52 Assmann, Jan, 214 Aufklärung. See Enlightenment Austria, 2, 10, 135, 172–73, 231, 253n40, 278 Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg) Empire, 118, 133, 135, 176, 188, 241 Authoritarian Personality, 263–65 Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, 17, 21 Avineri, Shlomo, 47n16

B

Babylon, 176 Badiou, Alain, 151–52, 154–57, 162n35, 164n76, 165n82, 165n89, 165n94 Baeck, Leo (rabbi), 228 Baghdad, 174

296 | Index

Balfour Declaration, 118, 126, 177 Balibar, Étienne, 144, 161n7 Ballagi, Ernő, 225–26, 232 Bambach, Charles, 158 Bamberger, Fritz, 229 Barrett, John, 245 Bar Kochba, 127–28 Barthes, Roland, 144, 161n10 Bastille Day / 14 July, 221–22, 224, 228 Baudrillard, Jean, 154 Bauman, Zygmunt, 165n93 Beaufret, Jean, 163n56 Becker, Walther, 278 Beilis case, 242 Belarus, 242 Berman, Leon, 221 Bernays, Murray, 245 Berrol, Selma, 189, 191 Belgium, 19 Ben-Gurion, David, 184n34 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 184n34 Ben Zvi, Yitzhak, 121, 184n34 Benjamin, Andrew, 160, 166n102 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 11, 52, 57–58, 74–75, 77, 200–202, 246, 255–56, 258 poem about, 86–89 Bentwich, Norman, 131 Bergmann, Hugo, 2, 6, 22, 118, 120, 122, 126, 136, 176 Berlin, 1, 19–21, 61, 104, 106–7, 113, 180, 217–18, 230, 233 Humbolt University in, 102n6 mayor of, 268 Bernasconi, Robert, 152 Betar youth movement, 282 Bezwodne, 242 Biale, David, 76, 84n84 Bialystok, 242 Bible, 25–27, 194, 272 Bielefeld School, 160n2 Bilderverbot, 256, 259, 262, 271–72 Bildung, 3, 5, 10, 22, 52, 113, 187, 216 Birkenau, 279, 282–83 Birnbaum, Nathan, 8, 187 Birnbaum, Pierre, 9 Bismarck, Otto von, 105, 216 Blanchot, Maurice, 199 Bloch, Ernst, 160n4, 270–71 Bloom, Allan, 38 Blum, Leon, 224 Boas, Franz, 2 Board of Economic Warfare, 242 Böcklin, Arnold, 107 Bodenheimer, Max, 123 Boder, David, 279 Bodin, Jean, 96–97

Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 155 Bollack, Jean, 205 Boorstin, Daniel, 165n93 Bordeaux, 186 Boston, 193 bourgeoisie, 35, 109, 177, 257–59 anti-, 67 French, 224 French-Jewish, 214 German, 4, 215, 229 German-Jewish, 4–5, 51–53, 58, 61, 66–67, 214 reactionary (anti-Semitic), 45n2, 261–62 Boyarin, Daniel, 199 Boyarin, Jonathan, 199, 201–2, 204–5 Brandeis, Louis, 193–95 Brandt, Willy, 268 Braudel, Fernand, 143, 160n4 Brecht, Bertolt, 88 Bremen, 187 Breslau, 233 Breuer, Isaac, 59–61 Brit Shalom, 3, 5–6, 11, 58–59, 74, Chapter 8 Britain, 9, 120, 182n6, 268 British Year Book of International Law, 244 Browning, Christopher, 9 Buber, Martin, 2, 7, 18–19, 23 and Hans Kohn, Chapter 8 and Gershom Scholem, Chapter 4 Der Jude, 19, 51, 128, 173, 177 and religion, 8, 68–69 Zionism of, 22, 58, 68–69, 71, 73–74, 128, 187 Buchman, M., 189 Budapest, 6, 226, 231–33 Buddhism, 174 Buenos Aires, 269 Bulgaria, 186 Bund, 192, 282 Burke, Peter, 160n2, 160n4, 166n103

C

Calcagno, Antonio, 165n82 California, 266, 279 Cambridge, University of, 240–41, 246 Canada, 12, 251n2 Canetti, Elias, 186 Cantor, Georg, 155, 157 Cardozo, Abraham, 60 Carr, E.H., 9, 118 Carroll, Lewis, 147 Cassirer, Ernst, Chapter 6 Celan, Paul, 198–99, 201, 204–8, 210n33 Central Consistory, 220, 230 Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV), 216–19

Index | 297 CV Zeitung, 216–18, 230 Der Morgen, 217 Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), 1 Chicago, University of, 19, 34, 271 China, 172, 175 Chinese Revolution, 157 Chou En-lai, 157 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 267, 296, 275n71 Christianity, 2, 102n9, 165n80, 166n94, 198, 201, 207, 217, 259–60, 270 anti-, 222 anti-Semitism and, 25, 261–62, 271 Catholic, 4, 231 and Hungarian Jews, 225, 232 Judeo-Christianity, 7, 222 Protestant, 9 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 44 Cleveland, 189 Cohen, Hermann, 18, 73, 93–95, 98–99, 200 Cohen, Naomi, 190 Cohn, Fanny, 192 Cold War, the, 33, 35, 40, 42–43, 45n7, 47n24 Collingwood, R.G., 160n2 colonialism, 59, 121, 172 anti-, 178 Committee on Scientific Research, 267 communism, 20, Chapter 2, 183n22, 185n47, 222, 224, 272 anti-, 2, 45n7 Connerton, Paul, 214 Constantinople, 174 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus von, 175–76, 178 Crémieux, Adolph, 230 Critical Theory, 18, 22, 256–57, 265, 271–72 Cropsey, Joseph, 34 crusades, 217, 222, 232 Cyrus declaration, 176 Czechoslovakia, 135

D

Daladier, Édouard, 223 d’Annunzio, Gabriel, 106 Dante, Alighieri, 105 Davar, 122, 131 Davos Debate, 93–96, 101 Decolonization, 43, 131 de Gaulle, Charles, 143 Deleuze, Gilles, 147–51, 154, 162n35, 164n76 DeLillo, Don, 166n107 Derrida, Jacques, 151–54, 160, 162n35, 164n72, 199–206, 208 Devetak, Richard, 166n107 Deutsch, Lili, 114 Deutsche Nationalzeitung, 270

Dews, Peter, 157 Dialektik der Aufklärung, 256–59, 263–64, 271–72 Diaspora (exile, galut), 10, 12, 20–21, 23–24, 28, 57, 59–61, 64, 69, 73, 89, 201, 229, 258–59, 269, 282 Dickinson, John K., 277 Dienemann, Max (rabbi), 229 Dienstfertig, 185n45 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 34 Dresden, 188, 193 Dreyfus, Alfred, 121 Dubnov, Simon, 24 Duke University, 242 Durkheim, Emile, 143, 161n4

E

Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden), 7, 21, 187, 242, 246 and German/West European Jews, 7–9, 12, 186–89 immigration, 2, 12, 188–91, 222, 224 in Palestine, 5, 188 in the USA, 189–91, 194 Weimar government against, 20 pogroms of, 20 Ebbinghaus, Julius, 268 Egyed, Béla, 165n94 Egyenlőség (Equality), 225–26 Ehrhardt, Judge, 278 Eichmann, Adolf, 6, 9, 11, 269–70 Einsatzgruppen, 251n1 Einstein, Albert, 10, 134 Egypt, 179, 192, 268 Elbogen, Ismar, 217–18, 230 Eliach, Yaffa, 279 emancipation, 3, 6, 21, 23, 165n89, 213–15, 217–23, 225–33 anti-, 223 law (1867), 227 post-, 6 empiricism, 144, 148, 155 Engels, Friedrich, 41 Enlightenment, the, 3, 6–7, 11, 19–20, 52, 54, 69, 105, 160n2, 215–16, 218 Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 27, 96, 200, 256–59, 263–64, 271–72 Eötvös, József, 232 Eschelbacher, Max, 217 Esra: Monatsschrift des Jüdischen Akademikers (Esra: periodical of the Jewish academics), 176, 183n22 Eucken, Rudolf, 108 Europe, 3–4, 12, 34, 57, 59, 86, 88, 106, 108, 121, 124, 171–72, 175, 177, 180, 208, 215, 223, 228, 232, 241–43, 257, 264, 269–70 Central, 58, 247 culture/heritage of, 8, 58, 70, 79, 101, 173–74, 199, 201

298 | Index

Eastern, 20–21, 188, 191, 224, 240, 247 German-speaking, 1 minorities problem in, 250 rejection of, 172–74, 176, 179–80 Western, 21, 172, 174 European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, 249 Europeanism. See Pan-Europeanism Event Begebenheit, 147, 151–52 Ereignis, 151-52, 155, 158, 163n59 Exemplarity, paradox of, 198-202, 204, 206 Existentialism, 34, 144, 161n5 Experience (Erfahrung, Erlebnis), 23, 61, 71, 152 Ezra, 25, 176

F

Far East, 172–73 fascism, 3, 7, 32–33, 42, 45n2, 213, 221, 223–24, 231, 263, 265, 270, 272 Faulenbach, Bernd, 215 Febvre, Lucien, 160n4 Federal Republic of Germany, 268 federalism, 43, 141n106, 175, 247 Feigenbaum, Benjamin, 192 Feiwel, Berthold, 123, 135 Ferencz, Benjamin, 246 Feuchtwanger, Ludwig, 230 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 47n25, 199 Finkelkraut, Alain, 199 Flowerman, Samuel, 266 Flynn, Thomas, 151 Ford, Gerald, 42 Fortunoff Archive, 279 The Forward, 192 Foucault, Michel, 148–51, 156, 162n40 France, 38, 143, 151, 205, 213–15, 220–24, 230–31, 233, 268 France, Anatole, 106 Frank, Jacob, 53–54, 60 Frankfurt, 19, 22, 217, 230 Frankfurt School, Chapter 15 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 269 Frankfurter Zeitung, 122, 125, 132 Franzos, Karl Emil, 8 Friedrich II, 105 French Revolution, 23, 147, 157–58, 165n94, 186, 220–24, 228, 230–31, 233 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 111, 152, 200–204, 258–60 Future of an Illusion, 27, 261 Totem and Taboo, 261 Freund, Ismar, 218 Friedländer, David, 229 Friedländer, Fritz, 218–19, 227, 230 Friedmann, Georges, 59 Fromm, Erich, 22, 255 Fukuyama, Francis, 48n37

Fyfe, Sir David Maxwell, 244, 246

G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 153 Galicia, 241 Gay, Peter, 6, 18 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 270 Germanness, 5, 11, 83n69, 199 Glatzer, Nahum, 28n9 Glaucon, 94–95, 98 Goebbels, Joseph, 3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 87, 109, 188 University of Frankfurt, 19, 267 Goithein, Fritz (Shlomo Dov Goitein), 22 Goldberg, Gerda, 73 Goldberg, Oskar, 55, 60 Goldhagen, Daniel, 9, 278 Goldwin, Robert, 42 Grau, Wilhelm, 219–20 Great Revolt of 60,000, 191–92 Greece, 43, 107 Green Line, 10, 71 Green, Nancy, 196n30 Greenspan, Henry, 283 Grégoire, Abbé Henri, 230 Gringauz, Samuel, 277 Grotius, Hugo, 97–100 Gulf War, 154 Gundolf, Friedrich, 108 Gush Emunim, 61, 71 Guterman, Bella, 278 Guttmann, Julius, 19

H

Haar, Michel, 163n56 Habermas, Jürgen, 101 Haganah, 124 The Hague, International Court in, 241 Haifa, University of, 277 Halakhah, 27, 52–53, 68 Halbwachs, Maurice, 214 Hamburg, 19, 187, 278 Hantke, Arthur, 123 Harden, Maximilian, 105–6 Hardman, J., 192 Hashomer hatsair, 3, 7, 282 Hasidism, 8, 55–56, 74, 100, 103n16 Haskalah, 53, 56 Hassel, Karl-Uwe von, 267, 275n71 Hassner, Pierre, 160n1 hauntology, 153, 154–56 Hayes, Carlton, 118 Hegel, Friedrich, 33, 35–40, 47n24, 47n25, 47n27, 48n36, 48n37, 64, 154 Heidegger, Martin, 18, 33–34, 93–96, 101, 102n9, 102n11, 151–54, 158–59, 199 Heine, Heinrich, 187, 229

Index | 299 Heinemann, Isaak, 230 Heller, Aharon, 73 Heller, Bernát, 231–32 Herf, Jeffrey, 282 Hermann, Leo, 138n28 Heschel, Abraham, 230 Herzl, Theodor, 10, 18, 20, 23–24, 67, 69, 270 The Jewish State, 21 Hesse, 18, 20 Hesse, Hermann, 113 Hilberg, Raul, 277–80 Hillel, 21 Historicism, 33, 49n50, 143, 145, 151, 157–59, 165n89 Hitler, Adolf, 6–7, 9. 11, 41–42, 96, 102n11, 180–81, 230, 232, 243, 250, 268 Hobbes, Thomas, 19, 30n63, 33–36, 41, 47n25, 48n36, 96–97, 102n11 Leviathan, 27 Hobsbawm, Eric, 214 Hoeflich, Eugen (alias Moshe Ya’akov Ben Gavriel), Chapter 10 Der Weg in das Land, Palaestinensische Aufzeichnungen (The way to the land, Palestinian chronicles), 174 Die Pforte des Ostens (The gates of the east), 177, 179 Hohenstaufen, 105 Hollander, Dana, 199, 203–4 Hollander, Joseph, 223 Hollywood, Amy, 157 Holocaust (Shoah), 3, 8–11, 52, 187–88, 233, Chapters 14 and 16, 269 Holy Land, 122 Homer, 259 Horkheimer, Max, Chapter 15 Horwitz, Gordon, 278 Hourwich, Isaac, 195 Howe, Irving, 192 Howard, Dick, 160n1 humanism, 5–6, 35, 45n2, 93, 123, 127, 208 anti-, 222, crimes against humanity, 244–49 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 230 Hungary, 215, 225, 231–33 Arrow Cross Party, 232 First Jewish Law (1938), 226, 231 liberation struggle (1848–49), 228 Numerus clausus law in, 225 Revolution of 1956 in, 43 Second Jewish Law (1939), 226–27 Husserl, Edmund, 199

I

Ibsen, Henrik Johan, 106 idealism, German, 33, 36, 47n25, 96

Russian, 194 Ignatieff, Michael, 242 imperialism, 59, 121, 132–33, 171–74, 180–81, 268 India, 172, 174 individualism, 96, 105, 143, 177, 257 Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), 22, 255, 257 Institute of Jewish Affairs, 240–42, 251n1 integration, 3, 5, 214–15, 217 in France, 221–22 in Germany, 219, 29 in Hungary, 227, 232 and Zionism, 73, 123 Intelligentsia (Intellectuals), 3–4, 33, 42, 53, 172, 181 American Jewish, 269 anti-European, 174 anti-Semitic, 25 French, 121 French Jewish, 213 German, 70, 96, 105, 112–13 German-Jewish, 1, 4–5, 7, 11, 17, 22, 213, 215, 219, 230, 256 Hungarian, 213 Japanese, 179 in Palestine/Israel, 10, 58, 123, 176 International Bill for the Rights of Man, 249–50 International Herald Tribune, 12 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 192 International Military Tribunal (IMT), 241, 243–44, 246 Iraq, 46n9 Ireland, 4 Israel, 1, 3, 6, 8, 19, 59, 61, 65, 78, 203, 272 Eretz (Land of ), 73, 176 German-Jewish Legacy in, 9–12, 209 Holocaust survivors in, 282–83 Max Horkheimer on, 267–70 Israelite kingdom, 25 Ivanovic, Christina, 205

J

Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 21, 59, 126, 282 Jackson, Robert, 240–41, 243–45, 251n1 Jacobs, Jack, 255–56 Jagendorf, Zvi, 2 Jameson, Frederic, 159 Jan Kazimierz University, 241 Janicaud, Dominique, 99 Japan, 171–81, 183n19, 185n47, 242 “Westernization” of, 172 Jarblum, Marc, 223 Jaspers, Karl, 7, 34 Jay, Martin, 256, 274n66 Jefferson, Thomas, 194

300 | Index

Jena, 108 Jerusalem, 11–12, 19, 22, 40, 57, 61, 89, 173–74, 178 Hebrew University of, 1, 9, 19, 22, 121, 128, 131, 247 Jewish Agency for Palestine, 266 Jewish Colonial Trust, 123 The Jewish Forum, 264 Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, 279 Jewish Historical Museum (Hungary), 227 Jewish legion, 59 “Jewish Question” (Judenfrage), 4, 7, 24, 58, 219, 226, 255, 263 Jewishness, 2–4, 6, 59, 78, 111, 123, 135, 195, 198–204, 207 Johannesburg, 11 Jonas, Hans, 77 Joyce, James, 4 Judaism, 4, 11, 18, 20, 22, 52, 54, 57, 59–60, 68–69, 76, 78, 84n83, 100, 132–33, 174, 201, 204, 221, 256, 260, 271 American, 267 modernized, 3, 132 Orthodox, 10, 23–24, 26–27, 57, 60–61, 64–65, 67–68, 70–71, 84n83, 216, 225, 233, 255, 282 postexilic, 25–26 premodern, 55 Reform, 5–6, 53, 56 Republican, 220 secular, 72 and Zionism, 74, 121, 127–29, 135, 172, 267, 282 Judaization, 198–99 Judea, 229 Jüdische Rundschau (journal), 177, 229 Jung, Carl Gustav, 260 Jünger, Ernst, 41

K

Kabbalah, 51–52, 54–55, 61, 65–66, 74, 77–79, 84n84, 101 Kafka, Franz, 1, 8, 11, 54, 75–77, 201–2 Kaliningrad (Königsberg), 1 Kalvarisky, Chaim, 126 Kanokogi, Kazunobu, 179–81 Kant, Immauel, 33, 35–37, 47n24–25, 47n27, 93, 96–97, 146–47, 152–53, 200, 268, 271 Kaplan, Jacob, 221–22 Karbach, Oskar, 176 Karpf, Maurice, 266–67 Kartell jüdischer Verbindungen (KjV), 19, 28n8 Kassel, 28n9, 188 Katz, Elihu, 161n4 Katz, Ruth, 161n4 Katznelson, Berl, 123

Kaufmann, Walter, 7 Kaunas (Kovno), 242 Kelsen, Hans, 241 Keren Hayesod, 119, 122–25, 131–32, 134 Khrushchev, Nikita, 41, 47n24 Kiendermann, Karl, 180–81, 185n47 Kierkegaard, Søren, 34, 102n9, 155 Kieval, Hillel, 127 King, Henry T, Jr., 246 Kipling, Rudyard, 173 Klages, Ludwig, 111 Klemperer, Viktor, 2, 4–6, 11 Koblenz, 231 Kodera, Kenkichi, 175–76, 179 Kohler, Louis, 190 Kohn, Hans, 6, 22, Chapter 8, 177–78 Kohn, Samuel, 226 Kojève, Alexandre, 38–40, 48n36, 48n37, 49n41, 49n46 Komlós, Aladár, 228 Kook, Avraham Yitzhak (Rav), 54 Korea, 172, 178, 184n32 Korey, William, 246 Koskenniemi, Martti, 247, 253n40 Kossuth, Lajos, 226, 232 Kracauer, Siegfried, 159, 255 Kristallnacht, 256 Krutikov, Mikhail, 183n22 Ku, Hung Ming, 175 Kundt, August, 106 Kurzweil, Baruch, 54

L

Lagarde, Paul de, 25 Lake Success, 246 Lambert, Raymond-Raoul, 222 Lamprecht, Karl, 158 Landauer, Georg, 126, 130 Landauer, Gustav, 57 Langbehn, Julius, 106–7 Laqueur, Walter, 6 Laski, Harold, 257 Lauterpacht, Elihu, 253n40 Lauterpacht, Sir Hersch, Chapter 14 Lauterpacht, Rachel, 252n12 Lavsky, Hagit, 120 law divine, 97 international, Chapter 14 natural, 97–98, 100, 244 Noachian, 99–100, 103n16 Lazier, Benjamin, 52, 84n83 League of Nations, 120, 241, 247, 250 Lederhendler, Eli, 188, 196n30 Lehmann, Siegfried, 57 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 97, 155

Index | 301 Lemkin, Raphael, Chapter 14 Lemlich, Clara, 192 Lemon, M.C., 146 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 11, 216 Levi, Primo, 283 Levinas, Emmanuel, 93–94, 98–101, 200 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 161n5 liberalism, 7, 10–12, 22–24, 27, 34–35, 43–44, 46n7, 48n37, 52, 123, 127, 131, 247–49 Liebermann, Max, 2, 107 Lille, 221 Lithuania, 241–42, 247 Locke, John, 33, 35–36 London, 140n74, 244, 248, 250, 251n3 Charter, 251n2 School of Economics, 241 University of, 241 Los Angeles, 266 Löwenthal, Leo, 22, 255, 257, 262–64 Löwinger, Samuel, 226 Löwith, Karl, 21, 34, 102n9 Lublin, 283 Lukács, György, 7, 32, 45n2 Lurie, Joseph, 126 Luther, Martin, 95–96, 102n9 L’viv (Lemberg, Lwów), 1, 241–42, 253n40 Lyotard, Jean-François, 145–47, 150–52, 156, 161n11, 199, 201

M

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 33, 96 Madison, James, 194 Madrid, 244, 248 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 106 Magnes, Judah L., 121, 129, 131–32, 134, 138n39, 139n55, 140n63, 140n74, 141n97 Magyar Zsidó Szemle, 226 Magyar Zsidók Lapja, 227, 232 Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon), 19, 99–100, 103n16, 230 Majdanek, 283 “March 22 Movement,” 145–46 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 157 Manchester Guardian, 134, 267 Mann, Thomas, 55 Márciusi front (anti-fascist Hungarian political coalition), 231 Marcus, David “Mickey,” 245 Marcuse, Herbert, 164n64, 261, 265, 270 Marshall, Louis, 190, 194 Marx, Karl, 2, 10, Chapter 2, 88, 144–46, 153, 156, 224, 256–58, 261, 271 The Communist Manifesto, 35 The German Ideology, 35 Das Kapital, 35 Massachusetts, 119, 133

Mauthausen concentration camp, 278 Mauthner, Fritz, 69, 74 May 1968, 143–46, 148, 156, 158, 160 Mazower, Mark, 250 mechanization, 108–13 Meiji era, 172 Meinecke, Friedrich, 157 Mendelssohn, Moses, 11–12, 216, 218, 228–29 Mengele, Josef, 283 Menorah (journal), 177 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 148 Merton, Robert, 186 Meschonnic, Henri, 204–5 messianism, 19, 21, 52–54, 56–57, 60–61, 65–66, 72, 74, 120, 220, 271–72 Metz, 222 Meyer, Arno, 8 Middle Ages, 217, 226, 228–29 militarism, 21, 134, 177, 180 anti-, 133 German, 71 Japanese, 181 Jewish, 59 Millar, John, 160n2 Milner, Joseph, 231 Milwaukee, 189 Mimesis, 257, 259–60, 262–63 Minima Moralia, 262 Mink, Eric, 166n108 Minorities Treaties, 247, 250 Minsk, 188 Mishnah, 67 Mizrachi, 22 modernity, 6, 33–38, 40, 46n7, 49n50, 54–55, 59, 65, 73, 75, 104–10, 114–15, 202, 260 Mommsen, Theodor, 25 Monotheism, 18, 100, 259 Morin, Edgar, 144, 160n1 Moscow, 268 Moses, 55, 230 Moses, Stéphane, 75 Mosse, George, 6, 9–10, 52 Moyn, Samuel, 241 Mullarkey, John, 165n89 multiculturalism, 7, 10 Munich, 20 Munkácsi, Ernő, 232 Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York), 279 Musil, Robert, 111–12 mysticism, 22, 51, 53–56, 59, 61, 66, 70–75, 77–79

N

Naftali, Fritz, 122 Namier, Lewis, 160n2 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 153, 201 Nanterre, 145

302 | Index

Napoleon, 105, 109 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 268 National Democratic Party (NPD), 269 National Vietnam Committee, 145 nationalism, 117, 134 Arab, 59, 131, 135 Asian, 178, 181 Boer, 9 enlightened, 5 ethnic, 19, 118 German, 6, 109, 200, 268 Hungarian liberal, 226 integral, 7 Jewish, 2, 3, 10, 18, 59, 61, 72, 119–20, 222, 268 political, 57–58 in Soviet Union, 132 in Vienna, 175–176 Naye prese, 222, 224 Nazism (Nazi Germany, Nazi Regime, Third Reich), 2–3, 5–8, 33, 42, 55, 58, 96, 157, 198, Chapters 13 and 14, 261, 264, 277, 279 Friedrich Nietzsche and, 7, 45n2 Japan and, 180–81 Martin Heidegger and, 93, 102n11 neoconservatism, 46n9, 49n52, 105 neoromanticism, 22, 105 Neolog Jews (Hungary), 225–28, 231–32 Netter, Nathan, 222 Neumann, Franz, 258 New Amsterdam, 194 New York, 188–89, 191–94, 241, 246, 251n1, 279 The New York Review of Books, 12 The New York Times, 245 The New Yorker, 269 Nicholas of Cusa, 165n82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7–8, 17, 21, 32–34, 39–40, 45n2, 52, 69, 106, 148, 149, 174 The Will to Power, 25–26 nihilism, 33, 41–42, 53-55, 57, 60-61, 66, 79 Nolte, Ernst, 8 Nora, Pierre, 144 Nordau, Max, 6, 24 North Africa, 12, 188 North America, 282 North Carolina, 242 NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), 269 Nuremberg, Laws, 229, 255 Trials, Chapter 14

O

Odysseus, 259, 263 The Odyssey, 259

Oedipus, 263 Offenbach, 229 Okakura Tenshin (The Ideals of the East), 177, 179 Old Testament, 7, 272 Orientalism (Orient), 132, 171–73, 174, 177, 180

P

pacifism (anti-war movement), 41–42, 58, 121–23, 131, 133–35, 141n94 Pale of Settlement, 192, 195 Palestine, 3, 5–6, 11, 22, 187, 230, 266–67 Gershom Scholem in, 51–52, 56–59, 61–71, 75, 78, 89 Hans Kohn in, Chapter 8 and Pan-Asian Zionism, Chapter 10 Palestine Land Development Company, 120 Pan-Asian congress (Tokyo, 1926), 179–80 Pan-Asianism, Chapter 10 Paneuropa, 176 Pan-Europa, 175, 178 Pan-Europeanism, 171, 175–76, 178, 181 Panentheism, 166n100 Pan-Germanism, 175 Panitz, Esther, 190–91 Paris, 87, 106, 189, 220–24, 233, 246–47, 249 Parizer haynt, 222–24, 231 Parousia, 152 particularism, 10, 12, 17, 20, 99, 199–200 Pascal, Blaise, 95 patriotism, German, 3, 66, 260 Jewish, 214, 220, 260, 268 Peel Commission (1937), 63n34 Pentagon, 240 Pentateuch, 55 Pest, 225–226 Petőfi, Sándor, 226 phenomenology 99, 148 philosophy of history, 36–37, 113, 146, 148–49 Pinsker, Leon, 17–18, 20–21, 23–24 Plato, 17, 27, 39–40, 43–45, 94, 99–100 Platonic-Aristotelian structure, 38 Platonic-Stoic tradition, 95–98 Platonism, 148 Pocock, J.G.A., 161n9 Pöggeler, Otto, 163n59 Poland, 24, 191–92, 224, 230, 241, 252n12, 278 Generalgouvernement, 242 Pollock, Friedrich, 255, 263 Popper, Karl, 44, 48n27 Popular Front, 224 Portugal, 88, 241 Positivism, 33, 49n50, 146 Neo, 148–49 postmodernism, 146, 199 Power, Samantha, 242

Index | 303 Prague, 1, 6, 54, 81n24, 118, 127–30, 193, 205 Prinz, Joachim, 219 Proust, Marcel, 4, 87 Prussia, 109, 113, 218

Q

Querido Verlag, 264

R

Rabi Binyamin, 126 Rabinbach, Anson, 244 racism, 6, 42, 55, 106, 109–10, 175, 215, 233, 245, 248, 261, 265 in America, 175, 262 in France, 230 in Hungary, 225, 227, 232 in Israel, 11 in South Africa, 9 and Zionism, 71, 121 Ranke, Leopold von, 158, 166n100, 219 Rapaport, Herman, 164n64 Rashi, 28n9 Rathenau, Walther, Chapter 7 rationalism, 52, 66–67, 70, 93, 97, 105–6, 110–11, 177, 216, 247, 260 Rayski, A. (Raigadski, Adam), 224 Readings, Bill, 146 redemption, 40, 53, 60, 72 144 regionalism, 175, 182n4 Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, 219 Revolution of 1905, 192 Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, 216–17, 228 relativism, 33, 158–59 Rhine, 151 Rifat, Mansur Mustapha, 179 Riga, 1 right divine, 97 natural, 38, 44, 46n7, 47n25, 49n50, 97, 100, 102n11 Riesser, Gabriel, 6–7, 11 Rischin, Moses, 188 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 224 Robinson, Jacob, Chapter 14 Romano, Claude, 156 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 263 Roosevelt, Theodore, 190 Rosenberg, Abraham, 192 Rosenzweig, Franz, 6, 11, 18, 56, 71, 200 Roth, Arele (rabbi), 54 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 33, 35–37, 47n25, 173–74 Ruppin, Arthur, 6, 120, 124, 126, 139n63 Russia, 241–42 Civil War in, 20 Jews of, 8, 20–21, 188–95, 225 Revolution in, 157, 177

Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905), 172

S

Saaler, Sven, 175 Sabbateanism, 53–57, 60–61, 130 Sambursky, Shmuel, 123, 126 Samuel, Georges, 222 Samuel, Herbert, 122 Santner, Eric, 166n108 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 144, 148, 161n5, 162n40, 166n108 Sassenberg, Marina, 218 Scheler, Max, 113 Schiff, Jacob, 190, 194 Schiller, Friedrich, 188 Schirmer, Dietmar, 216 Schleswig-Holstein, 267 Schmitt, Carl, 30n63, 34, 102n11, 163n56 Schmoller, Gustav von, 113 Schneiderman, Rose, 192–93 Schocken, Zalman, 54, 77 Schoenberg, Arnold, 157 Schoenerer, Georg Ritter von, 175 Scholem, Arthur, 51 Scholem, Gershom, 2, 4–6, 11, 19–20, 22, Chapters 3–4, 89, 187, 255 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 256 Schram, Louis, 189 Schultz, Hans Jürgen, 270 secularization, 10, 23, 53–57, Chapter 4, 99–100, 247, 255, 270, 272 Selden, John, 100, 103n18 Sereny, Gitta, 277 Sewell, William, 146 Shabbatai Zvi, 53 Shawcross, Sir Hartley, 244 Shoah. See Holocaust shtetl, 242 Simmel, Ernst, 266 Simmel, Georg, 108, 200 Simon, Ernst, 22, 58, 126 Simpson, Brian, 242, 249 Sinai, 26 Sino-Japanese war (1894–1895), 172 Six-Day War, 270 Slawson, John, 267 Smith, Anthony, 214 Social Darwinism, 106 Social Democrats, 57, 105 Socrates, 44, 94-95 Sonderweg, 9 Sós, Endre, 227–28 South Africa, 9–12 Soviet Bloc, 270 Soviet Union (USSR, Soviet Russia), 8, 42, 48n37, 49n46, 130, 132, 135, 185n47, 246

304 | Index

Spain, 89 Spengler, Oswald, 39 Der Spiegel, 268, 271–72 Spinoza, Baruch, 19, 27, 68, 144, 149 Spitzer, Moritz, 229 Stalin, Joseph, 43, 88 Stangl, Franz, 277 Starachowice, 278, 282 camps, 279, 280–83 Stephen (King), 231–32 Stern, Fritz, 6 Stern, Moritz, 213 Stern, Samu, 226–27 Stern-Töubler, Selma, 218 Strasbourg, 106 Strauss, Franz Josef, 269 Strauss, Leo, 2, Chapters 1–2 Strauss, Oscar, 190 Strindberg, Johan August, 106 structuralism, 144–45, 148–50, 156, 158, 161n5, 161n7, 162n 25 anti-, 149 post-, 147–48, 154, 162n23, 162n25 Studies in Prejudice, 263, 265–66, 271 Suez Canal, 174, 268 survivor memories/testimonies, Chapter 16 Swarsensky, Manfred, 219 Sweden, 96 Switzerland, 93, 256 Szajkowski, Zosa, 189–91 Szálasi, Ferenc, 232 Széchenyi, István, 232

T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 176–77 Talmud, 67, 78, 99, 101, 217, 230 Tanguay, Daniel, 23 Tao, 151, 174 Tawney, R.H., 160n2 Thon, Jacob, 125 Thucydides, 43–44 Tillich, Paul, 271 Times Literary Supplement, 12 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 113, 188 Torah, 53–55, 72–74, 78, 83n69, 101, 253n40 Toronto, 283 Totalitarianism, 48n27, 258–59, 271 Trainin, Aaron N., 246 transnationalism, 172–73, 179, 181 Treblinka death camp, 278 Troeltsch, Ernst, 113 Truman, Harry, 245, 267 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 204–6, 208 Tucholsky, Kurt, 141n94

U

Ukraine, 20, 192

United Nations, 246, 251, 268 War Crimes Commission, 244 United States of America (America), 3, 9, 49n46, 109, 146, 175, 177, 240, 242–46, 250, 251n2, 256–57 anti-Semitism in, 264, 266 Hans Kohn in, 132, 135–36, 140n74 Holocaust survivors in, 282–83 Jews in, 12, 142n11, 187–91, 193–95, 196n17, 209, 262–63, 266–67, 269 Leo Strauss in, 27, 32–35, 41–43, 45, 46n7, 46n9, 47n24 Supreme Court of, 193, 195, 241 L’Univers israélite, 220, 222, 230 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, 249, 251 universalism, 2, 10–12, 199–200, 203, 205 anti-, 7

V

Valmy, Battle of, 224 Varnhagen, Rahel, 5, 229 Verhaeren, Emile, 106 Vichy government, 215 Vienna, 1, 8, 171–72, 174–76, 181, 241, 253n40 Virág, István, 226 Vladivostok, 242 Volkov, Shulamit, 66 Voltaire, 160n2, 271 Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa, 246

W

Wagner, Richard, 198 Wallas, Armin A., 182n1 Wannsee Conference, 278 War of Independence (1948), 58 War Resisters’ International (WRI), 133, 141n93, 141n97 Warburg, Aby, 67 Warsaw, 242, 279 Ghetto, 251n1 University of, 241–42 Washington, D.C., 242, 245 Washington Post, 245 Wehle, Jonas, 54 Weidner, Daniel, 26 Weil, Bruno, 219, 227 Weimar Republic, 34, 38, 45, 52, 102n11, 104, 114–15, 217, 256 culture in, 2, 18 fall of, 97, 216 Jews in, 5–6, 101, 186 Weizmann, Chaim, 138n39 Wellhausen, Julius, 25–26 Weltsch, Felix, 176 Weltsch, Robert, 22, 81n24, 118–20, 122, 126, 128–29, 135, 139n59, 140n66, 176

Index | 305 Werner, David, 126 West, the (Western civilization), 8, 33, 40–45, 95–6, 115, 133, 171–76, 178–80, 182n6, 268, 271 rejection of, 171, 173, 178 West European Jews (Westjuden), 5, 8, 187-88 White, Hayden, 159, 166n108 Wiener, Max, 230 Wiener, Meir, 176, 183n22 Wiener Morgenzeitung (journal), 177 Wierzbnik, 282 Wieviorka, Wolf, 223 Wiggershaus, Ralf, 256–58, 263 Wilczek, Jeremiah, 284 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 22, 51–52, 56, 77, 215 Hochschule für, 217–18 Wolff, Simon, 188–89 World Federation of Jewish Students, 253n40 World Jewish Congress, 241, 243–45 World War I, 20, 52, 57, 112, 118, 128–30, 171–74, 177–78, 216, 221, 225–26, 241–42, 247, 250, 255 influence on Gershom Scholem’s concept of secularization, 66, 70, 72–73 World War II, 10, 33, 56, 58, 233, 249, 251n1

Y

Yad Vashem, 279 Yahudim, 189, 191 Yale, 279 Yellin, David, 184n34 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 202–3, 214, 260 Yiddish, 8, 192–95, 220, 242, 282 press, 222, 224, 231 Yidishkeyt, 14n44, 64–65

Yom Kippur War (1973), 65

Z

Zarathustra, 39, 49n44 Zeire Zion, 253n40 Das Zelt (journal), 177–78 Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen (Central Agency of the State Justice Administrations), 279 Zionism, 2–11, Chapters 1, 3–4 and 8, 187, 195, 216, 219–20, 223, 229–30, 233, 246, 250, 255 anarchistic, 57–59 anti-, 5, 59–60, 142n111, 178 binational, 58, 118, 120–21, 127 cultural, 21–23, 57, 61, 127, 176, 183n22 Herzlian, 18, 67, 69, 270 left, 3 liberal, 11, 27 in Lithuania, 241, 247 Max Horkheimer on, 266–68, 272 non-, 21, 118, 266–67, 282 Pan-Asian, Chapter 10 post-, 10 religious, 22, 71 revisionist, 21, 59–61, 122, 139n55, 282 secular, 17, 27, 59–60, 71–74 Żółkiew, 241 Zsidó Élet, 231 Zweig, Arnold, 187 Zweig, Stefan, 113 Zurich, 141n97 9/11, 46n9, 160